version

Well-known member
I'm currently too frazzled to come up with anything coherent, but the phrase "New Transparency" keeps coming to mind when I think about tech and social media atm. There's something about the way people are now willingly putting what feel like full psychological and ideological profiles of themselves in just their Twitter bio whilst the people and systems running things and even the platforms themselves become increasingly opaque and inscrutable that strikes me as incredibly insidious: the illusion of a transparent society where the transparency only ever goes one way.

I guess this could have been tacked onto one of several threads we've already got going, but I think it's something of a phenomenon in its own right. These platforms are encouraging people to empty themselves to the point where I wonder whether there will come a time when we lose the sense of what an inner life once was.

That excerpt I posted about the octopus wearing its thoughts may actually be happening in some sense.
 

version

Well-known member
Maybe, or maybe it's a case of what Woops was saying re: Mark, PKD and Baudrillard the other night and the individual mind being taken for the universal. You've more or less embraced the internet wholeheartedly.
 

william_kent

Well-known member
I'm worried about the possibility of the legislation of psychedelics, the wholesale invasion of interior space by corporations
 

version

Well-known member
It's a somewhat superficial transparency, mind you. I might know someone's pronouns, political beliefs and so on, but do I really know them? Is what they're saying actually what they think?

Something I've often thought when I've heard celebrities discussing things like mental health is it's a performance of openness that ends up simply adding another layer of artificiality. I don't doubt celebrities have personal issues like anyone else, but something about the way things are publicly discussed makes it impossible for them to genuinely articulate anything about their experiences, even if they think that's what they're doing.
 

woops

is not like other people
I'd say that most people of any stripe cling dearly to an inner life. This is the part of you that listens to music, falls in love and experiences awe under psychedelics (as well as in some cases unfortunately drives people to do unpleasant stuff) where twitter pronouns and the rest of it are attempts to present a flawless outer life. If the inner life fan be colonised it's game over isn't it?
 

version

Well-known member
I'd say that most people of any stripe cling dearly to an inner life. This is the part of you that listens to music, falls in love and experiences awe under psychedelics (as well as in some cases unfortunately drives people to do unpleasant stuff) where twitter pronouns and the rest of it are attempts to present a flawless outer life. If the inner life fan be colonised it's game over isn't it?
Think it was that Slothrop guy me and Luka like on Twitter who was saying something the other day about feeling we're being pushed into a scenario where all communication runs through centralised, heavily-regulated networks.
 

luka

Well-known member
we already have been. even the terrorists have to go through the same channels lol
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
Well, no. You can still talk to people irl for now. We're not quite in the pod yet.
Hence the urgency in reconciling extropy with humanism. Competition/evolution won't ignore the bottom line, despite many of us liking to think we would. A stagnant understanding of personal liberties and human nature will lead one right into the pod, as you say.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
We will be reminded just how marginal we are in the big picture, unless we start thinking bigger. People need more leisure time to advance themselves, and an optimal society should render that affordable for as many humans as possible.

One possible alternative to selling one's time is selling one's data. Still too cloudy for me, but there could be considerable economic purchase in such an economy where value is abstracted that much more beyond labor.
 

wild greens

Well-known member
Ultimately there are huge AI machines taking all this information on-board and creating a digital map of the over-sharing complications here. I "know" some online people far more than people i work with every day, or have casually known offline for a long time, and its strange that this massive over-sharing has become normalised

I know a fair few people with 10k+ posts on twitter, 100s of photos on insta, the machine knows your whole life there. It is an easy trap to fall into. until tweet-delete turned up there were certainly vague thoughts that would help machine learning fill in all kind of gaps about me- it was probably too late tbh. If you have grown up in the system then it probably knows you better than anyone

If you allow the system to track everything and involve yourself in this personal display then it knows what you look like, what you think, where you go, what your mates look like (assuming you're tagging them in etc), possibly even your entire facial structure etc if you're on tiktok, your sexual taste all that

I think there is the old argument of if you're not doing anything wrong then who cares but these systems can be hacked to shit, you can be left so exposed if you're not careful

I haven't experienced the thing where you talk about something and then you get ads for it yet but i know plenty that have
 
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