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An Ode To The Opinionated Committee Of Miserable Scolds And Ankle-Biters
A short treatise on individual vs. communal activities
Another year has passed, and I guess I'm getting all reflective. This doesn't happen so often anymore, but over the years we spent some time debating "old-Internet vs current-year-Internet". Typically when people talk about it, they bring up how "wild west" it used to be, free from shadowbanning, algorithmic manipulation, and cancel culture, and while it sure would be nice to again be free from Big-Tech shenanigans, recently I started feeling like that analysis is missing a piece. New- vs Old-Internet isn't just about deplatforming and smartphone-driven Eternal September, the advent of social media was a revolutionary change to the structure of the Internet itself. All of a sudden you, yes you, had some chance of becoming an Influencer, possessing the adoration of thousands, and would no longer be just another dude, forced to mingle with the plebeians on some shitty phpBB forum.
As an example of the shift, after the advent of social media, but before The Awokening was in full swing, it seemed like everbody and their dog had to have an "animated avatar ranting about feminism" Youtube channel, and later when they implemented livestreams and superchats, you could see everybody move to unstructured 4-hour streams. I suppose chasing trends is only natural, but at some point things started getting weird... or rather, depressingly ordinary. Suddenly content creators started talking about "branding", A/B testing their thumbnails, and probably deploying scores of other marketing tricks that I'm not even aware of. They have to churn out content at a regular and constant pace, because if you don't. you fall off and people will forget you exist. All the cool kids have spreadsheets now, it's probably less surprising that Kulak, in his quest to be a full-time writer is making extensive use of them, but apparently you can't even do prostitution without them these days.
A while back @DaseindustriesLtd asked if this place feels like home to others, my answer was horribly trite in retrospect, but it tried to get at the ability to speak my mind here, and the desolation of once dynamic and generative communities brought by the semi-recent cultural changes. But the more I think about it, the more it seems like there's something deeper about why this place feels more like "home". A long time ago, back when the crash of 2008 was still fresh in people's minds, I read Modern Political Economics by Yannis Varoufakis, the ex- finance minister of Greece. The final chapter, devoted to solutions to the crisis, had this little paragraph which, for some reason or another, has engraved itself in my brain:
Since this is a post-crash book, Varoufakis was trying to put forward some synthesis of all the economic memes floating around, from libertarianism to communism, trying to balance out planning vs. spontaneity, and individual freedom vs. collective interests. Setting the economics aside, there's something about this metaphor that I find quite fitting here. Ironically it was Dase himself who called us an "opinionated committee" that he doesn't want to justify his writing to, and prefers to write about important issues directly - a clear turn towards becoming a composer free to write whatever music he likes, and sink or swim on his own merit. While there's something to be said about not being so opinionated and set in our way, I'm more and more appreciative of being a part of an amorphous committee blob. I really enjoy that no one has any money to make, clout to chase, or anything to prove here, at least beyond the standard internet forum dick-waving. What's more the problem with the composer route is that you have to compose, compose, compose! As I mentioned above, in the world of Substack, Twitter or Youtube, it's churn or die. Meanwhile, back "home", I can pick up my instrument and join in when I have time and when the fancy strikes me, and when I get tired I can put it back down, confident that the music will still be there when I come back. My old libertarian self would probably spit on me, but there's something to be said about these sort of communal activities, where one does not have to fret about their relative status, or line going up.
I suppose all this is a long-winded and disjointed way to thank you all for keeping the lights on, and the music playing. For all the discontents dissing us, I think this is one of the very few places where the Dead Internet Theory, in it's AI or Human-NPC form, does not hold. Happy New Year to y'all!
Man, imagine if more aspects of life worked this way. Maybe that's just me talking, though.
I sympathize with the sentiment, but it seems hard to achieve. Consider that the quoted paragraph comes from a book that argues for what you want quite explicitly, the problem is that the chapter that promises to deliver solutions and outline a vision for the future is by far the shortest and the most vague. Most people who want this don't seem to know how.
The Amish are one of the few groups that seems to achieve some version of this in a sustainable manner, but most people looking for alternative economic arrangements don't seem to like them very much.
The Amish? They seem to me to be a pretty good example of what he said this vision is not: "Its members do not mechanically play from some given score, written by a despotic musical mind". Amish life seems pretty strict, bounded on one side by the reality of being a roughly 19th century farmer and on another by the various Ordnungs, which by the time you are considered worth having a serious say in them, you've lived under them long enough to internalize them.
Given how much I romanticize them, I probably should grit my teeth and actually learn how the Amish do things, but my understanding is that they do neither central economic planning nor rely solely on collective property, however they do a lot of economic projects, like building a barn for a neighbor, as a community. This may very well involve some authoritarian measures regarding their lifestyle, which means it's not exactly an improv music troupe, but my point is this is the closest you'll get to it in a sustainable way. If you don't like the hyper-individualism of liberal capitalism, you'll need something that inculcates a sense of duty towards the community in the average person, not rather than hoping you can free-ride on "
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