by Ibon » Mon 01 Jan 2018, 10:22:01
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', 'S')o this place was a way to burn excess minutes while working (and waiting for a virtual meeting group to form), then an obsession in itself (because I followed the typical member profile and thought the oil peak was imminent, followed by Ruppert's concept of collapse),then finally, a replacement for some of the discussions held at work, on an overlapping but different set of topics.
Now this place is a habit, a need, and I often am here five or six times a day.
Thanks for you honesty KJ.
Pay attention folks. KJ's obsession and visiting five or six time a day is not so much because of the complexity of the topics discussed as much as he admitted that it is a replacement to the organic social group discussions he enjoyed when employed that he missed after retirement.
This is the digital pathology that I am now exiting.
We live in a society where the organic glue that holds communities together has been destroyed. This did not start with the internet but social media came in at just the right tome to eclipse and replace that which was destroyed and it is an insidious phenomenon that at its worst can be seen in the youngest emerging generation and their relationship to Snapchat.
Read this:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... on/534198/We know the forces that destroyed community in the USA. The death of small town America in rural areas, the isolation of suburbia, consumer culture, etc. etc. What was already fragmented created a void and social media came in to fill it. But is it a real replacement to organic community?
It isn't. It is a lazy way to replace that was destroyed, between me and you, between my physical body and your physical body is a digital matrix. One that has an inordinate control over your nervous system. KJ visits six times a day. Cog responds to a post within 5 minutes, etc. etc.
Can you folks not see the toxicity? Have your organic lives been so lost that this is the best you can do?
I admit it is not easy to build community that was torn apart by economic and other forces outside of ones control. It is a challenge to go knock on your neighbor's door in the design of isolated suburbia and try to develop brotherhood. For some like Cog he has become so socialized in consumer suburban culture that he actually embraces and enjoys his anonymity and also being a snarky asshole. He has embodied and embraced hook line and sinker what defines the exceptional American today; afraid of social interaction, angry, snarky, etc.
This is what a digital venue creates. A big false Ersatz of what we lost. Community.
We are masters at rationality. Many of you will counter my points here and say that the complexity of human overshoot is a fascinating topic and that you derive allot of meaning from sharing this topic here in this digital community because your organic community walks around completely clueless. This is what SeaGypsy just posted. This is what also held me here for 10 years. There is a dangerous fallacy in this that I will now elaborate, this is the truth that came to me slowly the last couple of years that has caused me to now exit.
SeaGypsy's comment and my position for a long time ends up polarizing you into a position where you see your organic world of social contacts as largely clueless humans who do not want to face the truth of human overshoot. You then take refuge here with like minded folks. This results in it becoming far to easy to write off organic society because you create this "false" community of "us" here. As wonderful and brainy and insightful as we might all be we are not a replacement of this lost organic community. In fact we are enabling the division to increase because we are comforted by a digital venue that has no real substance beyond the thousands of posts that we collectively make that my very well be accurate in analysis but still at the end of the day it is virtual, all of this analysis does very very little but move in circles contained within this digital venue. And that is the toxic side of it, because it increased the divide between organic life and digital life.
There are so many aspects that the digital world is doing this to our species collectively.
As much as I will miss this community and as easy as it is to come on here every day and satiate myself with a topic that I hold closely to my heart, I refuse any longer to sacrifice my organic world with digital ersatz replacements. I will limit my internet time to just logistics of managing the flow of our guests and during the day and night I will be communing with them and the folks of the village close to us.
Who knows, because I no longer come here and I might be forced to exercise my organic social muscles in engaging my social contacts with the topics we discuss here.
For many of you with huge post counts ask yourself how the muscle tone is doing on your organic social contacts?
Again, enough said, I felt I owed this community a bit of a more in depth explanation of why I am exiting here.
Many of you are great folks with a quite mature understanding. Maybe one day we will meet each other. maybe not. In any case, best of luck in this new year and moving forward in negotiating these troubled overshoot waters.
I am putting into practice with this final post one of my new years resolutions!
Good bye!
Patiently awaiting the pathogens. Our resiliency resembles an invasive weed. We are the Kudzu Ape
blog: http://blog.mounttotumas.com/
website: http://www.mounttotumas.com