Resisting the Pipe

 John started a blog!  

And in communicating with him directly, reading his post, and following one of the links I see how much of a freak I am... this time in ways I am actually proud of.

Blogs? I don’t read em, so I don’t really manage how I read em (Ran and now John being my exceptions, and Ran is the homepage, so I’m really going to have to figure out what to do to see them regularly).

The piped society? ...  Well, my phone is de-googled and not on any chat app mentioned in the article. When I do blogging, Bluesky, or banking, I am doing so with laptops or Linux desktops.  I acknowledge that not everyone “realistically” can do this [1], with a special, parental nod to the problems here:

Now, your [default] is to be stuck in a forever chat with local acquaintances, many of whom you soon discover have extremely diverse views on life, parenting, and what it is appropriate to say about their (kids’) bowel movements on a group chat with 50+ members (most of whom they wouldn’t clock on the street). 99% of it is verbiage-garbiage, but if your kid is on one of those chats, you can’t afford to miss what passes, and so, if you’re a ‘good parent’, you have to monitor it regularly, or you’ll/ they’ll miss lifts, downpayments, parties, etc etc – and you’ll be seen as an irresponsible, bad, rude parent. Who knew the digital future would be so infinitely-indefinitely banal and hard to escape?

For even this, I have had a solution that has worked so far: I outsource it to my wife. And she doesn’t even see it as a sacrifice (!!!),  so I take no hit to relationship capital...  As this is the place where my freak flag flied (“no my wife’s allowed” it says on the sign in front of the metaphorical tree fort), I want to express how grateful I am that my wife isn’t capable of scheming against me, lacking vision and being quite low in conscientiousness, even though she would like to be controlling.

The article also provides a nice little document that supports a fifth critique I have of using horizontalism and/or trying to build local alternative institutions: people just want to normalize things, and I just straight up think they are wired to defer to people higher up in their social group.

What I’ve encountered in trying to raise this is that almost no one has concern, let alone ‘shares my concerns’. This tone of indifference has a new and specific texture, one that’s different to the fetishist disavowal of the Insta or X addict. With WhatsApp, I am met with nonresponse. It’s as quiet as WhatsApp. Raising something about WhatsApp, in my experience, is like expressing a preference against flush toilets or drinking water: you seem weird, you seem a bit tinfoil, you seem touched. What I can’t say – which would seem weird – is that, to me, this is the nonresponse of people who have internalised the loss of control over their lives and choices that dependency means in the piped society.

We get angry at people online and feel lonely ‘with’ people online – but we never notice the pipe, and, socially, in this culture, it’s almost impossible to have legible anger at its grip on us. If information is a difference that makes a difference, then the current cultural atmosphere is an indifference that makes indifference.

Okay man. Push as hard as you want against how normies think. Like fighting squirrels eating seeds, it’s a daoist trap -- the harder you fight, the more you’re thwarted, the more unhappiness you get. It’d be like trying to tell people to not adopt televisions in the early 1950s. Critique is not how these things end, or even lessen.  It’s not even how sub-cultures get started... Fuck the macro, build the micro, sure. But first make things as good as you can for yourself. Your air mask first, so you can then help others.

If you’re not part of a cool scene from it, there is no reason to be a radical.  AND if you can be part of a cool scene (or a scene that has parts that are cool) without being a radical, you really should do that as a consumer choice.

Blessed is the person who does not need this spelled out. But I had to spell it out for myself, first.

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[1] Although I guess I am somewhat “committed” to my path of technological disobedience -- but I am doing so for personal comfort rather than to signal I am part of anything.  If I had to have my phone hooked to these apps to function professionally, I’d get a burner phone. As is, I might get a burner flip phone and use my current smart phone as a camera... Or I might get deeper into photography and by real cameras when I have money flowing in.