Young people are struggling with mental health and relationships, but there are small shifts in beliefs and behaviors that could help.
Young people are struggling with mental health and relationships, but there are small shifts in beliefs and behaviors that could help.
Marx spoke of the alienation of products and labor, but Debord spoke of the alienation of communications.
In essence, our mass communications systems have effectively become products, and inasmuch, they also function of tools of alienation. There are no more community-owned and operated communications. The community-driven barbed wire telephone systems are long dead.
Even if you use a more “open” system such as Matrix, you’re still generally doing it on someone else’s private property. Even if the instance owner is very open, communicative, and desiring of a flat structure, they cannot change the fact that the structure is designed as hierarchy at it’s core. The internal hierarchy of computing is part and parcel to the problem, we do not build machines that operate on consensus, they all operate on the hierarchy of owner > admin > moderator > user. As such these systems build social alienation because there is no ability to build community consensus with these tools.
We have allowed the power of communications to be usurped by private groups for controlling ends, and we wonder why it is so hard to find social connection.
The article is not wrong, the best way to find social connection is in the meatspace, but as @zero_spelled_with_an_ecks@programming.dev astutely points out (at least in the USA) a good third or more of people that you meet in meatspace are absolute an absolute travesty of a human being. This leads to further isolation as you don’t know who is socially “safe” to be open with, as you could be communicating with a fascist who will intend to harm you for your beliefs and ideology.
Also many people are stuck in places where they don’t have meatspace options. For a lot of people you serve telekinetic conditions is obligatory and even for those who aren’t stuck with that as there will be an option could benefit from something always much better. I’ve been thinking that when we get around to doing renewable microgrids we should throw up fiber and ethernet lines while we’re at it and do community run Internet service providers under the same roof. That might help, especially if we make it normal to allow people to host servers from their own home