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3/12/2024
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** Cue eerie music. All that is in shot is some waves
bubbling over. **
This goes on a while. Then narrator starts:
| Modern society has created a situation where direct
| experiences of life have become diluted and dulled.
| This has occurred through mass media and the excess
| use of technology. We see the world through screens
| instead of directly through our bodies. Because of
| this our senses have become dulled and under
| stimulated...
I'll stop the quoting there [1]. The text comes from a
video on the cryptic promotional site for the book The
Wander Society by Keri Smith. I take the book to be
fictional account of someone finding out about a secret
society that many authors have been part of through
history. Others have taken this as a real account, which
perplexes me, but in any case if you do indeed have a
cynical bone in your body you have to make sure you are in
the right mood to read the book, which gushes in a way few
works of art do any more. (Maybe the ability to actually
feel things is what happens when you get out of the
clutches of the System? Maybe the problem isn't how much
you emotionally react to something, but rather what it is
your reacting to? And thus maybe the common defense
strategy of trying to feel nothing but coolness is
modernity's curse [2]... And I'll note that coolness is
still a feeling. It is comfort in that comes from being
high enough in a social hierarchy).
Back to the opening quote and that bit about modern society
having left our senses dulled and us under stimulated got
me to thinking... Aren't we also overstimulated? After all
the social critic John Michael Greer -- once 70% brilliant
and 30% crackpot, but since 2016 has left the ratios
reversed -- crafted the acronym for succeeding in the post
peak-oil future of L.E.S.S. Less Energy Stuff and
Stimulation.
Well, I think both Smith and Greer and right in this
regard, but they are talking about slightly different
things. Greer is talking about how we are overstimulated by
the tricks that have to be used to make boring things able
to hold us [3]. Here's a few of these techniques:
soundtracks, rapid camera cuts, changing the color scheme.
All of these are ways to jerk and distort reality that hit
your brain's processing as micro jump scares... Imagine you
were in the middle of the woods, just relaxing as you look
at the pattern of lights moving through the branches when
everything morphed both in shape and location, the color
scheme shifted to red and there was a noise of "waa waaaa."
You'd the very least pay attention. You'd probably be
terrified the first time it happened. But if it kept
happening, eventually you'd get used to it. And then
younger generations who didn't know a different would just
take that as reality.
So we are overstimulated in terms of context shifts. Which,
again, are tricks to hold your attention. That is the power
TV has to make so you can't just look away [4]. We have
stacked on top of that hacks into attention using social
proof and semi-random rewards, but I am starting realize
those later two are part of a proper, flourishing human
life; they just have to be directed differently. Artificial
context shift, on the other hand, is optional and too
likely to be used for harm rather than benefit.
But Smith is right that we are under stimulated. On the
level of senses, most do not get enough feeling with hands
or the rest of the skin (breezes, warmth, cold), not enough
smell, or even taste. But those could be taken care of by
technology or the spending of money, I suppose. But what
technology without cultural change can not stimulate and
what the vast, vast majority does not get enough of, is
one: connection and two: beauty without agenda.
====
[1] Actually, I'll keep going, as it is good script.
| this is not what we wish for as our reality. What we
| really long for, what we've always wanted is to be
| deeply connected -- to people, to the world, and to
| ourselves. Society has given us an image of what we
| should be experiencing as humans, of what we should
| have, of how we should feel about our lives.
| This image is propagated through the use of Spectacle:
| television, films, advertising, etc. It has nothing to
| do with the true experience of living, or the wants and
| needs of he individual, the needs of the soul. We are
| craving a life outside the commercial world, derived
| from direct experiences, not second hand representations
| of reality. We are craving a life that is free from
| constant distraction. We are craving the freedom and
| timelessness we felt as children.
| There is an answer to what we crave.
http://www.thewandersociety.com/TWSvideo.html
[2] See Infinite Jest, if you want this laid out obliquely
in a massive, non-linear tome. Also the book has... a lot
of other stuff.
[3] The etymology of the entertain renders the meaning hold
(tain, tener) between (enter), though my dictionary
chickens out and renders this "hold together." No, no
entertainment is not the like integration > integrity. If
you don't get feeling that the attempt is to hold you in,
then what I wrote here probably isn't for you. There is a
scene in Infinite Jest that plays with this etymology, but
it is so obliquely done that I don't think it would be a
quote that would easily fit.
[4] Greer offers the trick of counting each time you have a
camera cut. By doing this not only are you giving yourself
a distraction, but it breaks the flow the narrative (if
there even is one), allowing you to see how empty it really
is.
===
This work is hereby in the public domain.
Do what you want with it.
