In the past, you may have had to choose between someone you agree 50% with and someone you agree 80% with, and so you'd be friends with the 80%. It's your "best available friend."
Now with the Internet, you can choose to befriend the 80% agreeable irl guy, or you can befriend the 99% agreeable guy online. The 20% of disagreements irl feel completely intolerable, because you're not forced to cooperate for survival. This also contributes to strenuous familial relationships.
RT: https://poa.st/objects/a3cbbc29-f6ac-49c0-b525-3c072740149a
A friend is someone who'd rather spend his time with you than anything else. In the past, there really wasn't any other outlet to spend your time. Now, it's a valuable commodity targeted with precision and monetized by companies. By putting a price tag on time, you have millions of dollars spent trying to take it from you, and you can't get that time back.
Who do you think would win, some relatively pleasant person who wants quality time, or the latest million dollar attention grabber? That's why there are no friends beyond coworkers now.
@veff
I am slowly starting to get into a community, but seriously, finding people who are unironically willing to spend time with you feels like tearing your skin off.
@LukeAlmighty@gameliberty.club @veff@poa.st
The OP looks like some ordinary, run of the mill "phone bad" bullshit. But broken families and atomized individuals are the exception in other parts of the world, even though social media and wireless are cheap and accessible.
I suspect that the powers that be want us to internalize "phone bad" to the extent that is distracts from other problems, and because uncensored communities are the solution to those problems.
@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?
@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.
@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 @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.
@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?
@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 @Dudebro@nicecrew.digital @LukeAlmighty@gameliberty.club
Tragic is relative.
Was the leveling of Hiroshima and Nagasaki tragic? What the rise of the Soviet Union tragic? Was the fall of the Soviets tragic?
I really do think that tech will continue to advance, economies will continue to grow, and the global population will eventually reach 30 billion. 30 billion people who won't care less that some of their ancestors thought the telescreen brainzap was a heckin sad.
@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.
More likely cities, and now that we see how that turned out, well, it's time for monarchism.
@LukeAlmighty @Dudebro @KuteboiCoder If you want to argue dictionary pedantry then you've got me beat.