Morlock Elloi on Wed, 12 Dec 2018 20:34:40 +0100 (CET)


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<nettime> cellular


It seems, based on energy invested in passionate discourses in forums by otherwise intelligent people, that there is little understanding of cellularity of machine-mediated communications.

The amount of cross-talk, which is essential for spreading ideas to wider audiences, is near-zero. The perfection with which machines carve out the communication cells has no parallel in the history. One is always talking to known audience in a hermetic echo chamber, a gated community.

Subscribers. Followers. Supporters. Members. Goers. Forums. Invites. First you must identify yourself and join as the set member, then you can 'participate'. All set memberships are known to anyone that cares to find out, neatly recorded, logged and archived. The decision to join is set-based, not idea-based. Even if there was an idea used to market the set, the set is what remains. Such set is a death trap for an idea, which is probably why there is so much investment in enabling sets. Just think of it ... when you are interested in something, first you look for the set to lock yourself in.

Of course, there were groups before, but there was always cross talk. Information traveling through the air (light, sound) is broadcast by nature, not targeted. Ideas permeate environment accidentally or intentionally.

The notion that variety of 'groups' somehow represents choice and improvement is utter bs. There are estimates of over 600 million FB groups, and possibly hundreds thousands of GOOG groups (it's interesting that these numbers are never published. Platforms boast about numbers - users, visits, etc., but they will never reveal number of sets.) It looks much more like a fine-grained Venus flytrap.

Can you even imagine Christianity of Bolsheviks succeeding if they had FB pages?

The war on indiscriminate idea broadcast in the machine mediums began with the demise of web sites. Being DNS-addressable and reachable by everyone, they mimicked the pre-machine communication world. This was effected by suppression of URLs: instead of using the actual name, the hapless user was trained to 'say' what he wants, and then the authority would point to approved places that dealt with the topic. This training was incredibly successful: look around you - how many cretins begin web browsing by typing into GOOG search bar? Even if they know the f*cking URL, they will still type it into GOOG search bar. Some browsers even hide the address field.

The point is that the shit we're in is effected by some rather pedestrian means at the infrastructure level, which then have been made invisible by propaganda, and the way out is not some grand scheme, but rather simple de-programming. Or are we no better than elephants? (see "baby elephant syndrome" ... I wonder what elephants philosophize about in later years to explain their condition?)


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