Technology

I think because we feel that there is no real purpose to being alive, we need entertainment and distractions.

I often wish we had a star trek society where people would work on things that benefitted society in some way, instead of for money. It would have much more meaning because your talents would benefit other people, not corporations.

Someone who likes to draw would just draw and become appriciated for having great art, much like open source works today. Or if you enjoy making beautiful furniture, or robots.

What is destroying us is that we all work for being rewarded by money, not for appriciation from our peers. For me personally, the appriciation i get for working on open source projects is enough to keep me going and being happy with the work.

Some people say that most people would do nothing if they didn't have to work. I think they would want to do something. Because almost everyone would want to feel they have a purpose besides just existing. That is why we feel empty now at most jobs.

It's an interesting article, I couldn't help but think of how "Pirate Speak" really comes from Robert Newton's acting in a famous Disney movie. So while it predates big tech's debasement of culture it's still a "top down" artifact, in a way. I guess you could say it came from a creative decision of an artist (Newton adapting his native accent) and initially caught on for good fun rather than for profit. So far less cynical than the radioactive shit getting pumped out now, if for no other reason than in the 1950s Disney hadn't figured that shit out yet.

Only sheeple shop on Black Friday. An astute and correct observation.

Note the author doesn't use the word sheeple, but "black-friday" and "cyber-monday" he argues are top-down orders to the masses to consume, and he is absolutely correct.

I love this "Cultural malware" as a name for things like these.

Yup. Black Friday and Amazon's Prime Day are complete bullshit. I found out early when I saw a monitor I was tracking raise in price drastically then 'drop' to a sale price for Black Friday. When people wisened up to that companies started playing the 'model number' game, where they release the same TV or device but with a different model number to specifically skew prices and act like you're getting a deal. It's probably one of the best examples of late stage capitalism I've seen.

Similar top-down cultural phenomenon dictated by corpos is concept of "personal carbon footprint" - as a means of shifting blame and focus from them to individuals. This is almost conspiracy level unbelievable when heard for the first time, but true nonetheless.

I ended up getting some ssds last black Friday, but only because they were 20% cheaper than they'd been all year. Now the prices are even higher, so I don't feel like I bought at the wrong time

I’m increasingly convinced that there is no ‘we’. Rather, ‘we’ increasingly experience the world as isolated and alienated people who are mostly stuck in urban environments dominated by physical corporate and state interfaces (billboards, store-fronts, infrastructure etc) whilst also being stuck behind computers and smartphones dominated by Big Tech, which tries to feed us that illusion that the Internet is a ‘global village’.

Yeah globalization probably changes cultural celebrations a lot. Interesting perspective.

Black Friday is an infohazard SCP