I hope he's right. I'm so tired of this shit.
I have no idea what kind of demented pervert is actually reading this stuff, when you could be lying in a meadow by a glassy stream
:kitty-cri:
Things will survive in proportion to how well they’ve managed to insulate themselves from the internet and its demands. The Financial Times will outlive the Guardian. Paintings will outlive NFTs. Print magazines will outlive Substack. You will, if you play your cards right, outlive me. If anything interesting ever happens again, it will not be online. You will not get it delivered to your inbox. It will not have a podcast. This machine has never produced anything of note, and it never will.
This really hit home for me. I’m not sure capitalism can remotely create anything of worth and our modern internet is built from the ground up to serve and benefit capital.
To be normal, healthy, and well-adjusted under capitalism is to be irredeemably sick.
There's something deeply, distressingly wrong with people who live in this system but aren't depressed and filled with anxiety.
A foundational tenet of contemporary leftism should include post-internet rehabilitation. Helping people get offline and finding themselves again, finding community, finding a physical world again.
Wholeheartedly agree. I've been ruminating on the same ideas recently. Fundamental reconstruction of the internet should be a requisite for generational healing.
Absolutely great idea, I think this would definitely kill one of the social pillars that leads to young male mass shooters. Fighting against atomization and isolation would do a lot I think.
lol just wait til you see what isolation and atomization of society is doing to our elderly.
No, not the fox news elderly, the impoverished, senile, shitting themselves in a nursing home elderly.
Always-on internet has been a social and environmental disaster. So many people are wasting their lives on banal crap while being caught in dark design patterns. Offpunk is an nascent attempt at this rehabilitation on gemini sites where people try to only going online for short bursts. Don't know if that is the best place for it because gemini really seems like an attempt to bring back the blogosphere through software blinkers. The vast majority of content on gemini is extremely boring as a result just like with this substack and pretty much all of medium.
Cyberspace needs to die. A democratic internet should be a means to an end designed for climate resilience. Think mailing lists over web forums and social media made more convenient by webmail clients.
Even here on Hexbear I've gotten it from very online people that insisted that what they called "meatspace" lacked meaning and substance compared to the internet. :lea-why:
Hell yeah, i like this guy's style. Overly wordy and deeply weird prose is my weakness
Vibes remind me of a Ranting prophet clad in rags; the street corner his temple. I love it
Do not click the button below this paragraph, do not type in your email address to receive new posts straight to your inbox, and for the love of God, if you have any self-respect, do not even think about giving me any money.
:fry:
Having said that, it’s probably an improvement on television at least.
I don't own a television and haven't owned one for decades, but when I'm in line or in a waiting room somewhere where there's a television, it gives me chills just how much worse television has gotten since I had one of my own. Steve Harvey's empire is a bleakly saccharine place.
twitching against the screen until the sky goes dark and I’m one day closer to the end.
In fairness to the internet, before that quite a lot of Americans lived their entire life and died with nothing to do except read the bible and go to the market once a month if they were lucky.
I'm glad people are digging it, when I read it I just knew I had to show it to my dearest bots and feds on hexbear.net
The dot-com billionaires, in their ongoing mid-life crises, are trying so hard to make a second, larger dot-com boom happen with "metaverse" peddling and NFTs and so on.
It's an attempt at a revolution that has nothing backing it up but money and words, no substance beneath it. I think the link is on to something.
VOICES HAVE REVEALED TO ME THAT YOUR MAILMAN IS A DEMONIC ARCHON SPAT FROM BABYLON’S SPINNING PIGMOUTH, GOD WANTS YOU TO KILL HIM WITH A ROCKET LAUNCHER
Archon or not I stand with the postal union :stalin-gun-1::stalin-gun-2:
From time to time, I sit up and remember how scrolling reddit or YT was just how I spent my downtime waiting for an email from my employer or to wait out my partner's taste in TV and I wonder what I am waiting for now?
For me, it's memes and video games which leave me wondering at the end of the weekend: what did I spend my time doing? What did that give me? Literally just close my eyes and 2 days pass until I get to objectify more of my labor power
It's because just the act of going outside costs $29.99 minimum and any participation in social activity is $7.89/hr or more.
Even the outdoors is heavily commodified, if you're in a city it's blatant, but even the smaller towns and suburbs, the parks and natural areas are only accessible by car, or you need a permit, or you have to purchase new shoes or a backpack, or supplies.
The Main Street areas are patrolled by police that will tell you too move along if you spend too much time in the public space without buying anything, every other block is plauged with chain stores that all look the same with the interspersed boutiques now all selling the same kitch they found online.
The Internet is just the elevated form of reality, a distilled version of the hyper normalized commodity fetishism of the real world.
I've long since lost any interest in travel, especially within the US, because any unique character that distinguished one part of the country is either gone, or horrible. The same stores, chains, and products are available everywhere, with maybe a handful of regional variations that have been getting smaller every year. Every city has the same kinds of daring cultural fusion restaurants, the same theaters I can't afford, and the same shitty pop-punk-folk anarchist music scene. Unless it doesn't, and there just isn't a local music scene. It's all completely homogenous now. Everyone watches the same TV shows, everyone works the same shitty jobs, everyone lives in either the same shitty little apartment, the same overpriced luxury yuppie box, or the same alienating and horrible suburban tract house.
I’ve long since lost any interest in travel, especially within the US, because any unique character that distinguished one part of the country is either gone, or horrible.
"Prestige cities" are a very real and ruinous phenomenon and they're found worldwide. The world's being made more bland every year by chasing techbro-approved glass and steel aesthetics.
Everyone That Matters Has Started Wearing Jeans Over Their Heads With Their Arms Down The Leg Holes And Their Faces All Cramped Up In The Sweaty Groin Region, And They Walk Down The Street Like This, Bumping Into Things, And When They Sit Down To Eat They Just Pour Their Subscription-Service Meal-Replacement Slurry Over The Crotch Of Their Jeans And Lick At The Dribblings From The Inside, And They’re Covered In Flies And Smell Bad And Also They’re Naked From The Waist Down Because Their Trousers Are On Their Heads, That’s Part Of It Too—We Show You How To Get The Look!
Here’s how web3 is about to disrupt the meat industry. Every time you buy a pound of tripe, your physical offal will be bundled with a dedicated TripeToken, which maintains its value and rarity even after the tripe has been eaten, thanks to a unique blockchain signature indexed to the intestinal microbiome of the slaughtered cattle! By eating large amounts of undercooked offal while trading TripeTokens on secondary markets, you can incentivise the spread of your favourite cattle diseases—and if one of the pathogens you own jumps the species barrier to start infecting humans, you’ve successfully monetised the next pandemic! Once you get sick, you can rent out portions of your own intestinal tract to an industrial meat DAO in exchange for SlaughterCoins. Because SlaughterCoins are linked via blockchain to the progressive disintegration of your body, they’re guaranteed to increase in value! And when your suffering becomes unbearable, local abattoirs will bid to buy up your SlaughterCoin wallet in exchange for putting you out of your misery with a bolt gun to the head!
Especially true considering their entire platform is built on insane, fleeting internet trends now
He was a minor online British left figure back in the first Bernie era, and used to be in the Chaposphere. He even had a spin-off podcast with Amber, until he was cancelled for sexual harassment.
The fact that he was canceled for sexual harassment certainly puts this section in a new light:
Occasionally, online social movements do make something happen. A hand emerges from out of the cloud to squish some minor individual. Let’s get her friends to denounce her! Let’s find out where she lives! You can have your sadistic fun and your righteous justice at the same time: doesn’t it feel good to be good?
Try now - I switched it out for an archive link. Apologies, there was a weird looking ID in the URL and out of paranoia I’d removed it. Clicking it worked for me, but the was probably some weird caching going on :bordiga-despair:
back in the first Bernie era
The unimaginably distant past of 6 years ago.
Does this mean the noobs are leaving? We're going back to bulletin boards?
That is his thesis. I hope he's right. That's the closest thing to a beautiful dream I've heard in awhile
When I moved to my current residence I found a few bulletin boards in town that are regularly used and I fucking love them. Flyers for shows, weird classes, local artists, all sorts of great stuff. It feels way more human than anything online.
