inquiry

I remain unsurprised that the vast majority of humans left to their own devices will put and protect their own interests above all others by any and every means.

If you ask me (I know no one will, so I'll just go ahead and type it), that's the first and foremost thing in need of “disruption”, because there's nothing it can't ruin. It's root cause of so-called “why we can't have nice things”.

And, no, it's not just some other person or smallish subset (e.g. the “evil”, “deplorables”), because a huge part of its skills are in the area of obfuscating its intents and behaviors. In fact, it's so good at it that I dare say people are often unaware they're in its throes for being so danged good at telling themselves they're not – usually while expressing dismay/outrage over how obvious it is (or should be) that one or more others are sooooo “unwoke”, which irrelevant comparison is near the top of its bag of tricks.

But another trick is being more concerned with what kind of icing to put on a shit cake than with eradicating shit from the cake recipe.

For example, Bix waxed thoughtfully about how social media platforms might be tweaked in the direction of better.

But how do the mechanistic details matter if/when the participants therein still don't know how to act/behave in socially constructive ways, still are hair-triggered to explode conceptual feces all over the place upon the slightest of ego sleights?

Perhaps the better tree to bark change dreams up is the one in which ego sits time-bomb-ticking with a self-aggrandizing mirror in one hand, and a variety “fuck you weapons” in the other?

Elsewhere, of course there is “a difference between blogging and things that came before it”.

But, well, surely there are different kinds of differences, all the way from irrelevant, to superficial, to meaningful, to fundamental, to holy-shit-you'd-have-to-be-a-complete-idiot-not-to-see-it.

To me, the differences between blogging and posting to the likes of BBS fora or USENET are closer to superficial.

Yes, having to wait one's turn to post to a BBS forum meant interaction was radically slower. But it was still basically getting one's thoughts before the eyes/attention of others mostly in textual form.

And, yes, one can do more with fonts, colors, images, et. al. to bolster an instance of one's mostly textural personal representative (although I think there was – and still is – something to be said for the likes of ASCII art and emoticons).

If anything, the primary difference is that whereas then one kinda had to (to use the language of those times) “have a clue” to participate, these days really smart people have made participating so easy that – surprise, surprise, any idiot can – and does.

So what have we really accomplished with this mostly superficial “progress”?

I also don't see how “been there, done that” constitutes support of there being more than a superficial difference between then and now. Apart from the few formatting pluses I mentioned, to me it's still basically getting one's thoughts before others regardless whether it's 8-bit “displayable” characters in fixed-width font on a monochrome screen, or multi-byte characters in variable width font and varying colors, with this emboldened, that italicized, something else flashing, oh my look at that amazing grey-scale gradient in the background, etc., etc.

About the only (to me) meaningfully significant difference coming to mind is hyperlinking. But even then, there was a notion of “threading” in olden times that kinda sorta got something akin to that job done.

In summary, I'd rather see a newer, more expressive, less buggy version of human than a newer, more expressive, less buggy version of tools enabling textual war between older, less expressive, more buggy versions of humans.

If ya know what I mean....

And with a bit of a nod to this assessment of someone named Bret Stephens apparently not doing right by someone named David Karpf, I'm pretty tired of hearing/reading that only males are capable of toxicity and/or fragility. Males have hardly cornered the self-ishness market, and it seems more than a little sexist to keep insisting they have.

(Not that that was Bix's primary goal or intent in that post. I'm just saying that for me it was yet another tacit approval of a notion I consider more a signal of considering one's “self” part of some “woke” herd/crowd than empirically, factually true. No particular number of people murmuring the same thing makes it true anywhere save but in the minds of the murmurers.)