I'm actually just tired of the internet as a whole, which is disheartening after it being the cornerstone of my career for the last several decades.
Corporate censorship has me tired. Government censorship has me tired. Self censorship has me tired. The way we all hate each other has me tired. The way we all hate the situation and yet do nothing has me tired. Knowing that even doing something will change nothing has me tired.
We're on the same boat, after decades on the internet it's really sad to realise that the thing which gave me knowledge, a career, friends, hobbies, and connections to people and things I'd never have discovered otherwise has rotted, and it's rotting societies with it.
I found solace on the offline world though, going back to being a "local", participating in activities where the internet is far away. It's a cliché but being present in the real world is actually what solved my mourning of what the internet was.
Self censorship is so insidious. If you are not aware enough, it slowly creeps into your life without you realizing. That was the reason that I loved chans, because people were excruciatingly open there, without any filters. It was kind of funny to discuss with racists, because they were not trying to censor their points. But it got sad when the whole internet became a chan.
> But it got sad when the whole internet became a chan
I honestly do not see how you could go from talking about self censorship in the context of institutional censorship and then go on to say the whole internet has become a 'chan', it absolutely has not even if the current zeitgeist doesn't fully align with your particular ideals.
Great point. I meant in the sense that I don't need to go to a chan to read racist points anymore, but you are right about the contradiction.
>it absolutely has not even if the current zeitgeist doesn't fully align with your particular ideals.
It's an hyperbole to say that, sure. However, the change was faster than I expected. Nick Fuentes would be a fringe guy in 2010s. Now he is part of mainstream podcast circles
Yeah, it's pretty extreme. To be clear, I'm not saying it's a good thing, just that chan culture is so much worse across that and many other dimensions
You and me both. I'm not even sure I have the energy to eat the rich anymore, should the opportunity present itself, nor can I get worked up over the fact that this means they probably won. It's all so fucking stupid.
It used to be that western governments and powerful people based in the west had a reason to promote our society as somehow good. That reason was that they were terrified the masses would turn to communism. This is obviously not to say Marxist-Leninism is something to aspire to, but it certainly created an incentive. Now that threat has been defeated, our own powerful people are free to tighten the screws without fear of an organised response.
They were terrified of what Lenin incorrectly called 'leftcommunism' more than Marxist-leninism. Council communism, syndicalism, platformism and those kinds of stateless communism. State communism will always ultimately turn into Cuba, Vietnam or China, basically undemocratic state capitalism.
This is an inversion of what really happened. If they were so scared of leftcoms, why did the FBI/CIA use left-communism as a vehicle to disrupt socialist organizing within the US during COINTELPRO, operation CHAOS, etc? Why did they partially bankroll the Frankfurt school through the CCF? (Because it was nonthreatening, and a great tool to split the left.)
Compatibism (between leftcoms and neoliberal imperialists) as a strategy is well-known. Here’s a few resources for you:
I guess it's the people themselves you're tired of in general. Because many of them want to say things you don't want to hear, but you didn't expect it to be so. You expected that everyone is like you and agrees with you and has the same communication preferences.
I disagree completely. I recommend you to read "In the Swarm" by Byung-Chul Han as a primer.
People on the internet are tiring because how they interact is shaped to turn everything into a binary, the platforms where people spout their opinions don't foster any kind of actual human communication, it's just a farce of it with a never-ending shit-flinging-fest. If that's what you incentivise for you will only get the worst of people's outbursts.
If your brain hasn't been completely rotted by internet discourse then you will find that having hard conversations in the real world is still possible, that disagreeing while being curious and courteous about someone else's worldview is possible. It doesn't happen when people are so far down the internet rabbit hole that their real life persona is just a shadow of what their internet persona is, otherwise you will find that people offline can be much more reasonable, that you can have a discussion without resorting to shit-flinging from the binary "you are transgressive vs we are in-agreement".
You should try, it's very refreshing to realise that the real world is still not the internet, as much as social media companies are trying to make it.
Thanks for the book suggestion; adding this to my queue. I considered his more popular "Burnout Society" and it seemed too obvious of a thesis to warrant even the light effort. Maybe that's true here too, but I've lately been thinking that this mechanism is so powerful, it kinda can't be ignored.
It's not just that the internet discussion is rotten, but the discursive rot has definitely made the leap into the real world too. It's almost inescapable. What was once normal, a semblence of interpersonal decency you could expect as the default, has become the exception.
Corporate censorship has me tired. Government censorship has me tired. Self censorship has me tired. The way we all hate each other has me tired. The way we all hate the situation and yet do nothing has me tired. Knowing that even doing something will change nothing has me tired.