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got some time to kill so gonna do some rambling notes to self on the state of my whiteboard I think the main big picture is the question of wretchedness in our modern times. I roughly define wretchedness as a complex of despair, emotional and muscular tension, knottedness https://t.co/DtGe3hWiR1
wretchedness is simultaneously a way of seeing for most of us, this is intermediated by our modern media landscape. a person who is wretched will basically end up using their devices (universal cursed artifact) to self-harm. specifics of causality, blame, responsibility r murky
some of us have the opposite experience. we’re skilled chaos surfers who possess a strong sense of sovereignty, social skills, media savvy, vocab, and we’re able to use our cursed artifacts to luckmaxx: find friends, build relationships, enjoy economic opportunity, upside, etc.
a substantial part of my body of work so far has been me self-reporting my own journey through this mess, and a lot of what I’m trying to do is to help others with it – but even that is a little tricksy, I think it’s best done obliquely, indirectly
a question that comes up is: how do you make yourself (and others) comfortable when the context is collapsing? (side thread here about how modernity has brought about wave after wave of context collapse via technological n cultural advancements, both good and bad)
the future will only get more chaotic and so chaos-surfing is going to be an increasingly important skill. A lot of this stuff is me restating things that others have been saying for decades, centuries. Here’s McLuhan quoting Pius 12 ~ saying we gotta be stronger than the 📱 https://t.co/VQuYNRHSQW
Pope Pius XII in 1950: “...the future of modern society and the stability of its inner life depend in large part of the maintenance of an equilibrium between the strength of the techniques of communication and the capacity of the individual’s own reaction.”
here’s some of the essence of chaos-surfing in relation to reality not having fixed frames – this stuff was hard even before smartphones https://t.co/RUToEUJd6Z
what Jung is talking about here re: de-individualised persons is what I’m talking about re: sovereignty, self-sense. people who are drowning in chaos will cling on to tyrannical order in desperation https://t.co/yvXc8QX5JN
my first two books address major parts of the puzzle– still trying to condense them into ~3k word essays– and/but there are still missing pieces re: culture and media. Bunch of book overviews I wanna do. Been feeling a lil guilty for taking so long with it but so it goes https://t.co/wpf3NySi7i
feel like part of why I’m taking so long is I haven’t clarified for myself what I personally mean when I want to talk about culture and media. they’re such broad and abstract concepts in mainstream parlance. Let’s try
revisiting this thread first… https://t.co/Gw4jK2AlDA
after years and years of thinking about it, observing it, analyzing it, questioning it, I've come to think of culture as a sort of "aether". it exists primarily in people's minds, of course, and it manifests in behavior patterns, architecture, rituals, all sorts of things...
just putting this here for future reference https://t.co/yysOARAWps
