3 ms·
Kind of reminds me of Debord's concept of spectacle. The sheer mediation of life through images being its own sort of Abelique that steers our thoughts and patt
by viccis 2y ago
Kind of reminds me of Debord's concept of spectacle. The sheer mediation of life through images being its own sort of Abelique that steers our thoughts and patterns in everyday life every bit as much as an app. Not just the things people usually think of when they read a chapter or two of Society of the Spectacle and put it down, but also things like how our neighborhoods look, how signs and streets suggest to us how to go about our day, etc.
One of his (or, more accurately, the Situationist movement he was a leading figure of) more interesting ideas was that of the dérive. You would do it as a small group or alone, and the idea was to just wander through the city, making choices arbitrarily rather than taking the path of least resistance. The goal is to expose yourself to new things you might not have encountered and meet new people that your respective roles in the spectacle wouldn't have encouraged meeting.
One of my favorite observations to make is that Pokemon Go (funny enough, was mentioned in this story) was an accidental dérive app for a brief moment there in 2016. People walked around the city following pokemon leads rather than the normal visual and psychological cues of the environment, and I know some people who met that way. The end of this story, as well as the way in which the app was a totalitarizing force without being a repressive one, kind of reminded me of that.
- aebtebeten 2y agoI recommend not only the dérive in particular, but flânerie in general. A dérive can be done digitally* as well as in person; frex I have found the YouTube bubble to be somewhat like a large ship: on short timescales, it's going to go where it was heading, implacably, but on longer timescales, where it winds up has a lot to do with where, over time (in the case of YT, weeks to months), you have been steering it. (slightly more tangentially: I wonder if TAD was able to finish TempleOS due to his aleatoric development schedule, which forced him to tackle the parts he didn't like instead of going down rabbit-holes solely in the parts he did like? He would call it divine inspiration; I might call it dérive-driven development) :: :: :: If one believes that on beyond the written Torah, and the oral, the natural world is a third component, then, rather than continually selecting ("borer") a narrow subset, periodically opening oneself to the range of its experiences almost becomes a mitzvah. For, in their comments upon Devarim, did not R JefAi say "feed your head" (SP 67), and also R CroStNaYo then add, to "teach your children well" (DV 70)? (for an intragenerational equivalent, compare a Pioneer House motto: "having learned, teach your buddy") * is the blessing for the one who studies at night (by the LCD's glow?) to be, during the day, watched over by machines of loving grace?