So many people outraged but very few offering any context or insightful suggestions. Assisted by social media insane demand for controversy and dispute ( even without bad actors tweaking the algorithms), there seems very difficult for the sane rational voices to gain attention.
> "The shitstorm," writes Han, "represents an authentic phenomenon of digital communication."
This phenomenon, he states, is also a cause for the lack of proper politicking in the era of digital communication, since everyone can participate in a fleeting "shitstorm" there's no lingering narrative to keep the discourse on, internalise it, and enact change; people just move from shitstorm to shitstorm, each outrage is very ephemeral, and shit-flinging cannot enact any change or deeper discourse about the root causes that caused said shitstorm. Again, information is just additive and leaves no space for closing back on itself in a more general concept to be discussed about.
The "flood the zone" strategy seems to just attach itself to this quality of digital communication, using the ephemeral, narrativeless information to continuously drive an agenda, moving our attention into an ethereal moving target, we never get any sense of closure.
> "Meanwhile, the public, the senders and receivers of these communications have become a digital swarm -- not a mass, or a crowd, or Negri and Hardt's antiquated notion of a "multitude," but a set of isolated individuals incapable of forming a "we," incapable of calling dominant power relations into question, incapable of formulating a future because of an obsession with the present. The digital swarm is a fragmented entity that can focus on individual persons only in order to make them an object of scandal.
That and red states having an aversion to education.
- People who are cruel are not fit to make important decisions in human society
- The most important quality in a human's life is dignity
- There needs to be a return to spirituality and philosophy, away from religion and tribalism
These ideas if contemplated and thought through on an individual and collective levels would undo much of what makes modern living unpleasant and bring about some wonderful new perks :)
Recommend the read of "Psychopolitics", "The Crisis of Narration", and "In the Swarm", those books eloquently described feelings I've had since the social media boom of mid-2010s. We are living through a data totalitarianism, missing overarching concepts in the noise of never-ending additive data that never concludes into a larger concept for us to grasp, just pure bombardment of more information without having any respite to put all of that together in a sense of deeper knowledge, to understand the world we are actually living in.