Eye of the Slug

The Nietzschean advice about not gazing into the abyss for too long was a wise one. Maybe our screen oriented society should have taken notice more seriously. The critic of social media that has turned coach potatoes into basement cyberslackers is nothing new. Surely the neverending deluge of videos on TikTok has not helped, but let’s be honnest sloth is not a deadly sin by chance. Yet, there seems to be something more. Something like a paradoxically active sloth promoted by the digital culture. Internet activists wouldn’t even go down in the street to protest anymore. A strongly worded post on social media will certainly do right? Plus with the posts they will have long lasting feedbacks in the forms of likes and followers. Real life appears evanescent and … not so real because once the moment has passed there is no tangible proof that something. Let’s call it “the eye of the slug”.

The narrator fallacy

A major difference that social media introduced is the “active” participation of users. Instead of simply absorbing hours of TV programs, the average social media users makes choices, gives feedback, interact with other users and most importantly write the story of his life. I already discussed the fact that social media can be seen as a dual version of the picture of Dorian Gray: on social media only magnified and joyful events are displayed, everything that would appear on the picture of Dorian Gray is kept under the rug.

But there are deeper implications. A subtle one is that we are forgetting that stories are just that: stories. The way life is experienced, through the lens of social media, gives the idea that every event is part of a grand story. This is what I think when I write that it is a narrator fallacy. Because if there is a story then it means that there is an author. Hence the perpetual quest for “explanations” (what was the author wanted to express). Fact checkers are the limit of this tendency: for them nothing exists until it has received a seal of approval by a faceless expert or institution, somewhere. Cloud fact checking as a service. This is the idea behind the Bill Burr bit

What is ironic is that his call to experts, and its countepart, the ridiculing of people talking about it on the internet, is also an appeal to authority. But it is a nihilistic approach, because what he says is: people don’t know and they shouldn’t talk about it until they know what they are talking about, but they can’t by learn by talking and thinking together. The information has to come from the outside, those never named experts. From where those experts have gathered knoweldge remains a mystery, maybe by… talking between themselves? Does it appears to you like a circular logic? You bet because it is.

Inertia

How the online conversation unfolded about the LA fires was another witness to this new split. On one hand, the terminally online people are looking for answers (the fires are because of climate change), while on the other hand are more physically driven people (how come there was no water here? Where were the firefighters ? etc.).

This divide is profound. I would go as far as presenting it as the major political divide of our time. Estblishment democrats against MAGA republicans. USA against EU. Spaceship vs Regulation, Musk vs Breton etc. What stroke me in the LA fire discussion was the level of fatalism displayed by the “you can’t deny that global warming had an impact”. So fucking what ? If man is building cities it is precisely to master the environment. Wild fires always existed in California. We can make them worse of less destructive. But repeating : it is going to be worse if you don’t sacrifice cattle (because you know cows fart a lot) instead of physically moving your ass and do things (clean the bushes, make sure water tanks are filled and repaired, pre-dispatch firefighting hardware, practice drills etc.). There are tons of things to do. But those things are not done moving elecrons on internet, they are done by movign atoms. Of course it has a bigger inertia. So what ? Man up and move. Not in your gym. In real life with a purpose.

Now the interesting phenomenon is that it looks like that the internet is dividing along those liness too. The exodus from X appears to be a consequence of this divide. Of course the mercurial figure of Musk plays an important role too. But notice that Musk has mostly make things in real life before becoming an actor the internet. Like Amazon (maybe apple also) but unlike Facebook, Microsoft and Google. What is striking is how this divide is largely orthogonal to the nation-state institutions. Until recently even communist were productivist and promised better life (in material terms).

If you want a quick way to find on what side of the divide someone stands just ask yourself : what does this person wants ? For Musk the answer is easy : he wants to make the human life multiplanetary. You can find this immature, irrealist, interesting or disgusting, but it is clear. Same thing goes for Trump: he wants to make america great again. He doesn’t care to use salesman car techniques, and non conventional ways. Now on the other hand what did Harris expressed in her campaign ? At best She presented very abstract ideas. Nothing stupidly physical as : let’s buy Groenland and propose to Canada to become the 51st state. No, Harris campaign was rather something like : we need to reach net 0 carbon economy, we have to reduce our footprint as a species (until what level ?) etc. It transpired in every propositions: you could see ambition vs restriction at every turn.

Your choice is between either the eye of the slug or the eye of the tiger.