The case for a possible stabilized scenario

Computers as crack and computers as beer

The way I see it, is that everything hinges on the technological problem. An interface problem. Every single political and social issue of the day, as far as I am concerned, is downstream from this one core problem. Mankind and computers. How the use of the internet changes the human being. When I say that everyone is insane now, I mean to imply, because of our relationship to mass electronic media, “the internet”, “social media”, smartphones - computers.

Everything I talk about here - how it makes the world simultaneously too small and too large, how it may or may not be a series of comedic accidents or the product of someone’s directed will, or maybe a kind of self-moving force that various interested parties who consider themselves in control of or the designers of, can only influence and shift in minor ways, but is ultimately it’s own will, a force of nature. The specifics aren’t important for this.

The way I see it, what is happening to the human race is “struggling to adapt to information technology”, and the incompetence, insanity and madness we see manifested in the world is a direct product of, on an individual level, interfacing with the machine, causing people to get all fucked in the head.

My previous timeline for the future has always been bleak, and I have long considered 2007 the last year of the “pre-machine” era. The release of the smartphone, the first iPhone, brought the machine to “normies” - it made the internet available to everyone by removing the last barrier to access of basic mechanical know-how. Popularising it with women, children, and old people, who I all considered to be unable to ever “get it” - they would only ever be tools, passive users. Turning the toolbox of the internet into a passive one way information stream, turning it into TV.

While this is true, and the whole thing has been massively centralized in the passing 15 years, there is a possible world where things are not as bleak as all that.

There is a possible stabilized scenario. What is happening right now is, essentially, that it hit the boomers, and the boomers are in control of politics and the economy and land and all assets. This is cause for concern in the short term, where it seems like all hell is breaking lose, and everything is going off the hinges.

The variable is this:

It might be the case that there is simply a certain length of time of exposure to machine logic, it takes for an individual to become acclimatized to it.

The first time I used a computer was when I was 10 years old, or something. At this point in time I feel like I have a decent overview of how these things work - enough that I preach about it on a blog. The in’s and out’s, the pitfalls, the little behavioural traps you get caught in, and that much of the current iteration of media is explicitly designed to exploit. The stuff that makes me want to write an “internet survival guide”, where I muse on the old chan culture as a communal code of behaviour learned the hard way, by experimentation.

It’s easy for me to sit and think I hold the keys, and that everyone else is a stupid fucking idiot. That also gives me a nice sense of importance and a goal and all sorts of neat things. But: It might be the case that there is just an average time it takes, for the individual to become acclimatized to it. And that time might just be 20 years.

Something like that. When I look at what the smartphones have done to my peers and my elders, I might just be looking at someone who is ~10 years behind me on a personal development scale, and not ~10 years behind *the world*, as I had previously assumed.

The boomers being turned insane - well they were already insane from television, and I’m just personally worried because my parents didn’t watch television, but the phones got them. That’s a me problem, that’s not a societal problem. The boomers were already insane.

If this is the case - something like this - then the cause for all this tupsy-turvy we are experiencing is that there are a massive disconnect between how far along this path of, for lack of a better term, cyborgization, and it doesn’t correlate with previous era’s social structures of authority. Internet weirdos are the furthest along, and then young people and boomers are roughly equally far. But, given enough time, and assuming no end of the human race by some kind of wacky accident along the way - when the boomers die out, things stabilize.

Not instantly. But at that point, we’ll be the oldest, and the next generation will be born to zoomers who are either acclimatized, or at least, on the path.

If it is, for example, “it takes 20 years to become accustomed to hyperstimulating information technology”, then in about twenty years, things begin to stabilize. Socially.

In a very neat little way, this could eventually also double for one of the initiation rituals there has been so much talk about us lacking today. “You become an adult, when you learn to detach from the internet”. You become an adult, when you learn to shitpost. You become an adult when you learn to tell the difference between video games and real life. You become an adult when you learn to not be mad online.

Of course I still think its important to write the internet survival guide regardless. I think this process should be helped along by any means necessary.

I have previously compared smartphones to crack cocaine. I think they are explicitly designed to be as invasive and destructive to the human mind as possible. I think the “touch” interface is primarily there to stimulate the nerve endings on your fingers to subtly simulate touch, to trick your monkey brain into feeling tribe emotions. I think it is a deliberate attempt to move away from objectively superior interface technology - the keyboard, to lower the barrier to entry, to abuse you. There are a few more layers to that, but ultimately, it is not in your interest. It is not to help the user.

In the stabilized scenario, smartphones, or some later iteration of them, will be less crack cocaine and more alcohol: something that is a drug, but it is recognized as being a drug, and it is socially controlled through cultural norms: it is considered rude, sick, wrong, to go to work drunk. It is considered wrong to drink alone. It is considered wrong to drink in excess. Cultural norms control it, and the vast majority of people can indulge in a controlled, small amount - just enough to help you socialize. And meet girls. For example.

And in the stabilized scenario, some people with certain predispositions, psychological profiles, or biological predispositions, have to abstain entirely, because they can’t control it.

I think helping to articulate those cultural norms is something that would be incredibly helpful and productive to do. It’s what I am trying to do. Eventually. Some day soon. I’ve just been sick for a week give me a break, guy. I’ll get to it ok get off my back.

All of this is of course, depending on that one variable. The way I ultimately see it in my minds eye is, that it is a very high frequency wave of binary logic, a strong buzz, that shocks the system. Computers are ultimately an incredibly long series of binary y/n gates, which is binary logic, something we can biologically compute. But it is such an intensely dense ball of binary logic, far too much for us to compute, that the high frequency shocks us, like a lighting bolt. Really no different from sticking your finger in a wall socket.

A binary question:

Is it the case that human beings can adopt to this technological environment (beer)

or,

is it at a fundamental level in some way incompatible with us (crack).

Honestly I’m withholding judgement for now. I’m not sure. But some things are beginning to stick: not watching porn is, maybe not widely adopted, but it’s in the conversation. The notion that it’s destructive is out there. Little things here and there.

Regardless of how things work out, I hope to continue to spread the message that electrocuting yourself is bad. Even if it’s lame to say and I ruin the joke by saying it out loud.

“and so he slept in his gaming chair, for he had nothing left to give”