@veff @LukeAlmighty None of that matters , what matters is how other people feel valued when they are around you. To listen and not argue over ever little thing.

@Bianca @LukeAlmighty Well yeah, obviously an interesting jackass isn't worth spending time being around, but if people can be alone and do nothing or be together and do nothing, people generally choose the former over the latter. Speaking personally, I want to meet people who do people things, not just exist. It shows growth, personality and character.

@KuteboiCoder @LukeAlmighty "Phone bad" is a gross caricaturizing of my point, but I'll roll with it. If the Internet were to disappear forever tomorrow, would social life and community become better or worse?

@veff@poa.st @LukeAlmighty@gameliberty.club

For many, worse.

But maybe I deserve that, because something something soft skills. Is that what you think?

@KuteboiCoder @LukeAlmighty Maybe in the immediate aftermath it would take a hit. Would you still be worse off years after the fact?

@veff@poa.st @LukeAlmighty@gameliberty.club

This is Jacobin logic

@veff @KuteboiCoder
YES!!!
I grew up in the pre-social media era, and it was definitely much worse. Incomparable even I would say.

@veff @KuteboiCoder @LukeAlmighty Rebuilding our social life is our only hope of salvation.

@DC5FAN @veff @KuteboiCoder
No one disagrees with you there, but before internet, there was only one community. The normie community, that hoped I would rope.

Now, there are more of them. Yes, they are weak, but I am not hated in all of them.

@LukeAlmighty@gameliberty.club @DC5FAN@poa.st @veff@poa.st

Honestly, you look like an above-average straight white guy in your avi. Nothing particularly scandalous about the flip flag on your bio, that being the case.

Sorry, what flag is that?

I'm fishing but I don't want to push you to divulge more than you can.

@KuteboiCoder @DC5FAN @veff
I will dox myself for you...
That is an AI photo of Ryan Gosling- Luke Skywalker mix. So, I am happy I look good to you ;D

@DC5FAN@poa.st @veff@poa.st @LukeAlmighty@gameliberty.club

In the Before Times, "social life" means spending money at the bar or the strip club. Or church I guess, but that's super lonely if you're young and adventurous and of dating age.

At least now you have the option to learn an exotic musical instrument even if you don't know anybody who plays.

@veff @KuteboiCoder @LukeAlmighty Real sociality involves obligations and no one wants to be bothered with those anymore.

@DC5FAN @KuteboiCoder @LukeAlmighty That's ok, maintenance doesn't just apply to mechanical things, but also mental, social, spiritual etc. and if you don't schedule time for maintenance, they will schedule it for you.

@veff @KuteboiCoder @LukeAlmighty yes

Worse because even before the internet I didn't have friends

@Dudebro @veff @LukeAlmighty @KuteboiCoder WELL WELL WELL, i at least had that much, who is autistic now?

I never admitted to being mentally stable I am on the dark fedi

@Dudebro @givenup @LukeAlmighty @veff @KuteboiCoder That's my secret captain. I am always mentally unstable

@egirlyuumimain @Dudebro @LukeAlmighty @veff @KuteboiCoder

@Dudebro @veff @LukeAlmighty @KuteboiCoder thge air around here is filled with bean plant particles as the farmers are harvesting their bean fields
LOL

@Dudebro @veff @KuteboiCoder
Exactly the same opinion here.
There was nowhere to go before the modern always-online social setting. Now, I have something to work with, but before? It was a true hell.

People were shit only normie retards were capable of having social relationships. Sure I had "friends" but they would bail the instant someone asked "You want to go get fucked at (random potheads) house"

@LukeAlmighty @Dudebro @KuteboiCoder I guess my point doesn't work when interacting with 100% true-and-honest autists. My life was significantly better before everyone got smartphones. I had Internet at home, but I specifically avoided getting a phone until... 2017? I didn't want the life of the online to destroy the life of meatspace, but eventually everyone else hooked up to it and there was nothing to be found except online. If that went away, eventually everyone would have to crawl out of their room and be human again. I miss that.

@veff @LukeAlmighty @Dudebro @KuteboiCoder Sadly there is no getting the genie back into the bottle.

@veff @LukeAlmighty @Dudebro @KuteboiCoder maybe you just miss being young. I had friends, but looking back, none of those relationships were as deep as some of the people I have as friends now, online. They didn’t last, that’s one proof of it.

The relationships he is reminiscing were not destroyed by phones but by atomizing society. See your high school friends stayed with you because there were jobs avaliable in your town be it factory or a provider for the factory. Now you have to move to be employed and you don't know your neighbors.

@Dudebro @Griffith @LukeAlmighty @veff @KuteboiCoder my friend is a mailman he's just to bsuy to acutally do aynthing, but he has like 8 kids

@Dudebro @Griffith @LukeAlmighty @KuteboiCoder Yeah but now we've got a chicken-or-egg problem, and one I've constantly been back and forth on. Was massive smartphone adoption a symptom of an increasingly atomized society, or was society atomized in large part due to the wide adoption of smartphones?
poa.st/objects/d7346ff2-5c81-4161-9945-8bafc36f59b1

It was atomized due to natfta shipping factories overseas before the cellphone was a thing normal people owned

@veff @Griffith @Dudebro @KuteboiCoder
Smartphones did their part. Definitelly. But it was also already inevitable thanks to the multipla-school to work pipeline.

In short, you are prety much FORCED to move your living location 3 times during your socially bonding years. I seriously believe, that this is 100% malicious, but when you leave university by the age of 25, you have no childhood friends, no kid next door girlfriend, no connections in the new place of work, and no system in place to form a new friend group.

A rolling stone gathers no moss.

@LukeAlmighty @veff @Dudebro @KuteboiCoder it’s absolutely an uprooting mechanism. The internet helps cope with that.

@Dudebro @Griffith @LukeAlmighty @KuteboiCoder I'll also mention- although it will probably net me massive negative social credit- that a lot of "society" was founded on useful myths that kept us together. I had a relatively happy upbringing in my super-orthodox mormon family because we were an insular community which had shared values. When the Internet picked up popularity, it became obvious that the entire religion was founded on lies and deception, and that shattered all sense of community. I posit that the same thing happened to Christianity writ large and it wouldn't be nearly so destructive without the help of instant information propagation via the Internet.

@veff @LukeAlmighty @Dudebro @KuteboiCoder Really putting to test “if the truth will kill it let it die.”

@Griffith @LukeAlmighty @Dudebro @KuteboiCoder I only wish I hadn't been born in the interregnum.

@veff @LukeAlmighty @Dudebro @KuteboiCoder Our lives are gonna be hard ones. Have to get through for future generations.

@veff@poa.st @Dudebro@nicecrew.digital @Griffith@5dollah.click @LukeAlmighty@gameliberty.club '

I'm somewhat of a problem child, because I came of age during the Obama recession and basically had my 20s stolen from me, with the macroeconomic crisis on top of my own shit.

My mother (a single mom to remarried when I was a teenager) is a Boomer, and was the problem child for her family her whole goddamn life. I've ranted at length about that, but she really mastered the art of the gaslight to prevent herself from getting thrown in the loonie bin.

It's not illegal to be poor, not illegal to discipline my child, not illegal to raise my voice from time to time, etc.

Her mother, my grandmother, was an oak tree. She was quiet, she was strong, and at any time in my childhood when I had a roof over my head it was because we were living with her or she was paying our bills. She was obsessed with me, with us, as a guardian angel, but she also had talents and hobbies and interests in her own life.

@veff@poa.st @Dudebro@nicecrew.digital @Griffith@5dollah.click @LukeAlmighty@gameliberty.club

My family's downward trajectory had its own unique twists, but it coincided with the same time scale as pretty much everybody else's.

And yes, I think, phone bad has nothing to do with it. It's the Boomers.

@veff @Dudebro @KuteboiCoder
Each day, I celebrate the death of the world you grieve over. I felt the change only 4 years ago, but the healing process is real, and I can see myself slowly getting to a state I could call happyness for the first time in my life.

Fuck the old world. May it rest in piss

@LukeAlmighty @Dudebro @KuteboiCoder I suspect you're probably a social cretin or have major aspergers if you genuinely think moving all human interaction online was a good thing. You can celebrate the death of "the old world" for your lifetime, but the new world has brought about such a social upheaval that nobody is having kids. In 100 years either some form of equilibrium will be developed, or else a regression back to the old world.

Nobody is having kids due to women's rights and land ownership. Same thing happened in Rome. If you look at the map of women's rights and birthdates it's almost a 1:1

@Dudebro @LukeAlmighty @KuteboiCoder Not disagreeing with that. Who are the predominant users of social media?

@Dudebro @LukeAlmighty @KuteboiCoder If the Internet went down tomorrow, who would be most affected? Women and losers. If you fear the Internet going down you're one of the two.

@veff@poa.st @Dudebro@nicecrew.digital @LukeAlmighty@gameliberty.club

Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are faggots and autists, not women and losers.

@KuteboiCoder @Dudebro @LukeAlmighty I would consider faggots and autists to be losers.

@veff @Dudebro @KuteboiCoder
A loser is defined by his lack of success.

And guess what you're complaining about right now?

@LukeAlmighty @Dudebro @KuteboiCoder If you want to argue dictionary pedantry then you've got me beat.

@veff @Dudebro @KuteboiCoder
You mistook descriptive and perscriptive meanings of words.

The old world made you a winner, and now, it no longer offers you that benefit.

@LukeAlmighty @Dudebro @KuteboiCoder The old world was self-sustaining because it followed natural law. The strong begat the strong and the weak withered away. What we are currently experiencing is a freak bubble which inverts that, but cannot sustain itself. I said it before, but we will either have a synthesis (my hope) or a regression. Were I born 100 years earlier or 100 years later, it matters not.

@veff@poa.st @LukeAlmighty@gameliberty.club @Dudebro@nicecrew.digital

veff the BAPist?

I've read a bit of BAP. And I think that the BAP fantasy is just wish-casting for a global EMP disaster that wouldn't even cause a Bronze Age renewal anyway. The wealthy bunker survivalists will have Motorola radios, DeWalt power tools and Yamaha generators to rebuilt society in their image, and it won't be primitivist at all.

@KuteboiCoder @Dudebro @LukeAlmighty I've never followed BAP in my life. These conclusions came to me as I was dying in a hospital bed.

@KuteboiCoder @Dudebro @LukeAlmighty Also, I don't wish for primitivist society. As I stated, I'd prefer we find a synthesis. It's up to us to find it, because the alternative is significant regression. Not the kind dreamt up in hollywood movies, but one much more mundane and tragic.

@veff@poa.st @LukeAlmighty@gameliberty.club @Dudebro@nicecrew.digital

One of my shitty alts engaged with @amerika@annihilation.social regarding the 20th-century agricultural revolution, and how it made the rise of democratic movements (and the fall of hereditary aristocratic governments) an inevitability.

I don't see that historical collapse reversing itself with any feasible contingencies you can think of.

No kings, no lords, no masters.

@KuteboiCoder @Dudebro @LukeAlmighty @veff

More likely cities, and now that we see how that turned out, well, it's time for monarchism.

@amerika@annihilation.social @Dudebro@nicecrew.digital @LukeAlmighty@gameliberty.club @veff@poa.st