Technological Pareidolia

[pataphor]

I haven't been posting in a while, partly because it's unacceptable to
be censored by American fake morality, executed by algorithms that are
blind to the meaning of what is being said, and partly because I worry
about becoming of such an advanced age that I can only further damage
my record, that, even if now more visibly being misguided than I used
to notice, was still of better performative quality than what I could do
now.

One thing that still drives me to posting in deserted newsgroups is it
harks bark to an age were things weren't as owned by commercial
philosophies as they seem to be now.

I know this is some kind of illusion as those ways of viewing the
virtual world have died a long time ago, and maybe, as exemplified by
the recent freenode irc disaster, the idea of property, material or
immaterial, was always implicit from the beginning, at least for all
technologies started by American initiatives.

Not that the Swedish way of interpreting this stuff is much better,
where one doesn't seem to own anything, everything is just a privilege
bestowed on one by our betters, that one has too meekly accept and not
make too much fuss around, as those betters prefer to interact with
their subjects as little as possible.

So, even if freenode claimed to defend freedom by its staff moving to a
different server that hasn't been sold yet to some entrepreneurial free
spirit, during the transition it became completely clear to me, that
even if the operation succeeded, the patient was already dead on the
inside, as every founder of the existing channels seemed to view it as
their personal property, the rights to which magically and
unquestionably transferred to this new mirror domain; forget about
trying to conceptualize the transfer of a community to a new space in
terms of some kind of democratic agreement among the members, who
after all are the collective creators of a channel, no matter who
founded it.

Basically the 'owners' of a channel on network A would not negotiate
about what their community essentially is, as little as they would be
willing to discuss the deed to their own house, even if magically
transferred to network B, a bit like people in Britain colonizing the
United States, to just mention some kind of analogous thing happening
in 'real' history.

So, freenode, like the Americans, or for that matter the Israeli, with
their apartheid practice, which they're still failing to acknowledge,
have become what they hate, no matter how much even brilliant
scientists fall for the argument that there are good and bad people on
both sides, as if that even matters where one party has all the tech on
its side, and the other, not.

I'm sure they're racked by guilt when it is safe to do so, but this
doesn't make them look any smarter, unless one defines being smart as
belonging to some kind of tradition that enables one to gang up on less
advantaged individuals.

Things surely tend to get worse when one tries to link belonging to some
exclusive club with innate intelligence and superiority, which
conviction, even if copied by the perpetrators of the holocaust and used
against its origin, still wouldn't die, or at least be prevented from
raising their ugly head again.

The problem is, at least for people like me, who kind of have stepped
out of the game, at least technologically, is that the same kind of
self image building is now enabled by the media, assisted by algorithms
used by profit seeking companies.

Let me give an example of how this could be working, I mean why do
people see 'meaning' or 'community' in a series of tweets? Why do people
feel they belong to some superior community, even if only enabled by
corrupt and divisive technology like smartphones or social media?

The other day I was trying to get a new battery for an old smartphone,
and since I don't like to leave a trail on the web, as every time I did
that it was used to influence me via that opened channel in some
undesired way, I went to some local shop where I could maybe buy the
part without providing a way to get back at me with their latest
information about some new product or service I might like, however
justified such an effort might seem from their viewpoint, especially if
it had the potential to make them some extra money.

The guy behind the counter produced a transparent plastic container
filled with maybe a hundred batteries, of maybe a dozen or more
types, all of different sizes, number and placement of contact points
and other characteristics, that were ordered in sets held together with
rubber bands.

As he started scrolling through the different battery types before my
eyes, I thought I saw the one I would need, so I asked him to let me
pick it out of the box. Unfortunately I was mistaken, my type wasn't in
the box, even though I picked some very similar ones, differing
only in things like number of contacts, or thickness, or the rectangular
shape. But they were all of the same brand and visual layout.

At that point the guy at the counter asked me if I thought he was
stupid. Which was actually the third time something like that happened,
after the incident which finally put me in the mood of leaving irc
again, after first being disappointed about the lack of democratic
decision procedures during the freenode debacle.

Imagine, a guy basing his self image of being smart on his knowledge of
the items in a box filled with undeniable proof of the stupidity of
current day tech companies, making every single battery incompatible
with the other phones, even those of the same brand.

And, apart from the fact that he may know many phones from different
brands, handling them every day, I, who knows only a few batteries,
would for that reason probably be better at pattern recognizing my own
type of battery, what struck me was that this was the latest example of
this misguided pareidolic illusion of intelligence, seeking self
confirmation in what is proof of utter failure, pushed onto us by profit
oriented chaos agents.

But there is hope, even if recognizing the effects of this pareidolia,
as for example happened to me while hearing distant music and sounds of
people partying and singing after a while whenever I switched on my air
conditioners (I have two because they were cheap) is, or at least was,
associated with some kind of mental illness; as soon as I read the
wikipedia article explaining the effect, I was 'cured' and do not hear
those voices anymore.

But it took some time finding that wikipedia page, as my first searches
gave the craziest seeming results, it was only after I remembered the
term describing it, pareidolia, that I was pointed to the corresponding
article.

So it seems waking up to the illusions is guarded by a great moat of
incomprehension and attempts at distraction, but with effort, and with
already knowing part of the answer 'from the inside' one can finally
get there and free oneself from the illusions foisted on us by
technology, that we are at first unable to recognize and thus
extinguish.

[worm food]

Replying for posterity.