Anguish & Anxiety
..or conflict and agression. Man, I sure had a week for it. A trip inside the self-reflecting sphere - rubbernecking at blog kerfluffles, pitching my 2 cents even where it was probably about as welcome as a stinkbomb at a wedding reception, fielding phone calls from un-medicated loons at work, and getting cold-dissed on myspace.
So I was checking out the aftermath of an intra-blog spat over on an academic website, which was reporting on the case of a professor of cognitive psychology who resigned after threatening the child of an especially obnoxious right-wing warblogger in his comments section. It really was just two pigs wrestling in the mud as far as I was concerned.
One of the other commenters observed that all of this stuff was nothing new - flamebait, trolling, feuds, stalking, obsession. It all happened before, 10 years ago, on usenet.
There is something about the medium of the web that is disinhibiting, and not in a good way. Whole neighborhoods of the internet really are like the ouroboros - a vast serpent devouring its own tail (or tale), cosmic cannibalism, people getting cut off at the knees and reveling in put-downs. Ugh.
It’s like a chimpanzee tribe trying to establish a pecking order, mechanically repeating the same obsessions. And I jump right into it every time - conflict excites me - a chest-pounding troglodyte myself.
Don’t seek out conflict, let it find you! It always does too, but i have a hard time learning this lesson - whenever I get too aborbed in online arguments over a period of days, some unprovoked coincidence in my real-world life reminds me that I am feeding an unhealthy part of my psyche - the right man complex, infected by the madness of the empire, the emotional plague. And then I sheepishly withdraw, resolving to focus on healthy, productive tasks instead.
Thinking about usenet in the mid-90s reminded me of what I don’t want to do, or spend my time doing on the internet now. Trolling, arguing, and feuds - along with webrings, organized groups and mailing lists. Been there, done that, done, done, done!
It’s weird, sometimes I wonder if my fascination with right-wing political websites and chatrooms - the whole sturm und drang of left vs. right political discourse in the US of A - has overly influenced the way I see and perceive discourse on the web, period. I love argument too much, the addict in me gets such an empty, sickening rush from it…
And the hilarious thing about arguing on the internet, especially about American politics is - its all symbols - all ultimately empty symbols being flung back and forth as though they had some sort of weight. People grow so passionate about these symbols, so angry! About myths, interpretations, spin, talking points…
Anyway, thanks to the kook who crank called my office, and the goof who denounced enemies.com on myspace - i got the message, LOL. I’m gonna swear off tossing rocks at passing cars again for a while and just concentrate on purely personal projects:
- essay for New Dawn Magazine about the Anthropic Principle
- Two other editions of the as-of-yet-unnamed web magazine (one of the them about the original “Spiritual Hipsters” - beatnik and bohemain literary figures like Burroughs, Ginsberg, PKD and Castaneda)
- figure out how to hook-up rss feeds to joomla and ping technorati with all these groovy new tags
Please wish me luck, a thicker skin, and the goddamn self-discipline and common-sense not to go poking around in other people’s thornbushes.
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I’m feeling ya. I wanted to rename MetaFilter to AngryFilter. Some of the people leaving comments there have been pissing me off so damn much. I can’t believe how much ignorance and stupidity I’ve seen online over the past few days.
Meanwhile, the weather outside continues to be gorgeous.
Hey, I make sure to write on my rooftop to get sunburnt. It’s great. I saw it put pretty clearly: Fighting on the Internet is like running in the Special Olympics. If you win, you’re still retarded.