Pretend i’m a cranky old man for this next part:
Back in my day they used to teach us other languages in school (`皿´＃)
Nowadays all they learn is a single coding language (ノ°益°)ノ

You get the idea.

If we’re being honest learning some code is, of course, more useful than learning a new tongue. There, i said it.

But come on! (°ㅂ°╬)

The code they teach us is like
worse than kiddy script.

i don’t know if it can even be called code. It’s more like

Commands. o(〒﹏〒)o

So either the program you’re looking at is wide open for you already
Or theres a big language barrier shutting its door in your face. :(´ཀ`」 ∠):

Feels like the coursework is designed so we can tell our parents “we’re learning code in school!"♡( ◡‿◡ )
Rather than being designed to teach us to actually do anything.

Like teaching us to read instruction manuals
Instead of teaching us how to write our own sentences.

We don’t even learn Tesserect. What’s the point? Ask anyone and they’ll tell you Tess is the standard at every meg that matters.

Not to mention the whole idea is pretty goddamn cynical. Teaching us just enough "language” for us to be good customers
Instead of letting us learn how to talk to other people from different parts of the world with different experiences.

i mean, i had to teach myself about the whorf hypothesis.

And since you’re all clearly dying to hear about it, i guess i could tell you a bit.(⁄ ⁄>⁄ ▽ ⁄<⁄ ⁄)

The idea is that the language(s) you speak influence(s) the way you think.
Most famously: if you learn to read right to left, you’ll generally sort things right to left when thinking visually.

The effects aren’t huge, but they are there.

So i wonder if the opposite isn’t true.
That when we stop learning languages and isntead just focus on “Vocabulary” and “Product Names”
That that might have an effect on how we think, too.

Like maybe if we aren’t taught to at least be curious about other languages in school
We’ll all grow up thinking that other peoples languages and cultures and lives must not be worth hearing about.

The other great loss is that programming languages don’t have any history (ｏ・・)ノ”(ノ<、)
They’re built on top of each other in various upgrades and improvements and whatever

But that’s just coats of paint on top of coats of paint caking the walls of an apartment (￣ヘ￣)

Human languages don’t overwrite each other- they grow and blend and combine and mutate.

And it feels like we could use a little bit more of all of that these days.

lost in translation,

your nightowl

i’m gonna go ahead and assume we’re all on the same page here: (￣ε￣＠)
We know our countries are at war with each other; they just do it through proxies and secondaries and guerrillas and spies instead of tanks and riflemen.
It’s hellish, accepting that people are going to fight and die for causes they don’t believe in, directed by people who don’t care about them, and all of its not even going to get a proper label in the history books.

But that’s where we’re at.(ง ื▿ ื)ว

What’s less clear is where the divide lies between nations playing checkers with smaller nations as the pieces
and Corporations playing chess with superpowers as their pawns.

The State is powerful, powerful enough to hide whatever it wants from whoever it cares to
But the State is also big, and still analog in a lot of places.
There are paper trails for every unsavory task they’ve ever ordered, even if they’ll probably remain buried under the sands of filing cabinets until the sun goes cold.

Megs are different- Younger. Not quite as all-powerful (y'know, in terms of stockpiled bombs), but also not as restricted.
So when they want to go to war with one another, they don’t have to sing songs about peacekeeping or stability

They just send in the Consultants.▓▒░(°◡°)░▒▓

That’s what they’re called, apparently.
Dryworkers or Dockworkers are also code for it, according to my research, but those terms might be falling out of use.
It’s dumb,(╬ Ò﹏Ó) having to use codenames on your business cards, but i guess you can’t just put “corporate espionage” on your resume either.

Which probably looks something like

-2 years destabilizing foreign governments
-1 year derailing non-foreign government opposition
-2.5 years misting peoples heads in the jungles around the equator
-proficient in pitching

i wonder, of the two, who gets the nicer bronze umbrella? Who’s more fun at parties?
Government spies can at least say they “serve their country”
Corporate spies just have to count on people being able to read between the lines

┐(￣ヮ￣)┌i imagine that which path you choose depends what you’re more afraid of:
A court martial and jail time
or breaking NDA and getting sued into oblivion

You end up in the same place, if you really do go bankrupt.(O.O)
Attempting to scratch tally marks in a fairly comfortable prison cell wall made of an alloy you can’t pronounce
Glad that you’re not homeless
But missing home (っ´ω`)ﾉ(╥ω╥)

Maybe i’m being too soft.
Lots of people enlist in order to get a start on their career
But to go straight into Consulting

You’d have to be pretty goddamn coldblooded.

loafing off in the crows’ nest,
your nightowl

Hey, is it a convincing counterargument if i come out and admit that i just don’t want the people making the claim to be right? (((o(°▽°)o)))

Didn’t think so. (ಥ﹏ಥ) But i can hope, right?

Stagnation Theory’s been gaining ground again- among academics, scientists, engineers…people who are generally smart.

Does that mean it’s a smart theory?(҂ з´ )

Does that mean it’s plausible that technological development has been stagnant for more than half a century? (⇀‸↼‶)

i don’t know. But i do know that i don’t want that to be the case. Because all the generally smart people making that argument

Happen to be assholes!! (╬益´)

Highly-educated silver tower types who look down on the rest of us from on high and use a lot of phrases like “average voter” and “popular culture” and “least common denominator."٩(ఠ益ఠ)۶
Bigheaded jerks who think that societies should be judged based on how many marble statues or philosophical treatises they produce a year.
Supposedly enlightened free-thinkers who’d trade democracy for a machine-printed-philosopher-emperor at the drop of a shoe.
And supposedly brilliant minds who’d trade competently designed infrastructure for a 10 person mars colony before the other shoe had time to drop. ε=ε=┌( >_<)┘

(it doesn’t help that the forum-dwelling-fascists of the world are nodding their heads in agreement to every point above) (・_・)

There hasn’t been much progress in space exploration, i’ll give them that-

but there hasn’t been much to find out in space either Σ(￣。￣ﾉ)

i just think we should care a little less about how far our rockets have traveled and a little more about how global average life expectancy has frozen at 85.
While the age of the average politician creeps up closer to that number every year. ლ(¯ロ¯"ლ)

Maybe i’m being overly defensive.┐(￣ヘ￣)┌ It’s not pleasant to think of yourself as part of a declining empire.

But it’s even harder to see yourself stuck in the middle of an empire’s plateau.
At least when you’re going downhill, you’re moving forward.
On a plateau, if there’s not enough momentum, things could just
End.

pedaling as hard as i can,
your nightowl

For all of human history, we’ve struggled with the perennial question:
Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Which is a stupid question to struggle with.

The egg came first. (￣▽￣)

Eggs have been around since before the dinosaurs, and chickens were invented sometime in the 20th century as agricultural scientists raced to breed a bird with as much breast and thigh meat as physiology would allow.
“So where did the first chicken egg come from?”
(ΦwΦ)Ψ From a bird that was very much like a chicken but not quite enough of a chicken to be considered one, scientifically.

If that answer gives you a headache, well then congratulations: you’ve started to realize that speciation cutoffs (along with most cutoffs in general) are arbitrary.┐(￣ヮ￣)┌

We didn’t, at the time, set aside that first chicken and its not-quite-a-chicken mother, but for other, similar conundrums, we can in fact point to where the cycle began.
Like, say, the six day workweek and the six day school week. (ﾒ﹏ﾒ)
They came in that order, by the way-

that’s what i’m getting at.(￣ε￣＠)

Businesses were getting busier. There was more (busy) work to be done, and five days a week wasn’t cutting it (according to the powers that be).

Some wouldn’t go home Friday, and some would come in on Sunday, but everyone was getting in the habit.
The habit of cutting off one more kg of flesh for the performance evaluators to inspect.

This new paradigm created a need, nay- a demand!(ﾉ´ з `)ノ
A demand for more childcare.
And schools stepped in to help with the supply.

A lot of people claimed then, as they do today, that we really needed that extra day of schooling in order for our precious children to catch up with the rest of the world on our reading, riting, and rithmetic. (↼_↼)

But if that ever was true, it’s not true anymore. (￢_￢) We’re about even with every other nation out there, and every country with a capitol city and a capital letter in front has moved on to the 6-1 system.
Maybe we caught up, maybe they slowed down- Point is, now we’re one day short of a proper weekend- another block of our freetime offered up to the vicious cycle of inflation that fuels our work-life im-balance.

Fun fact: inflation is really, really hard to undo. You can slow it, kinda, if you work at it hard, but that’s just changing the rate, not reversing it.
I’d go as far as to say it’s impossible to reverse inflation o(〒﹏〒)o

With the tools of economics.

It’s a different story if you use the tools of psychology.(^人<)〜☆

Introduce a completely new story, still backed by the same state, then slowly phase one out for the other…
…And eventually you get yourself a reset.

Nothing’s fundamentally changed about the government, the banks, people’s spending habits
All that’s changed is people’s perception
And that’s all that matters.(っ´ω`)ﾉ(╥ω╥)

So maybe someday a big psychological shock will come along and give us back our day off

Makes for a nice dream, at least.
When you go to bed early on another goddamn schoolnight.( `ε´ )

penned into the calendar,
your nightowl

The Roman Empire! Famous for marble statues, aqueducts, blood sport, and collapsing.
Its expansion was fueled by conquest, and its conquests were achieved by a disciplined, well-funded and full-staffed army!ヽ(・∀・)ﾉ

Said staff being made up of the previously-conquered.シ. .)シ

See there’s an argument to be made that people, ideas, and countries are either growing or dying.

(Stagnation counts as dying)(￣︿￣)

No one wants to die, so if you have yourself a nice little country, you naturally want to keep it growing.

So what do you do? ┐(￣ヮ￣)┌Start a new war whenever the last one ends? Not a bad idea, but you start to run out of excuses.(￢‿￢ )

The enlightened governments of 2086 are trying something different: Don’t let the wars end in the first place.

You can let the names change- Can swap out the flags or the boogeymen as need be, but you keep the boots on the ground and the “Peacekeeping Presence” present.
You keep your soldiers busy, your populace safe(but stressed), and you set up a conveyor belt (or an assembly line):

A slow crawling feed of the young and the displaced “earning their keep” with Service in the Peacekeeping Mission;

Coming in confused and dissaffected, but leaving confused and patriotic and with enough spending money to buy lots of crap they don’t need.

A machine that takes in tired, poor, huddled masses :(´ཀ`」 ∠): and spits out Consumers (＋_＋)

…At least they become full citizens after all that.

Though even the most wide-eyed, idealistic and energetic among us don’t seem excited about heading to the polls anymore.

Would the Roman Empire have lasted longer if they just had more ballot boxes?(↼_↼)

down in the trenches (emotionally),
your nightowl

The best systems, the longest-lasting systems, all share something in common:
Self-maintenance!

Evolution’s probably spent 99% of its time getting it right- replication and reproduction and quality control.
Immune systems and autophagy and DNA repair- all that good stuff.
By comparison, growing legs and lungs and fingers is easy- Just a matter of time.

And that all carries over to systems of oppression.
The best ones don’t need to be enforced; they train the populace into doing that for them.

Which is my way of introducing the topic of self-censorship.

ヾ(￣◇￣)ノ〃

i was aware of it, before the oldnet. i think everyone’s aware of it- that moment of hesitation before you hit Post.

The nagging voice in the back of your head that you don’t want to get shadowbanned or delisted or un-promoted;
The big brother you construct for yourself, hovering somewhere above your left shoulder, nudging your fingers towards backspace.

“i’m just choosing to be considerate.” __〆(￣ー￣ )

Cursing, depictions of violence, discussions of sex
Y'know, the salt of life?
All risky. “Can’t be seen to be associated with it.” (；￣Д￣)

Better to play it safe. (⇀‸↼‶) “Once I make it big, once i have a platform, THEN i can start speaking my mind.”

But the words we use aren’t just a product our mind spits out.

Word choice is a choice.

And the less practiced you are in rebelling, the harder it becomes.

i say unalive in daily conversation. :(´ཀ`」 ∠): Sometimes i think it too.

And when i wanna curse the masters that be for un-aliving my independent thought |ʘ‿ʘ)╯
My tongue doesn’t go to the big bombs- the F’s and C’s and D’s on the top shelves of the expletives weapons rack.

The tongue is a muscle. If you don’t give it proper exercise, it’s gonna atrophy.

And soon you won’t even be able to reach for that shelf.

-Is how i feel. (￣▽￣) i still don’t wanna curse much on this blog because it feels unprofessional.

And i know i’m not a professional
But going through the motions, the warm-ups, the exercises for it

Maybe it can help me get back in shape ⸜( ´ ꒳ ` )⸝

independently choosing, of my own free will, to avoid the F-word,
your nightowl

On the oldnet you can scroll through the entire lifetime of a word- See it birthed, shaped, mutated and butchered.
A word like verticality.

See height used to be exciting. (╥﹏╥)People marveled at mountains, wondered at the clouds and gazed at the stars.
The skyscraper was the pinnacle of that; its form, function and even its named tinged with hubris and the slightest hint of violence.
Towers of Babel going up all over the place, taller and taller and stronger and ever more phallic. ୧((#Φ益Φ#))୨
Temples to commerce and business and the capitalist can-do. Dumb socialists toiled in brutalist cubicles inside brutalist square offices inside brutalist cubic buildings while we built ever upwards.

Okay well that part hasnt really changed.(→_→) Corporate headquarters are bigger and better than ever, sprawling not just upwards but outwards, subsuming monopolized restaurants and hotels and gyms, like fungal colonies with internal ecosystems all their own where employees can spend weeks without ever stepping foot outside.
But with sea levels rising, populations still climbing and real estate getting more expensive (and increasingly, underwater)

Now every building needs to be a skyscraper. Apartments, hospitals, courthouses, fire stations- even warehouses.

So cities have become more vertical.

And so has life. (￣_￣)・・・
And so has social mobility.ლ(¯ロ¯"ლ)

It’s not a 90 degree angle, but the slope is steeper than ever. Each step agonizing and seemingly impossible.
And each time you move up, and your eyes happen upon anyone even slightly below you
They seem to be standing still.

Like some kinda dumb socialist.( `ε´ )

No one’s on eye-level with each other, so no one can see eye-to-eye.(*´ I `)ﾉﾟ(ﾉД｀ﾟ)ﾟ｡

Except at the very lowest rungs of society :(´ཀ`」 ∠):
And the summit of power.

It’s exhausting. ε=ε=┌( >_<)┘ There’s no footholds or plateaus to rest on.
And we all feel so terribly alone.

-Is my take on it, anyway.
i’ve only had one job, and it was a summer gig my parents set up.

But i can still see things.
Like how much my parents work, and how much everyone elses parents work.
How theyre buried in money and things
How they have no time to enjoy any of it
How their necks ache from spending all day craned up towards their “betters”
And how dirty their boots are from scrambling over everyone else to find purchase.

freefall climbing,
your nightowl

More wackadoos this week- Cyber-huffing deep divers proselytzying(?) to an audience of none.ヾ( ￣O￣)ツ
Easy to spot them, even with text alone. Their vocab’s over-stuffed with -ions like Ascension, Sublimation, Submersion; Evangelist Buzzwords.(」°ロ°)」

Transhumanists and the like are always talking about the body and mind and the machine the way priests talked about the father and the son and the holy spirit in the dark ages- a triumvirate of separate yet inseparate parts of a divine whole (hiding somewhere offstage, trust me)
People who understand how tech actually works- engineers and programmers, they dont talk about their work with reverance and awe- they talk about it with boredom and frustration.(￣ヘ￣)

Mostly frustration.୧((#Φ益Φ#))୨

From an outsiders perspective, mods can look like salvation. For someone born 80 years ago, they might look like magic. But peel back the sausage and peek how it’s made- And you’ll see it’s just more spaghetti code.
Nothing holy about an artificial spleen making API calls every time your blood sugar dips ٩(× ×)۶ to see what the Corporate Society of Medical Engineers considers “outside the norm” today.

Religions are steeped in death. If we werent so afraid of what comes after, we wouldn’t have spent so much of our history speculating (and killing) over it.
But for transhumanists, immortality is a given; The afterlife is an opt-in.
The sooner you flay off the flesh, the sooner you’ll be able to dodge death, woo-hoo!(≧▽≦)/

But isn’t that the grand paradox of organized faith in general? If there’s so much to look forward to
Why are we waiting? Hell, why are we even bothering sticking around?(↼_↼)
Might as well dip out early and get into the much, much better afterparty ASAP, right?(ᓀ ᓀ)

These mortal-coil-shuffling, micro-chips-for-communion, cult-of-introverted-personality types at least have an answer there-
You have to stick around, as long as possible, so you have the best tech available when it comes time to try and copy-paste your mind onto a VR server. (~人^)

Which means, ironically(or maybe not ironically?), that these enlightened 21st century zealots are far more afraid of dying than any 12th century monk; Because unlike the monks of old, when a transhumanist has an untimely death, they’re not expecting any kind of reward.

In any other religion, when someone you care about dies, you take comfort that they’re in a better place.
But if you believe immortality’s hidden just inside a big enough computer, whenever someone you love is taken from you

All you can feel is that they’re stupid for not being an early-adopter.

Head bowed (not in prayer),
your nightowl

There’s a lot of schoolwork tied up back here in the oldnet
Unfinished book reports like tablets buried in the sand. Horrible group project experiences like sunken wrecks scattered over the seafloor.
Lots of files transferred at 11:59pm. :(´ཀ`」 ∠):

i expected there to be a big difference between the public and private schools, but maybe that’s my bias talking-
Since public schools haven’t been a thing since before i was born. ヽ(￣～￣　)ノ

Obviously there’s still that gap between the have’s and the have-not’s; the technical schools and the magnet programs and the fast-tracks to nepo-industries (mostly politics) are still pretty far flung from the corporate-sponsored k-12s designed just to funnel people into lower-management positions.
And government still has its hand in education, removed by a few degrees- assigning tax breaks and arranging contracts and occasionally rubber-stamping designed-by-corporate-committe curriculums;

But the way my parents and their social stratum neighbors talked about it, you’d think the public schools were basically zoos-
Or cancerously overgrown daycare programs.

Turns out, school is school, regardless of what ingignia’s stamped on the entrance. (¯▿¯)
Parents fight with teachers over grades. __〆(￣ー￣ ) Students do their homework at the last possible second.
Tests are given, pop quizzes groaned over, and teenagers are mean to each other. (っ˘̩╭╮˘̩)っ

i am surprised, however, by how quickly virtual schooling gained traction.
Naively or romantically or whatever- a part of me figured there were always impassioned students arguing for the importance of having their own physical space for learning, for socializing, for growth.
But i see other teenagers everyday at my school, ٩(๑･ิᴗ･ิ)۶٩(･ิᴗ･ิ๑)۶ so i should’ve realized by now-
The one thing they aren’t is impassioned about attendance. (¬_¬ )

Lots of low-grade alpha-indigos woke up whenever i started rummaging through school websites.
Lots of earnest, almost pleading offers to write essays for me that were due decades ago.(っ´ω`)ﾉ(╥ω╥)
i felt pretty gross, disturbing their sleep, seeing them get so agitated.
idk if it was the right thing to do or not, but i gave them some poetry assignments i rooted out from a literature professor’s nearly-dead personal drive.

i hope they felt fulfilled for the few seconds it took them to mish-mash together some generated poetry.
From what i saw, they did get it all to rhyme (；⌣̀_⌣́)

But i didn’t feel anything myself (￣ ￣|||)

monitoring the empty halls,
your nightowl

There was a book burning on the news.
Not the front page or primetime slot, i should mention. Just happened across my feed. Scrolled past it before i got to the part that explained why those books in particular needed to be made into kindling.
Maybe its politically lazy (￣︿￣) or anti-intellectual to say this but

i dont really care what reason you have for it. i dont like people burning books.

theres other ways to destroy media if you really need to.
piling them up outside a library and soaking the pages in lighter fluid is

never a good look.(҂ `з´ )

Also, it’s futile?? 99% of all media is digital, and 99% of all physical media has digital backups waiting in the wings.
Physically destroying a copy of a book, which you took from wherever it was shipped to from a warehouse, which it only got to from blah blah blah-
Your bonfire’s about 5 degrees removed from anything that’d actually erase the words you hate so much.(T_T)

But it hasn’t been about erasing words for a long time now, has it? It’s about sending a message to the would-be readers, and the were-the-authors

This is what we think of what you have to say
This is what we think of your story
This is what we think of you

i could never be a real writer or a real journalist,(×﹏×) but i think i’m still allowed to admire them.
It takes courage to pull your thoughts out of the ether and try to cram them into the ill-fitting container of the page in front of you.
Takes ten times that courage to then send that page to someone else to read.
And then ten times THAT courage to send it to a publisher, {{ (><) }} with the additional gall to claim that people would pay to read more of it.:(´ཀ`」 ∠):_

Back here on the oldnet, i don’t need to summon any bravery to vomit words onto URL (╥_╥)
Because even if some other backwards-looking stranger does happen to read it, i have no way of knowing.(っ˘̩╭╮˘̩)っ
And there’s never any risk of what i say ending up thrown onto a pile of immolated opinion!( ´ ∀ `)ノ～ ♡

Because they already tried to burn down the oldnet ages ago
And everyone still here seems content to just make snow angels among the ashes.

fireproof and criticism-insulated,
your nightowl