Thanks for joining me. I was apart.
Perhaps the first thing any even half-aware computer programmer, especially those who work with both web programming and whatever ‘data science’ is (no one knows… shhhh) should address on any new site is to mention the incredible increase in ‘siloing’ of people aka ‘Users’ (w/ a capital ‘U’).
As more and more of us choose to remove ourselves from one-to-one in-person communication except with those we choose to, the domain lexicons of everyone are diverging at an incredible rate. Everything you say, either in person or online, will almost certainly be ‘heard’ a different way by someone. At the least, another’s understanding of what you ‘meant’ will be parallel or tangent to what you ‘thought you meant’.
At worst, and much more likely, is that you do in fact mean something else, at least subconsciously. This actually is a phenomenon that is being urgently described (∴ formulae exist, which can be applied) by Sociologists (who turn out to be pretty good at math) and can be found on the National Institute’s of Health ‘pubmed’ system at NCBI, and search the Sociology papers for ‘bullshit’. It’s called ‘Believing Your Own Bullshit’.
You may ask ‘where’s the link to that’? The answer is, if you were interested enough in what I had written, it would be better if you actually went and looked it up. The vast majority of human beings who even read this are either not that interested, or just clicking on anything that looks like a distraction.
Now, this isn’t to say that I am a pessimist. Far from it, in fact. I know, in my heart of heart that things will be OK even if they really go to complete shit. That’s just one of those things about persepctive. Even if the world keeps on dragging you down, as the old song says, that’s no reason not laugh and smile. When you do that, at some point you realize you aren’t so much falling as flying, and maybe you’ll find someone down low who needs a lift up the stairs.
So what? What’s the point? As I am the sort of ‘bouncy’ (kind words) person who has to just run everywhere and see everything, what I am seeing is really, really scary and people need to know that ‘we all see it happening’. It seems as if everyone is diving into silos of inclusion-exclusion such as social media apps and online-games in a way I’ve never seen before. It really wasn’t making sense when i was seeing it as simply isolated cases of very-addictive user experience. Something seems to be really putting people on edge in virtually every domain. Look at any issue of a Psychology, Sociology, Human Resource Management, virtually any Governement agency charged with the good of everyone, and everyone is seeing the same thing happening.
People are walking around scared in a way that is far beyond what might be expected. We, especially those of us who live in the most diverse and cosmopolitan areas, have known people all of our lives who have been through war, famine, the worst you could imagine, yet they never seemed to act as people do now. Certainly, the lack of confidence in our Governemntal systems isn’t helping. Is that it? Terrorism isn’t entirely fictional, although it is certainly not something it would even make sense to worry about, unless someone is paying you to. People have tried to blame games, movies, and other media as long as anyone can remember, and perhaps there is merit in that, but I would tend to think they are more of a system than any cause. Kids go and play FortNite not to practice for doing harm to others, but to learn how to live in a world where ‘that could suddenly happen’. Of course, learning tactics and even strategy will only go so far n the real world, but who knows? Maybe Discord will keep working no matter what, somehow, and the twenty-somethings will make great and necessary communicators. Perhaps they will be the ones who teach the older generation how to talk to each other.
My best guess as to ‘what has changed’ is simply that we have been allowing our managers and leaders, and even our parents and older wise folk, to bullshit us for too long. I mean ‘bullshit’ in the formal sense, in the Sociological sense. ‘Formal bullshit’. It’s a thing, you can look it up on NCBI and search for the ‘bullshit’ papers.
The one paragraph summary of ‘formal bullshit’ is pretty simple. People in positions of authority are given unrealistic demands for work to be done, at ridiculously low cost, with workers the company doesn’t care about, who are all probably spending a good chunk of their time trying to find a ‘loyal’ employer. No, that wasn’t backwards. Companies just have removed ‘loyalty’ as anything except a platitude to explain ‘why we’re fucking you over’, and people stopped believing things anyone above them said a long time ago. Those who do believe things people who are supposed to be in charge tell them, such as young people or military veterans, or those who have had their emotional maturity forced out of synch with their chronological maturity suffer the most, as they are the most trusting. So, managers and leaders tell ‘half-truths’ or ‘euphemisms’ that, even if people understand them, people increasingly simply will not tolerate it anymore.
Given the state of the world today, it’s hard to really listen to anything that comes out of the mouths from the same people who got us into this mess. So, people are casting about for truths. There was an old television show that captured the world’s attention with the engimatic ‘the turth is out there’. That was at a time before there was ‘too much truth out there’, perhaps. I think that there are increasingly situations where ‘bullshit’ and ‘no bullshit’ simply cannot co-exist, and we see a lot fo social issues because of it.
It is said often now ‘No Justice, No Truth’, ‘Know Justice, Know Truth’ and many are disturbed by what they think is an ominous tone when they ‘hear’ the first version said. Which version would you hear, had you heard it said aloud before reading it? I think that so many very intelligent people are saying this is pretty simple. It’s a formula that is probably the only way forward. We cannot proceed in any meaningful fashion without a levelling of the playing field. It makes no sense, as everyone seems to be saying, that innocent people are imprisoned while the most corrupt receive the most rewards.
So, what’s going on? Why do you think people getting so squirrely lately? It seems like everyone is picking sides for some kind of end-game that no one even wants. Why? We can’t blame everything on one guy, can we? Would anyone give anyone, especially that ‘any one’ that much credit to have this much power over all of us, regardless of job title?
The weird thing in all this is that somehow, by being the worst possible person for the job, we’ve all suddenly awoke to the possibility of changing things like our current leadership by poular demand. Under any previous administration, even Nixon, there was a ‘let’s let the system work’ feeling overall. Certainly, marginalized groups have never stopped pointing out that they are being marginilized. Yet now, everyone feels a little of what so many have felt not only their own lives but a casting out that has lasted generations.
With this empowerment, though, come those who didn’t get the memo that tryign to force the situation with lone-wolf behavior is alwyas going to have the opposite effect. The object of hatred becomes a victim, and whatever horrible things they may or may not have done will never be known. The outliers who are stirred to action don’t see this. Worse, they are gullible enough to believe the broadcast promises of inclusion, only to realize that they don’t fit in the promised new home as they did anywhere else. Perhaps that’s all it is, the thing that’s causing small numbers of misguided but motivated people to do horrible things. They believed the bullshit, and simply could not reconcile things when it melted before their eyes.
“Do you know who the President is?”
(mumbling from the tranqs):
“Some asshole.”
– David S. Goyer, “Blade: Trinity” (2004)
Leftiger 
*mints, not months. Oopsie.
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