We've Lost the Plot

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I&#x27;ve been feeling this for a while. There&#x27;s a performative sort of aspect to people&#x27;s personalities now as though they are mimicking a character playing out scenes. There&#x27;s always been jokers or people who quote lines from movies but what I&#x27;m seeing is way more pathological than that. I don&#x27;t know if they are doing it on purpose or oblivious to it. If it were children doing this I wouldn&#x27;t be too concerned but it&#x27;s 30 year adults mimicking stuff like anime &#x2F; video game style expressions and movements. I worry that something has gone collectively very wrong in all of our brains from over stimulation.

There&#x27;s a lot of cool scifi mentioned at the start of this but it&#x27;s missing Karl Schroeder&#x27;s &quot;Lady of Mazes&quot; (2005) which takes on this concept directly. In it the perceptual layers people computationally put in front of their senses have lead to complete severing of filter bubbles from each other into discrete political entities that perceive and live in entirely different &quot;worlds&quot;. I don&#x27;t want to spoil it with more since it&#x27;s well worth a read.

Increasingly we&#x27;ve seen that technology controls and uses us, not the way we imagined it would go, and that especially the ad&#x2F;media industries have grown <i>way</i> beyond what can be considered healthy.<p>It is <i>infinitely grating</i> to be forced to stand at the side lines and watch all of this happen. After a ~decade of getting angry or desparate I have nothing left but apathy for this shit show.

Reminds me of Debord’s idea of the spectacle and Baudrillard’s simulation. The vicious cycle of art imitating life and life imitating art is ever accelerating with technology that gets better at beaming content into our brains to the point that we might not even have meaningful content with reality behind mass media.

<i>Our constant need for entertainment has blurred the line between fiction and reality—on television, in American politics, and in our everyday lives.</i>

I’d recommend skipping the read. A woman describing her tv habits and making non-sequitur Trump digs isn’t interesting writing in 2023, I don’t think there’s much of value being said here and I’m surprised the OP felt it was worth submitting.<p>&gt; here my tv-loving self interrupts, indignantly and a little defensively: It’s just TV. It’s all in good fun. And that’s true. I enjoyed Gaslit.<p>This is how I remember my older sister writing when we were in high school. Maybe I’m getting old, I just find the tone so infantilizing and tacky.

The tech industry hasn&#x27;t produced one net positive benefit for humanity in the past 20 years.

Wasted minutes reading this shit. tldr; an addicts trip report.