#Nerdrage: Conformity 2.0 rant
#Talknerdytomelover's @MikeDelic
i consider myself a huge fan and perhaps an addict of web 2.0 / social networking in general. most of the closest friends i have made in the past few years have been e friends. i met my last long term girlfriend on youtube and even though we are no longer together i am thankful for the relationship that we did have and i got a lot out of it. as recently as last month i met e friends for the first time, crashed at their places, broke bread and had marathon conversations with them. i love crossing over from the internet into 3d there is something very thrilling and magical about it for me. in some way it fulfills my old childhood fantasies about being able to climb into the television and play with the characters from my favorite shows. and the connections with artists and freaks i have made on the internet have led me to believe that there are groups that i can actually be glad to be a part of in ways that i did not think were possible ten years ago. in fact i would go so far as to say that without the internet i may have, by this time in my life, become the next unabomber, given my propensities for reclusiveness and feelings of alienation. tho who knows maybe i would've been more like st. anthony. either way i prefer the reality of my current life to those possibilities. thanks to the internet i can be a recluse a lot of the time and still socialize and share my creativity with a lot of people and i am very thankful for that.
that's not really the point i want to make though. though i have had great personal experiences with the internet and social networking and it's possibilities, i am not at all inclined to generalize this to the point of utopianism, as some of my nerdy friends do, because there are other things going on on the internet, specifically on sites like youtube, facebook and twitter, among others, that are exactly the kind of thing that made me wary of american society and culture before i ever got into the internet.
for instance, the term "just be yourself" was a trending topic on twitter recently. now, this is a phrase that has been around for a while. i remember it from the 80's when in sitcoms like the brady bunch or diff'rent strokes a character would try really hard to impress a girl or some crap like that and fail and then be told to "just be yourself." then get the girl anyway. lol. early on i knew that this was bullshit. i think i was like 10 when i realized that many people should not "just be themselves." it's an empty phrase anyway. i mean i know what it's supposed to mean but in a lot of ways it is essentially meaningless. and besides, sometimes you can achieve more satisfaction and be a better person in life by becoming that which you are not, and sometimes the best way to do this is to wade into unfamiliar personal waters. trust me, if you are lame and you want people you are romantically interested in to be attracted to you, you might have to learn to be more attractive. (full disclosure: i have not personally done this but have seen other people do it, though there is the risk of becoming phony, which i did see happen with one of my friends, and it was a drastic change, so i told him "dude you are a dick now i dont like you," and to be honest to this day i am glad i said that instead of "just be yourself" even if he still talks shit about me on facebook @ the pages of mutual friends like ten years later, which is annoying. but anyway.)
some people who should not "just be themselves."
1. child molesters
2. politicians
3. hollywood executives
4. tom cruise
5. me
now of course i am not saying that people should be phony but that they should be trying to change for the better. for a good deal of people on the planet this is, alas, unfortunately true. sometimes it is important to try and be what you are not as a means to personal growth and change and tho certain things may at first seem phony when you do them, if you do them for long enough you will become someone else. for instance, the first time you sing you might not be a singer and you would be right to feel that way, because it's true, but that in no way means that you should not continue to sing if you seek to become a singer. many of the things we do in life are acts of becoming. of course becoming is no more positive per se than simply being.
some things that i would recommend you not become:
1. child molesters
2. politicians
3. hollywood executives
4. tom cruise
5. me
the point i'm really trying to make is that in an era where it is important to learn how to use free speech lest you lose it, the mindless repetition of essentially banal platitudes is something to be avoided. the message is already trite if not totally empty, and to keep saying it over and over again as people were saying on twitter will completely drain it of meaning what least modicum of meaning it still contains. a lot of the accompanying content in people's tweets involved telling people not to care what other people think of them. while i have actually said this occasionally, especially to friends whom i considered hypersensitive neurotics, i think it is often a bad idea. some people really should care about what people say about them and be more open to criticism. child molesters, for instance, or tom cruise, or myself. there is what i consider a nefarious subtext just under the surface of such ostensibly positive talk. it encourages people to be immature in a way that i dont like. certain types of immaturity i like and think are unfairly criticized. a properly timed fart, for instance, is something i genuinely enjoy and often derive a great amount of joy from. and yet you will sometimes find more public outcry in the name of maturity needlessly vilifying the art of the fart in our culture than you will criticisms of the truly negative types of childishness that appear to be rampant, including a lot of people's inability to accrue any real awareness of what it means to be a flawed and beautiful human living amongst other essentially flawed and beautiful humans. i mean i have friends who are turning into reality show contestants psychologically because they cant learn how to deal with complex interpersonal situations. who will start out saying, yeah i'm involved in such and such, but i'm not here to make friends (a very common saying on reality shows, which are chocked to the brim with peoples who should neither be themselves nor be phony -- nor on t.v. for that matter it is the worst possible thing they could do for themselves and the culture in general, but i digress -- as their selves are essentially phony, which infuriates my inner holden caulfield) but then get hurt when someone else takes essentially the same attitude with them, only to realize that despite all claims of not seeking meaningful relationships with the people they try not to care about, they actually have been doing just that only to feel betrayed later by someone acting in the very manner which they'd earlier declared would be their own situational ethic. or rather they dont realize it, the learn nothing, they just go wtf i have been betrayed, not bothering to see the larger perspective or essential irony of the situation or cultivate any real knowledge of their self and/or others from it.
pardon my ranty tangent. my stupid friends are not the point here, really, except insofar as i consider every isolable thing in the universe one of my stupid friends, but that's not where i'm trying to go with this. the worst thing about all this in my opinion is not that which infuriates my inner holden caulfield as that which offends my inner wittgenstein, which is the obvious paradox and affront to fundamental logic involved in mindlessly repeating what is meant to be a slogan of individualism!! it's like steve martin's nonconformists' oath only it's not funny! you should see me right now there is fucking steam shooting out of my ears!! i am looking around for reality to punch it in the nuts but nothing even seems real enough to me anymore, there is some kind of parody of reality in clownpaint where reality seemed to be!! fuck you clownpaint!! and the implications of this stuff as i see them in my apocalyptic imagination give me little hope for a good segment of our youth as they are going to grow up in a world that is ever more connected with people engaging in ever more mindlessness. a certain portion of the population will seek only to mindlessly follow and repeat stuff. this has happened before and is in someway related to the great atrocities of the twentieth century vis a vis the banality of evil and crap like that, but what i am more concerned with here is not the banality of evil but the evil of banality. because of the media we have now and will be developing the there is a terrifying potential for this kind of mindlessness spreading across huge amounts of space in tiny amounts of time. fucking dirty words and well timed farts will continue to be considered obscene while mindlessness, mediocrity and fads that should be considered culturally shameful now will seem like nothing in twenty years. forget justin bieber, in twenty years their will be an uber bieber, and half the world will follow blindly his every move while the other half will pray for his violent death. this may perhaps cause the next world war. uber bieber is a threat to us all. and while half the world will rightly revile his existence and wish him death everyday in all caps all over the internet the other half will keep telling him: "dont listen to critics. JUST BE YOURSELF."
alright i'm done.
mb