(2023-08-10) The world we live in: the maxim of Arkham
------------------------------------------------------
First off, there are some good news: nntrac is mainly complete and almost
ready to showcase. My next post will be solely dedicated to it. Also, I have
found some extra bugs in nne and going to try and fix them as soon as I find
the time. But today, there's something else I want to talk about.
When researching TRAC history I shared in my previous posts, I also dug a bit
more into the topic of Ted Nelson himself and the history of his dream
project called Xanadu. I'll get back to what I think about it later, now I
want to focus on something else. As stated in a wonderful 1996 article in
the Wired magazine, called "The Curse of Xanadu", which is probably the most
complete piece of information about the man's biography (and that's why I
have saved it locally in the plaintext format and probably will share it
somewhere on the Gopherspace), Nelson invented the very idea of hypertext
because of his real struggle to remember and structure things in his head.
In other words, hypertext was primarily devised by (and for) ADD people.
Having realized that, I was amazed how everything else fell into its place:
starting with why Xanadu had failed and ending with why the modern bloated
Web and mobile touchscreen "apps" flourish.
You see, until ca. 1995, computers in general didn't try to be
"user-friendly" in the modern understanding of these words (which I have
already written about in some of my earlier writeups), thus requiring people
to actually think what they are doing and why. This, in turn, required some
fair amount of discipline, literacy and overall sanity. But then, businesses
in charge decided that smart people are not to be milked that easily, and
started dumbing down their products for larger audience to lift those
requirements. This process has never stopped to this day, and the
consequences are already devastating and promising to be catastrophic in the
forseeable future. This process has already reached far beyond computing
into other aspects of our daily life, and led to what I call "the maxim of
Arkham":
Everyone is now forced to live in the world that is specifically tailored for
people with mental disorders.
What if you don't have any significant mental disorders? Then you're screwed:
according to the Newspeak, you are not healthy anyway, you're
"neurotypical". You don't have any more influence on the world than anyone
else. You have the same right to vote as the illiterate dumbass next door
and the psycho-the-rapist across the street. You are the one who will be
made guilty if you say anything the mentally weak don't like, including the
truth about them. You are the one who all these "codes of conduct" are
really turned against. You have to walk on the same roads, visit the same
shops, buy the same things and suffer from these things' inferiority to what
you had earlier, because earlier those things were designed with mentally
healthy people in mind. And one day, you understand that the hardest task as
of now is to not go insane yourself when watching this madness surrounding
you every day.
But why? Because profit. Weak-minded people are easier to trick into paying
for thin air and buying trendy "one-time-use" products, to deceive them
about their real perspectives and values in life, to promote various
political agendas and so on. Compulsive consumption of material and virtual
goods is a monetary driver strong enough to wilfully keep everyone insane.
And if anyone awakens and realizes what's going on, this army of consumorons
will itself stomp on the dissenters without a second thought.
Gopherspace seems like one of the few places out there still not taken over
by consumorons. This is why I prefer this place as a safe harbor for
"neurotypicals" who don't suffer from Attention Deficit and Hypertext
Disorder even in 2023.
