I want to be very clear: this is dystopian and evil.
But it's frustrating to see so many responses along the lines of "gross, *I* would never want this."
It's like we've learned no lessons from the last 20 years. Did you want short-form video infinite scrolls? Did you want 40 TV streaming apps? Did you want the pretense of digital privacy to disappear? Did you want independent websites to die and get subsumed into a few mega-platforms run by oligarchs? Did you want every news platform to go behind a paywall? Did you want algorthims to fracture us out of common culture and into a bunch of polarized bubbles? Did you want Amazon to eviscerate bookstores? Did you want your attention colonized by the smartphone? Did you want the general enshittification of your digital life?
It doesn't matter what you *want*. It matters what most people will *buy*, and how that will ultimately shape the choices available to *you*, too. We have got to break out of the consumer-choice frame when talking about new technology. You, as an individual, sneering at the slop will not stop it. You, proudly announcing that *you* are too smart and tasteful for this won't stop it.
At a certain point, if you want to stop the total obliteration of a common human experience, you will have to turn to the state, to methods of coordinating collective action. You will have to actually fight this thing, not merely abstain from it as an individual consumer preference.
Houses are getting worse. The wood is 5 years old and has worms in it. The food has glass in it. Cars last 300 miles. You need 30,000 applications for a job. It's over. Light bulbs last 6 seconds. Ice cream doesn't melt anymore and there's glass in it. It's over.
I just don't understand why people are religious in this day and age. It's obviously backwards, obviously hogwash, and still we let fundie wackos force kids to believe in it all.
I cant stop thinking about the loan cutting news. This country is so fucked its not even funny. it's getting very hard to see a future where there is any reason to want to live in america. Trump's not the problem, nobody's fixing this shit when he's gone
Best I can explain it is that conservative "morals" are just doing what you're "supposed" to, not thinking about the consequences of your actions. You're "supposed" to vote Republican, and if that vote directly results in killing your own family, that's god's will, not your fault
They’re sanding off the edges of everything that enriches us as humans. If it doesn’t generate profit immediately it is deemed unworthy of financial support. Another step towards fascism
Mike Rogers is a corporate sellout who moves back to Michigan every few years to run for office to take another swing at the revolving door of corporate politics.
It’s so funny how many defenses of Christianity are just “dude, you just have to submit to the all-powerful alien, its reasons for subjecting you to suffering are very mysterious, okay?”
“Would you like to request voluntary departure, or should I issue a removal order?” The judge asked.
“I don’t know,” Angel, 13, replied before bursting into tears. He stared ahead stoically and continued to cry, eventually saying: “I have no one. I have nothing.”
Bro the president is a known rapist and my dad worships him like the second coming
What in the world could I have left to say to him just because I came outta his balls
We’ve slowly stripped away everything that once gave a person’s life joy and beauty. Museums are closing, literacy collapsing, myths and fairy-tales largely no longer taught. National parks are being carved up by developers. More people gamble than read.
All addiction, at its heart, is addiction to unconsciousness.
It doesn’t matter if it’s social media addiction or heroin addiction.
The addict is always trying to block out consciousness by covering it in stimulation or numbness.
This means the cure to addiction is always more consciousness.
But consciousness can’t just be willed into existence.
Instead, developing consciousness is closely linked to developing insight.
This is because usually the reason we want to hide in unconsciousness is that there’s something we don’t want to be conscious of.
Something in our world that contradicts the story we want to tell ourselves about the world.
Perhaps we want to believe that we can always avoid pain and only experience pleasure.
So we try to push pain into unconsciousness.
Or we want to believe that the things we love will last forever.
So we try to push any sign of decay or change into unconsciousness.
Or there is some story we want to believe about ourselves and who we are.
So we try to push anything that contradicts that story into unconsciousness.
So the way to overcome our addiction to unconsciousness is to build accurate world models.
When we learn to view the world as a place that includes suffering, is impermanent and is free of stable selves, reality starts to match our worldview.
With this insight in place, we no longer need to push suffering, impermanence, and things that threaten our sense of self out of consciousness.
Consciousness then naturally expands of its own accord.