The Reaction Economy
lrb.co.uk
lrb.co.uk
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964)
Would be nice to have social media weather report/farmer almanac for the region, esp if you are planting crops and stuff and don't want entire fields to get wiped out.
You can walk away from a hurricane. But to get protection from a pandemic, you rather need to take a vaccine, and also, sadly, limit the breadth of your contacts with strangers. The latter is basically the "social cooling" <https://www.socialcooling.com/>, buttoning-up or severing of social media interactions, visible for like last decade.
Hurricanes have a lot of energy. In theory we could expend all Earth's currently accessible resources to try controlling them. Barring some impossible to predict breakthroughs we cannot control hurricanes. Just like we (meatbags) cannot travel to other solar systems.
No idea how to actually do that though.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964)
The ending is great:
> ‘ Forgiveness is unique in being a reaction which breaks the chain, making a fresh start possible. It has been observed, of late, that there is a deficit of forgiveness in ‘cancel culture’ and the reputational attacks that thrive in the reaction economy. But digital platforms are anti-forgiveness machines by design. The broader question is how any of us – but especially children and young people – can become comfortable with our own freedom, our own spontaneity, against the backdrop of surveillance capitalism, which is the real condition of the reaction economy.’
It took me a long time to understand the value of forgiveness and come to terms with how horrible people just continue to exist. It almost came with maturity. Will the internet reaction machine mature enough to allow forgiveness?
> The broader question is how any of us – but especially children and young people – can become comfortable with our own freedom, our own spontaneity, against the backdrop of surveillance capitalism, which is the real condition of the reaction economy
Separate digital identities from real ones.
Edit 2: I originally had a much longer discussion about WWII and forgiveness but edited it out and did not indicate that I edited. Basically, I made a mistake, I take full responsibility, although you will bear the consequences.
>Sure von Braun worked for the enemy, but the U.S. needed his expertise and therefore gave him amnesty. Same for Unit 741, Hirohito, etc. in Japan.
The US didn't forgive Von Braun and Japanese scientists, they simply chose to look the other way out of expediency, because the evils of the Axis had become a commodity for the Allies. That's a subtle but important distinction.
Edit:
> The US didn't forgive Von Braun and Japanese scientists, they simply chose to look the other way out of expediency, because the evils of the Axis had become a commodity for the Allies. That's a subtle but important distinction.
Right -- you're making the distinction, between forgiveness in the sense of amnesty, and forgiveness as a ritualized, cultural, and Christian purification concept. Von Braun and Unit 731 received amnesty-forgiveness. Hirohito received ritual-forgiveness.
> Anonymity isn't forgiveness
Anonymity is forgiveness in the first sense.
GP was concerned with "the Cancelled" receiving both types of forgiveness. Anonymity only provides amnesty-forgiveness. It's up to you to reconcile that with the fact you don't receive ritual-forgiveness (and have to be ok with mere amnesty). Probably explains why most anonymous folks on the internet are so anti-establishment, because in this sense it (i.e., placing little value on ritual forgiveness) is a requirement to accept being a real person inhabiting an anonymous identity.
why the necessity of changing the behavior of them who receive the forgiveness?
the requirement of having a "willingness to change their behavior" tickles my funny sense (it raises a warning flag from me) because it prepares a bridge (a connection, a pathway) to control by means of forgiving which does not feel correct to me.
but I'm still trying to understand the general concept of forgiveness.
I agree that anonymity is not exactly forgiveness in principle. but functionally, and on the internet, something similar is accomplished by anonymity and by social forgiveness in real-world interaction.
Maybe the main difference between anonymity online and face-to-face forgiveness is the awareness of the actors involved? with anonymity you're not really forgiving anybody personally because you don't know who they are; this is reminiscent of how we don't have to 'forgive' the ground if we ever trip and get hit in the knees by the ground or something.
but the functional contribution of both forgiveness and online anonymity is a capacity to absorb mistakes. to withhold (or delay) the application of "justice" (but in practice it's usually some sort of revenge or token scapegoating) because it does make sense to do it like this.
but this is not trivial to explain; hence the complexity around explaining (and understanding) the principles of forgiveness....
keeps thinking
1. A willingness not to dwell on the past.
2. A relief from a sense that the past is causing present harms.
(1) applies largely to the person doing the forgiving, and (2) to the person being forgiven, but they are intertwined.
The "necessity of changing the behavior" affects both. If the behavior is still going on, then it doesn't matter if they've been forgiven for past transgressions. And if the person desires to believe that the past isn't still causing harm, then continuing to cause that harm undermines that.
You can frame it as a devious matter of "control" if you want, but we're talking about a conflict here. The person granting forgiveness wants a thing to change. They don't suddenly have omnipotent power to enforce that change. They merely have a way of framing the question.
If you don't care to be forgiven, there's nothing that can be done. If you have caused harm and don't mind continuing to be harm, then the second part of my formulation simply doesn't apply to you.
It leaves the first half, and they can do their best. It will almost certainly involve removing themselves from the situation, as best they can. That can have consequences for the person doing the harm, and if that matters to them they may reconsider. But that's not a magical control over them.
In reality we're all a bit horrible, but unable to see it in ourselves.
Now on the 47th level of reactions of reactions is me reacting to it.
It’s just that I was reading and reading and reading it, and at some point it started to resemble a twitch streamer that spends about an hour reading patch notes to a game while peppering every sentence with ahhhs, ummmms and well maybeeeeeees without culminating in anything.
By the speed of light at which messages are transmitted.