Imagine your favorite third place[1], a library, park, bar, etc. The place you regularly go to get connection to people without having to jump through all of the hoops to create and organize an actual event. It's a way to satisfy your innate need for conviviality without requiring much effort or willpower, which are always in finite supply.
You've been going to this place for years. You're a regular. You've made friends with other regulars. It feels good to be a familiar face and to see those familiar faces. A kind of warm sense of safety that we have evolved to experience since we first sat around a fire in prehistoric days. That sense of "Ah, good, I'm here nestled among my tribe."
Now imagine how it feels to walk into that room and discover that half the seats are occupied by mannequins. Each mannequin has a loudspeaker attached to it constantly playing random word salad.
Some of the regulars are still there, maybe. It's hard to see them through all the plastic limbs or hear them through the cacophony of meaningless noise.
How does being in that space make you feel? Now compare it to how you felt before the dead-eyed inanimate bodies showed up. That's what we've all lost.
I’m so intensely sick of this attitude. We are losing things with technology. Important things. Human things.
Looking under a microscope at one specific instance and saying “eh it’s not that bad, you’re overreacting” is disingenuous or at least putting your head in the sand.
Imagine a library. You go in, grab a book, and start reading.
Imagine the same library, but it's the Unseen University's Library - you go in, grab one of any book ever written, and start reading. You've gained something!
You want human things? Put down the technology and go and connect with some humans.
But yes, the original poster with their allusions to lost limbs and "pointless swinging in a vast, unquantifiable emptiness.." is overreacting, depressed or both.
The slop will continue until it is no longer profit-making for someone.
The fact that profit motives exist and motivate people isn't an "appeal to capitalism", it's just a statement of reality. The best way to stop slop is to put it out of business. People don't make slop for social prestige.
even if it is, that is their feelings. your outright dismissal of them is far more sad in my opinion than their feelings. lack of empathy is a truly sad state.
