Sunday, June 18, 2023

Because the medium is the message

 I got in a good amount of practice last night but felt like it was not enough. I need a suite of simple songs, simple things I can run through, the shakuhachi counterparts of "Merrily We Roll Along" and such catchy little tunes. I worked on "Hinomaru" with the "striking" accents and it goes OK but not as well as I'd like. I need to work more practice into my daily routine. I thought I'd have more time since quitting Reddit but I've just been spending more time on YouTube. 

I woke up at a quarter after 5. As I brewed up my chicory coffee I thought about how I can't even try to get back on friendly terms with my older sister because of being 2500 miles away and because the internet wants everyone to hate each other because that gets more attention and clicks. The medium is the message, I thought, bringing up an old idea that no one voices any more... 

Wait, The Medium Is The Message. That's Marshall McLuhan, a thinker who's not been disappeared, he can be found on Wikipedia, but in the present maelstrom of Twitter and Facebook and Reddit and even a movie, "The Social Network" or whatever the title is, where it's being slowly learned that the internet is a machine that doesn't care about human well being but only about clicks. Anything to get those clicks. 

This is why I can't even try, online, to reconcile with my older sister. The internet wants us to hate each other. It doesn't matter what's being said. It will act to get more clicks. The medium is the message. "Tear yourselves apart; tear each other apart, just click more". 

Human beings are not evolved for something like the internet. We do best gathering in small groups around a campfire or a luau spread, spending time making small talk and getting our breathing and even small body movements in unison before getting around to the serious talk. 

We do best going through adversity together, teaming up on things. Seeing what each other are made of. If I'd only known as a kid that when another kid pushes you down, they're doing so to see how you react, to see if you're material to be what the Australians call a mate. Who's going to be best to team up with. Adults do this too, minus the actual pushing-down generally, and this is why I have my Big Island and Oahu friends now. We'd gone up the Haiku Stairs and coming down it had gotten very dark and I'd guided them out, only because I'd grown up walking trails like that and didn't need to be able to see to tell where the most people had walked. The one friend had a car and had driven us there, and the other had gotten the first guy work and connections and we were all part of the loose network of electronics nerds on the island anyway. 

That's how friends are made. Going through things together. This is so obvious as to not need talking about except the internet likes people to be isolated because it gets more clicks. Capitalism likes people to be isolated because people living alone are more profitable than people living together, sharing things. But the internet adds another layer of alienation onto this, because it gets more clicks. 

In further the-internet-is-evil news, there's this story: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjvvkd/they-bought-a-house-with-plans-to-airbnb-then-they-were-banned-for-knowing-the-wrong-people?utm_source=pocket-newtab a person who bought a house to live in part time and AirBNB part time, finds out that since the internet thinks she's associated with some other people, she can't do this. This is closely akin to the non-compete condition I'm in with Ken. 

Basically, if I were to start my own Ebay account, even if got a whole different laptop, never used it on this wifi network, used it out of a ranted office downtown, etc., there's a pretty good chance Ebay would not only shut me down but shut Ken down as well. This almost happened to me when I was in Sunnyvale and a friend in Santa Clara. Shut down by Ebay means you're off the platform for life. Ebay thought we were "shilling" for each other. The internet decided we were the same person. We were, in their eyes, in a small way endangering their profit and their clicks. 

This is why if I sell on Ebay again it can't be from less than say 1000 miles away. Better to do it from Hawaii, 2500 miles away. But it's also why my plan is to have enough saved to live on for a year at least before I even contemplate selling on Ebay again. 

If I work for a donut shop and then after a decade or so decide to quit and set up my own donut shop, there's not a lot that can be done against me. But now that the internet presides over everything, it's not that easy. 


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