No, Twitter IS NOT real life. When less than 2% of the country is actively engaged with Twitter every day, and they're skewed as far to the Left as they are, Twitter doesn't represent real life in America. It's a fun house mirror.
Twitter does not represent America as a whole. It represents a small part of the country. The problem with Twitter is that people like you and corporations and media give it as much credence as they do because all of them are feeding the Twitter machine like it matters. It doesn't. It's evil and vile, and it's full of hate.
This piece corroborates Dave Chapelle's point. It seems to me he's getting into trouble for stating elemental truths:
A man who identifies as a woman is not a biological woman and never will be. Twitter, a phone screen, is not real. One of the single most annoying aspects of today's press is the headline, "Twitter slams . . ." Insert anyone who won't conform. One has to be a moron to take that seriously. A very small slice of zealots is mobbing societal norms, they are the enforcers, the fire trucks in Fahrenheit 451. Chapelle sees things all too clearly and has the guts to call them out. He is setting the standard for defiance, showing cowards what 'to thine own self be true' actually looks like, a happy warrior who will not be pushed around. With so many wusses caving daily, that's an honest to God profile in courage.
When I was in college, Dr. Timothy Leary came to my campus to give a public talk. The new drug he was pushing was VR, which could not credibly be said to have existed at the time, in the mid-80s. He envisioned a future in which we would all live in VR all the time; we could, he said, attend business meetings while lying on the beach.
My thought at the time is that such a future would be possible only if there were an underclass of drones, stuck forever in "meatspace", who would tend to all those inert bodies, turning them now and again so that they at least sunburned evenly.
The Singularity is a delusion based on outdated Cartesian metaphysics; we are embodied, earthbound beings, and inextricably so. We need food, and clean air, and clean water; we need companionship and touch and the rhythm of bodily movement.
As that is the case, the "hard gods of reality" will never be done with us, and we'd do well to remember how to serve them.
This author screams "I'm not a millennial, I'm an Xennial" all over, as if that saves him. Anyone that uses the word 'normie' unironically, like it's a everyday label, is already under the gun.
Antonio makes the galactically massive mistake that everyone under the age of 40 seems to make these days; he thinks everyone has just as much of an online social media life as he and his peers do. And that those that don't are not only in the vast minority, but should be almost pitied in their delusion. I can't tell if he's serious about this, or if this whole article is just a massive troll to get a lame laugh at our expense. Either way, he failed at both. The truth is no one really needs any of this crap he's talking about, it's all just convenient fluff.
Take myself for instance: no social media accounts whatsoever, no smart phone (only calls, texts, and a spades game for the crapper), and basically no online presence at all when I'm not sitting at my desk for a specific 'online' purpose. So I got no apps for anything, and still carry around a physical paper map in my car of the whole state I live in...something everyone should have by the way. I see almost everyone else (especially the young) walk around with their phones surgically sown to their palms, and I still definitely feel like I'm the normal one.
He even claims that the substack we're reading right now is part of this new all-encompassing metaverse...even though I'm sitting here reading it offline, by myself, with some Brian Eno lazily playing in the background, the early sun is rising outside, and the wonderful smell of my morning coffee is slowly waking me up to the new day. All of that, except the digital monitor I'm looking at, is physical and corporeal. But even the monitor is just a combined and convenient replacement for the newspaper and the telegraph. It's the computer that is the outlier, not me or everything is in the world.
I read somewhere recently that the world is changing so rapidly these days, that people have actually started to feel nostalgic for times from before they were born. From before they were even alive! I don't know if that's true or not, but it certainly explains why I always had this soft spot for the sixties. I don't know if it was the great music or cheap living or rampant hedonism or something else, but that decade has always beckoned to me for some reason. And I was never alive for it.
This is silly in every way. First, VR has always been around. Games and imaginative play have always been VR, using rocks or chess pieces or Legos. Second, the digital version of VR has been around for 30 years and has never gained popularity. Nobody has managed to sell it. Third, what does the author mean by "powering through"? Join the cult and surrender to Zuck? When cults are multiplying, you don't solve anything by encouraging the entire population to join the cults. The solution is to point out the silliness and absurdity of the cult, and let rational people laugh instead of "powering" the cult.
In the words of that great sage, Professor Stephen Falken, the only winning move is not to play. I'm retired and I don't do Twitter or Facebook, so I am largely immune from the cancel culture - plus I couldn't care less what others think or whether I offend. It's my right to offend, and I do it freely. My email is via ProtonMail, all of which arrives through a VPN to my Brave browser, making my data less available to the tech giants and thus to the federal government. After the 2020 election I literally threw my satellite dish into my pond, electing instead to apply those fees to upping my Internet to the maximum available, where I now pick and choose my news channels. A very surprising (to me) result was that without Lamestream news on the wall all day/every day, my anxiety levels remarkably reduced. I have channeled all those wasted hours into my family with a side-order of local politics. Where I live in rural Virginia, we've had a marvelous influx of Amish, who have many lessons to teach us if we will only listen. There is a remarkable peace - and effectiveness - that comes with being in complete control of your own life.
The 2021 season of the Atlanta Braves was not the metaverse. The Little League triumphs and tears of children I know are not the metaverse. The music recitals of other children I know are not the metaverse. Children, sports, live music are places where real people meet real people, but the "clever technologists" have no idea of this world. 95K people at Sanford Stadium in Athens, GA celebrated the World Series win of the Atlanta Braves at the University of Georgia-Missouri game last weekend. After the game the town was awash in music and human interaction. Do not know why the metaversians think the world can be made better than the true story of Jorge Soler MVP for the World Series (left Cuba in 2011).
And all this joy after the All-Star game was take away from Atlanta.
I got online in 1994. I did so as a way to escape "real life" because my personal life had blown up in my face - dropped out of grad school, got dumped by a guy, etc...the internet offered a safe haven and a way out of a life I could not manage. The safe distance between me and other people was what I craved. I could be close but not that close. They could not see me. They could only read my words. I was fully and completely protected. I was in complete control. But the internet was wide open and safe back then because people were afraid of it. They were so afraid of it they looked at people like me, who was already meeting and dating online, like we were freaks. I have watched the internet evolve all of that time. The two biggest things that disrupted our entire world up to COVID was the blogs where anyone could rise up and be an influential voice and social media. I've not seen anything as damaging to my own emotional well being and the lives of other people -- and our ability to care about any kind of truth or reality -- as these very clever social media algorithms. Its a shame, really. It all started out so well. But you are right, that we will emerge from this completely transformed and there is no other alternative. If there were, Hollywood would not be going all in on streaming platforms. They are now banking on all of doing what I did in 1994.
If you want to be unhappy and addicted to a screen then you should adopt the worldview of this article. Otherwise, turn off the screen after work and hang out with friends, neighbors and family. Pro tip: board games.
The automobile metaphor is very wrong. Liberals are trying to throw us into reverse - back to a time when elites ruled without question and the "little people" were required to be happy with the crumbs that were thrown their way. Conservatives are trying to restart the movement, long championed by what use to be liberals in the US, of returning power to people - from the government.
I had been considering reading 'Chaos Monkeys', but if that book is anything like this column it is over-rated and I will pass.
"China works on hypersonic missiles while our government, incapable of defeating a medieval religious insurgency in Afghanistan, launches a 'National Gender Strategy.'"
Yes. Yes. Yes.
The gender critical (think anti-trans) author Abigail Shrier, who has appeared on Bari's substack, ,recently interviewed Sen. Tom Cotton on her own substack. Abigail asked him whether the authoritarian Chinese Communist Party was in any way aiding the woke authoritarian left to increase political divisions within the US.
Sen. Cotton said the Chinese have a derogatory term called Baizuo (pronounced"bye-tswaw") which means "Stupid White Leftist." Baizuo refers to SJWs who care only about immigration, minorities, LGBT and the environment and have no sense about real problems in the real world such as missiles and ships. The word Baizuo tells us everything we need to know about the attitudes, aspirations and actions of the CCP
Without caring for the "hardware" it eventually breaks or wears out... the metaverse is coming but it is a utopian elitist fantasy for the foreseeable future... the authoritarian force necessary to keep the physical world running while the navel gazing elite class play in their fantasy world is untenable.
This whole metaverse is a lot for my finite mind to process! I wouldn’t understand it at all if I hadn’t seen Ready Player One.
Meanwhile …this stark reality feels like the real dystopia:
“China works on hypersonic missiles while our government, incapable of defeating a medieval religious insurgency in Afghanistan, launches a “National Gender Strategy.”
No, Twitter IS NOT real life. When less than 2% of the country is actively engaged with Twitter every day, and they're skewed as far to the Left as they are, Twitter doesn't represent real life in America. It's a fun house mirror.
Twitter does not represent America as a whole. It represents a small part of the country. The problem with Twitter is that people like you and corporations and media give it as much credence as they do because all of them are feeding the Twitter machine like it matters. It doesn't. It's evil and vile, and it's full of hate.
This piece corroborates Dave Chapelle's point. It seems to me he's getting into trouble for stating elemental truths:
A man who identifies as a woman is not a biological woman and never will be. Twitter, a phone screen, is not real. One of the single most annoying aspects of today's press is the headline, "Twitter slams . . ." Insert anyone who won't conform. One has to be a moron to take that seriously. A very small slice of zealots is mobbing societal norms, they are the enforcers, the fire trucks in Fahrenheit 451. Chapelle sees things all too clearly and has the guts to call them out. He is setting the standard for defiance, showing cowards what 'to thine own self be true' actually looks like, a happy warrior who will not be pushed around. With so many wusses caving daily, that's an honest to God profile in courage.
When I was in college, Dr. Timothy Leary came to my campus to give a public talk. The new drug he was pushing was VR, which could not credibly be said to have existed at the time, in the mid-80s. He envisioned a future in which we would all live in VR all the time; we could, he said, attend business meetings while lying on the beach.
My thought at the time is that such a future would be possible only if there were an underclass of drones, stuck forever in "meatspace", who would tend to all those inert bodies, turning them now and again so that they at least sunburned evenly.
The Singularity is a delusion based on outdated Cartesian metaphysics; we are embodied, earthbound beings, and inextricably so. We need food, and clean air, and clean water; we need companionship and touch and the rhythm of bodily movement.
As that is the case, the "hard gods of reality" will never be done with us, and we'd do well to remember how to serve them.
This author screams "I'm not a millennial, I'm an Xennial" all over, as if that saves him. Anyone that uses the word 'normie' unironically, like it's a everyday label, is already under the gun.
Antonio makes the galactically massive mistake that everyone under the age of 40 seems to make these days; he thinks everyone has just as much of an online social media life as he and his peers do. And that those that don't are not only in the vast minority, but should be almost pitied in their delusion. I can't tell if he's serious about this, or if this whole article is just a massive troll to get a lame laugh at our expense. Either way, he failed at both. The truth is no one really needs any of this crap he's talking about, it's all just convenient fluff.
Take myself for instance: no social media accounts whatsoever, no smart phone (only calls, texts, and a spades game for the crapper), and basically no online presence at all when I'm not sitting at my desk for a specific 'online' purpose. So I got no apps for anything, and still carry around a physical paper map in my car of the whole state I live in...something everyone should have by the way. I see almost everyone else (especially the young) walk around with their phones surgically sown to their palms, and I still definitely feel like I'm the normal one.
He even claims that the substack we're reading right now is part of this new all-encompassing metaverse...even though I'm sitting here reading it offline, by myself, with some Brian Eno lazily playing in the background, the early sun is rising outside, and the wonderful smell of my morning coffee is slowly waking me up to the new day. All of that, except the digital monitor I'm looking at, is physical and corporeal. But even the monitor is just a combined and convenient replacement for the newspaper and the telegraph. It's the computer that is the outlier, not me or everything is in the world.
I read somewhere recently that the world is changing so rapidly these days, that people have actually started to feel nostalgic for times from before they were born. From before they were even alive! I don't know if that's true or not, but it certainly explains why I always had this soft spot for the sixties. I don't know if it was the great music or cheap living or rampant hedonism or something else, but that decade has always beckoned to me for some reason. And I was never alive for it.
This is silly in every way. First, VR has always been around. Games and imaginative play have always been VR, using rocks or chess pieces or Legos. Second, the digital version of VR has been around for 30 years and has never gained popularity. Nobody has managed to sell it. Third, what does the author mean by "powering through"? Join the cult and surrender to Zuck? When cults are multiplying, you don't solve anything by encouraging the entire population to join the cults. The solution is to point out the silliness and absurdity of the cult, and let rational people laugh instead of "powering" the cult.
In the words of that great sage, Professor Stephen Falken, the only winning move is not to play. I'm retired and I don't do Twitter or Facebook, so I am largely immune from the cancel culture - plus I couldn't care less what others think or whether I offend. It's my right to offend, and I do it freely. My email is via ProtonMail, all of which arrives through a VPN to my Brave browser, making my data less available to the tech giants and thus to the federal government. After the 2020 election I literally threw my satellite dish into my pond, electing instead to apply those fees to upping my Internet to the maximum available, where I now pick and choose my news channels. A very surprising (to me) result was that without Lamestream news on the wall all day/every day, my anxiety levels remarkably reduced. I have channeled all those wasted hours into my family with a side-order of local politics. Where I live in rural Virginia, we've had a marvelous influx of Amish, who have many lessons to teach us if we will only listen. There is a remarkable peace - and effectiveness - that comes with being in complete control of your own life.
One EMP detonation and the metaverse is dead.
Sorry, guest author, but if resistance to your miserable soul-draining metaverse is futile, I've somehow achieved the impossible.
The 2021 season of the Atlanta Braves was not the metaverse. The Little League triumphs and tears of children I know are not the metaverse. The music recitals of other children I know are not the metaverse. Children, sports, live music are places where real people meet real people, but the "clever technologists" have no idea of this world. 95K people at Sanford Stadium in Athens, GA celebrated the World Series win of the Atlanta Braves at the University of Georgia-Missouri game last weekend. After the game the town was awash in music and human interaction. Do not know why the metaversians think the world can be made better than the true story of Jorge Soler MVP for the World Series (left Cuba in 2011).
And all this joy after the All-Star game was take away from Atlanta.
Conservatives are not looking for the reverse gear, they are getting out of the car. See Wyoming Catholic College.
I got online in 1994. I did so as a way to escape "real life" because my personal life had blown up in my face - dropped out of grad school, got dumped by a guy, etc...the internet offered a safe haven and a way out of a life I could not manage. The safe distance between me and other people was what I craved. I could be close but not that close. They could not see me. They could only read my words. I was fully and completely protected. I was in complete control. But the internet was wide open and safe back then because people were afraid of it. They were so afraid of it they looked at people like me, who was already meeting and dating online, like we were freaks. I have watched the internet evolve all of that time. The two biggest things that disrupted our entire world up to COVID was the blogs where anyone could rise up and be an influential voice and social media. I've not seen anything as damaging to my own emotional well being and the lives of other people -- and our ability to care about any kind of truth or reality -- as these very clever social media algorithms. Its a shame, really. It all started out so well. But you are right, that we will emerge from this completely transformed and there is no other alternative. If there were, Hollywood would not be going all in on streaming platforms. They are now banking on all of doing what I did in 1994.
If you want to be unhappy and addicted to a screen then you should adopt the worldview of this article. Otherwise, turn off the screen after work and hang out with friends, neighbors and family. Pro tip: board games.
The automobile metaphor is very wrong. Liberals are trying to throw us into reverse - back to a time when elites ruled without question and the "little people" were required to be happy with the crumbs that were thrown their way. Conservatives are trying to restart the movement, long championed by what use to be liberals in the US, of returning power to people - from the government.
I had been considering reading 'Chaos Monkeys', but if that book is anything like this column it is over-rated and I will pass.
"China works on hypersonic missiles while our government, incapable of defeating a medieval religious insurgency in Afghanistan, launches a 'National Gender Strategy.'"
Yes. Yes. Yes.
The gender critical (think anti-trans) author Abigail Shrier, who has appeared on Bari's substack, ,recently interviewed Sen. Tom Cotton on her own substack. Abigail asked him whether the authoritarian Chinese Communist Party was in any way aiding the woke authoritarian left to increase political divisions within the US.
Sen. Cotton said the Chinese have a derogatory term called Baizuo (pronounced"bye-tswaw") which means "Stupid White Leftist." Baizuo refers to SJWs who care only about immigration, minorities, LGBT and the environment and have no sense about real problems in the real world such as missiles and ships. The word Baizuo tells us everything we need to know about the attitudes, aspirations and actions of the CCP
https://abigailshrier.substack.com/p/could-the-gop-become-the-party-of
Without caring for the "hardware" it eventually breaks or wears out... the metaverse is coming but it is a utopian elitist fantasy for the foreseeable future... the authoritarian force necessary to keep the physical world running while the navel gazing elite class play in their fantasy world is untenable.
This whole metaverse is a lot for my finite mind to process! I wouldn’t understand it at all if I hadn’t seen Ready Player One.
Meanwhile …this stark reality feels like the real dystopia:
“China works on hypersonic missiles while our government, incapable of defeating a medieval religious insurgency in Afghanistan, launches a “National Gender Strategy.”
Yikes!