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The Internet of Beefs

ribbonfarm.com

71–80 of 342 posts

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#71
post #12

This article resonates with me and my experiences online to a startling degree. Specifically: “We are not beefing endlessly because we do not desire peace or because we do not know how to engineer peace. We are beefing because we no longer know who we are, each of us individually, and collectively as a species.” I think we are seeing a genuine lack of strong family, social, and organizational ties among most people,…

I think the lack of strong social ties was also the norm through most of the 20th century (in the US at least) but people didn't have the opportunity to connect with focused interest groups as they do now. Prior to that social ties were enforced through religion and that created it's own problems.

I think you're seriously underestimating the decline of participation in organized religion in the US both during the second half of the 20th century and in the twenty years since. Here are just a few numbers to chew on from Gallop's long-running polls[1]:

* The number of religious "Nones" - people identifying themselves with no religion - was right around 1% through the 1950s. In the 1970s it increased from 3-7%, and stayed below 10% through the end of the century. It's now over 20%. In the 1950's, ~70% of people were Protestant Christians. Now it's half that amount.

* In the year 2000, 12% of Americans reported that religion was "not very important" in their lives. Now it's double that amount.

* In the year 2000, 13% of Americans reported that they "never" attend religious services. Now 29% never attend.

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/1690/religion.aspx

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost like our social bonds are being broken in the same way chemical bonds get broken when we digest food. Like our capitalist society is a higher-order organism that is extracting energy from our societal bonds.

Not saying capitalism is devoid of fault but it seems like consumerism is more directly to blame

Isn't consumerism caused by capitalism?

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#73
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the sad truth about fast and rapidly changing social norms. this lack of identity and community.

What rapid changes have we seen lately? The change in that person's comment has been in the making for over a hundred years. The first thing I personally can think of (in the context of America, as one of the last Western countries to accept GLBT people, not in the context of the wider world, which has been accepting for much longer than America) is American GLBT communes in the 1780s. Given where we are in GLBT acce…

> What rapid changes have we seen lately?

Well change in support/recognition of transgender issues has been very rapid over the past 5-10 years.

"More than six in ten (62%) Americans say they have become more supportive toward transgender rights compared to their views five years ago."

Source: https://www.prri.org/research/americas-growing-support-for-t...

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#76
post #12

This article resonates with me and my experiences online to a startling degree. Specifically: “We are not beefing endlessly because we do not desire peace or because we do not know how to engineer peace. We are beefing because we no longer know who we are, each of us individually, and collectively as a species.” I think we are seeing a genuine lack of strong family, social, and organizational ties among most people,…

This is spot on. I wonder if this exodus has resulted in people trying to make workplaces their "religious community"; but obviously people who happen to be at the same company don't have any reason to agree on important issues. So then the mission becomes trying to make everyone at work care about and agree on .

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Re: The Internet of Beefs

#77
Imagine two curves, ressources, and population growth, one bouncing against the other, deminishing it. Imagine a blind force, trying to adapt to this circumstances.

How would a neuro-typus look like, that adapts to strife? How would its build up look like?

What would be the treshold to bring it out of hibernation in hiding out in the open? What could return it to hibernation?

Would it try to create a everlasting thirty year war, if it could? What re-purpose could such a neuro-typus have in peace times? Is something that is adapted to its surrounding even sick- can you call someone who traumatizes and revels in it, in its environment even sick?

Is religion - the maximum production of genetic lotterys for the great lottery of war- at cost of liberty, just another peace time adaption to this adaption to the perfect cycle of strife? How many neuro-typuses are there? Can diffrent neuro-typus form a social machinery?

Has the peacefull humanity, this idealized version ever existed? Or is this just some luxery delusion, created by science? Give me energy in abundance, give me fertilizer, give me fresh-water, give me forrests, i shall devour them, and call myself peacefull.

Will virtual violence (games) allow to hack/circumvent the cycle of strife behaviour?

Will self-surveilance gadgetry allow us to behave, even when the state collapses?

We live in intersting times.

We could feed this regressive behaviour for another thousand years, if we had fusion and spaceflight- but then, we would be exponential up and out there, holding the rocks of gods. Maybe its better to resolve this down here.

To harden the roots of the scenario-tree, give it all the chances to self-control, learned in a thousand years of repetition.

Dang, I wish you could invest kharma in a point, with a dividend, depending on investment. And with insolvency goes away all your posts to the underworld.

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#78
post #12

This article resonates with me and my experiences online to a startling degree. Specifically: “We are not beefing endlessly because we do not desire peace or because we do not know how to engineer peace. We are beefing because we no longer know who we are, each of us individually, and collectively as a species.” I think we are seeing a genuine lack of strong family, social, and organizational ties among most people,…

My theory is that people have replaced religion with politics. They've fallen away from organized religion, but they still need somewhere deep down, the comfort and certainty, (or "faith"), that spiritual belief conferred.

Many have found that comfort and certainty in the ideological tenets of the political groups with which they form affinities. As a bonus, people find a sense of belonging that is fairly similar to what 50 years ago those same people would have found in the various churches or temples.

Again, just a theory, but I think this is why a lot of political arguments have started to resemble almost clashes of religious dogmas. Or what the author has termed, "beefs".

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#79
post #12

This article resonates with me and my experiences online to a startling degree. Specifically: “We are not beefing endlessly because we do not desire peace or because we do not know how to engineer peace. We are beefing because we no longer know who we are, each of us individually, and collectively as a species.” I think we are seeing a genuine lack of strong family, social, and organizational ties among most people,…

Thank you for crystallising this succinctly. The loss of cultural meeting places, be they churches, or arcades, or malls, is something I consider a huge loss as well. The pendulum might swing the other way yet, however. If we can reinvest in our community centers and hacker spaces and make them part of the zeitgeist, we might all be rehumanize a bit.

There are many communities out there for people to join and find their tribe, they just aren't easily accessible or indexed centrally. A lot of them filter for like-minded folks -- even the ones that claim to accept anyone.

Focusing on community or hacker spaces is narrow view of one's options. I found mine via attending underground music events, then joining one of the groups and attending festivals with them, which eventually led to strong ties with the burner scene and some of the local artist communities.

I think people are forgetting that to experience these things you need to be present, and do so with some frequency. Open-mindedness and the right vibe will get you far socially. Unfortunately that doesn't really match well with the workoholic atmosphere that many jobs insist on, and so you end up with unfortunate situations like people mistaking their employers for family. I hope that those folks are secure in their employment because it is really easy to be cast out (e.g. laid off) under the guise of, "it's just business". Personally I think feelings of workplace-as-family are just another trap engendered by management to maintain employee retention.

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#80
post #17

I hesitate to criticize this person, because they're presumably writing for an audience that already knows them, and probably are following for this style of writing, but I have to ask: What is it with think-pieces that state obvious and widespread conclusions while using jargon and jokes to obscure how basic of conclusions they really are? I can't fault people who do this because they're paid by the word and taking…

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