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I've noticed an increasing amount of chatter from both sides about dropping out of society -- to build a homestead, or to buy a house in some foreign, isolated part of the planet. Of course, "I want to live rural!" guys have been around for years, and actually living rural in 2024 is a pretty raw deal for most. But it's telling so many have made the leap from, "I want to live small", to "I want to live completely alone (with spouse/kid/dog)". I'm sure much of this springs from a genuine love for sustainable living, the quiet life, the country and all of its joys. But the vibe I get is a subtle rising tide of misanthropy, of decreasing faith in the common man possibly regardless of one's leaning. As someone else put it,
My question is: Have you noticed this too? Maybe my circle's blowing this out of proportion, but maybe not.
If so, what's going on here?
I've got a personal theory for what's happening. See, I'm not much of a gamer, but I play two games regularly: Fortnite and PUBG. Really they're just for stimulation while I chill out and listen to music/podcasts, but something pretty damn annoying happens almost every time. I'll be relaxing in-game, looking for loot at a calm pace, when some absolute beast of a player flies in out of nowhere and shreds my health before I can blink. Every time it feels like bullshit because I'm not even trying to compete at that level. All multiplayer games have separate queues for "casual" and "ranked", but inescapably there's a handful of sweat lords who've memorized the meta, who know exactly where the best guns and vehicles are, who throw their weight around in casual games and ruin the experience for everyone else.
And when this happens, my natural reaction isn't "This game's matchmaking has failed", it's "I'm tired of these dickheads, I should play single player games instead". In other words, this is an organizational failure. Humans are naturally excellent at organizing themselves into the right groups -- you throw hundreds of kids into the same school, and very quickly the correct circles will form. There's bound to be a lot of kids with nothing in common, but this is obvious to both parties, so they simply avoid interaction. All groups are autonomous and self-organized, and it works really well.
Online groups in 2024 are algorithm-organized. The internet has taken on a kind of 1800s-Manchester-factory-worker housing feel where everyone's crammed into the same tiny spaces despite our differences. We are now constantly aware of how the other half lives, what they are saying. It's like your teacher forcing you to let the annoying kid play kickball with your group, to sit at your lunch table, etc. Going online feels abrasive in a way it really didn't back then. In 2009 you'd hop on some forum and it felt exactly like hanging out with friends, a 100% positive and chill experience. Going online now is like hanging out with everybody. Sometimes it's good, but a lot of the time it sucks. I don't want to know what the guys I hated in high school think of politics, or movies, or anything. But now I'm going to hear it, over and over and over.
Maybe I'm nostalgic, right? 2009 was a long time ago, I was basically a kid...
But probably not. Because I have a solid point of comparison: I understand Japanese, and spend a ton of time on the Japanese web. What inspired this post is actually a single website, which is 5channel. It's the largest anonymous bulletin board on earth, but more accurately it's a collection of around 1000 bulletin boards with virtually zero moderation. You can post wherever you want, say whatever you want, and... it works. Not because the Japanese are polite or something -- they can get wild -- but because if you just let humans organize themselves, things work out. This echoes my own time as an internet moderator, where I first believed that I could shape the board through my actions, but later realized the board's quality was beyond my control, it's an autonomous process that you have little say in.
I pay $4 a month to post on 5channel. I've made hundreds of posts there, and yet no one's realized I'm a white foreigner. Despite the language barrier, I post there because it's sorta like the English web was back in 2009. There's none of the bullshit, it's a site for nerds to make dumb jokes and chat about nerd stuff. When I browse reddit or twitter or 4chan, there's a lingering unpleasant feeling, but when I go to 5ch it's just dumb fun. It's exactly like the net I grew up with. You compare the two, and the English web just feels... sick.
I'm 100% ready to believe this pessimism in the air comes from our inability to self-organize. We are locked in with people we do not like 24/7, reading their crappy opinions, we can't just splinter off and make a new community and so we live with a slight psychological chip on our shoulder but we're not sure why. What's funny is my narcissistic tendencies fade the more I use 5channel. When you're stuck around people that challenge your identity all the time, you get defensive and sorta retreat back into yourself. But when you're around people who aren't going to constantly irritate you or challenge who you are, you start to relax and open up. You may even turn into a bit of an optimist. Conversely, it's this constant feeling of "Someone's gonna try and screw with me" that sorta defines how English web feels now, why everyone's so antsy and defensive and unwilling to let their irony shield down.
Human groups are naturally pretty small. In nature, whenever any major divide happens, tribes just split off and go separate ways. Being forced into a semi-permanent state of clash really can't be good for us, despite how "normal" this has become.
Hello! I think you are talking about me. I mean, we didn't buy a whole ass farm. But we bought 4 acres, got some backyard chickens that give us all the eggs we need, and a nice garden. We still buy food. Even most of our food. We aren't completely off grid by a wide margin. Although we have stocked up on a growing supply of 25 year shelf life emergency food as well...
There were dozens of reasons we made the decision to do this. The increasing social dysfunction of the Democrat controlled semi-urban core we lived in, as well as the utter fecklessness of Democrats to even acknowledge it exists. All the institutions there-in insisting we mask our then two year old daughter, while turning a complete blind eye towards the "mostly peaceful" protest that caused all the businesses to board up their windows whenever they appeared. The rise in crime, like the guy who got shot in my condo parking lot, that nobody seemed to give a fuck about. The people were wound up so damned tight, taking our newborn daughter for a walk, on our best following all the covid guidelines behavior, people would literally dive into the bushes in a mad panic off the sidewalk to maintain that 6 foot distancing.
After we left, we looked back in horror as the school district double, then tripled down on secretly transitioning children against parents wishes, and keeping pornographic "diverse" books in middle school libraries. Or when we have business there, and we still see people masked, alone in their cars on the highway.
There were affirmative reasons we moved too, as opposed to just fleeing Democrats. I wanted my daughter to have a yard, and woods, and a creek to play in. I wanted to feel safe leaving her relatively unsupervised outside. It was way more affordable.
Sometimes I miss living somewhere walkable. But those thoughts are fleeting compared to all we gained in a deep red county.
Kind of a weird focus on democrats in this post. Plenty of those where I live in a very rural state. We have creeks and woods and safe legal abortion and the lowest crime rate in the country. Democrats are driving crime is a pretty tired narrative. Density + poverty drives most of the type of crime you seem to be concerned about, not who you vote for.
I share your frustrations of the covid overstep and mess. It really turned me off to a lot of institutions. I just don't know that if the republicans had become the covid law and order party and insisted on authoritarian lockdowns for the children, would you have rebelled against them the same way?
It isn't red vs blue, especially here on themotte. Try to see the grey.
My Republican governor was happy to impose onerous Covid restrictions on the state (while of course violating them himself). The rules imposed in my state weren’t as long-lasting as they were in many blue states, but they were still intolerable to me and to many Republicans throughout the state. In response, the Libertarian candidate for governor received a record high number of votes in the following gubernatorial race.
I think you’re seeing party politicization where none exists.
I agree, I was trying to point out that what WhiningCoil was commenting on wasn't necessarily a red vs blue issue like he stated it was.
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This was never going to happen because the ways in which lockdowns were less than evenhanded were always going to hit the Republican base harder than the democrats.
I am postulating a hypothetical situation here that almost happened. Fear of the wuhan flu was red coded for the first few months if you recall.
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