So I made a thread about the original idea, a series of essa

File: 7a0670f639a44493cf8f25aaa79ccc5e.jpg (69KB, 664x800px) Image search: [Google]

69KB, 664x800px

>>9190577
“Before the seas and lands had been created,
Before the sky that covers everything,
Nature displayed a single aspect only
Throughout the cosmos; Chaos was its name”


Chapter One
Chaos

Libraries, fastfood restaurants, cafeterias, stadiums, and the community bulletin board. The scope of our discussion of loneliness can begin with places such as the ones just mentioned, that is, the relationship of loneliness to the social and public and not loneliness in its pure abstract form. Granted, it may not be the best place to see its gestation and festering growth, but I think it is the best place to observe its most fascinating effects.

Let’s examine each example in the reverse order above. These are not in of themselves the depths of modernity I mentioned earlier, but each can give some insight into the stirrings of those very depths.

The primary point of information exchange in the community bulletin board is the poster, it is thus an interaction between the individual putting up the poster and the wider community (specifically those who pass by). What does this have to do with loneliness, you might be asking yourself? Well, consider the way we use posters to communicate. You might find an offer from a babysitter for her services, an advertisement for an upcoming garage sale, or a notice for a nearby room for rent. This is a form of communication where the message is only particular to its creator, and its message is received ambiguously by an indeterminate person. If a person notices a poster declaring 4 puppies up for adoption, the person who pasted the poster will remain completely unaware, even if the person is indeed interested in the adoption. It is an impersonal method of communication, that much is obvious, it was never designed to be create personal connections to begin with. At the very most, it can lead to more spontaneous are personable communication should the relevant parties talk directly with one another.

You’ll soon see the significance of the impersonal nature of the bulletin board. Many thinkers have compared newer forms of communication to the democratization of traditional mass media (of the podium), but I would argue it’s quite the opposite. Traditional media’s power, or rather, the place of traditional media’s power, remains even in these new seemingly democratized forms: the result of corporate control and the pressing desire for commercialization and monetization. There are further natural barriers to broadcasting a message to millions of people and having them take notice, whether infrastructure, or credibility. Either way, the fact remains that your primary method of communication in the depths is not through a microphone, but through thumb-tacked posters, graffiti, and shouting from the window.

File: Alfred_Rethel_002.jpg (13KB, 175x357px) Image search: [Google]

13KB, 175x357px

>>9190584
But what of the stadium? Surely there is less loneliness in the presence of a crowd. I admit, there are many ways to not be lonely at a ball game, though, what we must be concerned with, are the numerous exceptions. Let us look at three possible scenarios of loneliness to grace the stadium: the non-fan, the fan among his ilk, and the fan in isolation. The non-fan, brought to the stadium by some contrivance, is immediately alone. His discussion of the spectacle is half-hearted. When it is rained out, and he is surrounded on all sides by raw humanity next to the hotdog stand under the concrete superstructure, he stays silent and only broaches small talk when another presses for it. The fan surrounded by his fellow fans can indeed satisfy loneliness, to the extent he desires such connections based on unity and furor. I am not here to trivialize those desires, but humans, as a totality, are much more than those desires, and it's certainly conceivable that they do not desire that in the stadium, despite being a fan of the team. His situation is like that of a man after a Thanksgiving feast, stomach full and being offered one more slice of Pecan pie. He can remember his desire for it, and may even reach for it out of habit, but it is not what he craves at that moment. No, he too can be alienated from those around him, and suddenly alone in the sea of lit up eyes. Furthermore, I think we can all agree, the fan in solitude is equally susceptible to such sentiments, whether it be because the stadium is sparse, or populated by hostile forces.

It should be clear that loneliness is something that can occur regardless the amount of people in the immediate proximity to the lonely soul. In terms of the depths, this means that no matter how many people have sunken to such levels, and how many messages are cried out into the dark, they will not necessarily decrease the amount of loneliness. No, sticking a bunch of lonely people together is no solution to loneliness if the content of their communication is one that doesn’t address their problem.

File: painting-nemesis.jpg (80KB, 745x615px) Image search: [Google]

80KB, 745x615px

>>9190590
The Cafeteria is an especially interesting case study, for it is there that we look at the issue of being observed in public on loneliness. Here, the lonely soul is surrounded by a cohort, that is a group of people they will interact with or see on a regular basis. If they do not talk with other members of their cohort, we can assume they will feel rather alienated in this situation unless that have a rather rare inner contentedness. But the situation gets more interesting when we look at the talkers, and, at the most extreme, the gossipers. They’ll converse, going from topic to topic, about trivial, odd matters, often about other people and issues relating to their cohort. Here is where the problem presents itself, what would a self-conscious individual do if this was their dominant form of communications with others? They would resist sincere confessions and expressions of their true desires, for fear of these things being shared with those without sympathy for them. This situations breeds shallowness for the few who live within the scope of this form of communication, and mistake it for the reality of their cohort, but most people, who know that the situation masks the complexity of the human soul, are left feeling they have no one to reveal themselves to, isolated form the world around them.

Now, to clarify, what is and what is not acceptable in a given forum with similar dynamics to the Cafeteria is in constant flux. Some such cohorts may have a prudish attitude, others, a lewd one, with the amount of either attitude changing over time. Breaking conversational taboos doesn’t change the relationship of the lonely soul to the public cohort. Sexuality is a great example, imagine a cohort of perverts who dine with one another every evening, they discuss many scatalogical subjects, and it appears as though nothing is off limits. However, what happens if you try to broach the subject of one’s feelings of isolation and desire for common affection? They will be derided for ruining everybody’s fun or completely ignored. Indeed, communication within such a self aware cohort can never deal with a problem of authentic loneliness.

I wish to be the eyes in the forest, the shadows behind the wall, the crow upon the fence, the unremarkable face in the crowd.
A painted and decorated mask is still a mask, and acts poorly for the purpose of not attracting attention. When I can laugh or lust without accusing or pitying eyes, why should I feel ashamed?

>>9190577
This reads exactly like one of my undergrad papers where I was trying to hit the word requirement as lazily as possible by writing a bunch of pointless lists, presenting subjective generalities as useful talking points,long lists of examples and adjectives, similes, and a 'conversational' tone that lets me meander at a pace geological.

>So, we arrive at the edge of the deep end. A land of three prophets. The utopians, the cynics, and the war machinists. But before we get to their prophecies, we must describe what lies below.

Dropped it here. An essay about the 'reality' of loneliness in cyberspace? More like an essay on your repressed desire to preach your feelings from a series of socially reductive purple prose fantasy novels.

File: untitled-4.jpg (76KB, 1111x797px) Image search: [Google]

76KB, 1111x797px

>>9190599
There is one further permutation of the Cafeteria we should examine, that is, the masquerade ball. Take this hypothetical situation, the same form of socialization as the cafeteria, but instead the participants are all anonymous; they show up to lunch in a fancy mask and cloak, communicating in nothing but unsigned letters. How would this change this expression of loneliness? For starters, you can now confess anything you wish without fear of its implications reflecting back on you personally. Surely now we can begin to see people having meaningful conversations about their alienation and desire? Ah, but here lies the rub, there is a trade-off with the freedom of anonymity, it comes with a great impotence. Those kind others that may console the confessor of desire can only do so in a generic manner, for they do not know enough about the individual's personal circumstances to completely understand their situation and comment on it thusly. The only way for them to gain this understanding is for the confessor to reproduce more and more of their self beneath the masqurade mask, de-anonymizing themselves through the act of becoming the mask: a laborious and often fruitless process, if not harmful to the confessor.

The lone soul in the fast food restaurant, on the other hand, is a perfect subject for taking a peek at the exact opposite situation of the cafeteria, the lack of self consciousness and indulgence of obscene pleasure. Here, communication takes two major forms, passive observation, and mere formalities. The mere formalities come in the form of your order, there are a limited number of ways to ask for a cheeseburger with fries (indeed, less than you’d think, but more than you’d hope). The passive observation is the much more ambiguous part, that is the conversations that pass the consumer by, the sound of a man loudly complaining on his phone about his ice cubes being frozen when he went to bed and melted when he woke up, for example. What are we doing when we listen distantly to the world around us? Chowing down on fatty, salty, juicy, oily bread and flesh. We focus on the intoxicating taste, the smooth, mushy texture, and listen to the dull, almost unreal sounds of those around us.

This is a common experience in the depths. It is a form of communication in which everything that is communicated is strange, either decontextualized, or paradoxically universal. The faces of strangers are often just as anonymous as the masked members of the cohort attending their masquerade ball. What’s more, consumed as we are with our own pleasure, the words of these strangers are rarely internalized with meaning, at most, they are picked up with a childlike curiosity, before being discarded or saved on a dusty bookshelf never to be picked up again. We are reduced to statues sunning in the garden, just as alone when it is full as when it is empty.

>>9190606
It's just a rough draft. I could use something a bit more constructive than that. Yeah, the writing can be tighter, and I plan on doing that in revision.

I think that you might want to reconsider stopping at that point. My whole goal was to be anything but socially reductive.

>>9190620
Analogy and metaphor shouldn't be used so much. Just cut to the chase, anon is socially atrophied because of internet and laziness

File: apollo_and_daphne.jpg (136KB, 540x704px) Image search: [Google]

136KB, 540x704px

>>9190607
The library isn’t too different, although, out of the examples given, it is probably the least alienating, though not by a significant margin. Information, narratives and a multitude of resources are at the reader’s fingertips. We can be immersed in fictions, texts which give us glimpses into the deeply personal sanctums of another’s soul. They give us the capacity to become intimately familiar with our fellow man and even have the power to reshape our own being from what we learn and observe. However, the information is also overwhelming. No single person can read every book in the library, nor would they ever want to. One must choose exactly where they would like to nest in this literary world. Most people confine themselves to a single genre or a handful of genres, whether on the basis of moral judgments, personal preferences, or situational necessity. One would hope, however, that during this whole process, the library is neutral. In fact, it seems we must assume this, that its collection is merely determined by popular titles, requests, donations ect, and not by ideology.

Furthermore, the library is quiet. It’s a place where personal communications are normally looked down upon, lest you distract a fellow reader. Indeed, it seems to replace communication between individuals with communication between equal individuals with communication between an author and a reader, a more sophisticated form of mass media, but mass media nonetheless. Unlike the poster on the bulletin board, the book in the library is much more respected, much more permanent, and has regulations surrounding it that require the community to be at its defense. It exists not only to be read and understood, but to be experienced. It has a podium, so to speak.

The Depths

So, we arrive at the edge of the deep end. A land of three prophets. The utopians, the cynics, and the war machinists. But before we get to their prophecies, we must describe what lies below.

Simply put, it is a combination of all the isolating methods of communication we have mentioned thus far.

The community bulletin was one of the most direct inspirations, given the prominence of the BBS (Bulletin Board System) as the model for forums on the early internet. These simple image and text boards were a way of easily pinning posters on a single or handful of centralized boards. Unlike more traditional and freewheeling community bulletin boards, only a handful of people now had the ability to regulate and take down posts. This model continues to have a massive impact on online communication, being the basis not just for forums that merely adopt a modern version of the system, but for almost all social media.

>>9190630
I suppose you're right. I'll cut them down.

File: narcissus-and-echo-500x280.jpg (45KB, 500x280px) Image search: [Google]

45KB, 500x280px

>>9190639
The stadium is equally relevant, for with the Bulletin Board’s transition to cyberspace, came with a newfound popularity. Suddenly thousands of people could be looking at the same board at the same time, capable of contributing a new post every couple of seconds. It became crowded. Thus, communication takes on the social properties of a large communal gathering.

And with such a communal gathering, comes with gossip, self-consciousness, just as in the cafeteria. It’s anonymous mirror, the masquerade ball, allows for freer speech, at the expense of that speech’s ability to genuinely and authentically benefit the speaker.
Alternatively, the creation of such a space and its ability to share images and text, also facilitates the lurker, one who cocoons himself in obscene pleasure, not participating in the communication, but listening passively. The fast food connoisseur of the digital world.

The ability to use technology to create near instantaneously copies of vast amounts of information also makes it possible to put the knowledge and resources previously held by the library available even more readily to those who have access to the internet. As was true for the more traditional libraries, communications between the individuals imbibing such flows of information are more limited, after all, the platforms which produce such information are not really designed to spur discussion.

The question of neutrality, well, we will see the truth of the matter as we broach the first two prophets.

The Utopians claimed that cyberspace offers a radical new space, free from state power, indeed any power. The Utopian viewpoint is perhaps best captured by John Perry Barlow’s 1996 manifesto “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.”

File: narcissus3210.gif (86KB, 352x455px) Image search: [Google]

86KB, 352x455px

>>9190657
“We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear….
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.
Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.”

The Utopians were not the first on the scene of the depths, but so did they also predate the emergence of these spaces. Their origins can be traced to the counterculture movements of the 60’s. Several of the people who had believed that LSD and free love would make possible a society free of war, abuse of power, and oppression went on to Silicon Valley in California, believing that cyberspace would instead make such a utopian dream possible.

But were they correct? Did cyberspace really represent a radical place that marked a point of resistance to power itself?

The second prophets, the Cynics, would say no.

Telecom and media corporations have great ability to control the information flows that dominate cyberspace. The term, cyberspace, after all was coined in a 1984 science fiction novel (“Neuromancer” by William Gibson, our principal cynic) where a futuristic matrix of “cyberspace” was dominated by corporations and their employed hackers, the only resistance being a criminal underground. But, what about the public places seemingly removed from corporate power? Image and text boards barely paying for their servers, where the rules are fast and loose, even the rules imposed by state power. There, of course, remains some corporate gatekeepers, massive search engines primarily. Let’s assume and imagine such a forum that can survive being blacklisted by Google, does power simply not exist in this place?

The answer is once again no. There are two main sources of power that remain, moderation and ideology.

File: 5f6d92f4fc8dcd26175bd05a3afc7c80.jpg (907KB, 1690x1051px) Image search: [Google]

907KB, 1690x1051px

>>9190669
Anyone who’s had experience with a complete lack of moderation knows that like a park without people to cut the grass, eventually it will become overgrown. If there’s no one to stop it, there will be plenty of people (and robots too) to post gore, child pornography, spam, advertisements and malicious links. What does not get posted in such unmoderated spaces is serious discussion, that is rendered impossible. Any actual people still posting for non-illicit purposes are doing so almost as a piece of performance art, doing so either for the pure enjoyment of the act, or to troll the few brave souls who peek in for the first time. Since we must assume that our public space in the depths of modernity is actually usable as a forum, we must assume some form of moderation, and thus the power to remove posts and ban posters, to force central control over discussion.

The second source of power is perhaps even more sinister. Ideology is like a frame, it doesn’t change the content of what it encases, but creates a constructed context. It creates a certain logic to the world, a sort of homebrewed etiology that explains why things are the way they are. Ideologies are not moral codes in of themselves, but as our understanding of the world informs how we respond to it, so does ideology inform what we “should” do. In a sense, when we act upon ideology, we are only following through on its own external logic.

File: Pygmalion.jpg (28KB, 443x333px) Image search: [Google]

28KB, 443x333px

>>9190709
Ideologies are, of course, nothing but abstractions, and give us no greater insight into the world than actually looking at it does. Then why do they have so much power over us? Well, the problem with ideology is that we are always in it, by nature of trying to understand our world and break it down into simple terms. In fact, when we try to escape ideology we often simply drag ourselves deeper into it. For example, what if we just do what science tells us is the best way forward? Well, in 1845 England, one thing that was regarded as pure science was the hard economic science of Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations”, which British lawmakers held up as an excuse for inaction during the Great Potato Famine in Ireland, which would cause the death of 1 million Irish, roughly 1/8th of the entire population. On the other end of the spectrum, in Stalinist Russia, their science was “the immortal science of Marxist-Leninism”, a science which professed that Communism was the inevitable end of society, and that the Communist Party would be the vehicle of history in this regard, effectively making anything the party did justifiable by historical necessity to reach Communism. The subsequent show trials of enemies of the Party, gulags, and political persecution would lead to the death of roughly 1/8th of the Russian population. Eugenics and Social Darwinism in the holocaust of Nazi Germany, the influence of American political “science” with its cottage industry of think tanks on disastrous wars such as Vietnam, the list goes on and on. Perhaps the most ideological statement to make is that we should simply “do what works”, as you do not even question who this works for, and for what purpose.
In the end, the best we can to keep ideology in check is to critique it, and realize that it is always acting as a form of power.
But what does all this mean in the context of our public depths? In terms of communication and public forums, ideology takes on a new dimension. War.

It is a constant battle for control over which ideology will dominate the space (as the most successful ideologies are those which demand propagation from their adherents). Propaganda, memes, debates, arguments, slogans, and strawmen are out in full force constantly. Which ideology becomes dominant in a given place at a given time is due to a multitude of factors, factors which often reflect back on other another in a dynamic constantly changing mess. In other words, the flow of ideological power is overdetermined, each factor determining every other factor.

File: 39745-1415898166-PYGMALION AND GALATEA No.jpg (638KB, 864x1188px) Image search: [Google]

638KB, 864x1188px

>>9190722
But it would be a mistake to simply discount all the struggles in these spaces as merely ideological ones. There are real, material, and egoistic forces at work as well. Besides the most immediate pleasure seekers, those searching for attention, validation and consolation, there are those advancing their own political projects for their own benefit. The NEETs (those not in education, employment or training, a designation that was started by the British government), often voice their support for social welfare and universal basic income, the video game consumers will likewise speak of the need for better quality of such games, and the toiling worker may express the need for higher wages and fear of automation of their simple tasks.

All these things considered, we come to the visions of our last prophets: the war machinists. They, unlike the previous two, do not make a value judgment on the promise of the depths. Instead, they merely describe it. The public depths of cyberspace are a warlike landscape, where alliances are constantly shifting, and power constantly changes its form throughout the cycles of domination. The best metaphor for this war is not chess, where each actor’s strength and attack is determined by a precoded hierarchy, but Go, whereby each piece’s significance is exterior to themselves. This idea is best described by the principal war machinist, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze.

"Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive. They have qualities; a knight remains a knight, a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop. Each is like a subject of the statement endowed with relative power, and these relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation, that is, the chess player or the game’s form of interiority. Go pieces, I contrast, are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person function: “It” makes a move. “It” could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant. Go pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no intrinsic properties, only situational ones. Thus the relations are very different in the two cases.

File: Ovid_Metamorphoses_-_Biblis_en_fontaine.jpg (190KB, 892x729px) Image search: [Google]

190KB, 892x729px

>>9190737
Within their milieu of interiority, chess pieces entertain biunivocal relations with one another, and with the adversary’s pieces: their functioning is structural. One the other hand, a Go piece has only a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations with nebulas or constellations, according to which it fulfills functions of insertion or situation, such as bordering, encircling, shattering. All by itself, a Go piece can destroy an entire constellation synchronically; a chess piece cannot (or can do so diachronically only). Chess is indeed a war, but an institutionalized, regulated, coded war with a front, a rear, battles. But what is proper to Go is war without battle lines, with neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles even: pure strategy, whereas chess is a semiology."

Much like the Go pieces, the warriors in the depths have much of their power exterior to themselves. It is through their relation to other warriors, and their own strategies, that they exert strength and change the battlefield around them.

Nonetheless, I sense this metaphor is incomplete. It is difficult for someone to comprehend themselves, or even larger institutions, as mere Go pieces. How then, can we imagine the depths as they really are?

Let us start by going on a journey, whereby we begin at the redemption of Man. In the Christian Bible, when Jesus laid in torment on the cross he loudly shouted “Oh god, oh god, why hast thou forsaken me?!” a bizarre proclamation for all familiar with Christian theology. Jesus, after all, being the sun of God, was a member of the holy trinity, and thus god himself. If we are to take this exclamation seriously, we must come to the conclusion that in this very moment of torment God was alienated from himself. That for this one moment, he became as one of us, suddenly divorced from the holy love and warmth of the Lord, whereby the world was reduced to all it was, no longer the will of God but simply existing. All that was left was material and man (here, lowercase).

File: 726994._SX540_.jpg (58KB, 540x460px) Image search: [Google]

58KB, 540x460px

>>9190746
Yet, it seems this too is not enough. For man still acts as though possessed, and we cannot admit the existence of demons, sectors, and spooks without the existence of God or gods. How can we possibly hope to explain the actions of man in the depths, or anywhere else, with nothing but the material world, lest we reduce man to a single static, inhuman entity? The answer may lie in the world of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”. A world of gods without Divinity. Here gods were more than just flawed and unvirtuous, they were defeatable, constantly outwitted and bested by one another, and occasionally by mortals as well. Like the depths, the world of the “Metamorphoses” is driven my unending change and by human character. And indeed, there are two particular characters of this worldly epic that can provide us insight into the current predicament facing the depths: Pygmalion, a particularly notable lonely soul, and Nemesis, a particularly unnotable Goddess of revenge.

It is clear then, that the depths are a place which increasingly isolates its inhabitants, and that these inhabitants are locked into a warlike landscape with constantly changing dynamics of all forms of power. Knowing this, it must be up to these inhabitants to, one, develop a set of strategies to decrease their isolation, and two, develop a set of strategies that allows one to fight for a good purpose, a purpose which will hopefully include the first issue.

It is urgent that one keeps in mind that much like Go, there are no precoded rules in this war of the depths. There is, however a law, enforced by the very nature of this place. Its effects are self-evident and widely infamous.

“All that is holy is profaned; all that is solid turns to air.”