I had been wondering what's going on with SDF, as the number of
active users was going up with surprising speed. Then I started
getting e-mail alerts from a long forgotten mastodon account.
Seems people are following me, even thought that account is
not connected to anything really...
Well, the news finally hit me that there's some drama on twitter.
As I get my gossip mainly from podcasts, it takes a week or two
before the news cycle reaches me.
If anything, I would prefer to have even less of the usual
thinly veiled political strawmen bickering on my stream, but it
happens that the same system that generates the bickering also
generates the quality curation, so I can't just unsubscribe from
all of it.
But I think I am getting pretty good at pruning my feed. It is
turning more and more towards the eternal (or at least long term)
questions and less towards the flame wars. If anything, I may be
getting a bit too eager to prune. These days when I see words
like abortion, identity, cancellation, Russia, China, Biden, Trump,
Brexit, Covid, crypto, opioids, censorship, facebook, celebrities,
I get the instinct to unsubscribe. I have to hold myself back and
really consider if the podcast has in general been talking about
these topics more than 30% of time. If they have, they are not
worth my time. They are most likely grifters, selling shit or
running a campaign.
I think I literally could not bring myself to repeat the above
statement in real life. I think the culture is so heavily
fortified to consider the news cycle sacred that it would be
seen sort of blasphemous to not want to "take part in the
discussion".
What this taking part means is actually a form of hypnosis. Quite
a strong hypnosis as well. Sort of like when you are in a sports
match: You look at the same thing as everyone else, you go through
the same physical movements, you yell the same lines. And then
there are the people on the opposite side who you must think as
your enemy while the event lasts.
The hypnotic nature of the cycle was really obvious when the
Ukraine War started. It was a straight cut from Covid all day
every day to Ukraine all day every day. If it was not about
hypnosis, we could, as a culture, actually focus on several
things at one time. It would be more like "Oh, I am not really
that interested or knowledgeable on health matters, so I am not
going to use my time following that story and commenting on it,
but I do know about foreign policy, so I will use my time there,
where I can actually contribute" or maybe "I don't know much
about this topic, so let me follow it for a couple of years, and
then see if it is worth commenting on".
The news cycle is a series of deathmatches. Like waves hitting on
the shore. News are not pushed along anymore, they flow and
spread by themselves around the globe. Or maybe it's even worse.
Maybe they are superconductive. That's why the cycle can only end
when you get a new pulse that overwhelms the previous one.
