the more meta you go, the less emotional weight your knowledge carries. this has led to both miraculous success and extreme tragedy.
Conversation
because it lacks emotional weight, "going meta" can be a psychological defense mechanism. you can ignore a depressing experience by justifying it through a conceptual framework.
1
20
thanks to mass media, we witness more suffering than ever. as a result, ideologies have become more abstract and more totalizing. they perform for us more emotional labor.
Quote Tweet
If winners under capitalism are random, then they are not easily culpable as scapegoats (even rationalizations must be rational to a degree). The result is losers scapegoat the system itself.
And capitalism-the-system does not care whether you hate it.
Show this thread
2
4
although meta-knowledge dulls out emotional responses, no ideology can absorb them. our collective witness of suffering manifests as pervasive low-grade anxiety and depression.
1
1
7
many have an expectation that a scapegoat will work, that we can absolve our emotions by hurting the target.
but the scapegoat will not work unless blood is spilled. and online, suffering has no witness (except performatively, which doesn't count).
1
6
it is commonly recognized that those who shout the loudest online are also the most unwell. why do they? because they have the strongest desire for absolution.
1
8
Religious practice is informed by scapegoats. Their power lingers: fast on Yom Kippur, feel yourself become renewed.
But real suffering (such as through collective fasting) must be experienced for these rituals to work. A call for suffering is not enough.
1
5
The emotional tenor of websites is determined by their interfaces, e.g. Facebook limiting "react" emojis to limit expressive range.
1
9
Most websites implicitly "ban" suffering. What would a website that allows it look like?
4
1
14
4chan and the smaller chans are some of the few places where you can be completely honest about your suffering, without repercussions for status (because there largely is none)