Fear sells. If you fill content with mortal danger then we find it hard to ignore - we’re wired to both seek out and/or avoid dangers.

Just because media sources are ramping up the hype to compete in an ever narrowing market, it doesn’t mean humanity is in more danger of self-destruction than it was 100 or 1000 years ago. When the news outlets start saying “Everything is great!” That is a sign to start worrying.

Big bad things are relatively rare and so are newsworthy. Little good things are everywhere. Little bad things are dealt with. Big good things are exceedingly rare and so usually unavailable to report on.

So you look around you personally and you see lots of little good things happening and little bad things being dealt with and that’s so common it’s not reported on. Then the media rounds up all of the rare big bad things from around the world, not mentioning all the little good things going on in everyone else’s lives, and it looks to you like a false picture of the world. But both worlds are true, you just have to remember that there’s a whole world full of unremarkable little okay lives not being reported on.

But also, it sounds like you do live in a place where things are pretty nice, on the global scale. It’s also useful to be aware that you’ve probably got it a lot better than many, many other people. But it’s still not a world of total darkness like the news reports: even people living much harder lives still have lots of little good things to enjoy, and their hardships usually mostly amount to lots more little bad things they have to deal with.

I understand that.

What I’m thinking of is the idea that we’ve created something, a runaway virus, that’s escaped our control, almost like an A.I. that’s turned on us. It appears to be of us but it’s not. It doesn’t share the same objectives or sense of ethics. It’s contrary to everything we are. I don’t mean the owners of the media, or capitalism, or a failed democracy. Think of it as a beast. If you were religious you might call it the Devil. It’s an abstract force that divides us and creates confusion, indecision, suspicion and mental instability.
How do we resist it when it presents itself as essential to our best interests? And what actually is it?

From Carl Jung

“Indeed, it is becoming ever more obvious that it is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes. The supreme danger which threatens individuals as well as whole nations is a psychic danger. Reason has proved itself completely powerless, precisely because its arguments have an effect only on the conscious mind and not on the unconscious. The greatest danger of all comes from the masses, in whom the effects of the unconscious pile up cumulatively and the reasonableness of the conscious mind is stifled. Every mass organization is a latent danger just as much as a heap of dynamite is. It lets loose effects which no man wants and no man can stop.” (http://www.idleworm.com/ideas/jung_ballard_collective_insanity.shtml

It is AI driven. The rest is what I already said - preying on our human instincts to survive and avoid death.

Note: some organisms change their physiological structures under certain stresses. Maybe the same has been happening to us since we started messing with artificial lighting and diet.

The rest is what I already said - preying on our human instincts to survive and avoid death. — I like sushi

The media, is that what you mean?

What I’m thinking of is the idea that we’ve created something, a runaway virus, that’s escaped our control, almost like an A.I. that’s turned on us. — Brett

I think I know what you mean. We can contemplate a system of 7.8 billion human beings, which means 7.8 billion networked brains. Not only does technology give us simultaneous global awareness of all the news that AI finds fit to print, which forces this complexity on our awareness, but we grapple also with the necessary mystery of technologies that no one can hope to find time to understand. Of course we have experts in this or that field, but the short human lifespan and accelerating technical progress prevents any single mind from grasping human technical knowledge in its fullness. Philosophy looks in this context like a strategy of grasping illuminations of essence that must remain abstract and general.

It doesn’t share the same objectives or sense of ethics. It’s contrary to everything we are. — Brett

As I see it, the motives involved are still ours. Yet the system has a kind of life of its own. Consider how distant most of us in the first-world are from food production. Most of us work for abstract 'video game points' in our bank account, which we can then take to the grocery store, the landlord, and the mall Amazon. Most of us were born into a world where this was the norm, nature itself. Another norm is the use of 4000 pound fossil-fuel-burning vehicles to get everywhere. And there is no frontier. Everything is always already owned. Those 'points' are realer than anything else, one might say, simply because all of us believe that all of us believe in them.

What a refreshing post. The way you write reminds me of the Kafka parable “Before the Law”.

“Grasping illuminations of essence that must remain abstract and general”.

Perfect. I wish more could contribute like that.

In what form should we try to grasp this reality, what language? Or is there a new language to be learned, a new mental state required to move into the future?

It’s like something’s happening and we can’t grasp it, we have no experience to fall back on. All we see is the world fed to us in old images: jackboots, martyrs, apocalyptic cities, tyrants, storm clouds, angry men and weeping women. Tired, cliched images empty of meaning, a B- grade movie. And worse, we try to make meaning out of those hackneyed images.

I like the idea of calling this thing “AI”, it makes some sense, gives it some form we can comprehend. It’s not as we imagined (how slow we are); some robotic, computerised creature, but something far more sophisticated, and invisible.

If you were religious, you would know it's the Devil.

What a refreshing post. — Brett

Thank you for your kind response. Of course I enjoyed all of your posts in this thread, and these inspired me to contribute.

In what form should we try to grasp this reality, what language? Or is there a new language to be learned, a new mental state required to move into the future? — Brett

I personally don't see an opening toward something radically new. I do like what we are doing right now, though, which is something like clarifying our shared situation (and shared alienation, I think.)

It’s like something’s happening and we can’t grasp it, we have no experience to fall back on. All we see is the world fed to us in old images: jackboots, martyrs, apocalyptic cities, tyrants, storm clouds, angry men and weeping women. Tired, cliched images empty of meaning, a B- grade movie. And worse, we try to make meaning out of those hackneyed images. — Brett

That's a poetic way to put it, and I agree. I think this relates to what Heidegger meant by 'curiosity' and the banalization in 'idle talk.' But I am also reminded of the book I am currently reading, The History of Materialism by Lange and his approving portrait of Epikuros (as he spells it.) Humanity has weathered this kind of pluralistic, spectacular decadence before ---but this time the technology makes it less and less escapable. The screens that drown us become necessary for paying the bills. In the US, many of the decent jobs involve extending the spectacle (machine learning and website construction.) It's we who are becoming atoms and void. Alienation is medicalized and treated with pills.

Have you looked into The Society of the Spectacle ?

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.
...
The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
...
This is the principle of commodity fetishism, the domination of society by “intangible as well as tangible things,” which reaches its absolute fulfillment in the spectacle, where the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible par excellence.
...
The celebrity, the spectacular representation of a living human being, embodies this banality by embodying the image of a possible role. Being a star means specializing in the seemingly lived; the star is the object of identification with the shallow seeming life that has to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations which are actually lived. Celebrities exist to act out various styles of living and viewing society unfettered, free to express themselves globally. They embody the inaccessible result of social labor by dramatizing its by-products magically projected above it as its goal: power and vacations, decision and consumption, which are the beginning and end of an undiscussed process.
...
The consumption celebrity superficially represents different types of personality and shows each of these types having equal access to the totality of consumption and finding similar happiness there. — Debord

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsHtSPub3w8

I like the idea of calling this thing “AI”, it makes some sense, gives it some form we can comprehend. It’s not as we imagined (how slow we are); some robotic, computerised creature, but something far more sophisticated, and invisible. — Brett

I agree here, too. It is invisible. What is ontically closest is ontologically farthest. It's the water in which we swim, a contingent development dimly conceived as necessity itself. It needs no ideological support, having become a habit of interpretation. I think AI is a good metaphor.

The media, is that what you mean? — Brett

I think you'd be interested in some media studies. As you note, the world depicted by the media has taken on a life of its own - this has been the subject of considerable commentary and some insightful analyses.

Some of the notable books and essays include Marshall McLuhan The Media is the Message, Neil Postman Amusing ourselves to Death (this is a book I've read excerpts from over many years and is on my must-read list). In fact Neil Postman has a lot of really interesting and relevant things to say about the whole phenomenon, you will find his homepage here.

There's actually a lot of commentary and media about this issue, but it can be hard to discern in our media-soaked environment.

I think you'd be interested in some media studies. — Wayfarer

I have read a bit on media studies. Marshall McLuhan I’m familiar with. I did quickly check out your reference to Postman. Their work is always interesting to read in light of things. But in someways I see them as not so much clarifying things as adding to the white noise. I’m not even sure what terms to use in these posts. It’s like the media is just the stone the AI writes on. This is the only way I can write about how things look to me. I know it’s a bit nebulous but if I use standard terms then the understanding becomes standard and so to the response.

Yes, I have read a bit on ideas of The Spectacle;
“All that once was directly lived has become mere representation."

It also brings to mind Baudrillard’s ideas on the erosion of meaning and simulacra.

Maybe this is the way we have to live, it’s the only thing that makes sense, even though it does not. Migod, I’m beginning to sound like a French post-structuralist.

This I like, too;

“It's the water in which we swim, a contingent development dimly conceived as necessity itself. It needs no ideological support, having become a habit of interpretation

I continue with this OP in the hope of clarifying ideas I have. They may not be cohesive but other posts may help me formulate something I’m trying to grasp, or straighten me out, or shoot me down in flames.

What the media, including the Internet, has done is allow the development of a universal unconsciousness, or maybe a universal consciousness (I’m not sure), that contains more ideas and beliefs, more signs than a single mind has so far had to cope with.

Though some of those ideas or beliefs are not part of our world they bear down on us alongside, or intermingled with, our own cultural ideas. This is happening to everyone to one degree or another.

This “world” is made up elements like headlines and images, archetypal in their simplicity and delivered to us rapidly without real explanation or even meaning: the burning building, the car crash, the shootings, the tyrant, the armies, the warlords, the burning forests, the angry mob, the weeping woman, they’re mythical images that come and go like takeaways, eroded of meaning but still having a shadow. Through these images, weak as they might be, we interpret the world, or struggle with it.

But there is no world like that, where everything happens in one place at the same time, every second of the day, that goes with us wherever and whatever we do.

Because we no longer place value in the importance of images and ideas, by that I mean they have become “ mere representation”, eroded of meaning, they are consumed without thought or understanding.

If you extrapolated the psychological conditions of a tribe in the Amazon, pre contact, extrapolated that to a global level you might have some idea what I’m reaching out for. The technology is no different than a carving of an animal or spirit that instilled fear in someone passing by, or the words spoken by a shaman, or secret mens’ business; so little understanding of it but so profoundly affected by it.

I imagine once someone would have had to go to a specific place to see such images; a church, a burial site, sacred places anyway. Now the images appear on television, on the side of a bus, on a pack of cigarettes or your child’s t-shirt.

So this “world” is possibly something very primitive, acted out, or renewed, in a modern condition. Like a primitive language taking on a guise in a new world, taking us back to the primitive beings we were.

What the media, including the Internet, has done is allow the development of a universal unconsciousness, or maybe a universal consciousness (I’m not sure), that contains more ideas and beliefs, more signs than a single mind has so far had to cope with.
...
This “world” is made up elements like headlines and images, archetypal in their simplicity and delivered to us rapidly without real explanation or even meaning: the burning building, the car crash, the shootings, the tyrant, the armies, the warlords, the burning forests, the angry mob, the weeping woman, they’re mythical images that come and go like takeaways, eroded of meaning but still having a shadow. Through these images, weak as they might be, we interpret the world, or struggle with it.

But there is no world like that, where everything happens in one place at the same time, every second of the day, that goes with us wherever and whatever we do. — Brett

MacCluhan wrote of World City. T.S. Eliot wrote of Unreal City. Where do these images that haunt us from the billboards live? I like the word geist. What is this image-drenched and drama-drenched spirit of our times? As MacCluhan understood, we are forced to numb ourselves to cope with the overstimulation of our visual-imaginative organ. The eye is a mouth is a vagina. Ours is stuffed with images designed to seduce and threaten us. We get news we can't use, endless phantasmagoria.

Does this not connect to the ubiquity of conspiracy theories? Philosophers can even plausibly defend covering wars by watching TV, covering the dream of the war, covering its image for distant spectators who fund it almost unwittingly, numbed as they are by everything else on the news. The world is mediated by screens for us. What I know of non-local reality is determined by anthology of images chosen by others who are not disinterested in my response. At the same time, I can't simply play the victim. The screens are like nicotine, simultaneously stimulant and narcotic. I like to think that I'll eventually live some stripped down lifestyle away from the general madness, though my attachment to a woman makes this more complicated.

Now the images appear on television, on the side of a bus, on a pack of cigarettes or your child’s t-shirt. — Brett

Do you know Berger? Ways of Seeing? This video gets right to your point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jTUebm73IY

Something you didn't mention but I find important is all the erotic imagery we swim in. We are given women who are perfectly desirable and yet radically untouchable. These sirens call to us from an impossible dimension, generating a kind of thirst that isn't simply lust. Once only those with access to rare oil paintings could enjoy (?) such soft porn. Now the image is cheaper than water. On one of my walks lately, I saw perfectly beautiful young woman getting her picture taken. I'm sure the pictures were great. What is this project of being captured as a glamorous, desirable object? A plenitude. Death and the maiden...and I, the 'philosopher' much older than her, was of course death --engaged in the dynamic-dying project of articulating this strange world. Plato's idea is for the eye , a visual form. The photo freezes a moment of perfect beauty, which a person can claim if not exactly be, since being is time is motion. The book, however, plays that role for the philosopher (Death). [If you'll allow that wandering at the end.]

So this “world” is possibly something very primitive, acted out, or renewed, in a modern condition. Like a primitive language taking on a guise in a new world, taking us back to the primitive beings we were. — Brett

This reminds me of Vico's chaotic age and Joyce's Finnegans Wake. The order breaks down into a fertile chaos, a corpse and/or pile of manure. Or Yeats. 'The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.' What is it to be post-literate? It's not that we can't read. It's that it becomes harder to read in the same way. Instead of interpreting text with our imaginations, we all gaze at a single, overpowering screen. When I do go out (which is rare), I usually talk about TV shows and movies. I'd rather talk about books, but...

What is it to be post-literate? — thing

That’s an interesting point; to be post literate and yet to feel informed. And yet we are informed in this most primitive sense.

Does informed necessarily mean enlightened? Not in a spiritual sense but in knowing.

Does informed necessarily mean enlightened? Not in a spiritual sense but in knowing. — Brett

As I see it, being merely informed is to be shallow. Think of your favorite difficult philosopher. Imagine how a person is bound to misread or mishear an aphorism or summation out of context. The merely informed person has gazed at a thousand surfaces, and they can parrot a few key phrases without any real investment or understanding. Have you seen those bathroom books that offer the highlights of the books one is supposed to have read? Trivia, and trivialization. And even this complaint itself is subject to the same effect. The 'deep' thinker is one more cartoon. The idle talk of surfaces always already knows, has always already heard it. And yet hasn't really heard it, because 'it' cannot live on the surface. Curiosity glides from surface to surface, sure that it is consuming the essence.

We learn the fonts, the tones, the body language of experts.