"Read good books and real journalism. Find your friends. And enjoy your life” Harris.
Yep, no question about it. But how does this translate to reality when a vast percentage of a country's population has a new-age equivalent of attention deficit?
Wordsworth published an important sonnet in 1807. It says in four lines what has occurred in the US over many decades.
"The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
Below, William Delaney explains what Wordsworth meant by "sordid boon."
-- What he means by "a sordid boon" is that we have made a very bad bargain. We have given our hearts away in exchange for money. This is indeed a bad or sordid bargain if we have done so. If we have lost our hearts in the bargain, either literally or figuratively, our lives are dark and empty. We are like the blind. Or worse than that: we are like the dead. We are surrounded by beauty and drama but miss almost all of it except for occasional "glimpses" when we are not thinking about practical, selfish, worldly matters. Our minds are filled with an endless stream of consciousness like that depicted by James Joyce in his novel Ulysses and by William Faulkner in his novel The Sound and the Fury.
To understand what Wordsworth means by a sordid boon, we must consider the first part of that same line. We have given our hearts away. That is a horrifying thought. What have we gotten in exchange? What is the boon? Where is the quid pro quo? There is nothing we could receive in exchange that would be worth a fraction of the value of what we have given away. And once we have made a bargain, it is almost impossible to undo it.
To emphasize how pathologic American "life" has become, let me share this with you. In yesteryears, when a close friend or family member had a birthday, you would give them a call on the phone, or perhaps send them a birthday card and actually take the time to write some endearing message. This changed in our pseudo-culture with the emergence of the Jacquie Lawson greeting card. No more phone calls, no cards in the US mail, but an animated email message, with flowers and figures and cute animals magically appearing. But it got worse.
Soon, that disappeared and instead along came "messages" or texts. Now, celebrating my birthday about two weeks ago, I received from my two siblings, a one-liner wishing me a happy birthday. WTF, I just turned 83 and survived a lethal malignancy. I provided support for my parents with little help from my sibs. I feel like a Rodney Dangerfield skit. All I got was a text or glib email. My friends from Europe took the time to write their thoughts about me and how much I meant in their lives. Again, WTF!
This country is ailing, and yes, Mike is just about always spot on. But the core of pathology starts, and ends, with the PEOPLE. Our politicians suck, most of them at least. But we elected them. We took more time to check out the new cars we considered buying, and sitting on our asses watching football, rather than doing our due diligence. We invited the wolf and the fox, and their den of thieves, into our House. It's our version of Guess Whose Coming to Dinner?
America AILS. The AIL is in apathy. The AIL is in ignorance. The AIL is in lassitude or laziness. We are the 2025 version of decadent Rome. What we have with Fascist Trump, Appointees and a Republican Party that has lost its moral compass is a reflection of who we have become.
An essential treatise for our contemporary condition, except for "Unlike drug addiction, which destroys individual lives while leaving social structures intact...". Having lost my brother to fentanyl, his leaving did not leave our family's social structure intact. That single link in our family chain may have made a difference in bridging political preferences and understandings. At least, I'd like to think so.
This post articulates what my brain knows and feels on social media. I recently realized my vital community work of child care is owned by a private equity firm, and this commodifying of our lives, our minds, our emotions by PE, by social media, by ads on games etc is sickening.
I'm leaving my present job. This article more than anything is convincing me, for the good of my own life, to leave most SM. I hesitate only because I use mine to advocate for wildlife. And it's the only place I'm in regular touch with many good, longtime friends.
Like so many, I opened a Facebook account when it was first “a thing.” But it felt somehow wrong, narcissistic, and obsessive almost immediately, so I logged out permanently about 15 yrs ago. Had the same experiential deja vu with LinkedIn, so “buh bye,” Reed. Never tried Twitter/X because… why?
These apps stimulate and incentivize the same dark forces of human nature (and, yes, admittedly, also some of our better angels) as does our offline capitalistic culture - greed, envy, and gluttonous excess, to name a few of the seven deadly sins that social media programmers and trolls have wielded like cudgels against our collective and individual psyches. But it only takes a little dark energy to kickstart the entropy of social destruction - just look at how much of our democracy has been destroyed in only 8 months of Trump 2.0 vs the 250 yrs it took to build it….
Social media content - at least the stuff that engenders our darker feelings and behaviors - is a socio-cultural virus. A COVID of the mind. And it is now a pandemic. The viral vectors are the apps or platforms that distribute this malevolent content. Which apps have internally destroyed us - or are well on their way to destroying us - as members and citizens of a compassionate and empathetic democratic society. These apps have mutated our minds, rendering too many of us into little more than isolated consumers of dopamine hits, gotchas, likes, and destructive snark…
The solution to “social” media may have more in common with substance addictions than we imagine. That is, knowing it is bad infrequently results in users stopping. It takes real pain (rock bottoms) to influence users they should seek another way.
Unfortunately, we are not close to that point yet even with increasing chaos, mental, and physical sickness directly from our ubiquitous use of “social” media in the inauthentic online facsimile world we increasingly inhabit. Many more really bad things at a societal level must happen before a reevaluation, and new, healthier paths are taken. Knowledge of the problem is rarely sufficient.
Maybe more pointedly, social media has massaged the way we think about things to prioritise quick reactions, first instincts and short responses, rather than well-considered, researched, thoughtful commentary with which others can meaningfully engage. This inventory of effects is having a deleterious effect on the fundamental fabric of our societies.
Quite the dilemma. Substituting consumerism for citizenship, we are no longer creators, and we bleed memecoins to those who are. They become addicted to our attention at the same time we are addicted to randomness rather than order and participation in reality. Passivity dumbs us all down. We used to rely on each other to provide a sense of meaning, by interacting. Now it seems there's no there there. And no real meaning until we drop the addictions to randomness.
Agree. Even Google recently took it upon itself, (the nerve!) to tell me when to take a break, call it an evening, and rest. I swear I did not activate any notifications of the kind.
I was very against social media from the beginning. It just smelled wrong from the start. But even us naysayers would have had a hard time predicting how quickly it took us down. Now with right wing billionaires buying up the whole ecosystem I fear it will only spiral further.
Perfect. And yet... here we all are. I logged out of all social media ages ago - ironically I worked for a social media agency for a while, and it made me ill on a daily basis. I even had an anti social media social media account. And a couple of satirical ones. But I felt like everything I did, whether is was satirical or posting news about the horrors of social, or even trying to get family and friends to log off, just added to the mess. I can't see how to win. The only people who could get rid of platforms like TikTok are the very people who profit from them. Hence why Trump has gone to great lengths to backtrack on his TikTok ban. And constantly buddies up to Elon and Mark.
"Read good books and real journalism. Find your friends. And enjoy your life” Harris.
Yep, no question about it. But how does this translate to reality when a vast percentage of a country's population has a new-age equivalent of attention deficit?
Wordsworth published an important sonnet in 1807. It says in four lines what has occurred in the US over many decades.
"The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
Below, William Delaney explains what Wordsworth meant by "sordid boon."
-- What he means by "a sordid boon" is that we have made a very bad bargain. We have given our hearts away in exchange for money. This is indeed a bad or sordid bargain if we have done so. If we have lost our hearts in the bargain, either literally or figuratively, our lives are dark and empty. We are like the blind. Or worse than that: we are like the dead. We are surrounded by beauty and drama but miss almost all of it except for occasional "glimpses" when we are not thinking about practical, selfish, worldly matters. Our minds are filled with an endless stream of consciousness like that depicted by James Joyce in his novel Ulysses and by William Faulkner in his novel The Sound and the Fury.
To understand what Wordsworth means by a sordid boon, we must consider the first part of that same line. We have given our hearts away. That is a horrifying thought. What have we gotten in exchange? What is the boon? Where is the quid pro quo? There is nothing we could receive in exchange that would be worth a fraction of the value of what we have given away. And once we have made a bargain, it is almost impossible to undo it.
To emphasize how pathologic American "life" has become, let me share this with you. In yesteryears, when a close friend or family member had a birthday, you would give them a call on the phone, or perhaps send them a birthday card and actually take the time to write some endearing message. This changed in our pseudo-culture with the emergence of the Jacquie Lawson greeting card. No more phone calls, no cards in the US mail, but an animated email message, with flowers and figures and cute animals magically appearing. But it got worse.
Soon, that disappeared and instead along came "messages" or texts. Now, celebrating my birthday about two weeks ago, I received from my two siblings, a one-liner wishing me a happy birthday. WTF, I just turned 83 and survived a lethal malignancy. I provided support for my parents with little help from my sibs. I feel like a Rodney Dangerfield skit. All I got was a text or glib email. My friends from Europe took the time to write their thoughts about me and how much I meant in their lives. Again, WTF!
This country is ailing, and yes, Mike is just about always spot on. But the core of pathology starts, and ends, with the PEOPLE. Our politicians suck, most of them at least. But we elected them. We took more time to check out the new cars we considered buying, and sitting on our asses watching football, rather than doing our due diligence. We invited the wolf and the fox, and their den of thieves, into our House. It's our version of Guess Whose Coming to Dinner?
America AILS. The AIL is in apathy. The AIL is in ignorance. The AIL is in lassitude or laziness. We are the 2025 version of decadent Rome. What we have with Fascist Trump, Appointees and a Republican Party that has lost its moral compass is a reflection of who we have become.
Welcome to Fascism.
Welcome to the Third World.
Welcome to the Fourth Reich.
An essential treatise for our contemporary condition, except for "Unlike drug addiction, which destroys individual lives while leaving social structures intact...". Having lost my brother to fentanyl, his leaving did not leave our family's social structure intact. That single link in our family chain may have made a difference in bridging political preferences and understandings. At least, I'd like to think so.
This post articulates what my brain knows and feels on social media. I recently realized my vital community work of child care is owned by a private equity firm, and this commodifying of our lives, our minds, our emotions by PE, by social media, by ads on games etc is sickening.
I'm leaving my present job. This article more than anything is convincing me, for the good of my own life, to leave most SM. I hesitate only because I use mine to advocate for wildlife. And it's the only place I'm in regular touch with many good, longtime friends.
But thank you. I've got some thinking to do.
Counter.Social No algorithms, no bots, no trolls, no ads, crowd funded. Real community
Like so many, I opened a Facebook account when it was first “a thing.” But it felt somehow wrong, narcissistic, and obsessive almost immediately, so I logged out permanently about 15 yrs ago. Had the same experiential deja vu with LinkedIn, so “buh bye,” Reed. Never tried Twitter/X because… why?
These apps stimulate and incentivize the same dark forces of human nature (and, yes, admittedly, also some of our better angels) as does our offline capitalistic culture - greed, envy, and gluttonous excess, to name a few of the seven deadly sins that social media programmers and trolls have wielded like cudgels against our collective and individual psyches. But it only takes a little dark energy to kickstart the entropy of social destruction - just look at how much of our democracy has been destroyed in only 8 months of Trump 2.0 vs the 250 yrs it took to build it….
Social media content - at least the stuff that engenders our darker feelings and behaviors - is a socio-cultural virus. A COVID of the mind. And it is now a pandemic. The viral vectors are the apps or platforms that distribute this malevolent content. Which apps have internally destroyed us - or are well on their way to destroying us - as members and citizens of a compassionate and empathetic democratic society. These apps have mutated our minds, rendering too many of us into little more than isolated consumers of dopamine hits, gotchas, likes, and destructive snark…
The solution to “social” media may have more in common with substance addictions than we imagine. That is, knowing it is bad infrequently results in users stopping. It takes real pain (rock bottoms) to influence users they should seek another way.
Unfortunately, we are not close to that point yet even with increasing chaos, mental, and physical sickness directly from our ubiquitous use of “social” media in the inauthentic online facsimile world we increasingly inhabit. Many more really bad things at a societal level must happen before a reevaluation, and new, healthier paths are taken. Knowledge of the problem is rarely sufficient.
Such is the nature of addiction.
Maybe more pointedly, social media has massaged the way we think about things to prioritise quick reactions, first instincts and short responses, rather than well-considered, researched, thoughtful commentary with which others can meaningfully engage. This inventory of effects is having a deleterious effect on the fundamental fabric of our societies.
After all, McLuhan didn't call his book "The Medium is the Message". He called it "The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_Is_the_Massage
(Apparently the use of "massage" was a misprint on the first edition but McLuhan liked it so much that he insisted it be kept.)
Quite the dilemma. Substituting consumerism for citizenship, we are no longer creators, and we bleed memecoins to those who are. They become addicted to our attention at the same time we are addicted to randomness rather than order and participation in reality. Passivity dumbs us all down. We used to rely on each other to provide a sense of meaning, by interacting. Now it seems there's no there there. And no real meaning until we drop the addictions to randomness.
Agree. Even Google recently took it upon itself, (the nerve!) to tell me when to take a break, call it an evening, and rest. I swear I did not activate any notifications of the kind.
If I could find “real journalism” outside of the internet I’d read it. MSM is absolute garbage.
I was very against social media from the beginning. It just smelled wrong from the start. But even us naysayers would have had a hard time predicting how quickly it took us down. Now with right wing billionaires buying up the whole ecosystem I fear it will only spiral further.
On point!
Perfect. And yet... here we all are. I logged out of all social media ages ago - ironically I worked for a social media agency for a while, and it made me ill on a daily basis. I even had an anti social media social media account. And a couple of satirical ones. But I felt like everything I did, whether is was satirical or posting news about the horrors of social, or even trying to get family and friends to log off, just added to the mess. I can't see how to win. The only people who could get rid of platforms like TikTok are the very people who profit from them. Hence why Trump has gone to great lengths to backtrack on his TikTok ban. And constantly buddies up to Elon and Mark.
The solution has to involve following the money. How does the addiction produce cash flow for the operators of these systems? That’s the key.