The recent explosion of postmodernist ideals has been fed by the fact that many people, including children, live their lives almost entirely in a place that is rooted in abstraction and divorced from living, breathing, material reality - the internet.
We are now able to see the whole world, every square foot of it in fact, through our own eyes on a screen. We’re able to know what’s happening in every corner of the globe.
Or are we? What we see on Google Earth isn't the real world. It’s just an abstraction.
Or are we? What we see on Google Earth isn't the real world. It’s just an abstraction.
Points of light fed through a screen are no substitute for being in a place, breathing the air, hearing the sounds and seeing the sights.
Humans were not built to have access to the whole world.
Humans were not built to have access to the whole world.
We were built, originally, to have knowledge of maybe around 100 people and knowledge of an area perhaps of a 10 mile radius at any given time. With so much knowledge of the whole world, we become psychologically unmoored.
That’s why people form such strong, unshakeable ideological viewpoints. They’re protective. They make this vast, unknowable world that we’ve been exposed to smaller and more familiar, less frightening and less unpredictable.
We terraform the world to fit our own worldview. We believe what we want to believe. We choose the news outlets that fit our ideals and thus accept only a custom-made version of events, with all the bits we don’t like neatly trimmed out.
Not only do postmodernist ideas get quickly spread through the internet - they fit perfectly with this bespoke version of reality that humans have formed for ourselves in response to a neverending, overwhelming tsunami of information.
The idea that you can magically change reality to fit what you wish were true, that real problems can be solved by hacking language or thinking enough happy thoughts - this makes a lot of sense in an online world where you can carefully curate your persona
so that people will only see the parts of you that you choose, or where you can curate the information about the world that you like and shut out what disturbs you.
Kids, above all, need to be protected from this. 2D screens are no substitute for real life.
Kids, above all, need to be protected from this. 2D screens are no substitute for real life.
If you plug a child under the age of 16, even 18, into this online world when their brains are still developing, you run the risk of permanently dislocating them from reality for the rest of their lives. When I see the way teenagers on here are talking about
gender and sexuality it is abundantly clear they have no real understanding of the physical world and how it relates to such things. Social media is isolating them from each other, from reality, from touch and smell and sight and sound. We need to stop this.
If you have kids, internet has to be for schoolwork only. No social media, no smartphones, none of this shit. The internet is as bad as alcohol, it's worse than psychedelic drugs. It will fuck up your child's relationship to reality permanently.
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