For about 30 years now, I’ve been trying to put my finger on what exactly is causing the amount of friction I have with human beings online. They like to say that it’s entirely my fault, but that’s bullshit. There’s a certain level of interaction that I give back to them (for lack of better terms in English: meaning, I react in certain ways that feed into what they’re doing) that is not helpful for the environment of which I wish to create. Let me give you a concrete example.
A person yells out into the void, on a social media service, ‘if you do X, then fuck you, you’re scum.’
I reply, ‘don’t call me scum.’
The person replies and starts a fight.
People often say, ‘don’t feed the troll.’ But this doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, because, in this situation, only the troll is allowed to speak. It’s similar to how liberals try to get away from Neo Nazis by avoiding every single bit of terminology that the Nazis use. The Nazis glom on to something, and the liberals abandon it.
Let me give you an example from popular culture, to help you understand this more easily. I’m going to make this more-palatable for you.
The Nazis take shit like the Borg.
Now this is the point where the people reading assume that I’m suggesting pacifism against Nazis. No: what I’m pointing out in this video occurs 1 minute and 7 seconds in:
… I’ve made too many compromises already; too many retreats. They invade our space, and we fall back.
Here’s what I’ve seen happen over the past 3 decades, online.
Good people used to populate the Internet. There were assholes, but they were cloistered. And then the more people got to use the Internet, the more they took it for granted, the more general toxicity and negativity invaded the space.
Now the good people are cloistered, but the assholes run free.
I’m not suggested we should have gatekept the Internet better. After all, there also is no ‘we’. I could not have done anything, nor could you have.
What I’m saying, is, the more that the real world began to use the Internet, and the less that the Internet was this curiosity, relegated for use only by ‘nerds’ and social outcasts and misfits, the more everything bad about the real world began to permeate onto the Internet. Now there’s no going back.
Social outcasts used to keep the Internet nice for themselves. Now that they’re beset on all sides by normies, they’ve reacted in such a way where they’ve become spiteful, rageful, vindictive, and territorial, in ways that don’t make any sense. And they have no real way to gatekeep their environments that don’t also hurt they themselves.
‘Don’t feed the troll’ created an environment in which the people causing all the problems were allowed to speak, while the people who caused relatively fewer or no problems, they fell back. They surrendered their territor(ies) online, went to different websites, and became less concentrated. Meanwhile, the Bad People™ got full use of the facilities.
The insane are running the asylum. They have been since 2003. It’s just that, with how widespread Internet use is, it really hasn’t become a problem until quite recently. I’d like to say it started in 2014, to puff myself up and say, ‘I ruined this.’ But I didn’t. And it would’ve happened a different way, anyways.
Not even Chanology was the start.
This is not some blameless phenomenon. People perpetrated this. I had a hand in it, but I did not ruin it by myself. Furthermore, in trying to grow and evolve as a person, when what I did to protect my own ego, something that was once pretty much nonexistent, fragile and easily hurt, caused the largest tantrum spiral I’ve ever seen on the Internet? I offer no apologies.
Somebody told me I was worthless, and that I should kill myself.
And I told them to go fuck themselves.
And everything just unraveled from there.
It is, of course, going to continue. Human beings have no real desire to become better. When they say, ‘do better’, they don’t really mean it. They just want to be mean to one another.
And that’s your problem.
You want to be mean to each other. A lot.
Here’s a secret: when the Tantrum Spiral started in 2014 (and none of you are going to know what I’m referring to, unless you actually know me), I did not tell that person to go fuck themselves.
I said, ‘I don’t deserve to be spoken to, in this way.’ And they took it like I had slapped them in the face and said ‘go fuck yourself’. That’s why I always tell the story like that.
That’s the thing about human beings: you can tell them, ‘good morning’, and they’ll take it as an insult, demanding you tell them, what’s good about it?.
When people say that to me, by the way, I always tell them,
you’re alive. That’s what’s good about it.
Discussing Turtles with Crazy People
My uncle, Ryresai, once told me a story about how he was doing research about turtles, and other turtle-y things. And he was discussing this with someone, who seemed very interested in turtles. He was, in fact, a published author on some sort of turtle-y research.
My uncle is very intelligent. And he’s very passionate.
It was about an hour and 45 minutes in that Ryresai realized that the person he was talking to was insane. Some things started not making sense. And after that, the whole thing started to unravel.
Ryresai suddenly realized that nothing he had said to the man had had any real effect. He was discussing turtles with a crazy person.
The man he was talking to might once have been ‘sane’. Or he might have been something like a savant, where he was good at one thing, but he lacked relevant and useful experience and knowledge of protocol when it came to other things. Or he might have gone insane after he wrote the book.
But even then, there were signs. There were tangents in the book that started to not make sense. But it would almost-always get back on track. A minor derailment; nothing more.
But that’s the thing. Even, if not especially, the smartest of people, they tend towards insanity. I, in particular, chose not to pursue mathematics, because I did not want to develop schizophrenia. (When you’re nine years old and you’re basically the kid that J. shoots in the simulation in Men in Black, you tend to not want to pursue any more advanced informations.)
That is to say, I played the Marathon series on PowerPC Macintosh, and then, I got into Quantum Mechanics/Physics, pretty deeply.
You don’t wanna do that when your balls haven’t even dropped.
But, anyways. Jokes aside, there is one thing I want to tell you about all of this, that I want to impress upon you.
When you try real hard online? And you’re wondering why everyone is so angry at you? And you don’t understand?
And you’re trying to tell people things, and get them to understand you, but they’re just not understanding you?
Be careful.
You may be discussing turtles with crazy people.
An Explanation
A lot of people don’t tend to get the sublteties of my writing. They don’t understand my nuance. I’m not saying people aren’t smart if they don’t get it. I’m just saying, I want to make something perfectly clear.
The Internet is this way because you can’t get anything done when the people you’re talking to don’t fucking understand what you’re saying. That’s ‘discussing turtles with crazy people’.
Essentially, everyone trying to do something good online, they’re not being heard, nor understood; and when they want to gather with like-minded people, those like-minded people tend to either be insane themselves, or in such a bad fucking mood that they’ve cloistered themselves in a way that makes interacting with them damned near impossible.
It’s easy to be a mindless dipshit who smears their shit all over the wall and tells even the most-learned of elders that said elder’s mother sucks him good and hard thru his jorts. It’s much more difficult to actually produce anything resembling a civilization, when the vast majority of people who could, are being smeared with other people’s shit.
This is untenable.
Don’t expect anything useful from the Internet.
For civilization to exist, the people who act as the enablers of said infrastructure must also exist. And no one online is going to do the work for free, forever, without getting burnt out so badly that it doesn’t even matter.
I could write more, but I honestly have better shit to do.