one thing that's been very helpful for me in grasping how the internet works at scale is recognizing that there's so many people on here who just want Attention and they have no real preference for the form it takes. i don't mean they want fame or influence, though they might, but more fundamentally people want the sense of having pushed upon a structure or a discourse and then seeing that structure or discourse at least seem to respond in a way that authenticates the initial push, that makes it all feel real, and which suggests the individual who did it is Solid and Exists. this whole ecosystem is a vast machine for making you feel like, by writing your thoughts down in a place others might read them, you have "done something" and any response you get, positive or negative, feels like proof that it's working: I am here, I exist, the world has no choice but to recognize me
- she/they
- theonly.ciswoman.online/
you’re here, and i’m here too
in reply to @lutz's post:
"I post, therefore I am."
I do think there's something of genuine philosophical interest in what you've observed here, though. Like the Internet is a one giant exercise in transforming the self from the Cartesian conception of the most irreducible unit of a world/worldview to something contingent upon an external community. (This latter conception of selfhood may have always been the case, but it still feels rather seismic to see its implicit acceptance on such a massive scale.)
I think this is the same impulse that leads people to graffiti a toilet stall (or a well in Rome) or carve something on a tree. If you want to inhabit this space, it's going to be with my tangible memory present as well.
(or a well in Rome)
If Pompeii's Graffiti is anything to go by, this might just be a regular impulse of humanity regardless of technology.
The thing that really strikes me about this system is how close it is to what E M Forster imagined 115 years ago in The Machine Stops.