I had two dreams last night conserning a hedonistic future that we are headed. The first one was more generically cyberpunk wpoliticshere technology is everywhere and in everything, where only very small places are car free (hence safe to walk around in) and everyone lived hedonistically. If anyone reading this is unaware of what hedonism is, essentually it is the philosophy that we as individuals should maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Essentually the best possible thing for a hedonist is the coom and consoom pod. I don’t remember much from this dream, but I do remember seeing a picture of ai luke smith advertising a frying pan and being creeped out because I knew that he didn’t consent to this.
What was more signifigant however, was my second dream I had which was much more realistic. I was listening to some commentator, talk about something and then I took one of my earbuds out to go and take a shower. After a minute went by, I started to hear someone else talking out of the earbud from my other ear. I didn’t know what to do with the earbud so I decided to just leave it in and listen to it, though I was absolutly annoyed. What I heard shook me. It wasn’t some grand point that was made, rather it was that I had already heard what I was hearing over and over probrably by now hundreads if not even thousands of times by now. It was the rhythem of an argument with all of the fancy terms that go into an argument, but it was all just meaningless nonsence. It was not designed not to convince me of anything or to teach me anything, but to take my attention so I would consoom the “intelectual” content.
Recently I have quit twitter because it is a waste of time, but rather than get rid of the reaction to boredom by consooming content on twitter by automatically opening the app before I even realize what I am doing, I simply replaced that reaction with YouTube instead of twitter. I can say that my time wasted has been “better spent”, but it still was fundemtally wasted because I didn’t use that boredom to seek out something. In fact, when I woke up from this dream, I immmediatly went to YouTube to consoom content. I then reflected on this dream which lead me to put down the phone and then write this post after breakfest of course.
I think that this is probrably an experience that my zommer readers can relate to. Growing up, I knew about the negitive effects of social media, So I purposfully abstained from social media minus YouTube because of this fact. Because of this I never actually got a proper social media account until I was in high school. And even now, I never really had a “social media presence”.
If you are wondering, The story of my first “social media” basically went like this. Sarky opinion posted something on twitter so I decided to comment on that post. Because you need a twitter account to interact with twitter accounts (total bullshit btw), I created my first twitter account @ZachGunslinger (suspended)
Depending on how your opinions of social media were and what your parents thought about them, You may have more or less social media accounts. In particular, you may or may not have fallen for the “newer” social medias. If we look at Tic-Toc or its spiritual ancestor, musical.ly (bet you havent heard that name in forever) It has capured seemingly most of the zoomers. Its content is designed not around any sort of even pretent attempt at socialization, but just a massive dopamine farm that works based of the low attention span of the zoomers and encourages their attention spans to drop further. It’s buisness model is the old model of attention turns into data that is sold alongside advertising space but this version seems to do that to the extreame. I cannot imagine any legitimate use of this app. You are pretty much forced to find some third party rss feed (which breaks often) for anyone who you do follow because the app does everything possible to lure you into their dopamine machine. And for what? Do you really care about that person if all you follow them is on this short byte platform ran by a company directly under the CCP? It is eye opening just how much content you don’t care about whenever you replace your social media sites with a rss feed.
What could be more of a hedonist hell than a society revolved around users of Tic-Toc? Luke Smith has this ideas of “internet land chads” and “internet surfs” The surfs use the platforms of other people to get and publish their content and hence are completly relient on them to exist as a person. So if all of their content is on these platfroms and they all collectivly decide to ban him, all at the same time, then he is effectivly de-personed and silenced. Those who enjoyed that persons content, are now forced not to enjoy their content anymore, and the creator is forced to shut up. My point is illustrated by looking at two content creators, Alex jones and LeafyIsHere. When Alex was depersoned by big tech, he just fell back on alt-tech and his website. It wasn’t until the state went after him seeking to basically ruin him that he seems to be shutting down. But even despite the actions of the state, his website and content is still up with an audience to view it. Yes it may not be the amount pre ban, but he is not gone. Compare this to leafy, He got banned of YouTube and that basically ended his career. He seems to still be around, but only as a retired YouTuber that posts onto instagram.
Lets wrap this up with some suggestion on what to do. First off get alt-tech for anything that you care about. Second become uncensorably by decentralizing the people that you rely on to publish and to get your content. If you have your own website (a gigachad has mirrors of his website) with alt-tech sites, then any censor will have to go after a large amount of people whom don’t want to censor you. By extention of this, use a RSS feed reader. Once you start jugling a large amount of platforms, it will be hard to keep up with the people on them. To simplfy this, simply follow them through rss and then check your feed reader ever so often. And finally, decrease your dependence on your cell phone. You cannot meaningfully contribute with a cell phone so you should see it as a device for quick things. An easy way to get your one website is ether 1. through renting out a VPS. You can follow Luke Smith’s landchad.net tutorial or 2. you can use a free website hoster like neocities.org As for alt tech, I don’t know what will be big or small in the future, so all I can recommend is checking out this list of fediverse application Things look bleak but even if we won’t win on a macro level soon, we can still win on an individual and community level. Lets take back our digital sovereignty and turn the internet back into the “wild west” that it used to be.
by :GunslingerZach(Reply-to)