This is not what I’m supposed to be doing right now, but there’s something I need to formulate for myself before I can get on with my day.

The problem with the microblogging platforms in particular, but social media more generally is that it lets us all express the contents of our minds more or less unfiltered. But the filters we impose upon ourselves to maintain smooth social interactions are what civilisation is. This means that social media is a de-civilising influence, which is why the last 5-10 years has been such a trainwreck socially. Closet fascists and nazis are no longer in the closet because the civilising impulse of self-censorship has been circumvented by a direct tap to Broca’s area. The same goes for the extreme identitarians who want to enforce a weird genetic-cultural bureaucracy where the entirety of your person is determined by your racial profile.

I don’t want access to your unfiltered thoughts. I want the thoughts you have thought through and worked out, that are productive and constructive and not the inarticulate yowlings of a terrified wounded canine. Once you get far enough out on either wing of the political circle you always end up at totalitarianism. The desire for a totalitarian state is an infantile desire: perfect control over the whole world. Our infantile desires are the reason we developed higher brain functions, they censor and regulate out stupid, simplistic impulses into actually productive actions.

By tapping directly into our uncensored brains, social media gives that stupid, simplistic infantile part free reign, and brings out our inner dictator. And so the social world becomes more and more dictatorial.

The OG nazis happened because a small group of psychopaths tapped into the infantile anxieties of 1930’s germans. Social media is doing it for the whole of connected humanity. This is not a good thing. Stop using it. Period.

Continuation

I have a few mintues until my first appointment, so here’s what I’ve been thinking. Decentralised social media is a myth. Mastodon is a decentralised infrastructure, no central person or company owns and administers the whole of the system’s contents. However, Mastodon is a centralised user experience.

Which probably isn’t the best way of expresing that idea. What I mean is that the Mastodon input interface is uniform for everyone who uses it and its output is identical for everyone who receives it. This means that the infinitude of human experience must be squashed down into fixed form in order for it to be expressed.

The same argument can me made for speech, or visual art, or whatever, that they force non-verbal/visual experience into verbal/visual forms—but for the most part these have so much flexibility that we don’t experience them as constraints. They are not artificial in the way that Mastodon is and they are extremely flexible in a way that Mastodon simply is not.

Later

I’m fucking exhausted right now from 5 whole sessions and a 10 minute, very light workout.

I don’t think it’s possible to artificially induce giveashit. Outside of the immediate moment, I do not feel any sense of connection with others. Utterly lacking object permanence, even though that actually means something completely different. I suppose some people might call it empathy fatigue, but basically, I’m tired and demoralised.

The only thing I can think to say is that I have too many projects and so I naturally never finish any of them. This leaves me feeling inept and ineffectual and buries me under the weight of responsibility.