Apr 28, 2022·edited Apr 28, 2022Liked by H.P. De Veer
I hope that your entertaining hyperbole doesn't reflect actual emotional turmoil over the state of things. Put simply, you are correct but also things are not *that* bad.
The hyping of Meta is the same hype about the world wide web from the 1990s (sometimes our capitalist tech overlords run out of profitable ideas and have to repackage old ones). We haven't turned into cyborgs over that.
Humanity is never going in one knowable direction. We are, of course, bound by the laws of time and entropy, and it may well all crash and burn, but the relation between the competing "real" worlds will always be a complex back-and-forth with innumerable moving parts.
You have indeed found me out! Yes - I knew I was indulging in a bit of hyperbole, I decided it was worth it to stay ahead of the game right now after enduring a decade of tech companies repeatedly telling us we have "nothing to worry about," only to later find that the exact thing that we were worried about has already come to pass.
I am trying to lower the constraints of assuredness on my writing a little bit, which leads to some whackier places, but also allows me to expand my scope a little bit to locate the source of what exactly we are all "up to."
Important to remember, like you say, that there is rarely one specific direction, and that we are subject to myriad forces all tugging the web in each of their own directions and the outcome often being some unexpected formulation that no one intended or predicted.
Thanks for the kind words and encouragement - it really meant a lot to read your comment!
I hope that your entertaining hyperbole doesn't reflect actual emotional turmoil over the state of things. Put simply, you are correct but also things are not *that* bad.
The hyping of Meta is the same hype about the world wide web from the 1990s (sometimes our capitalist tech overlords run out of profitable ideas and have to repackage old ones). We haven't turned into cyborgs over that.
Humanity is never going in one knowable direction. We are, of course, bound by the laws of time and entropy, and it may well all crash and burn, but the relation between the competing "real" worlds will always be a complex back-and-forth with innumerable moving parts.
Or maybe I'm just too old to care.
Either way, I enjoy your writing. Keep it up.
You have indeed found me out! Yes - I knew I was indulging in a bit of hyperbole, I decided it was worth it to stay ahead of the game right now after enduring a decade of tech companies repeatedly telling us we have "nothing to worry about," only to later find that the exact thing that we were worried about has already come to pass.
I am trying to lower the constraints of assuredness on my writing a little bit, which leads to some whackier places, but also allows me to expand my scope a little bit to locate the source of what exactly we are all "up to."
Important to remember, like you say, that there is rarely one specific direction, and that we are subject to myriad forces all tugging the web in each of their own directions and the outcome often being some unexpected formulation that no one intended or predicted.
Thanks for the kind words and encouragement - it really meant a lot to read your comment!
I have been so consistently wrong in the last decade, I've got a new rule; if I can't believe something is true, it probably is.