the thought orphanage

i have a lot of scattered, orphaned little thoughts that i write down in my notebook or on my phone. they have a tendency to end up languishing in those places, so i've decided to gather them all up in this orphanage here for easy adoption, should one of them happen to catch my eye or maybe yours some day.

can't decide?

buzzword bonanza


metamemetics

nontent

neo-kulak

iatrogenesis

reality-addicts

credentialism

safetyism

antifragility

idiotism

legibility

hyperstition

scientism

involution

science


the science bureaucracy - too rigid, legible, manageable to be open to serendipity

science aesthetics - borrowing the credibility of science by using its aesthetic language - not just limited to visuals, writing style as well, citations, etc.

pop science as folk religion

a doppelgänger that looks good in all metrics but doesn't actually produce anything useful

the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics

"data poisoning"

autistic literalism

"reality"-worship

data is created not measured. there is no such thing as "measurement".

the map is not the territory

experts: "experts should be in charge and you should give them a lot of money"

this vs. that


obscurantism vs. being tongue-tied

the autist-schizo dichotomy

the is/ought distinction

illustration vs. graphic design

hygiene (sterile, legible, etc.) vs. cleanliness (next to godliness)

being into (positive) vs. being out of (negative)

pro and anti vs. in and out

“entertainment” vs. art

sexual reproduction vs. memetic reproduction

literature & lesser arts


literature must once again assimilate popular, profane forms. skip the rotting middle of book club bait bullshit "literary genre fiction", fuse the low and the high, a la pynchon. the public was scandalized when "tristram shandy" came out but now it's "literature". the next great literary work may be a light novel.

lit crit of the internet

people might just be skimming books instead of actually reading them...

jokes and satire seem to be getting very stale lately, we may need to go out one layer and make jokes about jokes or a satire satire or a parody parody to get things back on track

i do not trust writers who write very short paragraphs

marketing & the other dark arts


people generally think they understand marketing - but that's what the marketers want you to think

don't forget that photographers are liars: playing with light and angles, removing context, etc. usually this is to make places look better than they are, although there are some places nearly impossible to faithfully depict in a photograph

marketing is magic - illusion, trickery, misdirection, manipulation

political brands

consumption brigades

"if you're seeing it, it's for you"

ads for ad blockers

disinformation, misinformation, deinformation, uninformation, antinformation, counterinformation, reinformation


trivia = information pollution

pre-chewed information

wikipedia editors basically control reality, more so than journalists

anybody can make shit up but if you're a journalist you can make shit up, publish an article, and then it's a Fact and people can "cite" the article to "prove" it is true

influences of literary register upon presentation of information

illegibility as armor

stochastic terrorism

“You cannot sell news today without a point of view.”

social media & tech


they want you to think ai is going to be used for self driving and stuff but it will actually be used for online "chat control"

internet privacy stuff is too time-consuming/annoying to be worth the effort. the efficacy is nearly impossible to evaluate and there are rarely visible results. simply another autistic niche tech-related fandom.

easy to forget comments, tweets, 4chan posts, discord messages are all short form content as well - connected to collapse of attention span?

definitely feels like it has gotten harder to find useful stuff online

"you are/become what you eat" applied to (social) media consumption

phones - black mirror is a black hole - the size disguises the depth of the abyss

reject machinic thought

background noise

distancing oneself from the world - phones, computers, earbuds always in

the universal accesibility implications of the touch screen

the new techno-victorian age

"the internet of bodies

digital fiefdoms, data-producing serfs

World of Code, God the Supreme Programmer, scientists the decompilers - the deceit of crypto goons and Code as Law

all the recent crypto hacks are basically a real life version of people finding video game exploits or ways to abuse mechanics to get loads of in-game cash

productivity porn

fandom reification

"Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People"

the internet is made of demons

the informational asymmetry of parasocial relationships

politics & conspiracies


global lukewarming

deschooling society

the World Zoo

mental immune system - axioms and weighted terms

"world of cops"

are power and virtue truly incompatible?

rhetorical hyperinflation

disaster porn

synoptic media, information, institutions

regulatory capture

the modern Table of Ranks

the Autistic Society

"everything is a social construct" is parotted a lot however the implications are rarely considered

"the sanitized man"

shifting baseline syndrome

culture war stuff is basically politics junk food. not that nutritional (informative/important) but manufactured to be extremely addictive, to the point where it is all some consume.

from "question everything" to "in this house we believe"

legal wizardry

self-perpetuating prestige of institutions

fake diversity replacing real diversity

mental illness


the very idea of mental illness could easily be causing it, maybe we should be spreading unawareness of mental illness

it is nearly impossible to distinguish mild mental illness/paranoia from someone very committed to an act as a form of ironic joke - is this irony poisoning? "you are who you pretend to be, so be careful who you pretend to be"

dissociation = the physical manifestation of ironic distance?

the pathological society

to "have" a condition -> excess POSITIVE

the DSM used as a personality quiz

toxic positivity

they've gotten very zealous about putting up allergen warnings on everything, never thinking about what effects that may have on us hypochondriacs

consent anxiety

the climate cult

genuine schizos reposting ironic schizo memes

hyperpatholigization

psychosomatic conditions are postmodern (hyperreal) diseases

psychiatric demonology

"it takes a village to build a mind"

deep memetics


i wish all the shootings would stop, not because of saving lives or whatever but because i'm sick of the torrent of insufferable memes that follows each one

memes are not harmless, their strength lies in the fact that most underestimate their power

"the memedium is the message"

rage clicking is still clicking, the outrage is the point, rage-sharers are complicit.

the virtue of silence

notable quotable


"all that is solid melts into air"

"yes, i've never thought of it that way, but that's exactly how it is"

"All worthy things were built in Hell.”

"we're saving money, but at what cost?"

"Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the end, it can be calculated in advance and is incorporated into the ritual."

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”

unsorted


gochiusa urbanism

the power of contradiction

no such thing as pavlov's cat

complexity inflation

naming the demon

the authentic fake

some outliers are very easy to find

the optimal amount of failure is not zero

the loss of comfiness