jjulius
A hammer is fantastic for driving nails, but it's not really all that good at washing a dog.
Differences of opinion are okay, but it's harder to get along when our lives are lived in spaces that silo us off and encourage distrust and anger. Screens do that to us, meatspace doesn't.
We're absolutely fascinated by them. Gobsmacked.
And many people blindly believe what they see on their screens because they don't know any better. They trust the article they read without thinking too deeply about it or looking for alternative perspectives. They gobble up the reel they just watched and are irate about whatever it told them to be irate about. But this isn't anything new, just look at how easily grandma and grandpa gobbled up whatever Fox News fed them in 1998, or what heavily edited images designed to manipulate their thoughts and opinions they were exposed to in the 70s, the 80s when they turned the television on.
Screens have always, and will always, be used to manipulate people, and that's been incredibly amplified over the past 15-20 years.
Yet if you take the screen away and spend time connecting with people on a deeper level, really spend time getting to know them, life feels a hell of a lot different than what the screens show you. Understanding one another is a hell of a lot easier. Everyone can see exactly the same thing as the other person - the analog, meatspace world around them that isn't being manipulated and twisted in an effort to get them to think a certain way.
It's the screens.
Our inability to collectively get along ramped up exponentially as smartphones took off. Phones, and the platforms within that people have become dependent upon, are the root.
Edit: Instead of getting to know people at a deep level, understanding what shapes their core views and how they view the world, and constructively communicating with them to shape their worldview over time for the better, we prefer to yell and scream at each other in 140 characters for the sake of upvotes.
Real change and progress takes time and effort, but for some reason we're collectively deluded into thinking that it'll happen via upvotes in 45 seconds and without ever having looked one another in the eye.
That drive fucking sucks ass, don't get me wrong, but oh well, that's part of life - the kid has to learn that sometimes shit's not gonna go their way and they have to figure out how to get over it. I'll be damned if I'm gonna teach them that the way they can calm themselves down and regulate their emotions is by the sweet, sweet blue hue of a tablet.
We're a two working parent household and we keep screen time limited to a short amount of TV time. We'll expose them to screens more and more so that we can properly educate them over time, sure. But man, I don't get the whole, "even a two working parent household barely has time for anything and is stressful," bit because - yeah, that's exactly what parenting is.
Parenting is hard. It's exhausting. If you don't have a village, the onus is on you to do it right. That's what we've signed up for, is giving our all to our kids until they're out on their own. That's what we're supposed to do. It's not supposed to be easy. But we're here, so let's do the hard work and do it right. We owe it to them.
I say this as a parent - hogwash. Fred Rogers looked into children's souls and spoke to them deeply at a nice comfortable pace and kids felt that, whereas today's modern screens utterly eviscerate their attention spans.
Likewise, what with your shot-from-the-hip response that lambastes OP in a non-constructive way, the very kind of unhelpful "dialogue" that is all too common on the Internet these days.
Perhaps someone is genuinely ignorant and it could've behooved you to have kindly offered suggestions as to which of the "thousands decent science fiction and literature sites out there" your strongly opinionated, holier than thou self finds most valuable? Seems like a better place to start than whatever... this is.
This is pedantic. If folk can't see that this is a slow roll towards rolling out the same thing in the US eventually, I've got a bridge to sell you.
... so? Being linked to it is not an obligation to bother with it, neither is FOMO.
Chris Dave, Marcus King and Cory Henry @ the Blue Note, an absolutely stellar performance from start to finish https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woiMRaeimqQ
Pino Palladino, Blake Mills & Same Gendel - Just Wrong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im-Avcv7deE
Pino Palladino, Blake Mills & Chris Dave - Taka https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6s5JavYgE0
Snarky Puppy - Lingus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_XJ_s5IsQc
Robert Glasper, Chris Dave, Derek Hodge & Yasiin Bey, Live @ North Sea Jazz Festival 2019, a really dope combination of contemporary and classic Jazz alongside Hip Hop (Glasper riffing on some Thelonious Monk while trading phrases with Chris Dave as Bey drops some unreleased Black Star is so damn fun) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5QVcYeT74I
R+R=NOW performing Resting Warrior live, time signature is 15/8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmrYWVos0Cs
Nate Smith Live @ Paradiso https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pVRd_hproY
Nubya Garcia @ KEXP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7d9T71UWXE
Yussef Dayes - Black Classical Music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPXamHHDfNI
God yes, please. I backpack and mountaineer in the PNW and have been trying to research trip ideas up in British Columbia, and as a result I discovered https://bivouac.com.
Here's a website that's still frequently used by a large number of people as a valuable resource, is regularly updated and maintained, and yet looks like it's straight out of 1995.
Every pages loads instantaneously, everything is simple yet packed with detail, and it's such a basic, straightforward, delightfully pleasant experience to just browse through the site. I was so thrilled after just 5 minutes on the site that I threw them $25 for a year's full access.
Sorry for the tangent, but oh man, it's such a refreshingly stark contrast to the rest of the bullshit that fills the web these days.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQhjkemEyUo
When I ask ChatGPT certain questions, it very clearly shows me the sources it's searching through in the form of favicons, and they're always the favicons of sites that are in the first 5-10 results for a Google search query that would fit what I've asked the LLM. It will then cite those websites as it's source, with a direct link to the page that also shows up in an equivalent Google search. It does that daily.
And that's OK.
Ah, but that's precisely the beauty of life, that there is no meaning. Life just "is".
See, this made me know. I'm gonna go shower. :(
I mean, when someone blanket generalizes and casts a very wide net, saying that it happens "all the time", and someone with 40 years of theater-going experience in those locales has not seen it happen once, then yeah, they're gonna point out that you're, at the very least, hyperbolically stretching the truth.
Please spare me the high and mightiness about any passive aggressiveness in my post, I just responded in kind to your own passive dig at those locales. If you're going to make tall claims like you did, don't be surprised when people push back.