Bug

rogueish:

One cannot be expected to march full-bore into an interpersonal relationship based on no common ground. How ill-advised would that be? The issue, however, lies with the fact that where shared obstacles and interests might be enough material to last the star-crossed lovers and hetero life mates of the carefully edited and encapsulated multiverse of film, literature, and story for the brief entirety of their public lives, the real world is rarely so dynamic or exciting. There are gaps and valleys in the everyday minutiae that cannot be filled in with erudite banter about the oeuvre of post-rock and postmodernism. Even before the initial shine fades, relationships—real relationships—consist mainly of long stretches of dull, prosaic moments that can be traversed only by a wearied, begrudging, and ultimately loving acceptance of the very real human being opposite you. Once the great screaming fights happen—and they will assuredly happen—one cannot simply hold up a boom box, blast Peter Gabriel, and make everything better. Relationships, friendships—even ones that take place predominantly online—these are things which require a fathomless connection and understanding in order to expand beyond anything superficial, and to acquire those things one must first dig deep beyond the marrow and expose oneself. But in an overly self-aware culture where nothing is sacred and everything is ridiculed, the prospect of being willingly vulnerable is terrifying. There is a palpable risk here of being hurt, of having the fundamental you-ness be weighed and measured and found wanting, whether by complete strangers or people you could see yourself loving, and it becomes so much easier to, in a sense, not be a real person—to simply be a series of likes and dislikes and perfunctory information; a picture attached to a blog which says nothing, reveals nothing; to be a ghost in the machine of the world.

When this quote first showed up on my dash I just thought it was just banal reflections on a non-existent problem, but looking at the whole article, it’s actually really fucking creepy. This is how it starts:

I stumbled onto a blog of a young woman who had posted a few videos of Warren, notably all four parts of his final appearance on Letterman. Earlier entries consisted of quotes from the works of David Mitchell and Joe Hill among others, clips of Doctor Who and Californication, scans of Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan, etc. In short, what I saw was someone who by every indication shared much of my current cultural tastes. What I did not see, however, was anything about her. Beyond her profile picture (which I admit was attractive enough to necessitate this pseudo-stalking for something more substantial) there was nothing. No personal glimpses into the depths of her, no self-pitying rants about being lonely and unloved, no poorly written woe-is-me-isms about the unfair hand she’d been dealt. Her short bio included only her gender (female), name ([REDACTED]), age (24), likes (Kurosawa, Bertolucci, Le Corbusier), dislikes (blatantly unforeign names, apparently), and a disclaimer which stated that nothing on her blog belonged to her.

The problem here is glaring in its prominence: Apart from some small insight into her personality, she declined to surrender anything real. Here was someone with whom I could see myself hazarding an actual human connection, yet her principal online persona amounted to a blog which could have been tended by an automaton with no one being the wiser. What I had here was an approximation, an idea, a blueprint of skin and soft tissue with none of the faults and foibles and utterly imperfect yet utterly wondrous idiosyncrasies that betray a living, breathing person at the other end of the noosphere.

Yes, that’s the author demanding that all women on the internet surrender the deep intimacies of their personal life to him.

neo-luddite

smash servers

cut cables

exhume steve jobs and throw him into the tiber

(via thenoobyorker)