I can’t shake the feeling that society’s greatest ills stem from decades of moral decay, with social media acting as an amplifier rather than the root cause. There’s still gold to be found, as you said, but it takes effort to sift through the noise.
Misery loves company, and in a world overflowing with distractions and cheap temptations, most people take the path of least resistance—consuming whatever is easiest. In doing so, they become fools, spiritually bankrupt, shaped by the very environment they refuse to question.
The most powerful antidote is to change that environment. Seek wisdom. Pursue truth. The moment you do, doors open—not because the world changes, but because you finally see through its absurdity.
I used to be completely in sync with the cultural beat, but now, I couldn’t care less. It’s far better to forge your own path than to follow a crowd of useful idiots who become victims of their own oppression.
I agree. I think you must turn your back on it, then find something else to do.
Social media and its equivalents are easy. They require minimal effort. And they pay something back quickly, although only in the junkie sense of quick hits that soon dissipate. Hence them coming back for more and more.
I think only abstinence works. But few can cope with that. So who knows what the solution is.
But for individuals, walking away and finding something else to do is important. Plus, as the article suggests, plenty of us are not lost in the online world. We have rejected it in some sense. Others are still finding their way back but they will make it.
Absolute classic. He would have had a field day with social media. His views on television were spot on. And here we are, living in a world where 1980s TV would feel like glacial tedium to most Zoomers.
Neil Postman predicted the post literate society, a return to the dark ages, based on the immediate grasp of visual content, unmediated by the brain, which television provided. He wrote eloquently of how television erased the difference in comprehension between children and adults, that no knowledge or experience was needed to approach a tv show unlike a dense textbook or complex novel. His warnings were never heeded, education was eviscerated long ago in an attempt to make it more entertaining and equitable, and the internet has destroyed the attention of millions, locking them in a permanently arrested state.
If his warnings had been taken more seriously we would’ve been better armed for what followed.
'Being uncontactable' and investing less belief in second-hand information is a good start. In order to function 'normally', we need to 'accept as the case' all kinds of things that we never can (or will) verify as 'being the case'. This kind of 'acceptance on faith' eventually erodes one's ability to detect the difference between valuable and worthless, between obviously false and possibly accurate.
The issue each person has to confront with 'second-hand' information is investment. The degree of investment in a particular second-hand version of reality is up to each person. The system rarely enforces investment in their deceits. So it's possible to take the task of 'non-investment' ('uncontactable') as a mental, moral or 'spiritual' discipline.
You have to make as your credo, 'I will invest no significance in any belief I have not confirmed for myself by direct experience.' You can live is though everything that you do no know from direct personal experience is just hearsay that you accept provisionally as potentially having value but you do not invest any significance in until you verify the reality of it for yourself.
Whenever I think about this approach, I think of Carlos Castenada's commentary on 'attention'.
How you use your time and where you direct your attention decide almost everything about the outcomes of your voluntary actions.
'Being uncontactable' means not being available to deception and secondhandedness.
I agree. Attention is THE currency. Where we focus our energies. It matters. Losing an hour to Tik Tok is different to an hour in the gym or cooking a healthy meal.
While I despair of the people I see around me, I do sincerely believe the majority are not lost, or at least not lost completely. I think being intentionally uncontactable is an early step in people waking up.
So many good things to consider in your post I'd have a hard time naming them all. I'm most pleased that you cautioned against the tendency to believe that the loudest voices, the hyperbole used to inflame and invite clicks, and the side-show type content to which our digital devices blast and blare at those who use them is NOT consumed by everyone.
I consume a great deal of on-line content, but not mindlessly or carelessly. I probably read close to a million words a day (maybe more if I include the long-form content to which I listen) written by the authors I subscribe to on this platform, and pursuing some of the links their articles contain or the commenters post. I watch videos, too, mostly You Tube, but again I've pruned the choices down by deleting the automated algorithm suggestions and keeping only those to which I am willing to devote my time.
I've never had any social media accounts. I'd be susceptible to the time waste because now and then I'll get captured by You Tube shorts and have to force myself to quit scrolling the content. There used to be a platform called Stumble Upon and that's where I got my first taste of how addictive the internet can be.
The internet is a wealth of information. It is up to the individual to choose wisely or foolishly that to which they will expose themselves.
Great comment. I agree. Temptation is always with us, digital or otherwise. We must cultivate the self-discipline to resist if we can.
I do think it is important to remind ourselves the online world is skewed just because not everyone posts or comments or adds content. Most in fact don't. But a further distortion is created by algorithms and artificial promotion by media outlets.
I too read online and watch videos. It is the mindless scrolling and the endless search for dopamine hits that damns many people. The loss of attention is another. I am sure many would find this article too long at 2000 words.
I think optimism needs to be spotted. I think we have to try harder to accept the internet is a distortion. Some voices are very loud, others quiet. But it is not a straight reflection of life.
This is a great piece, and you make many salient points that deserve a wide audience, but this is the most important- that everything that comes to you highlighted through the algorithm is a distortion, itself the product of the least stable brains, the most tireless self-promoters, an AI fever dream, or perhaps the best paying advertiser. None of it has organically floated to the top of your feed based on reality or quality.
Of course. This is true. Lots of artificiality, promoted hard by vested interests.
But the high quality stuff also exists. The great literature, songs, music and art. It may be drowned out but not forever.
George Orwell never had a regular publisher. Other authors were heavily promoted in his day, celebrated with money and knighthoods. And yet it is Orwell we read and not them. Today's unknowns may be in that category too. People crave quality after all.
And thank you for your kind words. Perhaps I will attract a bigger audience eventually.
I am amazed at the quality of writing on substack and the creativity that YouTube brings out. You’re absolutely right about there being no shortage of thought provoking long form essays and in depth interviews.
The dangers of permanently stunted attention spans and parochial shallow opinion masquerading as knowledge can’t be overstated though. I can barely believe that the entire civilized world swallowed an environmental agenda advanced by an ignorant Scandinavian adolescent.
I am never quite convinced those movements are successful. I am not sure people do believe them so much as they don't stop them. Alas some do believe all they are told.
And the phone zombies do worry me. Most worrying of all are the children raised in this environment. The ones who never read a book or have never developed basic attention spans. What hope do they have?
But as the article argued, some of us have avoided this fate. And I suspect there are more of us than we realize.
While what you say is true, the masses that don't engage don't matter. The narrative and subsequent policies from the government are made by those who are crazy enough to engage. Unless the proposition is "well, out of the majority of humans who don't engage, some of them will survive to rebuild after the crazies bring down civilization.
The mass man is nothing more than a vehicle from which greatness can sometimes (rarely) emerge. What they do is as immaterial as their being.
Perhaps. But the idea is the online world would have us believe the brainwashed mass man is all there is. I think he is a minority and he is of course always with us. He has never mattered in the sense you mean it.
Others are escaping, they are waking up. I think they may make a difference.
Hopefully that waking up will help produce greater men out of the mass. The recent graphs showing 18-20 year old men are less Democrat than 60-65 year olds for the first time ever is great.
Bukowski is the poster-image for "don't do as I do" and "don't do as I say" at the same time. He was one of those writers all the interesting girls of my teenage years read, as a sort-of male counterweight to Karin Boye.
Anyway.
There's a sociological concept inented, if that's the right word, by Emile Durkheim long ago, called anomie (from Old Greek "anomia" = "without laws/lawlessness") that describes what you are writing about here. While Durkheim meant it on the societal makro-level, that industrial urban modern society caused this condition by destroying all old norms (laws) and traditions when the rural working class was forced into urban slums to become robots in the factories, it also works on the mikro-level for the individual: without norms/Nomos (Old Greek for the spirit, or daemon, of law and more importantly order) you aren't a human, not even the human animal, because without the Nomos there's no context to your existence at all.
A feeling bound to inoke and evoke in equal order the state of perpetual fear and distress that something is askew with reality itself, making you quest eternally without for that elusive true meaning that is only found within and by an act of you creating yourself (potentially over and over several times during your life).
This parallels nicely the Abyss spoken of by Nietzsche. As you gaze into yourself, you also gaze into your self. An act more terror-inducing than most anything at all, and something Western intellectuals have shied away from eer since Nietzshe's day.
After all, if the path lies within, and the act is in your own hands (actual and metaphorical/-physical) by your own will - what is there to market as a panacea, as a commodity with which to garner capital form the lost spiritually anemic and alienated slaves of the corporate machine?
The battle is spiritual, and it matters very little if by that you mean a religious faith or just your own spirit - your you-ness if that makes sense in English: whatever act you do, whichever creed you teach by living it, if it's aganst the machine you will be villified by it and its Archons and agents.
And one way of knowing ones worth, is by the strength of one's enemies and the efforts they make to suborn, recruit or destroy you.
A belated thank you, Spaceman Spiff, for introducing me to Bukowski the novelist. (I had heard of him through some internet readings by Snordster, but didn't know about him or his writing past that.)
I found a free on-line copy of Bukowski's semi-autobiographical novel, Ham on Rye, and I'm loving it.
And I wish to encourage you to go EMF-free, and create a broad rainbow coalition in your country, fighting this, with all you've got! Humanity might depend upon it, even life as we know it.
You’ve perfectly captured the state of the world.
I can’t shake the feeling that society’s greatest ills stem from decades of moral decay, with social media acting as an amplifier rather than the root cause. There’s still gold to be found, as you said, but it takes effort to sift through the noise.
Misery loves company, and in a world overflowing with distractions and cheap temptations, most people take the path of least resistance—consuming whatever is easiest. In doing so, they become fools, spiritually bankrupt, shaped by the very environment they refuse to question.
The most powerful antidote is to change that environment. Seek wisdom. Pursue truth. The moment you do, doors open—not because the world changes, but because you finally see through its absurdity.
I used to be completely in sync with the cultural beat, but now, I couldn’t care less. It’s far better to forge your own path than to follow a crowd of useful idiots who become victims of their own oppression.
I agree. I think you must turn your back on it, then find something else to do.
Social media and its equivalents are easy. They require minimal effort. And they pay something back quickly, although only in the junkie sense of quick hits that soon dissipate. Hence them coming back for more and more.
I think only abstinence works. But few can cope with that. So who knows what the solution is.
But for individuals, walking away and finding something else to do is important. Plus, as the article suggests, plenty of us are not lost in the online world. We have rejected it in some sense. Others are still finding their way back but they will make it.
great thoughts--remind me of Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
Absolute classic. He would have had a field day with social media. His views on television were spot on. And here we are, living in a world where 1980s TV would feel like glacial tedium to most Zoomers.
Neil Postman predicted the post literate society, a return to the dark ages, based on the immediate grasp of visual content, unmediated by the brain, which television provided. He wrote eloquently of how television erased the difference in comprehension between children and adults, that no knowledge or experience was needed to approach a tv show unlike a dense textbook or complex novel. His warnings were never heeded, education was eviscerated long ago in an attempt to make it more entertaining and equitable, and the internet has destroyed the attention of millions, locking them in a permanently arrested state.
If his warnings had been taken more seriously we would’ve been better armed for what followed.
I agree. And his work is powerful. It was certainly a strong argument in favour of reading and literacy as cornerstones of a great society.
We can also look at today as a kind of test. Many will fail as they succumb to easy entertainment. But not all.
I suspect the outcome will be the establishment of a slave class. Enslaved to their addictions and thoroughly controlled.
Excellent essay.
'Being uncontactable' and investing less belief in second-hand information is a good start. In order to function 'normally', we need to 'accept as the case' all kinds of things that we never can (or will) verify as 'being the case'. This kind of 'acceptance on faith' eventually erodes one's ability to detect the difference between valuable and worthless, between obviously false and possibly accurate.
The issue each person has to confront with 'second-hand' information is investment. The degree of investment in a particular second-hand version of reality is up to each person. The system rarely enforces investment in their deceits. So it's possible to take the task of 'non-investment' ('uncontactable') as a mental, moral or 'spiritual' discipline.
You have to make as your credo, 'I will invest no significance in any belief I have not confirmed for myself by direct experience.' You can live is though everything that you do no know from direct personal experience is just hearsay that you accept provisionally as potentially having value but you do not invest any significance in until you verify the reality of it for yourself.
Whenever I think about this approach, I think of Carlos Castenada's commentary on 'attention'.
How you use your time and where you direct your attention decide almost everything about the outcomes of your voluntary actions.
'Being uncontactable' means not being available to deception and secondhandedness.
I agree. Attention is THE currency. Where we focus our energies. It matters. Losing an hour to Tik Tok is different to an hour in the gym or cooking a healthy meal.
While I despair of the people I see around me, I do sincerely believe the majority are not lost, or at least not lost completely. I think being intentionally uncontactable is an early step in people waking up.
The nice thing is that it's a 'practicable practice', something you can start in a small, limited way and grow into a firm orientation of the world.
Yes. Leave your phone when out for an hour. See how it feels. Take a book.
So many good things to consider in your post I'd have a hard time naming them all. I'm most pleased that you cautioned against the tendency to believe that the loudest voices, the hyperbole used to inflame and invite clicks, and the side-show type content to which our digital devices blast and blare at those who use them is NOT consumed by everyone.
I consume a great deal of on-line content, but not mindlessly or carelessly. I probably read close to a million words a day (maybe more if I include the long-form content to which I listen) written by the authors I subscribe to on this platform, and pursuing some of the links their articles contain or the commenters post. I watch videos, too, mostly You Tube, but again I've pruned the choices down by deleting the automated algorithm suggestions and keeping only those to which I am willing to devote my time.
I've never had any social media accounts. I'd be susceptible to the time waste because now and then I'll get captured by You Tube shorts and have to force myself to quit scrolling the content. There used to be a platform called Stumble Upon and that's where I got my first taste of how addictive the internet can be.
The internet is a wealth of information. It is up to the individual to choose wisely or foolishly that to which they will expose themselves.
Great comment. I agree. Temptation is always with us, digital or otherwise. We must cultivate the self-discipline to resist if we can.
I do think it is important to remind ourselves the online world is skewed just because not everyone posts or comments or adds content. Most in fact don't. But a further distortion is created by algorithms and artificial promotion by media outlets.
I too read online and watch videos. It is the mindless scrolling and the endless search for dopamine hits that damns many people. The loss of attention is another. I am sure many would find this article too long at 2000 words.
Thanks for reading and commenting.
I love that he’s pictured with a cat. 😻🐈
Definitely a cat guy:
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/c6/ab/60/c6ab609e03781f1731a74eb22ec99044.jpg
Excellent piece. It is just too easy to be overwhelmed by the horrors of modern digital life. Perhaps optimism needs to be taught.
I think optimism needs to be spotted. I think we have to try harder to accept the internet is a distortion. Some voices are very loud, others quiet. But it is not a straight reflection of life.
This is a great piece, and you make many salient points that deserve a wide audience, but this is the most important- that everything that comes to you highlighted through the algorithm is a distortion, itself the product of the least stable brains, the most tireless self-promoters, an AI fever dream, or perhaps the best paying advertiser. None of it has organically floated to the top of your feed based on reality or quality.
Of course. This is true. Lots of artificiality, promoted hard by vested interests.
But the high quality stuff also exists. The great literature, songs, music and art. It may be drowned out but not forever.
George Orwell never had a regular publisher. Other authors were heavily promoted in his day, celebrated with money and knighthoods. And yet it is Orwell we read and not them. Today's unknowns may be in that category too. People crave quality after all.
And thank you for your kind words. Perhaps I will attract a bigger audience eventually.
I am amazed at the quality of writing on substack and the creativity that YouTube brings out. You’re absolutely right about there being no shortage of thought provoking long form essays and in depth interviews.
The dangers of permanently stunted attention spans and parochial shallow opinion masquerading as knowledge can’t be overstated though. I can barely believe that the entire civilized world swallowed an environmental agenda advanced by an ignorant Scandinavian adolescent.
I am never quite convinced those movements are successful. I am not sure people do believe them so much as they don't stop them. Alas some do believe all they are told.
And the phone zombies do worry me. Most worrying of all are the children raised in this environment. The ones who never read a book or have never developed basic attention spans. What hope do they have?
But as the article argued, some of us have avoided this fate. And I suspect there are more of us than we realize.
While what you say is true, the masses that don't engage don't matter. The narrative and subsequent policies from the government are made by those who are crazy enough to engage. Unless the proposition is "well, out of the majority of humans who don't engage, some of them will survive to rebuild after the crazies bring down civilization.
The mass man is nothing more than a vehicle from which greatness can sometimes (rarely) emerge. What they do is as immaterial as their being.
Perhaps. But the idea is the online world would have us believe the brainwashed mass man is all there is. I think he is a minority and he is of course always with us. He has never mattered in the sense you mean it.
Others are escaping, they are waking up. I think they may make a difference.
Hopefully that waking up will help produce greater men out of the mass. The recent graphs showing 18-20 year old men are less Democrat than 60-65 year olds for the first time ever is great.
Indeed. And the growing chasm between young men and young women will be the spark to light the fuse.
Bukowski is the poster-image for "don't do as I do" and "don't do as I say" at the same time. He was one of those writers all the interesting girls of my teenage years read, as a sort-of male counterweight to Karin Boye.
Anyway.
There's a sociological concept inented, if that's the right word, by Emile Durkheim long ago, called anomie (from Old Greek "anomia" = "without laws/lawlessness") that describes what you are writing about here. While Durkheim meant it on the societal makro-level, that industrial urban modern society caused this condition by destroying all old norms (laws) and traditions when the rural working class was forced into urban slums to become robots in the factories, it also works on the mikro-level for the individual: without norms/Nomos (Old Greek for the spirit, or daemon, of law and more importantly order) you aren't a human, not even the human animal, because without the Nomos there's no context to your existence at all.
A feeling bound to inoke and evoke in equal order the state of perpetual fear and distress that something is askew with reality itself, making you quest eternally without for that elusive true meaning that is only found within and by an act of you creating yourself (potentially over and over several times during your life).
This parallels nicely the Abyss spoken of by Nietzsche. As you gaze into yourself, you also gaze into your self. An act more terror-inducing than most anything at all, and something Western intellectuals have shied away from eer since Nietzshe's day.
After all, if the path lies within, and the act is in your own hands (actual and metaphorical/-physical) by your own will - what is there to market as a panacea, as a commodity with which to garner capital form the lost spiritually anemic and alienated slaves of the corporate machine?
The battle is spiritual, and it matters very little if by that you mean a religious faith or just your own spirit - your you-ness if that makes sense in English: whatever act you do, whichever creed you teach by living it, if it's aganst the machine you will be villified by it and its Archons and agents.
And one way of knowing ones worth, is by the strength of one's enemies and the efforts they make to suborn, recruit or destroy you.
A belated thank you, Spaceman Spiff, for introducing me to Bukowski the novelist. (I had heard of him through some internet readings by Snordster, but didn't know about him or his writing past that.)
I found a free on-line copy of Bukowski's semi-autobiographical novel, Ham on Rye, and I'm loving it.
That's great. Hope you enjoy.
Superb! Thanks!
Thank you.
Dear Spaceman Spiff,
Technology has advanced enormously, so I am not sure if some of them are even able to escape anymore... https://dhughes.substack.com/p/lissa-johnson-transhumanism-and-covid
Easy download and sharing here:
https://rainbowcoalition.substack.com/p/i-support-beautiful-lissa-johnson
Sharing your post on notes.
And I wish to encourage you to go EMF-free, and create a broad rainbow coalition in your country, fighting this, with all you've got! Humanity might depend upon it, even life as we know it.