Category Archives: society

Fake nostalgia

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I’ve seen people expressing “analog nostalgia” for all kinds of pre-digital devices; film cameras, phones with rotary dials, audio tape, vinyl records and so on. That wouldn’t be all that weird. The weird part is that almost exclusively, people expressing such nostalgia were born after this tech went functionally extinct.

For instance, when I hear a young person in their twenties spewing such nonsense, I instantly get an allergy attack from their affectation. A person who is 26 years old was born in 2000. There were no rotary phones then. I had my first cellphone in 1999, and I was actually not an early adopter. By that point, we all had wired phones with multiple memories and nobody I know had a rotary dial on theirs. CD players were a thing for a while; audio tapes and vinyl did stick around, but by the 2000s, it was CD era. Film was at its peak in mid-1990s, in a crisis by 2004 and dead by 2008. An average gen-z person knows film only from faded-out prints that were kept in someone’s hot attic, and had degraded into a greenish-blue mess. They don’t actually know what film looked like when it was the current technology. So, when they say they are nostalgic about film and they buy cameras with greenish-blue presets that supposedly emulate film, I don’t actually know what the fuck they are about, because film didn’t look like that. I know, because I was there. I made scans of fresh prints and fresh slides when they were a current technology.

This is what a scanned fresh C41 print looks like:

That’s what “looking like film” actually means. And this is what E6 slide looks like:

Fuji Astia 100F, Canon EOS 3 and EF 85mm f/1.8

Fuji Velvia 100, Canon EOS 3 and EF 85mm f/1.8

Fuji Sensia 100, Soligor SR-300MD and MC 50mm f/1.4 Rokkor-PG

Yeah, it doesn’t look at all like what you’ve been told film is supposed to look like. It doesn’t have the greenish or bluish faded-out “nostalgic” tinge. It’s not all warped, fucked over and full of all sorts of artefacts. That’s because it wasn’t shot with a potato and developed in cat urine, and then left in a kitchen drawer by the stove for 30 years for you to find it there and think “oh, this looks like shit, it makes me so nostalgic, I wish everything looked like shit again”.

So, why shoot film if you don’t want to make it look like shit? No reason whatsoever, because the modern digital process can make things look as great, or better, than they used to look in film’s prime. The only reason why you’d want film today is affectation and a misplaced fake-nostalgia over believing that things used to be shit, and it would be great if they were shit again.

Olympus E-1 ZD 14-54mm f/2.8-3.5 early digital camera.

Canon 5d 35mm digital camera

Modern 35mm digital camera.

Sorry to ruin your fake nostalgia, but film actually looked good. Digital also looks good. Go fuck yourself with your fake faded-out greenish shit, you don’t know what you’re talking about. A vinyl record, if fresh and not scratched, sounded exactly like a CD. An audio tape sounded reasonably good but worse than a CD, which is why we stopped using it. I hear that people stopped using horse-drawn carriages because cars, unlike horses, don’t leave piles of shit on the streets. Also, rotary phones were shit and we replaced them with numbered dials in mid-1980s. Yes, old cars had great visibility because they had bigger window panes and less metal. You know why we moved away from that? Because more metal means better structural rigidity in a crash, which helps if you don’t want to die or sustain grave injuries.

Fuck old technology.

Indefensible

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That’s all fine and well, but what if you desire something that can’t be justified as an instrument of work or creativity? What if the thing you want to buy is indefensible?

By that I mean trinkets and jewellery such as expensive mechanical watches, or fancy cars. If you’re really rich it can be yachts or jet planes, but you get the picture; it’s something that makes no sense in proportion to your wealth and income.

The answer to that is very simple.

No.

You need to control yourself and learn to figure out what you’re trying to accomplish, rather than just follow such stupid and financially destructive impulses. Money is precious. It should be seen as a blessing, as something that saves you from terrible things in this world, and who knows what price had to be paid in order for you to get it. I’m not saying you should feel guilty for having money and give it all to poor people, but you should see it as a blessing from God that was given to you in order for you to do something constructive with it. I don’t know what that would be, because I’m not you; it’s always specific. Insulate yourself from harm; be able to actually do what you’re meant to do, since money is fuel for everything else. I also don’t see anything wrong in spending some pre-defined discretionary spending sum on some trinkets that you actually like, as long as you’re not actually depleting the money that’s supposed to be used for constructive things.

Discipline needs to be learned. It’s fine to indulge yourself to a point. Go buy yourself ice cream. It’s not fine to act like a fucking idiot and spend all your money on a car or some other toy. You need to learn to say no to yourself and not act like a petulant child that throws tantrums when it desires some trinket. Your inner child can eat shit.

You need to say no, and you need to obey.

Toxic waste

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Meta must tighten controls on children’s accounts and pay $567 million into a fund to remedy its role in a youth mental health crisis, a New Mexico judge ordered Thursday, in a ruling that dealt the social media giant another hefty penalty and compared it to polluting factories. (CNN)

A New Mexico judge has declared Meta a “public nuisance,” comparing the social media giant to a polluting factory. The ruling orders the company to establish an abatement fund and overhaul key features of its platforms over alleged harm to children. (RT)

It’s a case of “too little, too late”, considering the condition of the generations raised on tablets, smartphones and social media, I’d say. It’s also a case of “I told you so”, since I kept saying from the beginning that social media is the spiritual equivalent of toxic waste that is by design reducing people to their basest level, but nobody listens to me so yeah. Now they have the irreversible outcomes, and this verdict isn’t going to change anything.

But I don’t think it’s just social media; it’s broader than that. Any situation where people are constantly exposed to feedback from large groups of people will result in a very reductionist monoculture of thoughts and emotions. In essence, this reduces society to a collective idiot, because stupid consensus reigns supreme, and every truly smart idea will contradict that, and such will be violently attacked and ridiculed. In essence, this polices thought until everybody is obedient, retarded and vaccinated.

Also, this form of mental coherence on a very low baseline, essentially the consensus of the IQ 85-115 crowd, the ±1 standard deviations around the median, the monoculture of the Gaussian mean, is something that creates all the fanatical hatred of all dissenting thought, and extreme intolerance of “non-approved” ideas, and it’s not like that phenomenon is new in society, but social media brought it to a whole new level of bad.

So, it’s not that only Facebook, or only the social media, or the smartphones that enable permanent connectivity to the network, are the problem. I think it merely exposes pathology within human social structures, that was always there, but this escalated it to the level of caricature.

Apex predators

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I occasionally watch all kinds of videos on YouTube and I noticed a weird fascination with monsters; apex predators specifically. Whether it’s about polar bears or crocodiles, or extinct things such as T-Rex, the prevalent theme is that humans are defenceless against such monsters and yada yada.

Bitch, please. The Inuit used to hunt polar bears. Their fur was considered particularly good material for women’s footwear, because of the soft fur. They even prayed to a polar bear god to send polar bears their way to be killed.

Crocodiles? We make shoes out of them, too. All kinds of leather accessories as well. Nice texture.

I used to wonder about human babies; their tendency to cry loudly seemed like an extremely anti-survivalist strategy in leopard country. It would attract all the predators from miles away. And then it clicked – no, the leopards wouldn’t be attracted, because a crying baby means lots of adult humans with sharp sticks. Bad, very bad. Humans like leopard fur, it’s very soft.

There’s only one “apex predator” in the world today, and it awarded other, lesser predators a protected status, because we think they are cute and interesting to have around. If a Megalodon was found to still exist, it would not be an apex predator, but a protected, endangered species. If humans wanted to hunt it for shark fin soup or something, we could drive it to extinction by Tuesday.

If T-Rex happened to get resurrected, it would be instantly endangered from poachers who think its teeth are great for piano keys or something, and its testicles are an aphrodisiac. An African elephant isn’t that much smaller than a T-Rex, and it’s endangered, not from T-Rex or Allosaurus, but from dumbass poachers armed with AK-47s.

Think about that. T-Rex would be hunted to extinction by people who are interested in what steaks made of its meat taste like, and they’d like to have trinkets carved from its bones. Whales are huge and what not, and we entertain ourselves with stories about monster whales, and we almost drove them to extinction because their oil was considered extremely useful before petroleum industry was a thing.

Big things are just endangered species to us; no matter how big. We put them under protection and know each by name. It’s the small things that are a danger to us, paradoxically; mosquitos, ticks, viruses, bacteria, fungi.

The only big things that are stupid enough to hunt humans are those whose populations weren’t reduced to only those who ran in panic after hearing a human baby crying.

Head in the game

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I was trying to find a pattern behind the human irrational behaviour regarding certain things – status symbols, compulsive shopping, trying to acquire symbolism of achievement thinking it will result in the actual thing, trying to optimise decisions about even the smallest things and “win”… but what if there isn’t any?

What if the root of it all is profoundly irrational?

What if it’s merely an extension of childhood patterns that were never actually understood and replaced, and instead, one is trying to be “good”, to “please the parents”, in order to “win”?

What if people are unconsciously negotiating with some implicit, invisible parental figure, and trying to be successful in life by meeting some criteria – “look at me, I have all the wealth symbols, I’m successful, can I get approval now?”

Because, for them, somewhere, the parents are actually in charge of the world, and if they are pleased, everything will be all right. So, depending on what they think their parents are expecting of them, what the rules of the game are, they will try to win.

So, is the rule that the person with most money wins? Most status symbols? Most degrees and titles? Most fame? Stable income and predictable life? Joined the military and died protecting his country? Married and had children? Performed religious duties well? Because people don’t look like they are all playing the same game, and yet, strangely, they all are – they all try to gain approval, be good and successful; unless they are so broken they are completely self-destructive in their pathology.

Anti-religious people seem to try to use this form of behaviour to try and discredit all religion as a way of appeasing “sky daddy” of some kind, and yet, the connection of this behaviour with religion and its projection upon transcendence seems wholly incidental. The materialistic atheists manifest the same behaviour through different symbolism. The religious person will think that he with least unforgiven sins and most sacraments wins; an atheist will think that he with most offspring, control over most assets and with greatest reputation in society wins, but both are trying to check boxes in order to “win”.

Unfortunately, at no point do they seem to stop and think about what the fuck they are doing here; it’s all automatic, following an instinctual line of either pleasing the parent or rebelling in order to get attention. The irony is that they will devote an inordinate amount of effort to trying to “win” at the most insignificant things, such as buying the best dishwasher, camera, TV, watch or a car, where a rational bystander would notice that it doesn’t actually matter, because after getting to the point of “good enough”, the differences don’t actually gain you anything. Basically, after getting a watch that looks elegant, appropriate and not “tacky”, nobody really notices anything about it, and yet, people will invest incredible amounts of effort into it. It sounds irrational, and the first instinct is to try rational arguments, but what if it’s actually irrational to the point of complete disregard of all rationality? What if people are just following the invisible lines towards parental approval, or rebelling against imagined parental authority, and their entire existence is essentially sleepwalking, barely perceiving anything beyond trying to satisfy the limbic system of their brain that was conditioned somewhere in early childhood, to try to navigate parental approval?

There’s definitely lots of that everywhere – an endless effort to appease an invisible or imaginary parental authority in order to navigate the needs of your limbic system that is stuck somewhere in early childhood. But it’s not all I’m seeing. There are other motivating factors – respect and love, for instance. You don’t dress up for a special occasion because you seek approval, but because you respect the occasion and the people involved. You don’t treat your spouse well because you seek approval from your invisible parent; you do it because of love and respect.

I don’t buy myself expensive photo equipment in order to impress anyone; I do it because I understood that respect for my art form and craft requires it, and deliberately starving it of resources means disrespect, and if you disrespect your own work, how could you expect others to appreciate it? It’s a delicate dance between pathology and virtue, between self-contempt masquerading as asceticism, and overindulgence. It’s so easy to go overboard either way – do too much, or not enough, and the line of moderation might not actually be where you think it is.

I do, however, have one thing to recommend. Awareness. Know what you’re doing, and know why, and then it becomes very easy to find the correct course. Have your head in the game, and see the big picture of what you’re trying to do, and what methods you are choosing.