Tag: socialdivision

  • I Was Wrong All Along

    I Was Wrong All Along

    Blog Entry: Unlike most articles on Mentatul, this post details a personal experience, hence, it is posted underneath the Blog^ category.

     

    “There may be said to be two classes of people in the world; those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not.”

    The game of life has countless species, tribes and actors, mixing and dancing through an infinity of stages(*). Given this complexity, truth is a multi-dimensional riddle that changes its definition and solution from one perspective to another, and from one target to the other.

    Technology advances, ethical standards change, cultures collapse, civilizations emerge, species die out and new ones appear. History is written by the winners. A heretic yesterday, a hero today, a villain tomorrow.

    And this game of life can be so intoxicating, one can get (almost) hopelessly lost chasing reflections in Indra’s net^. But along the way, things happen, and the illusion breaks apart. It is during one such moment when I truly understood and integrated how wrong I was. It was as if living “I know that I know nothing”^.

    Up until not long ago, I had negative thoughts about many politicians. I disliked many corporations. I despised advertisement and cultural programming through mass-media and the mainstream entertainment industry. Now, after many Mentatul articles, I feel I’m finally able to admit how wrong I was to let myself clouded by negative emotions when, in fact, it was all part of the diversity of life. Everything and everybody has a right to exist, and we may thank their existence for they give shape to the values that we hold dear.

    From this day forward, I shall write from a state of accepting the complexity of the game of life. I’ve made just enough mistakes to realize politicians make mistakes. I was deluded often enough to now understand that businessmen sometimes are deluded.

    The worst politician was once an innocent baby. The vilest corporation was once a hopeful startup. Things get blown out of proportion mostly because the game of life this civilization is apparently engaged in playing^ seems to thrive on brutal separation. Don’t get me wrong (even if I am wrong :D), it’s good to have sides in any game. Unfortunately, picking the “wrong” side in the current civilization can be a very miserable affair.

    This may be due to the survival instinct, but if so, I feel that it is time to overcome it. We’re fine, damn it! We’ve survived. Time to invest energy in something else. For example, evolving our civilization towards a more interesting game of life.

    And when I say “evolving”, I don’t mean it in the very direct way trans-humanists^ see it. It’s more like a more vague and gradual process which is more akin to Wu-wei than a focused, concentrated effort (which I feel will only lead to more destruction, pretty much in the lines of our past centuries of “beating nature into submission”, a task we’ve been “good” at but are starting to feel the backlash from).

    Read about Wu-wei^ or listen to this:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtGtqmC5wU4^

    So does this mean one is supposed to sit idly while greedy corporations destroy ecosystems? Of course not. But the way we go about enacting the next change in our civilization’s DNA will determine if we revert back to the bloodshed of revolution of if we are ready for the ecstasy of evolution.

    There are many ways indeed of enacting peaceful change. If you have a job, start by reading Brave New Work^. It will awake you to the potential locked within our outdated way of working. If you want to contribute to evolution, start with “peace” and “empathy”. Realize that corporations are only as greedy as the stock market forces them to be^.

    Most importantly, peaceful change is enacted by renouncing the obsession to control things. As the saying goes, “relax, nothing is under control”. And yet…

    “Realizing that our inability to control life is not the same as having no way to navigate it, leads to freedom and liberation. Just because I can’t control the sea doesn’t mean I can’t learn how to swim in it.”
    – Rami Shapiro

    With less desire for control, I salute you. With more awareness of how wrong I was (and will perhaps continue to be, but hopefully less and less), I salute you. I salute you traveler, and thank you for your presence. Now, shall we proceed towards a beautiful Universe?

    Fractal Wrongness
    Fractal Wrongness

    And despite the fact that I’ve been wrong all along, that doesn’t mean I’ll stop writing and being wrong :). It’s great to find new ways of being wrong every day! That’s how we learn.

    Some additional notes about this post

    When I wanted to find who is the author of the quote I started this post with, the first link I found was an article trying to locate the source^, which shows just how hard it is to sometimes pinpoint a wise saying. So, I guess that quote can already be considered a proverb.

    I started the article by saying that “The game of life features countless species, tribes and actors, mixing and dancing through an infinity of stages.”

    I’m particularly happy with this phrase, because of the word “stages”. The word “stage” has two main definitions^. The word matches what I wanted to say in a beautiful way. I originally meant to say “theatrical stages”, but the fact is that in the game of life, the species, tribes and actors all go through an infinity of evolutive stages as well. Even the stages go through stages :). Here’s to the hidden gems of the English language.

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  • That Pepsi Commercial

    That Pepsi Commercial

    This nicely written article on Wired says it all: sometimes corporations are so tone-deaf that they manage the impossible: uniting the Internet:

    https://www.wired.com/2017/04/pepsi-ad-internet-response/^

    I am saddened by the fact that Pepsi took a noble message and a beautiful story only to ruin everything by having a script and implementation so utterly disrespectful towards minorities, women and social classes. Pepsi wants to say “we should look beyond social classes”, but instead highlights the ugly differences that exist between the privileged and the other 99%. The commercial is also a rather sad mix of cliché and kitsch.

    Bottom line? It’s bad taste. Just like Pepsi and the rest of the canned sugar industry.

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  • How to Make Facebook Show You the Stuff You Really Care About

    How to Make Facebook Show You the Stuff You Really Care About

    Facebook doesn’t really do its job when you ask of it to follow a website for you. Before getting into the reasons and details, here are two images that explain how you can properly follow a page on Facebook. Unless you change your notification settings as shown in the images, the default behavior is that whatever you see in your news feed is at the whim of algorithms designed to extract money out of everybody using the website – users on the one side and advertisers on the other. Sadly Facebook treats as advertisers even non-profit content creators such as myself, but more on that below. However, at least for now, there are still ways to circumvent the algorithms. Here’s what I’m talking about:

    How to follow
    How to follow, step 1
    How to follow
    How to follow, step 2

    Fueling the division

    It’s a pity that I even have to type this but alas, due to the rather unfair algorithms employed by Facebook (and many other social networks), I realize it’s necessary to explain the current situation. Before I start, I’d like to emphasize that I have no problem with Facebook making a profit. As a living commercial entity, it needs to survive in order to evolve. But what will it evolve into? We as users of Facebook need to voice our concerns if we wish to have a say in its evolution. A social network should be the best place to make oneself heard but unfortunately, in the case of Facebook this is increasingly false.

    For example even if you follow Mentatul on Facebook, you will still not see all the new posts in your feed because the social network uses a ruthless filtering system that actually separates people into comfort bubbles^. This algorithm has its upsides because it can show users more of the stuff they are actually interested in, but it comes at a great cost.

    First of all, it deepens the chasms between social groups, reducing one’s opportunity to discuss with people outside one’s comfort zone. Like any company, Facebook wants its users happy. Happy users spend more time on the website and make the company more money. I’m not saying that the Facebook experience should become a carousel of discomfort, being bombarded with things you don’t care about or even disturb you. But instead of allowing users to become isolated tribes there should be certain topics that can cross all boundaries, especially topics that are important for social development (equal rights, education, ecosystem, anti-corruption, critical thinking).

    Perhaps one day AI algorithms will be smart enough to discern between constructive writing (ideas, criticism, analysis) and intellectual poison (false news, hate speech). The question is if the humans sitting at the control panel will allow these algorithms to contribute to educating people. Certain elite groups prefer to dumb down the masses so that they are easily controllable. But there are also those that have realized that an educated population can be much more profitable for the entire species in the long run.

    Making life difficult for non-profits

    Another way Facebook algorithms are hurting is treating non-profits as if they were advertisers. The website is built quite “intelligently” so that it coerces the owners of pages into paying for getting exposure. It’s understandable when we’re talking about commercial, for-profit entities. But sadly, for all its “well meaning”^ attitude, Facebook doesn’t help non-profits much. Most of my posts there hardly reach a third of my followers, with the website constantly nagging me to pay in order to reach more people.

    A friendly reminder to PAY
    A friendly reminder to PAY

    There is zero advertisement on Mentatul and the website doesn’t bring me any money yet, quite the contrary, it consumes time and bandwidth. I will never charge for my work, everything is provided for free, with a possible future option for donations. Unfortunately, Facebook doesn’t care that my page is a non-profit. Even though I’m an independent writer, it still treats me as an advertiser. What a non-profit cares about is for people who are interested in what the non-profit has to say to receive all updates.

    A friendly reminder to PAY
    Another friendly reminder to PAY (for each post)

    When I post something on Mentatul’s Facebook page, it gets shown to a (sometimes very) limited amount of people “following” the page. To make matters worse, I’ve noticed that the most important articles, such as the ones about social issues (consumerism, intellectual diet, cultural and environmental decay) are shared even less. It’s not surprising, because such articles seem to go against Facebook’s profit-driving forces: advertisement.

    A friendly reminder to PAY
    A friendly reminder to PAY (for sharing original content I created and already paid for… with my time)

    This is not a revolution. It’s evolution

    What makes me even sadder about this situation is that I’m not even against any company making money! I’m not against advertisement at all. Treating our consumerism problem for example doesn’t mean there won’t be advertisement or profits anymore.

    It simply means that companies should be encouraged to produce higher quality products with replaceable parts at increased cost. The increased cost is a profit driver that will allow companies to cover for the R&D investment required for providing better quality and the infrastructure required for maintaining products for a longer time.

    Competition means that there will always be winners and losers. Curing consumerism will still be done by companies, but it has to be us, the buyers of products, who make sure that non-consumerist companies succeed. Facebook still has a place in that world, so does advertisement and corporations. But it can all be done in a much better fashion in order to safeguard our ecosystem and continued quality of life on this planet.

    And this is how I turned a post about how to follow a website into a philosophical discussion about economy, advertisement and the artificial intelligence used by social networks. Seriously though, if you like what I write here, please go through the trouble of following my Facebook page properly :D.

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