I can feel some measure of Null's pain. After I erased much of my online presence and spent less time arguing politics and the economy with brainwashed numbskulls who lack the attention span to even contextualize anything that didn't happen less than a month ago, I realized that not only did these people not care about my wellbeing at all, I was wasting hundreds or even thousands of man-hours that could have been spent on far more productive things.
I've been fucking around online since the dialup era, and I don't even recognize the internet anymore. The internet of the late 90s and on through the 00s was
fun. It wasn't infested with political correctness and people weren't constantly at each other's throats. Creativity was allowed to thrive without limits. Then, the social media giants came along and they caged everyone and turned the whole thing into a shitty, gentrified amusement park. As an act of rebellion against this trend, I once tried starting my own pro-free-speech forum. An XF board on a VPS, just like this one. Everyone called me a Nazi sympathizer. Right away, people tried harassing me on my own board, to the point where I eventually had to block Tor users. The whole experiment crashed and burned a mere couple months after its inception.
I have a buddy of mine IRL who's a real tinfoil-hatter. Older fellow. I once tried showing him my Minecraft builds, many years ago, at the height of that particular fad. He gave me this disappointed look and said "It's not real". I didn't understand at all. I was so fully committed to the virtual world, buildings made out of voxels were as real to me as ones made out of wood, or concrete, or bricks. In my head, there was no distinction between the virtual and the real. Virtual worlds were, from my point of view, natural extensions of real spaces, as autistic as that might sound. This guy sat me down, and he explained to me how the powers-that-be want people anesthetized to their worsening conditions of life. How they want people investing themselves in virtual hobbies as a substitute for real ones, and meanwhile, our real space is shrinking, with people living in apartments comparable to prison cells.
He asked me which I'd rather have; real acreage with my own garden, or a fake virtual greenhouse with fake, inedible plants. He asked me if I wanted imaginary achievements or real achievements, fake skills or real skills. I thought his argument sounded like the most Boomer thing I'd ever heard, at the time. It struck me as rather backwards. After all, a virtual environment is more environmentally-friendly than taking over actual space to realize one's ambitions. You don't have to disrupt any ecosystems or despoil any pristine land when you build a virtual LEGO castle. I had, since long ago, drank the VR kool-aid. I thought we were all going to be wearing augmented-reality goggles and drawing graffiti on everything and checking out other people's art installations with our GPS-enabled phones.
But now, I'm starting to see it. I'm starting to see just how much we've been denied.
Nobody actually talks with each other anymore. Notice that? You can have four people sitting together in a room, and every last one is staring at their phone. To check their updates. To see how many "likes" they got. To get that dopamine hit they desperately need, before promptly depressing themselves with another hit of fatalistic, sensationalist news coverage.
People are defined less by who they are and more by what they buy. There are iPhone people and Android people. Microsoft or Sony. Tesla or Toyota. After the nuclear family was broken up, after religion was debased and destroyed, and after communities were atomized, the only remaining sense of affiliation was to brand name products. Identitarianism arose as a reaction to a state of life utterly devoid of genuine identity.
The more people find out about each other, the less they like each other. Everyone has to obsessively tweet out every little goddamn thing about their lives, down to the tiniest, most boring minutiae, just because they can't handle the stress of keeping it in, and because they feel that they're important enough that other people absolutely
must know that they ate Chalupas or walked their dog that day.
In modern society, you can be surrounded by thousands of people and still feel utterly alone. Irrelevant. Insignificant. Less than an insect.
There are no great individuals anymore. No great speakers, no great thinkers, no hero scientists, and no wise statesmen. The only way to be heard is to be swept up in a fad. To surf the waves of the latest flavor of the month, only to be replaced by the next one when people get bored and start looking for another distraction, which our corporate media readily provides to them.
This is worse than Idiocracy. So much worse. People can't even see the walls of our prison. Not only were we not handcuffed and jailed, we walked into this social media Skinner box ourselves, we reached through the bars while holding the key, and we locked ourselves up in our cells. We didn't even have to be coerced. We went along with all of this
willingly.
It's infuriating.
