I hate the injection of personality into technological instances or common hiccups in modern Internet culture. My heart monitor watch shows me a smiley face while booting up, Github buttons spam "Buy me a coffee!", Reddit says shit like, "Don't panic" when a webpage doesn't load. Shut the fuck up and leave me alone. I am so tired of being surrounded by these pale imitations of reality, like I need to be pacified with pseudo-emotions or meme culture every step of my day.
All this hustle culture pisses me off. The “be your own boss” culture sucks ass.
Not to imply that you've had time to be sleeping on the jobs
My cousin once laid out his plan to literally create a personal brand about a lifestyle of hanging out in a studio producing music for other people and selling art. I was aghast.
My brother used to work for a youtube channel for a famous child, and his girlfriend knew communist theory, so we were telling him how the kid was a commodity, he was a "brand". I don't think he got the point.
"Is your hobby making you money?"
No, it wouldn't be a fucking hobby then, assface.
I hate modern hookup culture and dating apps. I feel like its commodifying human relations, completely reducing them to a transaction and devaluing them to the point, where finding a lasting relationship or love is a major pain in the ass and leads to major alienation, avoidant attachment and a bunch of shit like that.
Was going to say this, but didn't know how to word it. "Friendships" are the same way. Because you're not friends with anyone, they're just in your "network."
Yeah. I live in a foreign country, where people are notoriously bad at making contacts, so you get a lot of people in your network, but few friends. A lot of my social interaction then come form places like this, where you end up talking about intimate things with strangers, that otherwise you will talk to with a friend. And it does give you some relief, some sense of community, but it is also like a cheeseburger from McDonalds or a frozen pizza - something is just missing, and a website cannot really be your friend.
In the U.S. people are terrible at it as well. The only random people who want to be your friend just got started in Amway.
I liked swiping on people, that was fun. Lots of funny bios, cute people. And then they started swiping back and I suddenly didn't want to engage anymore. I think I just wanted a hotornot-style thing.
This is correct.
The best description of the dating app scene I've ever heard was "turning first dates into a series of job interview-like experiences", which is one of the most horrific things I've ever heard in my life. I already avoided dating apps and websites because I'm intensely paranoid about putting intimate, detailed, and accurate personal identifying information on the internet. Hearing that turned me off from cautiously venturing into the scene entirely.
Zizek talked about this a little, how "the encounter" that makes love romantic get stripped away with Tinder and such apps. There's no chance encounter or crossing of paths, everything has been prearranged by a corporation for you and so on and so forth.
I think this was kind of the central point of Society of the Spectacle, in that working people become so alienated by mass media and mass consumption that they become unable to actually relate with each other save through the middleman of spectacular commodity. See also my rant about social media elsewhere in this thread. But also how in current moment our go-to conversations with co-workers usually aren't about things that matter, like grievances against the boss, planning things to do outside of worker, or discussing political issues; it's the Game Last Night, or superhero movies, or the last episode of Game of Thrones, or which epic memes you've seen lately, or the last crazy thing Trump said on Twitter.
In the atomized and alienated hellscape of late stage capital our only cultural commonality is how big of an orgasm we had watching the latest Marvel film.
it's the mythology of the modern era, im sure someone could argument that better than me
This seems true to me. Instead of shared fables and gods, we have "still a better love story than Twilight".
I feel this every time someone tries to refute a historical argument of mine with an example from a Marvel movie
As the resident Star Wars defender, people should compare fiction to real life. Anyone that compares real life to fiction is an infant, and you need to check up on them and make sure they aren't chewing on a battery or something
This is the one that gets me too. I genuinely do believe that people absorb many things better when it's through metaphors and stories but like. When did we become incapable of talking about shit without referencing YA books or Marvel movies?
My heart monitor watch shows me a smiley face while booting up
Dude, nothing is serious anymore. Everything HAS to have a smile, or be funny and make me laugh. It's like real jokerfication shit, why does EVERYTHING have to be light-hearted and feel-good? Every commercial, every TV show, every billboard has a fake-ass smile attached to it. Ask someone how they're doing? Their mouth says "I'm fine" but their eyes say "I'm dead inside." JFC people, JUST ADMIT THAT THINGS SUCK HOLY SHIT.
Tbh I get why people say "I'm fine." If I say I'm having a bad day invariably people I barely know will probe me with questions about my personal life. Why can't I just be miserable without scrutiny or having to explain myself?
I know, and I understand because I say "fine"for the same reason. It's just that... we don't go out looking for "fine" things to fix, ya feel me? It feels like we're all just gaslighting ourselves straight into the grave.
"Marvel humour" had poisoned so many pieces of media now. The style of writing where if there is any sort of threat, any potential emotion, any quiet moment, is immediately undercut by a "funny" quip.
I saw people cry at the end of Infinity War because it actually tried. Final moment of potential victory, horrid realisation of defeat, then it's silence as the weight of just having let a madman get away with wiping out trillions of lives in an instant sets in.
Bam, cut, done. Make your audience fucking cry, you pussies. Make them sweat during every action scene.
I watched the Addams Family movie the other year and it shocked me how much they don't make comedies like that anymore. Other than the very best shows and movies, every funny moment is the character being funny. The ridiculous situations of Airplane! wouldn't be greenlit today.
It's why I can't bring myself to hate The Final Frontier. It still captures a lot of that spirit that the other films have, especially the dynamic between the core three of Kirk, Spock and Bones. It kinda sucks but at least you can tell someone cared, even if they weren't talented enough to pull it off.
It doesn't give me the same awful vibes that something like Nemesis or Into Darkness does. Or the new CBS shows for that matter.
I can only speak for myself but the reason I say "I'm fine" is because I figure the other person is only asking to be polite and doesn't really want to hear about my problems.
On the same level, every piece of media trying to take itself too seriously. I really don't mind putting some idpol in your tv show if it's relevant to the characters experience, but half the time it feels exactly like the Boys. Pandering on the surface without addressing underlying issues. If you want to get political, get political. Don't half-ass.
Hard agree when it comes to film, but I was more thinking about everywhere else. Like magazine covers, ads on the bus or train, just fuckin smiles everywhere I look and like OP said even on shit that doesn't have faces. I'm sure they're even specifically designing cars to look like they're smiling because focus group testing shows it "makes people feel more comfortable."
In the 90's the majority of people were doing better than before, and art was all gloomy.
Dude, nothing is serious anymore. Everything HAS to have a smile, or be funny and make me laugh. It’s like real jokerfication shit, why does EVERYTHING have to be light-hearted and feel-good? Every commercial, every TV show, every billboard has a fake-ass smile attached to it. Ask someone how they’re doing? Their mouth says “I’m fine” but their eyes say “I’m dead inside.” JFC people, JUST ADMIT THAT THINGS SUCK HOLY SHIT.
Don't come to Korea.
I don't like that people don't know how to be alone, and that includes not responding to a text or notification immediately. The expectations people have for availability are unreal and exhausting.
I have tinnitus so literally can't stand silence. I'm good in nature but def hate silence.
I feel like a fucking weirdo for feeling this way. I was born and raised in the NYC metro area and after I hit 30 I just want to be left alone for the most part. I still like to see my friends and family a lot, but fuck texting. It's like I'm reverting to a time before cell phones. I'd much rather someone come over for dinner and drinks once a month than mindless bullshit every day.
Same! When I moved for a job I realized how different a lot of my friends back home and I were, since we weren't really on social media or big texters. I never had a need for a smartphone till I had a job that required one. I love my friends in my new city, but they really don't understand why I need time to myself - sometimes for a week or longer, especially if shit's stressful. They're getting used to it now so fortunately I don't think they take it personally anymore, but honestly I think Covid taught them more about that than actually listening to anything I said.
Not unexpected or odd but I've been thinking about this recently and this thread is a pretense to dump it here
The vast majority of people who despise social media often can't articulate precisely why they think it's bad, just some nebulous gut feeling that something is wrong with its proliferation.
Here's why it's bad. It involves millions of people - all of whom are alienated from and suffering under the regime of neoliberal capitalist society - turning the spectacle of their lives, experiences, and opinions into commodities for mass consumption by others. These spectacles are not even necessarily real or organic, as many are outright staged or manipulate the consumer in some way. People are commodifying their very lives and identities, and they are doing it for free, and then they are handing it over to a massive tech corporation so that the corporation can monetize and earn profit from it. If you are very lucky, you can perhaps actually get a share of this profit, if you are on a platform such as YouTube or Twitch, but the vast majority of people who participate on these platforms see nothing, and are in fact further exploited as a resource by the advertising these platforms use to earn their money. And then, the mass consumption of these spectacular commodities are used by the same people as a substitute for real, genuine social interaction, lived experiences, and personal relationships with other human beings.
Like we make jokes about living in the Matrix or a simulation all the time, this is that simulation. We pretend to have lives on social media, pretend to care about the pretend experiences of others, and form pretend friendships with pretend personas under totally false pretenses. In even worse cases, it is used by tons of people with untreated mental illness to self-medicate instead of seeking out actual medical help or human interaction (that includes this very web site); or, it allows mentally ill people, social rejects with malformed personal habits, political extremists, and others ostracized IRL for good reasons to connect with each other over long distances, potentially get organized, and exacerbate their worst tendencies (incels, Nazis, conspiracy theorists). It often causes people who have been engineered to retreat into isolation to further retreat into delusion and self-pity (see: QAnon boomers who have cut off ties with actual family members over a conspiratorial cult). It just causes further alienation, apathy, lethargy, and psychological damage to snowball exponentially.
comrade, I found this very profound and beautiful. I am also drunk. After writing what follows, it occurs to me that I am not addressing large parts of your post.
You may be giving too much importance to the relationship between pretending and social media. It's completely possible that inauthenticity is a necessary social characteristic that is maybe even pre-mammalian. Plus, people were pretty inauthentic before social media too (source: old). The obsession of the 90s punk kids with who was a poser, who wasn't, as though there is such a thing among fourteen-year old kids. But everyone poses, no? only some do it better? Everyone makes decisions about who they want to be, including about how they want to be, and all of that is inauthentic initially. A chemistry student isn't a chemist, just like some kid who decided they want to be punk isn't going to be very punk for a while.
People need and crave validation. This also predates social media. Social media gives a less meaningful inlet for validation, but it does give it. I feel validated when people like my posts here. I feel validated when people laugh at my jokes in real life. It makes me feel good. Before Facebook, people would just bring in photoalbums to show you pictures of their kids, or their trip to fucking London or Dallas or whatever, and they wanted to show you that because they wanted to share with you, and that you would like what they shared. Facebook just anonymizes that process, but people share it and people look at it for the same reasons they did before.
Instead of an in/authenticity dynamic, what your initial concerns made me think about was a prison where inmates could communicate for only a few minutes every day, but that communication would be unrestricted and nonviolent. I imagined how their communications would change to try to short-circuit that chemical rush you get from social validation, what that would actually look like, how incredibly sad but heartfelt it would be, and how social media is more of a pale reflection of that world, the one of the broken and isolated, accelerating a process that - with its built-in inauthenticity - makes it ugly, sad, but somehow so sweet and heartbreaking. People communicate best in person, with their bodies and faces, and social media is just a sort of hollowed-out and maximally-commodified version of how that specific communication mode resembles the person themselves, to be sold to advertisers.
I perhaps am emphasizing the inauthenticity of social media, I'm fairly heavily influenced in my perceptions of these kinds of relationships by what I know about prominent Twitch streamers or YouTube creators who essentially have to maintain an on-camera persona at all times when they're creating content (I need to re-watch Lindsay Ellis's video on Manufacturing Authenticity, it seems directly relevant) that is often forced to be permanently optimistic, if not to merely keep up the spirits of the audience but also because they have an immense weight placed upon them by their own followers (I have watched a lot of a streamer named Ohmwrecker who does a shitload of Dead by Daylight content, and one of the most shocking aspects of them is just how many viewer messages get sent to them that are effectively mentally ill/deeply alienated and disillusioned people using him as a personal therapist. That's so much to put upon someone who is essentially a stranger who is good at a video game you like).
Certainly there is a level of authenticity to social media. But at its core these are commodities of spectacle. People gravitate toward the dramatic, like screaming matches posted to Facebook. The vast majority of things like TikTok, Vine, or YouTube are heavily edited even if they're not outright staged, even as something as simple as clip from a popular pop song or a filter. Here, on this very website, we engage in "bits" to entertain each other that are influenced by stuff we consumed elsewhere, like the podcast itself. Hell, regarding the podcast there's even times where the fact they are forced to maintain certain personas and sometimes reach the limit, like when Felix tries to force a bit and it falls flat, or Amber goes out of her way to be a contrarian.
I don't know. To get a little weird for a moment, if neoliberalism is a social engineering project aimed at the fragmentation and commodification of identity (ie forcing the working person to don the mask of worker, manager, commodity, salesperson, and consumer all at once, changing depending on the context), social media is its apotheosis in that the producers reconstruct their fragmented identities as commodities. Your sense of self is so shattered by the neoliberal way of life that there's just a void eating away inside of yourself? No problem, we've got an app for that. Just build an inauthentic self designed for consumption by the masses.
A funny video that emphasizes this point in regard to content creators: https://youtu.be/rPHK494AUxE
Also, that kinda exists in real life as well. My grandmother once bought a ceramic chicken, cue her now having 30+ ceramic and glass chickens around her house because people decided that was her thing. She has told me before she doesn't turn them down or throw them away because it might upset the person that gave it to her, thinking it was a good and thoughtful gift.
The fundamental goal of modern advertising is to have you define yourself through your consumption, to form a "Brand". My partner's mom literally has a "signature scent" and she's a goddamn manager, but has been sold on needing to have things like that.
Human's need to be individuals within a community (to borrow a problematic term: snowflakes) isn't something I'm ready to blame on capitalism, but holy hell is it exploited constantly, and social media allows companies to do it more effectively than ever. Hell, I'm wearing a fucking siracha shirt right now that someone bought for me cause I put siracha in my ramen.
Modern technology has become a huge component of everyone's day to day lives but at the same time people have been taught it's completely okay to throw their hands up whenever they hit a mild snag. As an IT grunt I'm awfully tired of helping people plug in HDMI cables, it's incredibly fuckin basic
I like to compare it to getting a 'low fuel' light and just abandoning your car on the highway cause 'you can't figure it out'. I'm so tired of it, but hey, job security
Yeah, I get the brunt of it cause it's my job but even if I wasn't the one fixing things I'd still be annoyed by the learned helplessness...
Why would they have shame? They've been conditioned to believe that giving up is an acceptable first step, and they never have to learn on their own with people like me around, so the possibility of being ashamed isn't even in the picture
I'm the same as you, but not even at an adequate level. I just Google the problem every time. Everyone who asks for my help could just Google the problem and get the same answer as I do.
I mean, separating trash from treasure in the Google results is also a skill
True. Lots of fake results at the top. Another problem with modern society.
I'm so fucking glad that I had a gigantic stubborn nerd as a father who would always rope me into trying to fix shit that broke around the house instead of paying someone else to do it or simply throwing it away. Taught me a lot about trying to fix stuff instead of just tossing it the second it didn't work properly anymore.
I don't think people understand either the implications it has on organizing.
Like it is impossible to organize a leftist party without completely circumventing all established forms of communication.
Half the reason Nazis do stochastic terrorism is because it's the only way to guarantee that you can't be tracked. Because a one man cell acting on his own volition isn't telling anyone what he's doing.
This reminds me of a stupid anecdote from my life. I lived in a town with a population of <5,000 on 9/11 and the school board banned kids walking to and from school at least till the next semester. Like, what did they think was going to happen?
Venmo, it fucking commodities friendship. Steve, do you really need me to pay you exactly $4.63 for your hamburger? We're going to hang out again, but "just get me back" is completely lost outside the closest friends. It makes me feel weird when I pay for somebody else and they want to get me back right then, like our friendship was a transaction.
One day I'm gonna write a David Graeber-esque rant about the history of money and how it alienates us further, Venmo being the highest form it.
Oh yeah that is something I've found weird too. The weird part is how they turned it into this like mini social media where it reads like a facebook timeline if you read through your "friends" venmo histories, which was just pulled off facebook. Some people spend a lot of money on eating out and idk I just feel like it's almost a boasting thing people will do, to let everyone know how active they are? Probably really cynical of me, but people will write like a paragraph damn near about just sending someone $25 for dinner, and it's just something I could never consider doing. It's just weird to mix money and friendship in the way that it does it.
Honestly no, that's a great take. Every single app has been Facebook-ized. JoesFrackinJack will be properly credited in my manifesto and your name will echo through the halls of history.
There's an anthropological term for this, generalized reciprocity (the chill kind) vs balanced or symmetrical reciprocity (the George Costanza kind). My old roommates and I would always be like "generalized reciprocity" with a hand wave when there was any unequal exchange, was nice.
My two best friendships have consisted of buying each other food, cooking for each other, buying the other one tickets to a concert to not go alone, buying each other video games to share the experience etc.
Another consisted of a dude (I thought was a good friend at the time) crashing at my place 2-3 nights a week and sharing food with me, only to give me a fucking bill when he was moving away. Like, fucking what? And I was such an insecure lonely at the time that I paid it to continue the friendship, which ended there anyway.
That last one's messed up, wtf. Like, giving a friend the exact amount of money you owe them is weird enough, but billing them??
Its funny I feel the opposite. I hate owing people money(in part because my memory is really bad) and money apps made it really easy and convenient to pay people back. Now whether the transaction needs to be exact or something isn't necessary, we usually approximate it but its still nice so I don't have to carry cash all the time.
The expectation of mantaining a virtual persona online that should reflect my "real self" in the form of social media like Facebook and LinkedIn. It seems super exhausting but also like a weird kind of informal social credit system since employers and even strangers you meet will try to vet you using social media and if you don't have any you're sus.
It's getting harder and harder to tell what's a scam, which makes people less trusting.
can't trust those Marxist-Leninist-Maoists trying to sell you essential oils and shit
MLMs are the absolute worst. Pretty much everything can be a scam, though. Even some of the more legit charities will scam you in ways other than how they spend the donation. Selling your info, trying to upsell you, tricking you into monthly donations, putting you on mailing lists you didn't agree to, using fake stories to get you to donate, hijacking people's social anxiety to get them to donate like they're being mugged, guilt tripping you after you already donated (which makes you feel worse than if you'd never donated at all), secretly doing things that go against the stated purpose of the charity, getting as indebted to big donors as political candidates do and giving them influence on what the charity does...
If a legit charity does this stuff, how can you trust a company or some random person on the street?
Ughhhhhh... I signed a change.org petition yesterday, and I had to click like 50 different things after signing it to avoid getting roped into something else but make sure that my signature went through.
I just realized something... this is what charities or other companies that ask for donations used to do only for big donors who got influence in return. Now, since the internet's made it easy to harass everyone who's ever given you a donation, everyone gets the same harassment, but small donors like us never have a chance to get any influence.
Along the same lines of what someone else said about things not being serious anymore, I'm tired of every fucking thing being meta, self-referential, or post-modern.
Everything has to be a wink, nod "you don't really buy this, do you?
Like fuck it was original to break the fourth wall in the 70s or something, critique of grand narratives and all that, but now nothing can be self contained.
Does every show or movie have to have "Wow, so that happened". Or like the fucking dragons in GOT turning their heads like dogs in a romantic scene. Just infantilizing.
Let things be sad or serious or whatever. The above-it-all, snarky bemused shit is so fucking bourgeois. "Hmm, it doesn't matter, I'm too smart to care about any of this."
Fuck off. Some things matter. I rather something be up its own ass and self-serious (which is easily dismissed, ridiculed, etc) than to be overly ironic.
Matt talks about this in a recent Cushvlog, though I'm afraid I can't remember which one.
I vaguely remember it and wholeheartedly agree, I actually stole the 'wow so that happened' from him.
hence why Twin Peaks is great. Lynch toys the line between the ridiculous and the profound, by being entirely and completely sincere.
Like I legitimately prefer lifetime movies to this kinda shit. I’d rather something take itself seriously and be bad, that’s actually funnier and better.
I think that's why I loved the modern She-Ra so much when I watched it. It is so incredibly genuine, the characters are themselves and hurt and love and its so over the top flamboyant without ever being ironic about it. Despite any problematic parts, the core is simply be true to your heart, love even when it hurts, and find your own reason to keep living.
This is a weird one to explain, and I don't know if it's technically bad, but technology currently allows us to completely change our current stimuli regardless of our environmental conditions.
It could be the best day of your life, and you could open up your phone and literally give yourself PTSD by watching snuff films. It could be the worst day of your life, and you could bring up truly sublime moments to offset it.
These changes are seconds away from each other. If you've ever scrolled through a social media feed, you could easily see both at the same time. Or schizophrenically pop back and forth between them. I'm often laughing at a meme, then seconds later I see a news story about done atrocity, then seconds later there's a cute animal.
In the past, if you wanted things to be different? You had to actually develop talents and put energy out into the universe.
If you wanted to hear some music? Someone actually had to play it. If you wanted to decorate something, you had to actually get the art done. If you wanted to hear a story, you needed someone to tell it to you, or act out it in a play.
Life had a continuous experiential rhythm, and there was no escaping it without social interaction. A beautiful moment was a beautiful moment. It was not reproducible outside of its context.
Now? You can replicate any experience outside of any context, any meaning, any social reproduction. So people start to think of life as discontinuitous. They start to think of the present as something they tolerate while their devices reproduce for them the life they actually want.
This is very similar to Marx's concept of commodity fetishism, but literally for human meaning and memory.
People are treating their actual lives like the accumulation of memory commodities. With the exchange-value being the intensity/desirability of that emotion.
I don't know whether that's good or bad, but it's VERY fucking different than what most humans' lives were like for tens of thousands of years.
It's time to read McLuhan. Specifically, Understanding Media. His views on cultures and groups with varying levels of technology can be rather unfortunate, but he essentially set out in the 60's to answer the same question you're thinking about. What, exactly, does electronic communication mean? What does it do to people? With our current technology comes this inherent immediacy, and as we get more and more advanced it will become more and more immediate. Electromagnetic communications began with the one-way broadcast of the spoken word, continued with the one-way verbal/visual and the two-way verbal, and has now exploded into an entirely new extension of every aspect of the human nervous system at light speed to every corner of the globe. It's hard to value the effects as good or bad, really. It's all just so different. We've built a culture and a language for 4,000+ years around writing and developed deep roots for how to think about writing. But now, we have moved on. Writing has been transcended. I think what's left to do is pick up the few scholarly tools we have at our disposal for analyzing this transition and exploring how to mitigate the negative side effects and take advantage of the positives. We need to make a terminology for discoursing about the Internet that is as rich and detailed as the way that we study rhetoric and literature.
Maybe so, but people are still quite capable of dividing the reproduction from the real, and will for a very long time
Hence people going to concerts, still fucking instead of just watching porn, etc.
I think the issue is settling for the reproduction
Like I said, I don't know if it's bad or not. And I don't know that people don't recognize it or not.
The point is that the construction of human meaning, of lived conscious experience, can now be isolated from its socially produced context.
You can go see a concert, sure. But music used to be something people did together. Entire musical tastes were developed solely based on what you could find within transportation distance of your house, and no further.
Now? You can absorb entire cultural experiences from different spatial-temporal eras at will. You could live exclusively in an experiential context which is impossible to reproduce where you live.
This is true even in terms of our politics! We absorb Soviet or Anarchist aesthetics and movements and culture, in an environment where not only can it not be reproduced, but the entire culture is utterly hostile to it! That's very fucking weird. There weren't like, Spanish peasants reproducing Aztec or Mayan culture. The concept wouldn't even have occurred to them.
Who knows what kind of organic politics would exist in the absence of this ability, or if it would arise at all. What would our resistance look like without the ability to reproduce all of these dead cultural signifiers?
Again, not good or bad. Just very different.
I see what you mean... and you're certainly not wrong. But I feel like we're missing something, here. Let me think about this.
