Read on Twitter
Everyone is slowly discovering the same thing, which is that the "free internet" and all the fun you had and freedom and positive potential of the technology, is dead, and the wild west period is over. You can no longer be a person only a brand.
Sometimes the proverbial drop that makes the vase overflow is understanding the "algorithm", sometimes it's alienation from cultural peers over money, sometimes its video games journalism. Ultimately all of it is the realisation that you are embodied, and you "are" not online
You are sitting in "front" of online and looking at a screen. Many lash out in these moments because that is a very disgusting thing to realize - it may be the case that something/someone else "ruined" the internet, but there is a inescapable part of it that is realizing,
That you were simply wrong about what is was, and what it could do, and what it could be. There never truly was this potential for connection in it. You are embodied. You are not "inside" the screen. You are looking at it. you wanted to escape the body. You wanted to be inside.
It's not only that the parameters have changed - the change is mainly to make certain aspects explicit which were formerly implicit, hidden away, easier to willfully ignore. The discovery is not only a revelation of what has changed, but also of what always-already was the case
Which is, you are not a cool cyperpunk hacker. You are a junkie
The wild west ending isn't such a new thing, it didn't happen recently, it wasn't the American election. It wasn't 2016. It was set in stone in 2007, and it was over in 2010
And the one lesson you should take away from this realization, is: don't take it personally. It feels like a slight, like being ridiculed and humiliated. "I've been taken for a fool, I've been had". But really nothing changes, it doesn't matter at all.
Just as long as you get back in the body, and approach it in a different way. You just have to not hate the body and want to escape to a kind of being that is purely virtual and platonic. You just have to stop identifying with your language, & start identifying with your actions
"you just have to stop wanting to die and destroy your physical form, and live as a purely platonic ghost". "Quitting drinking is easy you just have to stop wanting to die and choose to want to live"
Just because you have to be a brand you can still have fun at work. It's just a matter of not conflating categories and thinking that you colleagues are your wife
But it's hard to work and accept those parameters, when what you want isn't to have fun at work, but to have fun with your wife. At some point that's on you for expecting something unreasonable
The human soul is not a book, it's not a long string if sentances, and it's not a system of logic. The human soul is your capacity to manipulate physical objects in space.
Once you do away with this miscomprehension of what your being is, it becomes self evident that you can't "be a person" online - you never could. A brand is simply what it is possible to be, without the physical. And there is no physicality "online" - only abstraction & madness
Virtual does not mean "intellectual-soul-magic world that's higher and and contains the platonic form you can directly interact with". Is means, visual, seeing-with-your-eyes. "digital" does not mean "tron cyperspace vr other dimension", it means "using your digits(fingers)"
all of this could of course have been avoided through design and sticking to the image board format with no pretence of "identity". any attempt to create an "outsider" forum, outsider internet, "twitter alternative" etc, is doomed to failure before it even starts, for this reason
as long as you adopt the design philosophy, center it around "profiles", you have already fucked up
turn off the vibrate function on your phone
