You have been manipulated. By some of the richest people on Earth.
They built a playhouse for you, full of useful toys. Free to use! With calendars and walls to place your posters and shared photo albums and little magical locked drawers so you could collect money for good causes and they managed it all with a little magical creature that took all this info–much more than you could handle, from the hundreds and thousands of friends this system found for you.
The magical creature sorted out how important it thought each scrap of paper on the bulletin board was. And it turned that stuff into a scrolling sheet of paper it typed up—just for you! Your feed! And it watched you laugh or smile or cry, as you read your feed, and it kept track of that, too.
For inside the little creature was an infinitely large storehouse of index cards. It remembered everything! And it had an infinite amount of time to ponder the cards, while it sat and brooded, its pretty sculpted face stripped away to reveal a coldly gleaming clockwork of diamond gears and pistons.
The creature conferred with the billionaire and his army of clerks and bankers and lawyers.
Oh, what nice billionaires we have, to make such a thing for us we all thought.
For a time.
When the fun house seemed to be soaking up all our time, and making us feel weird and somtimes bad we were told, well, use it responsibly!
There are third party tools you can buy!
You could pay for a gnome to haul you out of the fun house, or to guide you away from the funhouse at certain times, but the gnomes sometimes were blocked by new magic created by the funhouse and the problem was, since you hired the gnomes, you could always just stop paying them and wind up back in the funhouse.
Surely, many of us began to think to ourselves, the funhouse isn’t really a drug. It isn’t really addictive, like heroin or anything. That’s just a metaphor. Right? Right?
I’m not sure anymore. Like the AA people sitting around smoking cigarettes, taking one sometimes lethal drug while trying to avoid a more lethal one, I’m sitting round in the abandoned church basement of my blog with a few friends. My actual friends. A handful of people.
Which is maybe as many friends as we need or should ever have.
Hand me your lighter, man.
p.s. Next meeting is in my basement.
http://www.ludism.org/tinfoil/Overwhelming_Gearwheels
Cool! Yeah, the issue isn’t tribalism, I don’t think, we have always been tribal, the thing is we have been fighting for the candy colored brains under the plastic dome in Gamesters of Triskilion.
Our tribalism has been used to create free content for billionaires.
Who do not give a rats ass when gladiators die in the arena.
Just because we have always been tribal does not make tribalism less of a problem. We have always had war and poverty too.
You might appreciate these posts on the Open Web that I’ve been collecting for awhile. I’ve been meaning to write a short post about the concept since before I rebooted my blog.
https://pinboard.in/search/u:rwhe?query=openweb
When I announce new posts on Faceboot, it’s terribly hard to get people to move the discussion to my blog. Usually, they comment right on the ‘boot. Sometimes they get upset, even if you ask them nicely.
Of course, the gladiatorial arena is also a problem. I’m not denying that.
The hidden algos, and the values they encode, the data that is generated, and who buys it and what they do with it, this meta layer, this big data layer, capitalism intersecting with tribalism in new ways, this perhaps perfect storm of weaponized bleeding edge tech and late stage capitalism. My younger friends see brighter clearer lines through the murk. Maybe it is only the fact that I can longer be any kind of a standard bearer, for anything I truly care about. I sort of pray that I am again able to pull the wool over my own eyes, and joyfully Believe in something again. But I’m now adrift between worlds. The view is breathtaking. What to do about my dwindling air supply not immediately apparent.
yeah people want to speak to the whole audience, not the subset that you own exclusively, not to your personal echo chamber, but to some broader imagined community, which is hidden behind the FB algos, some amalgam of their friends and your friends and friends of friends and maybe even hostile strangers who we can ambush if they speak up and act like assholes.
Well said. I deactivated my FB account a week or two ago. I don’t miss it. I miss being about to connect with that one friend I have in Barcelona, but I figure I can get his actual phone number or email address from a mutual actual friend.