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Tech and social media are making us feel lonelier than ever:
You've had a social day. Two hundred Facebook friends posted birthday messages, your video of Mr. Meow shredding the toilet paper stash got dozens of retweets, and all the compliments on your latest Instagram selfie have you strutting with an extra swagger. Still, you can't help but notice an ache that can only be described as loneliness.
That we feel this way even when hyperconnected might seem like a contradiction. But the facts are clear: Constant virtual connections can often amplify the feeling of loneliness.
"Internet-related technologies are great at giving us the perception of connectedness," says Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, a Stanford University psychiatrist who's written about the intersection of psychology and tech. The truth, he says, is the time and energy spent on social media's countless connections may be happening at the expense of more rooted, genuinely supportive and truly close relationships.
If virtual socializing cannot substitute for the real thing, will social media prove out to be nothing more than a fad of the late 20th and early 21st centuries?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Lagg on Saturday June 20 2020, @12:03AM (10 children)
Pretty sure it hasn't been so long that we forgot what small decentralized communities look like. I haven't. I still talk on soylent like I would in those places. If anyone holds my views as they are I'll be damned surprised because my internal canon gets downright eldritch. And that's fine. Keeps things flavorful.
Notice though, crazy hermits like me aren't representative. Normal people that function with crazies like me aren't representative. What's representative on these sites is formally-acceptable whoring of one's intellectual soul. Also known as the "influencer" mindset. If someone's trying to sell you something it's going to get depressing because you know someone's just trying to sell you something. Then it turns into a spiral going forever downward. People flinging views that aren't forged from their own hands and mind on you is noticeably fake. Of course it's going to turn the whole relationship into a shaky bridge. The whole issue as of late here is people willfully participating in insincerity on a massive scale.
Everyone knows what this game is. Everyone knows what the twitter, FB and so forth economy actually thrives on. Because we've been using the phrase "you are the product" for what has to be a decade by now. More? People know they're not engaging with each other but instead whatever pre-selected cookie cutter rhetoric that got slammed into their head until they stopped talking like normal people. So like... What the fuck? I'm an abject hermit now just as much as I always been, and this site is the only social media I've used in years. Even then I'm just off a 2-3 year break because the exact same problem I'm referencing in this paragraph started happening. I can quickly discern people like this too. Including a few particular individuals that know they're far better than this.
I'm not surprised in the least someone is "working on a pill" to deaden one's soul because life, pain and fulfillment are quite often the same yin-yang. It's another thing about this country that disgusts me to my core. I lost a large chunk of my life in an opiate dirge caused by unneeded money-seeking surgery. Then a sliver (because I was already catching onto this country of little soft bellied cowards looking to steal a dollar) was promptly lost to an anti-anxiety & SSRI hellhole provided by a therapist calling himself a "realist" and then failing to have conversational competencey to express the analogy I just did above in one sentence despite my stupid rural-origin ass.
Also, even in this very article it's falling into the spiral. All that shit about Zoom? That's glorified advertisement. It's what happens when the astroturfing goes full retard and people willfully and consciously allow it. I assume I don't need to reference all the "hurr look at my funny Zoom clip" ads they do disguised as organic posts. All these fuckers ever do is sell and buy stupid, irrational and worst of all boring cookie-cutter ideologies or literal products to each other. Screeching through a protocol so dense with hardcoded dialog-rhetoric lines that I might as well just be playing Morrowind which is at least nice and eldritch just how I like it. And they know they're doing it. The participants in this crap know what this is because they see the Like ratio gained from parroting corporate's advertisement jingles. It's a bunch of people speaking to each other through stupid commercial-speak while willfully doing it. I can't restate this enough times. Does anyone remember how Big Brother actually wins? When you internalize him and love him despite knowing everything. It's the ultimate enemy to freethought.
And people are calling it loneliness. Fer fucks sake. Learn to love yourself and the pain of your human condition. Because that pain drives you. If you want to see what a life looks like when medicated on all fronts both literally and philosophically you need not look any further than the stagnating bible thumping trailer trash in the part of the desert I come from. Opiates and petty disputes to distract from the larger hellish beauty that describes the organism we have going on here. Yin-yang and ouroboros forever and eternal are what they are but that is life. This stupidity with social media making people think living life is some kind of illness is just plain gross. I've never felt less lonely in my life and I am a hermit all the way. Because the friends I do have know I'm going to be me and be real, for better or worse. Treat the people that actually make a difference in your daily life right, and the rest follows. Our ability to congregate thusly in a localized fashion got us through evolution so far. This doesn't change cause you can read some asshole's spiel like mine on your screen.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Saturday June 20 2020, @03:13PM (9 children)
Well said, but I wonder if you are missing an aspect.
The promise of the internet was it was going to make it easier to find friends, we were supposed to be categorized with other people, it SHOULD be the perfect matchmaking app.
But what we got was a gamed algorithm that works for lapdogs well, and undercover agents well, and sets up people like myself with those undercover agents to ruin their lives. And bad ideas spread like wildfire because the ownership is doing the "order from chaos" "disaster capitalism" and "our cultural hegemony must rule" thing.
So the real facilitators of culture and other critical elements of a funcitoning tribe or group are excluded, for all but the dominant cultural hegemony, and this results in bad dates or no dates for everyone but epstein, and even his parties suck because all of the funnest people were not invited.
You are looking for your 140 people in your tribe, and the way the dominant cultural hegemony has managed things the last 20 years, you will never find them, and so every party you go to results in a fight breaking out, and every date you go on is kindof boring because there are no fun people to meet at the dart board.
Because you thought you were out to meet people and have fun and have a good life, but the entire time someone has been at war against you, 5th gen war, asymetrical war, over fucking facebook and twitter.
And it is difficult for me to imagine any douchier thing to do in the history of the world.
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It is not the way you describe organically, this is by design, and it is a form of warfare against you, and it is being done by a specific culture, with a name, who has been doing the same thing against all other cultures since the dawn of recorded history(which is the dawn of recorded history only because they are known to burn down any history alternative to their own)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2020, @03:43PM
Those damn Aussie aborigines, why can't they stop meddling in everyone's lives? Thanks jmicharl, I just bought a ticket and let me tell you they'll be getting some sternly worded lectures!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Lagg on Saturday June 20 2020, @05:17PM (7 children)
I wish I could see willful malice in the way you do. It'd make me feel better as silly as that sounds. Because at least then this asymmetric warfare on the mind as you put it, would have an originating chess master. But I truly feel like that isn't the case. I fear it's more a matter of people losing the war with themselves internally and turning to utterly irrational group think which contradicts itself because of the elements within having their own agenda. Often for petty money, hence the tendency to cull the groups involved until there's no one left but unquestioning tools that one of your links tries to express. Or they start cannibalizing themselves when they run out of enemies to fight (or when they think there aren't any more).
Like, what I'm trying to say is I have no doubt there is willful malice with a decent chunk. But I think in general a lot of people are scared children in a sandbox that fear the fact that life is an ongoing aimless ouroboros that is up to you to make meaning out of. You are the god of your sandbox. People become fearful when they grasp that, the true essence of adulting as it were. Religion isn't so much the in-thing these days so people are finding new preachers, idols and churches. New hymns and prayers to say "amen" to. I see the analogs everywhere and it horrifies me frankly. But I think it's because of responses to basic stimuli at the end of the day when it comes to this stuff.
The policy and spec people in the corporations behind these sites are empty vessels that accumulate cash with no ultimate end goal or understanding besides that's what they're supposed to do to prove they're better than other people. Even if at the end of the day it ultimately means nothing when it comes to the true business of life between oneself and the jungle. Those people are just as close to it as anyone else is. And I believe that provokes deep unstated fear. And they compensate by doing the only thing they're good at. Often failing at that too. (What the US has allowed to float to the top of leadership proves my point here better than any long statement ever could)
So, the social media sites turn into hellholes of insincere dialog that doesn't even originate from the mind of the person who's typing it. Because the execs see that the sort of... Death of the soul being called conversation happening on these sites provoke engagement. i.e. posts get Likes and people get subscribers when they participate in the bible-thumper-style parroting of hymns, prayers and amens. Then they refine this style of engagement over and over again until it starts training people themselves until they're worse off than listening to propaganda channels when doing chores all day.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Monday June 22 2020, @04:56PM (6 children)
"I wish I could see willful malice in the way you do."
so it's all random and unintentional?
I can hardly believe you think that, or anyone does. It all follows the direct lines of power and cultural hegemony, zuck trades the entire history(probably nicely trimmed by his higher ups in the hegemony) of private messages on facebook as part of deals.
Do you even know what Palantir is and Peter Thiel does? Reputation management? Mark Monitor?
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You need to review all of these, and take this one other thing into account, I can promise you I have been set up on at least 3 awful, waste of time dates by OkCupic with police, and never had a good date with someone who actually matched with me.
I dont know how you can rationalize this fact away, maybe I am a disinfo agent who hates okcupid, or despite racking up quite a few upvotes here at this site and elsewhere, and writing book after book on these topics, that I am all imagining it, or something.
The algorithms are not just fixed to work for only approved people, they are fixed to ruin and infiltrate the lives of non-approved people, and those non-approved people are the ones who might have any capacity to change, or may actually be the rightful leadership of your culture,
who you have only never heard of because it was an attack on you that you did not believe was possible.
And so you say things like you say "it is just the sum of human frailty and stupidity", which to me, despite your many words, sounds to me like the analysis of a child who has never left their house, and can hardly fathom the grim reality, and so needs to be sheltered.
Meanwhile the person who might be able to help you is banding on your door asking for help because they are being actively hunted, and you say "but i see no malice, just a disorderly mob hunting down a random person."
This was the same as our last exchange, you refuse to see what I am telling you 100x from 100 different directions, and I can hardly imagine anyone so willfully unintentionally ignorant yet who can write so well.
Color me puzzled. Most schills cant write as well as you can, or go to the effort of even trying to refute what *is already revealed in academic journals in the meme I posted* of how and why they operate in communiies *just like this one*.
And you will note now there are 10x stories here a day, most hardly even news, and this is across all such sites, making the chance of more than 5 people seeing this conversation almost null. That is not an accident, it takes far too much effort and is far too coordinated.
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Monday June 22 2020, @06:44PM (5 children)
Man, we've been through this dance before. You know I respect your perception of things but you have way too much paper trail for me and you see this as a coordinated intel op/counter-op. I don't think it's all accidental or random at all. Any more than I think those little cell-things in our body's ecosystem are accidentally interacting with each other based on previous stimuli. People with agendas can push it, but at the end of the day it doesn't connect into any grander conspiracy so much as selfishness or a frantic desire to prove oneself "better" than the next guy that spreads recursively because the wider population sees someone they perceive as an "authority" (and this is why we shouldn't do this, recognize authority) do it, thinking that is the truth for what defines an ultimate quest in life and so go forth and try to do the same themselves. The abhorrent clusterfucks that result are like tumors or cancers in our bodies. Growth that stops making sense and turns on itself. It's growth either way, and none of it is what you would call random. But it isn't malicious on the part of the cells involved either. They're replicating data they bounced off.
I'm quite aware of Palantir the company and artifact, and they both horrify me. But this doesn't change what I just said in the least. If you look at the soft bellied cowards with deer-in-headlights fear in their eyes who run it, it strengthens the point if anything.
Now, as human beings we're supposed to be using our advanced cognition to be better than the finite state machines we sprouted from. Some of us aren't doing very well at that. But I do not believe for a moment there is a grand villain involved so much as a scared little group of bratty children that need to be bitch slapped either literally or proverbially until they understand they are precisely the same number of levels removed from the jungle.
You know I respect you but also know I'm not going to review all those links and get lost in a maze of self-constructed narrative. We've been through this. My whole thing with regards to the internet right now is gaining a better understanding of my fellow people without turning to external references and rhetoric. Everything external in this manner is a clusterfuck authored by a significant amount of people that choose to submit to weakness in fearing an ultimate villain. When in reality what they fear is scared children who notice the whole class is looking to them for an answer, and the just making shit up. Thinking that the liquidity ultimately means anything when they meet the hungry man they cheated in the middle of a jungle.
I strongly respect your position because the mentality it represents keeps our government in check. But fearing those who fear you is fallacy. Remember that. And please consider this quote that sticks with me forever and always:
"Politicians need religion even more than a hermit in retreat. If a hermit acts out of bad motivation, he harms no one but himself. But if someone who can directly influence the whole of society acts with bad motivation, then a great number of people will be adversely affected."
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Tuesday June 23 2020, @04:22PM (4 children)
shills never read, ignorant people never read, at some point I dont care which is which.
If all you have done is skin/item trading websites for steam, I would need to hear a lot more about your work to respect it enough to try to parse sentences like this:
"People with agendas can push it, but at the end of the day it doesn't connect into any grander conspiracy so much as selfishness or a frantic desire to prove oneself "better" than the next guy that spreads recursively because the wider population sees someone they perceive as an "authority" (and this is why we shouldn't do this, recognize authority) do it, thinking that is the truth for what defines an ultimate quest in life and so go forth and try to do the same themselves. The abhorrent clusterfucks that result are like tumors or cancers in our bodies. "
I am being stalked. My agenda is for it to stop and I talk about it because it is a strategy for my personal safety, to seek assistance.
I do not really even know what you are talking about besides to say what I think doesnt matter, which is what every shill say, so if this is the best you have, yawn.
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Tuesday June 23 2020, @05:06PM (3 children)
I've not really done anything but try to engage with you in good faith and you're just falling back to rhetoric like the others on here who devolved into doddering old-fuckery. I don't even understand how two of my steam-related jobs out of a 14 year career is relevant here besides for another post I made that you're clearly obsessing too much over.
If you want to sit there like a typical cowardly little american shit, then by all means do so. I apologize for trying to engage with you in good faith. Since that appears to be what you take issue with, that I respect your opinion but also have my own.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Thursday June 25 2020, @01:46PM (2 children)
you did not engage in good fatth, you just negated everything i said and refused to read or consider anything i presented as evidence
as a programmer if the best contribution you have made is to help people trade their fantasy hats from video games, you should have gone into landscaping and made more difference on the world mowing lawns.
But at this point I know what you are.
If anyone is reading this wants to see a real static site, follow my username and you will find one, and if you want an example of a bullshit psyop avatar lagg.me will demonstrate that for you quite nicely.
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Thursday June 25 2020, @04:10PM (1 child)
Once again: Continue building your pin-up and red string universe around yourself to distract from the very real con artists stealing out from under you every day while you lick them in the boot in return for it and say "thank you daddy".
You are a typical, wilting little American pussy. And I am exhausted of sharing a country with your kind. You stupid unaware fuck. Acting like a scared old man with a psyche that collided with that of a child. Just like the rest of this country.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Friday June 26 2020, @02:50PM
Your theory that the entire police state and totalitarian trend, as well as the traitorous tie ins with israel, are just due to aggregate human weakness butterfly having a convergent butterfly effects is manifestly stupid.
I cannot believe anyone is that stupid without being paid to pretend to be that stupid.