How Do I Hate Social Media and its Midget-Minded Divas, Let Me Count the Ways
All pretty pictures and no compelling ideas makes your polity a desert deserving of death.
By
David Gottfried
Hello, little people. Cute and fetching little lovelies. Your web pages have such adorable color schemes. The wavey lines contrast with the straight lines in a cornucopia of gorgeousness.
Everything about your world is so terribly fey and precious and tiny. When you communicate, you do not orate or declaim. You twitter and tweet like little gay birdies (I am not anti-gay. I am gay. It’s just that I know so many utterly effeminate guys that every so often excessive faggotry truly makes me want to vomit.) You do not give your companies names such as “American Industrial Enterprises”; instead, you give your businesses tiny, tiny names such as Hulu, which sounds like a person getting fucked moaning “ooh ooh.” And the granddaddy of companies in this godawful digital nightmare is a castrated cuckold called “Microsoft.” It bespeaks a prick that is very, very tiny and very, very soft.
How do I hate thee, I hate thee in much the same way that Elizabeth the First hated dumb floozies who tried to seduce Lord Essex. Elizabeth was a fucking genius and did a swell job of managing England’s affairs, but she was like an old and dusty fat book, shoved off the stage by a hot slut from the slums of London.
I hate thee the way Beethoven hates Beyonce and Justin Bieber and the imbecilic swine that sways to their shit.
I hate your tiny, tiny ideograms and graphics which perplex everyone with poor eyesight. Hell, if language was good enough for Shakespeare it ought to be good enough for you.
I hate your programs that modify my text as I write. Get this through your goddamn head: No infamous conglomeration of AI and fascistic police can devise a computer program that knows what I want to say. And if computers learn to read our minds, we should all commit collective suicide.
I hate writers who talk about marketing all the time. When I was in college, I did not know a soul who spoke of marketing. We spoke of music and peace and love, but we did not give a rat’s ass about marketing. To explain why I hate marketing, I must refer you to “The Lonely Crowd” by David Reisman, written in the 50’s. I’ll try to summarize the relevance of his great tome into a few sentences:
1. Until about 150 years ago, most people did not live in urban areas and most people believed in G-d. Being by themselves, and believing in G-d, they followed that which they thought was good and true. They did not follow crowds. Reisman called these people inner-directed.
2. Nowadays, people live like ants in an ant hill, and they don’t believe in anything. They do not till the land; they do not make machinery. They work with other people in gossipy offices. They care about the whims and tastes of others. They are outer directed.
Working with other people means lying to them to make then buy something, making them feel ugly so they will spend thousands on plastic surgery and committing them to mental institutions if they think for themselves. (Footnote 1) Because they work with other people all the time, they care only about the will of the group. They are the outer directed mousey men who follow Trump or Hillary and sometimes they become rat men and they follow the likes of Hitler.
In any event, I had been talking about marketing. Marketing is an essential component of social media.
We market something by trying to appeal to others. We appeal to others by mimicking and mouthing their prejudices and hates, by being outer-directed. Marketing is outer-directedness par excellence. Since I have been under the spell of Daivd Reisman for years, the very notion of marketing makes me sick. Marketing may be essential to making a living. If that is the case, then most people who are making a comfortable living should be put behind bars. To me, everything about marketing is, at root, evil. I know this may sound prudish and impractical, but I want to live in a world where that which is good is able to sell itself by being itself. I long for a world devoid of the scummy stench of the salesman. What can I say. My Mother was a genius who starved in the Great Depression and started Brooklyn College at the age of 15. When she was asked on a test, in her first year, what a businessman was, she wrote, “A legal thief.” My Uncle Morris came to this country because he was wanted by the Russian Secret police as he was part of a ring of communists and Jews who were trying to kill the Tzar. We weren’t ordinary Jewish merchants selling shmatas.
If you think I sound a tad too alienated and bitter, and if you think my ideas lack rigor or crispness, I will take a page out of the book of the 19th century physicalists. They said that the closer an idea was to math, or based on math, the greater was its likelihood of being true.
Ergo, I will prove, with mathematical concepts, that social media is dragging us down into a ditch of intellectual mediocrity, political malpractice, and social conformity masked as rebelliousness that make the Fifties look like the era of Henry David Thoreau.
1) Hasty and invalid extrapolations: On the evening news in 2003, Americans were treated to film footage of 100 people in Baghdad toppling a statue of Sadaam. Of course, 100 people on your TV screen are not necessarily representative of the millions of people in Iraq. But the TV viewers, swept away with mind-numbing visuals, do not think of this. A print article, which stated that 100 people destroyed a statue of Sadaam, would generate a yawn.
A reader would be more apt to think – because while we are reading, our minds are less apt to slumber – and realize that 100 people aren’t necessarily representative of much of anything. The American people, their intellects stunted by infantile, picture-book news, quickly extrapolated from one crowd to all the millions of Iraqis and concluded, to our great peril, that the Iraqis loved us. This is what I meant by the political malpractice engineered by modern media.
Of course, most people saw the evening news on television. However, most people use their computers to look at images. Half the people I know look at their computers for porn. And the other half send their mates grotesque or funny images. Therefore, the ills of television are also apparent on the allegedly more upscale and “intellectual” computer.
2. We read faster than a narrator can speak: The rate at which a narrator speaks is always slower than the rate at which we can read – unless of course one is barely literate. Ergo, more ideas, per minute, will always be relayed by reading.
(The following ideas are not based on mathematical concepts and so can’t avail themselves of the life raft offered by physicalist philosophy)
3. A pic is not worth a thousand words. It is an amalgam of half-truths, distortions and extraneous and irrelevant nonsense which will tend to dissuade us from an examination of the truth. People assume that what they see has to be true, and so they view visuals with less skepticism than ideas. But pictures lie in more ways they can imagine.
4. During the Vietnam War, the United States government was desperate to demonstrate that South Vietnamese soldiers were truly assisting us in fighting the communists. At times the pentagon gave the networks film footage of South Vietnamese soldiers running around in rugged, rural terrain, guns firing, supposedly in battle. However, the film footage was make-believe as the South Vietnamese soldiers were running around in Georgia. (The supposedly “liberal” networks never mentioned that the film footage had come from the Pentagon when they aired it to millions of gullible Americans.)
5. Some radio and television “news” providers turned up the treble when activists from the left were broadcast. The accentuation of the treble made them seem juvenile, anxious, neurotic and a bit effeminate.
6. The electronic media makes for a frenzied, hysterical body politic that knows not what it is doing. At the end of 1992 and the beginning of 1993, the evening television news was splattered with pictures of starving people in Somalia. We intervened. Shortly thereafter, we saw pictures of marines tortured in Somalia. Then we ran away. We react. We never think.
7. The discussion of public policy is always undermined by the picture media. Notice that whenever an announcer, on a television news show, speaks about the health care debate in Washington, the camera focuses on pictures of pills going into vials, and nurses wielding syringes, and old people in wheelchairs. None of these pictures tell us anything about the virtues of the public option or any other issues under discussion. But they will take our attention away from concentrating on what the narrator has said. The narrator will speak for perhaps a mere two minutes. But the narrator has not only mentioned next to nothing about the substantive issues because his time is so severely limited; his brief span of time is further undermined by the deflection of so much energy toward our wasteful viewing of superfluous pseudo medical scenes of pills going into bottles.
8. When I was involved in AIDS activism, a guy from television stressed that we had to concentrate on flooding the airwaves with pictures of bleeding AIDS patients and protesters who were bleeding because the police had assaulted them. This does a great job of dramatizing the matter. The fellow aids activist said, “We just need pics of suffering.” But the pics of suffering do not tell us what public policies would best combat that suffering, and why heterosexuals, who did not abuse drugs, would also benefit from aids research. (At the beginning of the epidemic, there were virtually no antiviral drugs in existence. By discovering drugs to fight the AIDS virus, we would learn how to fight viruses. Also, because viral infection is often implicated in cancer, by learning about AIDS we would garner knowledge that could amplify our battle against neoplasms. Actually, the most common oral anti viral regimen for covid contains Ritonavir, which was first used in 1995 and 1996 to combat HIV)
9. The image media makes it harder for dissenters to challenge the status quo and proffer new ideas. If one is in a political organization, and one wants attention on the evening news, one will have to be dramatic, or a bit absurd, or fuming with apocalyptical rage. Very simply, television wants to give us a show, to boost ratings, and the last thing they want is an objective, dispassionate discussion of the issues. To get noticed in social media the tendency toward hyperbole and hysteria is magnified geometrically. If you want your voice to get noticed, you may scream your social media shit like a madman whose blood is on fire from speed and is on the verge of stroke and death.
In the late 1960’s the media made and then destroyed the new left. It made the new left by letting the left blaze across the airwaves with untrammeled id -- in the form of the black panthers, the yippies, and other radical groups, the left burst forth with exuberance. To get on the airwaves, the left had to do absurd things. (For example, at the close of 1967, at a protest against the Vietnam War at the Pentagon, Allen Ginsburg said that he would levitate the Pentagon with his Buddhist incantations. The pentagon stayed put.) At first, the antics of the left got it much needed attention. But the silly stupid coverage eventually did us in. Eventually, the left was dismissed and ridiculed, and Richard Nixon was narrowly elected in 1968, and then won re-election in a landslide in 1972, and the left, which once was poised to change America, had become an impotent laughingstock.
Broader Philosophical Implications:
10. The Western world had always believed in the primacy of words and ideas.
However, the rise of the picture news defiled and degraded whatever propensity we may have once had for insightful thought. Both of the foundations of Western thought – Jewish thought and Greek thought – believed in the primacy of words and ideas.
The Hebraic wing of the Western World, as codified in The Old Testament, lauds words and ideation: In the opening passages of Genesis, we read, “And G-d said let there be light.” By announcing that light will ensue, light does ensue. The idea of light precedes the phenomenon of light.
Likewise, Plato said that there was something called “Nous,” a sort of heaven of ideas, and that before things came into existence on earth, they were formulated in that heaven of ideas.
Very simply, the Greeks and the Jews, although often characterized as advocating antagonistic views of life and morality, were completely at one in terms of the intellect. In a word, both the Jews and Greeks believed that people should reason and not react hysterically to images. The picture media of television, and social media which in large measure consists of the propagation and transmission of images, constitute a dethronement of the Western Way of the Hebrews and the Greeks and a regression toward the barbarism of Babylon and Egypt.
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Footnote 1: Adam Smith, the philosopher often deemed the champion of capitalism, was known to talk to himself when he walked down the street. Today that behavior would be deemed schizophrenic, However, in an inner-directed world, a greater measure of deviations from the mean was deemed permissible.