Don’t carry a grudge outside of a chain gang, and don’t carry water outside of a bucket brigade. The whole of every commotion is tragicomic, but way way way more comedy than tragedy. Since my mom died I’m staring down mortality, refusing to re-embrace a society I was never a part of. But I won’t clock out because I don’t need to care for them for people to need help. Folks who live for themselves produce/empower all problems, none of us is a magical exception. When will the billionaires/the gubmint/God/daddy fix problems ask people with time and money for streaming cool shit while the single mom next door robs Peter to pay Paul so her kids eat for a day.
If you share in the credits and rewards of a society but never its blame or burdens, you are not sharing anything, rather you’re just another asshole taking away from it and its potential. Villains are the ones who need others to make with the sacrificing, and anyone who’s the hero of their own story is just giving the world more shitty fan-fic. Where is it written that responsibility must be casual?
Evolution boils down to change or die. We learn, grow and evolve only when met by the uncomfortable or unfamiliar. But the great American unwritten novel preaches that everything beside oneself must do the changing, learning, growing and evolving, or oneself may as well be dead. I don’t believe any form of superiority or supremacy, be it office politics, national identity, your xenophobic aunt or your inner monologue, can ever explain why it’s superior, only how what’s different is somehow inferior. Journalists never ever ask racists to define racism in their own words.
In terms of technology in the general sense, when and where the most selfish no longer require masses carrying them aloft to live as demigod-kings, the masses allow themselves to be made irrelevant and expendable. When we grant capital more value and gravitas than life itself, life in turn is granted no choice but to pay the piper. Slow down, gods of time and space slow down.
In terms of twitter explicitly, people needing to get paid by us to profiteer our lives is so doubly insulting. Suicide is a felony unless you want to spend 40+ billion to destroy yourself, then the interventionist government goes all this crow is divine with salt. Gab, Parler, Minds, MeWe and Truth Social all cater to the rightwing. Mastodon does not, but is too complicated for most users as it wasn’t created to appease the wish-fulfillment capitalism of pop culture horn-doggerel although I may be the lone tweeter not to have peeped it for a spell. I test-drove it a couple years ago, most of the folks seemed to be the sorts who actually read the Greenwald articles about Snowden back when. I know libs are eyeballing it now but the whole decentralization of power thing really is not favorable toward any political party. The solution is to go potluck IRL.
Or stay put outside the confines of choir, as though in no other facet of our lives do we function where we are neither wanted or needed. In that respect, born-again Christians are suckers for marketing.
Flocks don’t grow if we keep to a choir’s comfortable familiarity. When I was caregiving for my mom’s final years we were shut out by every single person we knew in the world. I don’t want anyone to experience that. Make the effort to meet strangers halfway, you might save ’em. The root to all online social media is DIY segregation, and people pridefully feel when they are limited in that they must leave. But abandoning them altogether cuts growth for all parties. We need the uncomfortable, the unfamiliar, or we fester and die alone. There’s no unity when everyone justifies a comfort zone though. We could not meet rapists or murderers halfway, but physical or metaphysical any gated community is intended to block the mass of reality. People leaving twitter are no less primadonna than what ails them, the same way that comicsgate fanatics are no less primadonna than the alternatives they despise the most. Not to pick fights or tie up feeds, but I’d rather assert my existence than move every time a crazy neighbor declares ownership of the block.
Elon Musk is the opposite of John Galt. One exists outside the public sphere, urging the greatest minds to trade soapboxes and money-handlers for problem-solving to better the world. The other exists in the public eye, appealing to lowest common denominators to carry him aloft in praise of soapboxes and money-handlers. Without the users, twitter is nothing but pixels. Elon’s livelihood may well depend on being a slave-master carried aloft by the labors of workers and resources of consumers, but what he owns are not people, just pixels. Alan Watts wrote that even in the best of circumstances, most folks have the propensity to suckle the finger pointing the way rather than see where it actually leads. Like how Cobain did not want to be a superstar, because he knew he was a fuckup. And I think too many of our leaders and icons today are more interested in having their fingers suckled than in pointing anyone anywhere. The real soldiers and saints keep their hands too busy for that.
Evil is known wherever ego goes unchallenged, but wishing or voting or praying for others to do the heavy lifting in dealing with it is protecting only one’s own. Those who’ve done actual manual labor know the sun’s POV is not at all energizing, not for humans. It saps what we have to give. Dark, terrifying storms flowing with thunder and lightning, the sort most try to avoid, exudes our spirit come alive. Sociopolitics are no different. I do not see inconveniences as threats to myself, and I don’t see threats to myself as matters for others to sort. When my adult life is spent compensating for the shortcomings of the establishment for the peoples around me, then I am too occupied to cosign for its esteem. Always a fine day when any ego learns they do not actually hold authority over the sun, the moon and stars.
I’d say it’s prioritizing the needs of others vs prioritizing personal wish-fulfillment. In reality every single politician of my lifetime is just another shade of ego, with true heroes too busy sacrificing to be requesting it of others.