Friday morning. It’s my day off. First snow! The construction crew is busy. I can see school administrators in their offices when I look out the window. There’s Dhrupad singing coming from the kitchen.
When I read stuff on social media – Mastodon in my case – I often stumble on stuff I disagree with. Same with reading the newspaper, of course, except I don’t read the newspaper all that often any more. I wonder what to do with the negative things I read.
To ignore them, to skip them? It feels somehow wrong because the moral imperative I grew up with is that one should care about the world, and therefore read about the events in far away places. Be informed!
But we cannot affect most events, so why bother learning about them?
Sometimes far away events do affect us, even if we cannot affect them. Knowing about it beforehand helps us deal with the situation. We know what’s coming and we can draw better conclusions. If we know that the situation is terrible elsewhere, we understand the refugees on our doorsteps and are not confused by local politicians telling us a different story. And where as we cannot easily affect the situation forcing people to flee their homes, we often do get to elect local politicians.
And yet, the constant barrage must be contained, somehow. How often can I read about bitcoin and non-fungible tokens (NFT) before being incensed? There comes a point where I don’t need to know more. My decision is made.
But how does this awareness spread so that we as a society make the correct decisions? We live in a world ordered by time. I have made my decision sometime ago, but how do others learn about the issues? We can only read what we see right now which is why marketing works with repetitions.
If I repeat the messages that anger me, I am both teaching other people that haven’t heard about the issues and I am angering the people that have already made their decisions.
If I don’t repeat the messages, I’m not reaching new people. In a direct conversation, I can make my point and link to a blog post, which saves me some time. I don’t have to repeat myself. When I’m not in a direct conversation, that won’t work.
This time structure of our world leads to the kind of world I dislike. People are constantly posting their opinions, and I understand why they do it, but it also keeps making me angry.
In no particular order, the things that make me angry these days:
Ugh! Some days the list feels endless. I could keep adding to it. And I understand: bad news spreads, and we think it’s important, where as good news is no news.
The other day I wrote on Station:
The archaeo-librarian concluded the speech with another warning, “so always remember that the ancients had to structure most of their work along a timeline, in nice chunks that they could post on the social media and feeds and newsletters of their time. A very limited way to structure their work, for sure, but that’s what they had and so we must keep this in mind.”
In the old days, I felt that the Wiki Now was the answer. All the pages on my wiki are relevant, much like all our experience is relevant when we talk with friends. We know each other. Our shared experience is the context in which the conversation happens. There’s not the same kind of “speech before an audience” that happens in politics, or at the workplace.
So Wiki Now means that all the pages of the site live in the present moment. There are no “old” pages. If something is wrong, we fix it. If our opinions have changed, we edit it.
Sadly, I suspect that our human experience these days does not align well with this paradigm. We produce a lot more text. I write and write and write on this blog. More pages appear at the top of the blog and all the while older pages sink down into the murky depth of the shadowy archives. You can still find them, if you know what you’re looking for. But if you don’t then you can’t. And we change opinions all the time. At least I hope we do. And now it gets difficult to sift through this ever growing pile of text to find the pages that should be edited. The collection of pages only makes sense if every one of them has a date on it. Every comment needs a date, too. This is how the collection “forgets”, like we do.
Sure, you can dig up old stuff, controversial, inane, foolish… it’s all there. But with timestamps all over the place, we can at least put it in context. And if somebody points out a particularly bad take, I can go back and fix it. I can keep a spark of the Wiki Now alive.
Now that I’m trying to find an end to this post, I realise that perhaps this is how I handle unhappy thoughts: I try to think about the meta aspect of it. One level up, conceptually: why do these thoughts arise? Why is our world structured to provide an unending supply of bad news?
I wonder about a world where this doesn’t happen. In a world where there is hardly any news, where information also doesn’t age badly. I imagine a medieval world where information moves at glacial speed. All you have is a few fragments of classical texts or tales and that’s it. You can reinterpret them for the current situation, you can teach them to others, but your tale does not stand in competition to other tales. Those classical texts and tales are all there is. There is no news to be repeated, no gossip to spread.
Perhaps this is impossible. People would have tried to make a name for themselves with new interpretations, there would be religious schisms, debates to be had… I just takes a few episodes of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps for me to understand that humans always structure the information life along such lines as to enable individual greatness, and from this all else follows.
There is something about our information processing that results in the world we live in – at least when I process the incoming information as I do.
#Philosophy
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I’m reading How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell:
Scrolling through the feed, I can’t help but wonder: What am I supposed to think of all this? How am I supposed to think of all this? … Many things in there seem important, but the sum total is nonsense, and it produces not understanding but a dull and stupefying dread.
– Alex 2022-02-11 15:36 UTC