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i hate this new world
there are all sorts of things that can terrify you about genz/gen-alpha but one that bothers me is people growing up in a world where one is accustomed to not owning things, does not know what owning things means, where having the agency to do both good and evil is a radical idea
and i must sound so boomer about all this but really it all came down to something as simple as them taking away my goddamn super monkey ball game. surely even the most cloudpilled digital native can understand why losing access to childhood media is inherently upsetting
i feel like i start to understand why the framers of the us constitution put the first and second amendments in there. as a european i will probably never be fully comfortable with the second one and it has had obvious bad outcomes. but they still had a fucking point, you know
in other words, adam and eve eating the forbidden fruit was the correct choice
if someone wants to download fucking vorophilia pornography games onto their device that should be their god-given right as a human being, if you ask me, whatever i may think of such software. there's this deep technopuritanism of our times that makes me want to stab things
i fucking hate the Christian God with every fibre of our being but He is a more merciful master than fucking Steve Jobs! i can at least be a fucking [series of exotic slurs] in this lifetime, i can do Evil, i have the right to do what i want before my supposed eternal damnation
apple's pretensions of being invested in creatives ring so fundamentally fucking hollow and cynical when they do not think software is deserving of creative dignity
a higher angel appears before god to present a new creation: a human being. an incredibly powerful thing, with its own inner world
god is about to congratulate the angel on this, but is interrupted
“look, i've lobotomised him! he can only do good!”
this is about the ipad pro
and that might seem like a strained metaphor, but fundamentally a “computer” or a “smartphone” or a “musical instrument” or a “camera” or what have you becomes an extension of the human body, and so the long arm of the corporate overlord or the state reaching in is… violating
@hikari no this is literally true on a neurological level. there was a paper doing rounds about it recently
I do kind of wonder about that set of tablets that got smashed by Noah when enraged about the golden calf? If I had to hazard a guess, they had more than 10 Commandments scrawled onto them.
(more from a histrionics perspective that is. I think it was KRS-One who mentioned something about Egyptians having something similar to 42 Commandments? IMHO, God or whatever was trying desperately to "dumb it down" for folks who were clearly too stupid to follow that many rules. Alas, human still can't even seem to follow 10. How many murders are committed still?)
@teajaygrey i'm…not sure you understood my point
What do you do about it now that you have been ejected from the Garden of Eden?
Science indicates that factory farming is one of the worst producers of greenhouse gases, on a planet that, not coincidentally, is also corroborated by almost all scientific studies to be undergoing global climate change due to human actions.
The lesson from that, should be: we should probably stop murdering for food, and go back to being frugivores, which is what humans were (again, from what most science seems to indicate as far as I am aware) predominantly frugivores evolutionary speaking in a historic sense.
Similarly, the 10 Commandments, are more in the realms of actions which if you do, you're going to have a bad time generally speaking.
Murder someone? Well, vengeance is awfully common as a response.
Adultery? That rarely works out well for families.
etc.
Those lessons were learned, the hard way, over the ages no doubt, long before they were ever codified into written language.
The temptations to repeat the mistakes of our ancestors are apparently strong enough that many people will keep repeating them.
But if we are truly to evolve spiritually? I think there are lot more lessons, and occasional spiritual teachings, which indicate things well beyond human existence.
As an undergraduate, I had to read the Japanese short story of 蜘蛛の糸「kumo no ito」aka "The Spider's Thread" The Wikipedia page on it summarizes the plot pretty accurately: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spider's_Thread
Essentially, there's a dude in hell (Kandata), but Shakyamuni takes pity upon him and extends down a single spider's thread from the heavenly realms of paradise, because once in his life Kandata had spared the life of a spider. It all goes sideways still, but the idea that y'know, humans co-exist on Earth with many other forms of life and that humans should learn to be kind to them and not be self centered, is sort of a core tenant of that short story. Spiders, last I checked, have been on Earth hundreds of millions of years longer than humans. Yet how common is it for a human, to squash a spider, or other insect? That's still murder. Though no human court will try it as such. If humans are ever to truly evolve, they need to cultivate a lot more empathy and compassion for all living things around them on this planet.
Sending missions to Mars, or even the Moon, is not evolving the human species. It's a waste of human resources that could be better spent solving human problems (also see, Gil Scott-Heron's "Whitey on the Moon").
@hikari weren't the boomers those who have taken it away in first place
tim cook is 64
edit: oh. oh no
@whitequark what have you realised?
@hikari ... that i can't count
nevermind he is a boomer
@hikari the uninvention of the computer upsets me so immensely
because not only are we living in a world designed around people not having a computer, we even live in a world where the computer computer user has their agency removed and gets forced to own a smartphone.
My bank does not offer authentication methods that work without an app anymore, forcing you to have at least one device with an arbitrarily "new" enough Android or iOS version to warrant having their authenticator app working
@KurisuVanEdge @hikari It doesn't even make sense. I am immensely more likely to have my phone stolen than to have my computer stolen, if 'security' were the point of it.
Subsequently, too many users, never actually valued the personal aspect of computing and have been more than happy to let their consumer priced devices do whatever even if the implementation details increasingly have been driven by tying users to more and more subscription, "cloud" time-sharing back end services.
Phreaking, used to be not terribly uncommon among the tech sorts in the realms of personal computing and it is certainly entirely possible to spend a lot of time online in the 21st century without paying a subscription to an ISP; but lamentably too many settle for convenience. So instead of evolving personal community driven mesh routed networks, which would facilitate more resilience and locality, most have been all too happy to keep paying the entrenched hegemonic vested network providers and "Oh, my T-Mobile subscription is bundled with Netflix [which is backed by AWS], etc."
I remember that when I graduated University and ended up working as a Network Technician at an SS7 telemetry provider, a part of my spirit felt crushed when I realized that senior network telco engineers, were probably the biggest paying customers of the entrenched vestiges of a convicted monopoly. I had imagined more people would have leveled up beyond phreaking? Nope. They were never phreaks. They also never really demonstrated a high technical aptitude. More that they would go get their trainings and certifications and keep the paychecks flowing.
Something is very, deeply, intrinsically wrong with capitalism.
There are alternatives.
They could be the norm. The promise of personal computing was again, from my vantage (and even Apple's 1984 Macintosh advertisement framing) potentially much more revolutionary. Instead, in reality the revolutionary aspects have been and still are fringe. ;(
The needle doesn't seem to be moving forward and it's not even skratchin deejayin backwards particularly well either.
@hikari Very fine balance between a hearty "f*** Apple" and "I don't want to screw over ppl who are used to that workflow".
God knows I've bitched enough about software that assumes the world is Unix-shaped.