Being Raised by the Internet

dyscalclia sucks

Yes, check All Advantage. It was a browser addon showing you add while you were browsing. I remember receiving a check from them (adressed to my mother obviously) when I was a teen.

The dumbest thing about this post is the usual grouping of "europeans" all together as if it's one country with one set of rules, cultural values and expectations.

> you were from a small shitty place that nobody ever heard of, but you had transcended those humble origins to become a being of pure information, sharing thoughts, philosophy and maybe code with other similar beings, and that physical location was irrelevant and really the whole idea of it was quite vulgar.

I truly think that postmodern (Facebook onwards) social media destroyed this ethereal, noncorporeal aspect of the internet by forcing users to identify as the social media profile. Bandwidth and compute on the early internet were not sufficient to exchange HD pictures and video at the volume we deal with today, and so the early internet was a primarily literate medium, with all the characteristics and benefits of literacy that entails: an affinity for autodidacticism, learning, information exchange, rationality. It seemed to exist on an ideal plane, where we dealt not with people but concepts, and characteristics such as geographical location, ethnicity, skin color, accents, and even sex simply were never even part of the picture to form a basis for discrimination - all one could see were your words and your pseudonym, and they could be judged on their own merits irrespective of whatever postmodern notion of "identity group" authored them.

The internet was not hi-fi enough to be confused with reality, and this detachment from the messy particulars of meatspace was well-suited for the exchange of ideas along the "information superhighway." It's only when people started posting pictures and videos of themselves that we saw the culture war heat up and begin to divide people along lines of identity, for the cold rationality of what was once a literate medium had now regressed to an audiovisual medium of spectacle, soundbytes, and shorts; no longer the meritocratic marketplace of ideas where all users were treated equally and ideas could be expanded upon at length, of words and concepts responding to other ideas and thoughts, the internet is now where talking heads spew 15-second invective at one another and people are judged on their appearance, accent, sex, or any number of other dimensions orthogonal to the quality of the ideas they express.

> Being from “the library” is maybe closest in spirit in terms of being infotropic and on an autodidactic mission

Illuminating, how you chose "the library" as the nearest neighbour and not "the cinema" or "the radio." I empathize very much with the OP and finding not only refuge from a chaotic living situation but also a way out towards gainful employment by drinking from the firehose of freely available information that was the early Internet; again being a primarily literate medium it was my library-from-home where I spent more time amongst documentation, or crawling through obscure technical fora just soaking up any and all information I could, than I did talking to my friends, family, or even people in general. There were innumerable days of my life (even still true to this day) where I spent more time writing bash and talking to a computer through a terminal than I did speaking English to another living soul.

Respectfully, I disagree. Every label or identity is yet another pigeonhole to be stuffed into and a thought-terminating cliche that reduces the complexity of one's life into an overly simplistic symbol which fails to represent the totality of one's being. Better to dispense with such coarse-grained oversimplifications and reject the notion of labelling selves entirely.

> You're not only your job, but you're also a parent, a child, an athlete, a hobbyist, etc.

You're actually none of those things. In the words of Alan Watts, [0]

    The principal disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with
    reality, just as we confuse money with actual wealth, and our names
    about ourselves, our ideas of ourselves, with ourselves.

You are neither a job, nor a parent, nor a child nor athlete nor any of these things. That which can be named and labelled is not reality; it enters into the sphere of representation and takes us a layer of abstraction away from the base reality of what you are, of which we cannot really speak and must treat in silence (see the Tao, or the Tetragrammaton).

We exchange these names of ourselves, ideas of ourselves, language describing ourselves, with others, hoping that the full reality of ourselves will be communicated, in whole and not in part, to others, who will actually see past the symbols and recognize the selves to which they point. In actuality they conflate the symbol and the self, the representation for the reality, falling victim to the deception of Baudrillard's simulacrum, of images that "mask and denature a profound reality."

Hence the injunction of the philosopher Kwaw to the daimios of Japan in Aleister Crowley's parable Konx Om Pax [1] to call themselves "the Synagogue of Satan, so as to keep themselves from the friendship of the fools who mistake names for things," while advocating not a "Satanist" way of life, but rather a Taoist one seeking the equilibration of opposites to achieve first inner personal harmony and then outer societal harmony.

A postmodernist would see the label "Satanist" and immediately conjure up images and notions of evil and "the adversary," confusing the name with the actual thing, the deeds and the philosophy of the synagogue, never bothering to inquire beyond the label and the name into the nature of the thing itself, letting their priors and biases make uninformed snap judgments for them. A modern instantiation of Kwaw's tactic can be found in The Satanic Temple, who advocates not for "evil" (whatever this word means) but for the advancement of rationality and reproductive rights. Yet this phenomenon extends far beyond The Satanic Temple and religion and extends to all of life more broadly, and this simplistic reduction of the world into one-word labels and mental filing cabinets is what lends to the exact same tribalism pg notes in his essay.

Ascribing labels to one's self limits your degrees of freedom by circumscribing your capabilities and characteristics within the bounds of the label. For if I am P, then I am not (not P) and immediately I have entered into a dualistic discourse of "me" and "not me" or of "self" and "other." Now you are beholden to a past, a history, and limited by that which you have identified with, rejecting what you are not yet but could at one point be. The very clinging to what scraps of "identity" one has accumulated around one's self is precisely what leads to this fragility of personality once those identities are forcibly taken away.

Ironically postmodern ideologies admit of "non-binary" sexualities that reject simplistic dichotomies and labels, but fail to extend this mode of thinking to other domains of life that would benefit from the same treatment; instead they insist on fractionating all of society into discretized identity groups and factions instead of recognizing the unique individuality of each human being, failing to acknowledge that continua instead of hard dichotomies exist and reality is not so cleanly divided. These ideologies purport to have moved beyond stereotypes and assuming everyone had the same lived experiences growing up, and yet continues to do exactly that with simplistic filing away of people into labelled cabinets of "identity."

All abstractions are leaky, including abstractions of self. Postmodern (Facebook onwards) social media has enabled a new era of idolatry; where once we erected statues and idols in a vain attempt to capture the ineffability of gods, now we publish online profiles and reels in a vain, narcissistic attempt to capture the ineffability of the self.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJYp-mWqB1w

[1] http://www.astrumargenteum.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Ko...