What are you being distracted from ?

I am a man.

I am a man from an older time, a time long gone by.

I am a man from a time long gone by, from a time before the "everything" became overpoweringly too largeⁱ for everyone.

Consequently, I perceive responsibilities where others very elaborately and laboriously manage to miss perceiving their own bankruptciesⁱⁱ. This doesn't just mean that I keep around the kittens' cars newspapers that I bought months ago and I intend to read months hence. It means a lot of things in that vein.

For instance, I have (mediatedly, I don't recall "whose" it specifically is) an iPad somewhere that I filled with games, having done on that platform the same thing I did with browsers, which is to say check out all the gamesⁱⁱⁱ. Because I'm a principal not to mention lead designer in a game publisher that's worth about 100`000`000 of those worthless dubaloos (or whatever you call them), and that position comes with responsibilities.^iv

Today I reviewed the state of this platform, which spent six months or so downloading games from the walled garden nine months ago. Because I do such things. And I wept^v for the sad ; I wept at the sorry state of all the meanwhile forgotten toys. Do you know the story of the velveteen rabbit ?

There they sat, a good half of them, befuddled. Pretty icons, little drawings, an overwhelming effort to cute that I could have easily mistaken for being a labour of love. "There seems to be a problem with your network", they blinked, confused. "Error connecting server", they sighed. What could be the matter ? "Make sure your network connection is..."

No, my network connection is fine. Their network connection isn't. Their server went away, one day. It was no longer "economically feasible", which is to say the ~0% ROI they provided finally exceeded the capacity for secreting hope of some spammer-minded "entrepreneur" somewhere and the plug got finally pulled. What do you mean "they should not have been made in the first place" ? You don't propose to limit the Catholic's creativity! Are you saying every sperm ain't sacred ?!

Their server went away, leaving them stranded, broken. Unfixable, of course, "walled gardens" come with some very real costs to offset the wholly imaginary benefits they provide to spammer-minded "entrepreneurs".

Sad, indescriptibly sad, little fragments of a thing that used to be, gutted and left about, inch-tall sweet faced "elf archer" or whatever else gamified existence that doesn't exist blinking at you from the intro screen that's never going to move on. Stuck there, forever.

Was it all worth it ? If you look back at all the stranded debris, very much not limited to a tablet misplaced about my house, do you feel content ? Are you sated ? Were your appetites satisfied, has the whole process delivered upon its promises as far as you're concerned ? Has anything you have done to date made your life any better ?

I ask because I suspect it hasn't, because I know it couldn't possibly have ; and I'll tell you plainly that if I actually expected the lifetime of things I make to not exceed my own lifetime^vi I'd just go hang myself this fine morning.

The trading of power for the fetish of power, you see, the cornerstone underlying all ourdemocracy and all pantsuitism and all "modern" and all crap is fundamentally a promise to impermanence. The only way, absolutely the only way anonymous priceless cuntlet could have her hopes not be violently contradicted (which is still a ways away from any kind of satisfaction), the only way inflation could "level the playing field" for each generation, the only way there's anything there for all on the basis of their mere presence and for no further consideration is if everyone agrees to never ever ever do anything.

Never doing anything is a guaranteed recipe to unhappiness. That's really all there is to it. And it's not even all that easy to never do anything, which is why all the need for "distraction"^vii.

What are you being distracted from ?

1. The fight-or-flight response leaning towards fight is obviously the male characteristic, in that you can define the females in any population by their not taking that option.

   Obviously, this is a discussion of gender, which is a sociocognitive construct (sociocognitive is how people politely say that it happens in the unthinking brain, copying what others do because they do it) ; its biological somewhat-underpinning is defined genetically : every cell in a sexuate organism's body has a number of chromosomes as necessary condition of its existence, among which a couple are sex chromosomes and that's the whole story of sex (no, you can't be "transsexual" unless you live inside a nuclear reactor -- the proper name for your affliction is "gender confusion", a small step up above Down syndrome, but still in any case mental retardation, as defined by "having failed to meet age-appropriate developmental goals").

   The fight-or-flight response is also somewhat modulated (especially in immature males) by "sociocognitive" considerations. One revelatory aspect of this modulation is the crowd-seeking behaviour of the adolescent male, that monkey going to war while checking behind every five seconds to make sure "where the fuck is everyone". Another revelatory aspect is the "anger of the crowds" phenomenon, that situation where abnormal context suddenly assuages the inhibitory circuitry of a mass of ex-cattle-now-briefly-men who then promptly go on an angry rampage. They're suddenly willing to fight, the mob, as a mob and only as a mob.

   The problem with "sociocognitive" isn't necessarily that USG agencies pretending to be "corporations" not to mention powerful and important will (unsuccessfully) attempt to "shape" it. For one thing the situation of those lost souls is much akin to the situation of a foul smelling old dood standing on a rock somewhere in a deserted mountain range going "I'm making it storm! I'm making it storm!" all day long, all year long. Obviously it'll storm sometimes, and for the poor idiot that is actually worse than it not storming at all!

   The problem with sociocognitive is that as integration happens (integration being the main function of technology, incidentally) the subjectively-perceived crowd of monkeys ever grows, which leads to serious problems in ever feeling safe enough to act at all. (Yes, this is whence all that "anonimity" nonsense practiced by rural yokels jus' trynna make it in dis big city bidniss.)

   In the old city of Athens, a half-man who could get a few hundred others behind him felt safe enough to attempt to take over the government -- and half the time succeeded. During the 1800s the crowd of Paris attempted (and failed) to take over the government. They had reasoned that "everyone is there", except a hundred thousand Parisians reflecting the "consensus" of the largest city "in the known world" turned out not to even matter. It's not a question of "weren't enough", you understand. Properly speaking it was a question of couldn't have been enough. Paris was united to the rest of the country, insignificant individually as it were, by rail and road, and consequently the government was readily capable of smothering the rebellion within days. Their armed forces were strictly speaking insufficient, but they didn't need actual armed forces, the simple gravitational pull of "sociocognitive" did most of the heavy lifting.

   The missexperience of the Paris commune led the communists (as socialists thought it fashionable to call themselves throughout the 20th century) to only attempt paper-driven revolutions thenceforth, and to very carefully stick to a "nonviolence" schtick. As the mouthpiece of the Italian communist party well explains for your benefit in Romanzo popolare, the name of the game is avoiding the hostility of the "public opinion". This trauma-driven "ideological evolution" (a special kind of sociocognition) was also the original driver and the necessary cause of the pantsuit & ourdemocracy flowering of socialism that you see today in the colonies.

   Leaving aside that the physical space of the greatest city in the world doesn't even exist anymore, having been supplanted by rather immaterial things, the integration has gone so far as to render the crowd sentiment of safety strictly unfeasible. How is the almost-male alt-monkey to ever feel itself safe enough to act on his male inclinations, when the scope of the world is entirely beyond any kind of evaluation ? He's more than willing to fight, you see, in principle -- provided it's safe to do so! And only then! Wut do ?

   Predictably wut do is not much at all, apathetic anomie. You got a better idea ? That is safe ? So then! [↩]

2. Consider the recent discussion...

   mircea_popescu leaves September 12th log next to November 21st log for... i'm not even sure, everyone capable of knowing knows and everyone who doesn't know is not gonna find out anymore than my stove is gonna learn a merry jig.
   a111 Logged on 2017-09-12 21:08 rothbart: I've been trying to grok the segwit "theft" incentive - as the bounty grows, so does the PoW defending it - doesn't this keep the segwit outputs safe?
   a111 Logged on 2017-11-21 14:32 asciilifeform: 'the first SegWit address whose funds were recovered'

   mircea_popescu remember back when "mp invented miner conspiracy" ?
   mircea_popescu and can you believe the utter schmucktard still hasn't posted nude pics with appology scribbled in his own blood where his ballsac/eyes/etc used to be ?
   mircea_popescu if your stupid head causes you to stumble, CUT IT FUCKING OFF! Gangs of New York style!

   ...of the ancient discussion...

   hanbot kakobrekla so in the process of protecting the shareholders from a 17 btc bill, you managed to destroy all their holdings and stick the bettors with a 13 btc or w/e it's going to end up. pretty sucky, innit?

   hanbot kakobrekla from the outside, all that's seen is you going gotta protect the shareholders!!1 and a week later the shareholders are fucked...and the customers are boiling. not that i expect you to take responsibility rather than talk about it, but you've fucked up.

   hanbot nah, take responsibility for the following thing: "i, kakobrekla, turned the situation where the shareholders owed 17 btc and had credit to repay it in the future, into a situation where the shareholders have nothing, and the bettors owe at least 13 btc, if not more. this is the best i could do, hire me and i'll do the same for you."

   ...of the endless discussion. When's the last time a precious cuntlet slash Princeton graduate felt the need to not merely apologize for being stupid, but actually to fix it ? In herself I mean, in the correct manner, I mean. Not bullshit "here's how I purport to alter reality thereby making my pretense of adequacy less glaringly nonsensical" attempts at sociocognition but rather the right and proper "here's me, on my knees". [↩]

3. No, not most. All.

   It can't be done ? Maybe it can't be done by you, have you ever thought about that ?

   What, you thought the stuff in the first footnote applies to me just like it applies to you ?! Lol. [↩]

4. Much like the crab is held to see all things around it, so am I. So are you. Why is it that I see you but you don't see me ? [↩]
5. Literally, I did. My tears wettened tit. [↩]
6. Washington Post & its camp followers flatter themselves with the notion that they're competing with me. Yet nobody except for me, and especially not they themselves have any use for their own product after its brief "newsyness" wears off. Articles on Trilema are linked half a decade after their original appearance, translated though a decade old, and not as some kind of debenture but because they're needed, organically part of the whole thing like old folks in "traditional societies". What possible relevancy could a month old Atlantic piece bear to anything or for anyone ? Same-day culture, and a Black Monday awaiting behind every tomorrow. [↩]
7. Which necessarily doesn't work, either, because it's made in the same deliberately-impermanent way. Somehow five hundred generations of Persians were content to play the same game of chess whereas you need a reimplementation of the same tired old timers every six to eighteen months. Why is this ? [↩]