we don't know how to use the internet yet

[Jonas Long]

this is something i've thought about a lot, how incredibly fucking miraculous and amazing is it that we have this thing called the internet?  i think it's so huge and amazing that we haven't begun to scratch the surface of how to really utilize it to our best advantage.  i guess you could say this about a lot of things, and life in general, a "youth is wasted on the young" kind of thing.  which way will it go?  will we eventually learn how to use this absolutely reality game changing thing in the best way it can be used, or will it be squandered like so much of humanities capabilities seem to?  we should be having the best conversations of our lives every single day, and experiencing the best art and expressing ourselves to our full creative limit, and there's NOTHING stopping us but ourselves.  i was personally resistant to technology for a long time, and still am in some ways, i didn't get my first smart phone until i was 31, i'm usually the last one to join all the social media trends, i'm wary of whats popular, it often seems like popularity is what ruins a thing, like your favorite band for example.  thinking of exponential growth in things, like how the advent of film making wasn't that long ago, and we've gone from a movie of a train leaving a station to whatever james cameron is up to now, or the even more recent advent of video games.  i dunno.

[Phil]

Amen to that. This forum for example. We each have a vibration and we all have a vibration, and there is no limit to what that can become or how great the co-creative experience can be.  

[Jonas Long]

There seems to be an "order of things" that the human race has to go through...some of us are very impatient but nonetheless, we have to go through the motions of this "order" to get wherever we're going... the "order of words" extends to everything.  That's the rule that basically states every book ever written had to be in the particular order it's been written in, Shakespeare could only happen when it did, and not only could but had to happen, dictated by the inevitable succession of words since the birth of the first written word, and when you get down to it, the first conscious thought and all thoughts that follow, which results in all things that follow...

I fucking hate marvel movies. 

[Phil]

😂 

It is a wonderful story. 

[Mandy]

We ran into an issue locally where one woman started a town community Facebook page, left Facebook went AWOL and left the page completely and utterly moderated. Facebook won't close it, it's fully of scams and is an utter mess. So two other people started a second page even though half the time people still use the first page. There is one woman in town that everyone hates and is trying very hard to get to leave, and the people moderating the new page have no idea that they can't just join in with this prejudice and bully, target and harass people. There is another guy in the town that has some serious mental health issues, and occasionally goes off his medications, and then harasses people or creates dangerous situations and confrontations that almost always involve police. He has started threatening this woman, (who is also currently 8 months pregnant), and because it's a small town everyone knows where everyone lives. He drove up to her, swerving into the building she was at, and yelled obscenities and wouldn't leave. He later referred to her as a demon in his post on the unmoderated page, I reported it to Facebook and they left it up because they don't know enough about the community to know that she's the one being targeted. There are also major issues with other local Facebook groups being used to target people for their race, to organize white supremacy marches, to publicly post activist's or immigrant's addresses online. It seems like we've had the internet long enough to know better. 

 

[Blessed2]

Yeah it's pretty crazy.

 

Some time ago I had a mini psychological crisis as for the first time ever I actually looked into how all this tech and computers actually work.

 

It started when I was fooling around with a record player. Like a vinyl player. I was blown away to really see that the needle literally reads a physical carving on the vinyl. Yeah I know, what a gen Z moment.

 

Then I got interested and read about how  CD records work. It's pretty nuts. The needle is a lazer beam and there are microscopic "bumps" on the disc. A bump is 1, no bump is 0. It's binary code. The computer counts the time of how long it takes for the laser to return to the reader as it's reflected from the disc. If it takes like a few nanoseconds longer, the computer is like "no bump there, it's a zero". WTF

 

And then I read about flash drives. You know, USB sticks etc. It's even fucking crazier. There are like millions or billions of little "caves" which each can hold one ELECTRON. A FREAKING ELECTRON. When you install information into a flash drive, you literally move single electrons into these "caves". The amount of info the flash drive can keep, the 1GB or 128GB you see when you buy one, means how much these caves there are. And when you attach it to a computer and want to play music for example, the computer reads the information by checking what caves are loaded with electrons. And there's your "Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen".

 

And then I started reading how a computer works. And that's when it started to get almost scary. I had been using these devices for my entire life and I'm only now learning how they actually work? I mean... I knew it wasn't magic... But I was still shocked to learn that they are literally just machines, physical machines that are based in actual physical mechanisms. Fundamentally speaking, a modern computer, smartphones etc. are based on electrons moving in specific ways. That's how the binary code, 10100111 etc. is created. It's not magic. There is literal electrons that are physically making up the code.

 

And then there is internet and 3g, 4g, 5g etc. These are photons (light) carrying information into your device. Same 10101110 binary code stuff, just not electrons but LIGHT on a wavelenght your eyes can't see but your device can catch and read. There's your "Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen".

 

I mean, yeah I "knew" all this stuff, but this was the first time I really got it.

 

It fucking nuts. Made me really appreciate my dad more. He has been working for Nokia for almost his entire life. I told him how I was almost freaking out a bit as I learned this stuff for the first time, and he was just like "yup, it's pretty cool isn't it?"

 

Really recommend reading some wikipedia articles etc. about this. It's really interesting and mind-blowing stuff.

 

 

[Jonas Long]

2 hours ago, Mandy said:

We ran into an issue locally where one woman started a town community Facebook page, left Facebook went AWOL and left the page completely and utterly moderated. Facebook won't close it, it's fully of scams and is an utter mess. So two other people started a second page even though half the time people still use the first page. There is one woman in town that everyone hates and is trying very hard to get to leave, and the people moderating the new page have no idea that they can't just join in with this prejudice and bully, target and harass people. There is another guy in the town that has some serious mental health issues, and occasionally goes off his medications, and then harasses people or creates dangerous situations and confrontations that almost always involve police. He has started threatening this woman, (who is also currently 8 months pregnant), and because it's a small town everyone knows where everyone lives. He drove up to her, swerving into the building she was at, and yelled obscenities and wouldn't leave. He later referred to her as a demon in his post on the unmoderated page, I reported it to Facebook and they left it up because they don't know enough about the community to know that she's the one being targeted. There are also major issues with other local Facebook groups being used to target people for their race, to organize white supremacy marches, to publicly post activist's or immigrant's addresses online. It seems like we've had the internet long enough to know better. 

 

Well, it would also seem like humanity has existed for long enough that we'd know better than to be that way.  The internet is doing nothing but reflecting how people are, if that Facebook page was moderated better, there'd still be those unmoderated individuals being just as fucked up and lashing out in the same ways.  

The town you live in reminds me of the time I spent in Louisiana, I never in my life thought people still lived and behaved the way I saw them living and behaving there.  

But there's no way around the "order" this whole thing is unfolding in, I guess...unless there is. 

[Mandy]

@Jonas Long Social media allows them to do it with great speed and efficiency, and with a false sense of disconnection. It's like thinking the right to bear arms still holds and cannot be questioned no matter what technological advances occur. "Nuclear missiles for all!" 

 

But yes, the sense of separation is the root issue, not the "thing". 

 

[Jonas Long]

5 minutes ago, Mandy said:

@Jonas Long Social media allows them to do it with great speed and efficiency, and with a false sense of disconnection. 

 

Maybe?  Fascists and assholes also seemed to do what they do just fine before the internet too.  

[Joseph Maynor]