Three Point project

They say it's a curse to live in interesting times... but I'm all mad and frustrated with the world so... These are fucking interesting years to be alive as a human. 25 years of the internet, and the world has flared with such imagination, contempt and a whole array of things I never imagined could really exist. A little while ago I started writing (and couldn't stop) about how it's changed everything:



Oct 27, 00:41

There's something happening within society; being a hermit I'm probably the last person that should speak on this but I have a perspective, so here it is. I'm not talking about one electoral race, one vote, I'm talking about a motion in the social or group-consciousness..

Kids are smarter. As ever, I may well be wrong, if you reading this have opinions please share them! But kids, they just are, right? We can all agree that children have a higher capacity towards intellect than their adult peers (family, friends etc) this is evolution. They come into a world that partially understands more science than I've ever had a chance to catch up on. My niece and nephew were using computer tablets aged something-like 8 and 5, the 5yr old (is now a pre-teen) and is so fucking smart it scares me how much he understands of my behaviour without ever speaking on it.

I love the internet because it allows me to give a smile to people who I will never meet (which since life is ultimately purposeless, I choose to make genuine smiling my purpose most days). The internet can breed fear and anti-social'ism because you don't really see anyone else online.. even when you see videos of people, it's abstracted; I mean, we all know that celebrities are not their television personalities in real life [Add: it's a natural defence mechanism of the mind] (..when Madonna/Rihanna/whoever/Andrea Corr has to take the oozing bin out because there's no one else around to do it, which you know has happened since they've been famous). Uh, what I'm trying to say is.. there's no call to do the 'right thing' or be good to people online except in conscience and hind/insight for how others will perceive it if witnessed. Which largely is what governs people anyway.. but, uh, there's no physical manifestation of that, necessarily. And therefore, people get away with shit that... maybe even they themselves would never do in person (I know models who've had rape threats, from modelling, seriously, for like magazine modelling). The internet can fool you into feeling alone with your thoughts, without realising that for every little bit of backlash that you don't have to deal with, there are others out there doing it in your stead and five times as hard because the blow often comes blindside to the poor sap at the other end of the witticism).  The internet gives everyone a glimpse into what it is when your empathy decides that it doesn't really give a fuck either (otherwise known as ASPD)....... [[it exercises empathy, or strains it.]]

I honestly think that it's no coincidence that the generations of people raised with easy internet access seem to be having a problem with some of the more .static. aspects of wider society now that they / we^ are old enough to say, "I can pick a limp noodle or a closeted pig-fucker for PM..? Oh, fuck you." [Carefully forgetting that Teresa May exists.. if I ignore it hard enough she'll go away]. Or maybe saying, "So, I can tacitly agree that the DNC's pre-selection was okay, because she's PotUS now.. or vote for Trump and see the world burn...? Oh, fuck you." [Add: this was written before Trump's....... *sigh*] Or maybe something else like that, that I haven't been paying attention to because I'm a hermit. My point is, people notice.

And I think a lot of the problem is that we're being pulled every way at once and (though this has always been the case we used to be able to just turn the fucking wireless off, now the wifi makes my phone dance a jig for a minute upon connection) pretty much the only people trying to lead us are.. doing it for a gain or motive other than... [oh, how do you say...] 'universal betterment'? Now, I think we can all agree that 'the news' is an ever-changing ouroboros. It seems to be that most people I speak to are sick of the emotively suggestive news, as well as the shiny flashy news. People don't want gore and violence or palpitating propogandised 'feel how i say you should' ¬ shit. [Add: Again, written before journalists started having existential crises on-screen].

The news is supposed to watch, display and comment upon all the, uh, nasty people that we haven't been able to deal with yet.. and you know... the natural disasters that need to draw attention, the discussions that need to be had or are being had outside law courts, universities, etc, other places where people frequently use words containing more syllables than I can process before coffee of a morning - basically all of that stuff that most of us are too busy living to want to pay attention to... They're building a new rail system so taxes are going up by 0.003% this month.. I don't want to know that but when the paycheck comes in and I'm saying "..taking how much?!" that little voice in the back of my head says, fixing the trains and that pothole-alley on main street, and my lil nephew's local A&E (because that kid is gonna break a leg falling out of a tree one of these days). That's what the news is for.. us to be lazy to. So that the careful parts of our minds just have the data to hand. [Has anyone not seen Inside Out yet? Watch it!!] [Add: not that one should necessarily be lazy and accept fact without some kind of a checking system, but you know some days you just don't have the energy, it's for those days that I say this.]

And, uh, I mean. People are more likely more afraid of something they've never experienced - I've never been mugged but sometimes terrifiedly imagine knife-wielding monsters in the bushes; my sister's been mugged twice, first time the guy did have a knife and took her cash and phone, the second time she laughed at the tweens and they reportedly looked very embarrassed before sliding away). The internet provides a level playing field for everyone hooked in. Data. Data. All you can eat buffet of data. Now in the UK I've noticed that there's been a hard but short (8yrs or so) uptick in the number of politicians, among others, wishing that some of that data could be removed. [NB: I can understand governments wanting some data (related to security etc) to remain secure, I'm not questioning the need for that, I'm talking flip-flops, prejudice and pompous nonsense]. It strikes me that half of 'the west' is trying to legalise weed and chanting Happiness for Everyone and the other half is saying "hey look at those guys with their weed over there, isn't the world a better place now lets grab their houses while they're high."

And the kids understand that.. because they're smarter than us adults in this amazing mutating evolutionary way, they're what we wish we could be, or need to be.

People I know to be insightful, in moments of awareness and vulnerable openness have been saying "something's coming, something's changing." Maybe this is the same thing as 'youth has no respect for its elders' which was reportedly said in Aristotle's time. And then again, group-psychology is still psychology and in that there are often cresting rises; things happen in waves. Maybe we are coming towards a time of renewed-enlightenment or chaos.

[My opinion of religion: if it's giving you hope rather than constraining you, go with faith and do good in the world. If it's constraining you, don't give it the head-space.] I think for a very long time people were largely [seemingly] religious, and held to a set of morals. And if you don't conform to those you are amoral. Thanks to this history we live by a standard of good and evil that is not applicable in reality. Because reality is more complicated than that. Things can be evil and can be good, but that doesn't actually affect or effect the things themselves unless they have emotion. Hence, everyone will agree that taking life is evil, but probably not bat an eyelid at killing a wasp for its presence. (My fascination of bugs and the Mirror Test aside), We as society don't abhor something without near unanimous consent, and even then with a 'tradition' it takes weight to change. It has been historically very hard to tell what people believe, the internet changed that. (I am firmly of the opinion that pollsters forget that actually everyone hates taking surveys and with the amount going around in and election marathon...yikes). Yet we allow causal cruelty? Society is changing because the weight of awareness shifts over time. People are more open now than they were even four years ago (look back at John Stewart's rants about homophobia in 2012). And as such there are some (people who 'walk in the shadow of love') who will take advantage of that, often because they have a need that's otherwise not being fulfilled, sometimes because.. well.. that abyss is pretty. And the fucking kids understand that, on a fundamental level better than you and I do. They haven't experienced the things necessarily that will take them to the abyss yet, but they'll handle it better because they're better equipped.

In all honesty: I've been writing this beast of a blog for two weeks or more now.. and I don't really know what I'm trying to say here. Maybe its simple and we as a society need to wake the fuck up and start working together rather than trying to eat each other. Maybe I can help that by getting off my hermitised ass and talking to people more. Maybe what I'm trying to say is we're all fucking mad (life sends us it, in little packets of experience) and does that matter if we're mostly getting on and not trying to kill each other? Maybe I'll wake one day to find the abyss is prettier from the inside than looking across that shiny surface, or maybe that button will never be pushed. We make the mother fucking world around us. I'm a bit sick of being told that's not true when it literally is true... look at me typing here and you reading it there by moving the mouse (or whatever your preference of motion).

If Fact A + Fact B gives you an 'ephemeral concept' or an arbitrary-seeming Fact D then you've probably just missed C's influence on A or B thus changing the expected result into something that doesn't make sense.

I guess I'm saying... as a person be aware.





^Weirdly (for me), I straddle this border. Remember fondly the world without and would see blood cover the walls to protect my internet now(!!)

¬You know what fuck Chris Crispy.. the guy's a sick fuck, I have no idea how he gets to say some of the shit that he says (not to mention what he's done) and not get fucking sacked.. but oh, Chris Crispy, you [gah! there's no word for.. Latin: camur] motherfucker.. Only an asshole resorts to fucking with people like this.