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ephemera  3yr ago (ryandv.substack.com)   Edited 1mo ago   3379 thread views

NEVER, YOU DUMB FUCKING ARAB.

ryandv.substack.com

Palestine is a fucking inbred terrorist state. I hope the Gaza strip gets fucking glassed. Palestinians are worthless room temperature IQ terrorists. Palestine is a shithole and a failed state.

Islam is a fucking terrorist religion and Muhammad was a fucking pedophile.

Todd is a fucking white nigger. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47231544

In traditional Syria–Palestina, if a girl had no paternal male cousin (father's brother's son) or he renounced his right to her, the next in line was traditionally the maternal male cousin (mother's brother's son) and then other relatives.

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Most of his references are to landmark philosophers on media, i.e. Baudrillard and MacLuhan (they were both way ahead of their time, they lived in the era of TV but saw trends that would persist into the age of the net), which he does explicitly call out. Also, the title is a reference to one of Baudrillard's keystone works.

I will note aside that Simulacra and Simulation, of Matrix fame, is an absolute must-read if you're interested in social media/advertising/market of "signs".

The fourth stage is pure simulacrum, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims. This is a regime of total equivalency, where cultural products need no longer even pretend to be real in a naïve sense, because the experiences of consumers' lives are so predominantly artificial that even claims to reality are expected to be phrased in artificial, "hyperreal" terms. Any naïve pretension to reality as such is perceived as bereft of critical self-awareness, and thus as oversentimental.

Sound familiar?

What is the black mirror?

Your cell-phone, the name being coined by the TV/streaming series of the same name. Modern phones are literally black mirrors, which makes the metaphor all the more piquant.

What do you mean by digital vampires?

My interpretation: vampires avoid mirrors; people who avoid the black mirror, who don't participate in phone culture, might be argued to be less real than those subsumed by it, given how central phone culture and the net generally are to current existence. Think of the Amish. Are they "real"? Are they significant, do their concerns matter? Do you care about them at all? Do they have even the slightest impact on your life?

I think the implication in this entire post is, essentially, "social media has given us the Observer's Paradox From Hell: people practically self-modify themselves in response to the pressures of social media, becoming the mask to a frightening degree." No one can authentically present themselves; in fact, the authentic "self" may actually be suppressed in favor of the public persona. We can never approach the truth of things, especially of people, because everyone's eyes are on everyone else.

This all probably makes more sense if you're a fan of modern-day content creators (YouTube video makers, Twitch livestreamers, and VTubers especially). But all that being said, this is not a new problem at all and social media has simply upped the scale of this issue by one or two orders of magnitude.

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