John Wise

There’s such a fine line between being a noodge and an optimist in my world. On one hand, I believe we can manifest our ambition to do better, while on the other I’m afraid that I’m more skilled at complaining about what’s wrong instead of offering solutions. While a radical reform of education is at the top of my list for bringing change, I also understand that humanity shifts at the pace of tar pitch. Without a systemic shock, I can hardly find a sliver of hope that we’ll recover from our willful embrace of intellectual laziness. But it’s not always dark, or maybe it must be darkest before a light turns on.

I see glimmers of potential that there are those who are trying to drag us forward toward our better selves, but all too often, I cringe at what I perceive to be sickly sweet in their approach. I have to tamp down my knee-jerk reaction to the cloyingly wholesome nature of messages where everyone wants to feel good about the situation being documented and held up as exemplary.

The conditioning of my youth was such that the collective was weak, laden with the baggage of hippy love and patchouli. Determined individualism with the lone hero who will inspire the kid, the team, the troop, or a nation out on the horizon, waiting to make his solo entry when the time is right. Did I watch too many John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and James Bond films in my youth? Yes. Come to think about it, our current U.S. president is trying to play this tired trope yet again.

Years ago, I was a proponent of kids playing games such as Minecraft as I felt it exemplified the scenario of people cooperating across unseen borders with people who were relatively anonymous. It didn’t matter if a kid was disabled, starting to be aware of their sexual identity that might be different than the accepted norm, or had already been made to be ashamed of their race because, in the pixelated world of the game, there was only collaboration and sharing.

Today, I watched a clip from Yes Theory on YouTube where their team brought a recent high school grad with an underprivileged background from Los Angeles to Arizona for a visit to Biosphere 2. Initially, my reaction was to hit the back button and leave the apparently sappy content I’d never be able to relate to, but I worked against instinct and tried to see why these young people had garnered 5.76 million subscribers. It wasn’t long before I could get past the exuberance and appreciate that this team was celebrating the tenacity of the young lady to endure hardship. Introducing her to the idea that it only takes a minute and some determined effort to change your circumstance allowed Yes Theory’s team to share the emotional impact made on their guest. The clip ends with her receiving a $300 gift card for art supplies as she’s an aspiring artist, but then they also present her with a $10,000 check to help with the costs of college.

To a generation brought up selfish and isolated in their cubicles, witnessing the youthful celebration and gratification that comes with sharing and maybe inspiring others is bitter medicine that might as well be wrapped in unicorns and rainbows. We need to unwrap that prejudice and join the party, turning away from the I/Me generation and learning to understand that the We/Us generation is here.

Those who are still acting selfishly were effectively abused by a system clinging to outmoded paradigms that are no longer viable. Many of these people are angry that they’ve not yet had their moment in the sun owning a big house or an expensive car, going on pricey vacations, buying designer clothes, and receiving invitations to exclusive clubs. They feel cheated that a generation before them seem to have had all the luxury, and now they want theirs. How those people heal is still up in the air.

For the millions who’ve been considering what kind of normal the world might be in the future after the pandemic, one thing they do know is that they don’t want to go back to what had been. Figuring out something as massive and complex as fairness and equity in the social and economic world of hundreds of millions of people trying to soothe raw nerves created by neglect, disparity, racism, and abuse, leading to catastrophic situations for loved ones is not a solution that just springs into the collective conscience.

People such as the team behind Yes Theory, Best Ever Food Review Show, and SoulPancake, along with individuals such as Liziqi and Lady Gaga, are offering us views of our world that best demonstrate the importance of people in communities helping one another and being positive role models.

The bias some people feel about those things they are unfamiliar with is the real toxic commodity that only works to fuel great intolerance. How we overcome that hostility within ourselves is an ongoing exercise that must evolve as we are forced to confront our new reality, a reality that is still being written, thought about, recorded, shared, and invented.

To close this entry out, please do not read this as a Pollyannaish Kumbaya message that somehow some fresh-faced, bubbly internet celebrities are going to solve our problems. Nothing is that simple. This has me thinking that maybe I should write a blog entry about nuance and generalization where people I speak with face-to-face want to take umbrage with my gross generalizations, but then if I tell them something is green, I get a pass. We can distinguish between millions of shades of colors, and not a single person has ever asked me to be precise in just what hue I’m generalizing about when I speak of the sky being blue. Humans intuitively understand that there are millions of shades across the spectrum of colors that we might speak of, but quickly get caught up in a dilemma of wanting to argue when details they find pertinent to a discussion demand exacting answers to a problem that is obviously multi-faceted.

So while a particular negative force might be wreaking havoc in this and that spot and a drug crisis, racism, and poverty are exacting a toll over there, salves are at the same time being applied in the hope of contributing to partial solutions to intractable problems. Sometimes, we need unicorns, rainbows, and even a hug from a hippy.

“I hate Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Apple, Microsoft, this software, that social media company, Amazon, Adobe, apps, online bill pay, convoluted passwords, internet scams, spam, site registration, YouTube, Netflix, cookies, and everything else about digital connectivity.”

Then leave it.

I was just considering doing precisely that, leaving it. Not that I hate any of the above aside from internet scams, but I was wondering out loud with Caroline if we could possibly leave our digital lives behind. She suggested that one way would be if we were to trade our current lives for rural offline ones where we’d accept a life of gardening and hanging out on the farm. No way!

My life online has gradually become so ingrained that I can no longer pinpoint when that happened and at what point there was no turning back. I can share the day it likely happened, though I didn’t realize it at the time as I think I still had options; that would have been on January 9th, 1998. On that day, I placed my first order with Amazon for books that were impossible to buy in Arizona, not just the Phoenix area but all of Arizona. Interestingly, my first two purchases were for No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior by Joshua Meyrowitz (which replaced the photocopy I had from a friend in Germany) and Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society: The New Science of Memes from Aaron Lynch.

Ironic that the first two things I bought from Amazon related to fundamental changes affecting our relationships with information and commerce. I’d read No Sense of Place around 1989 when Olaf F. thought it important enough that he accepted the significant (at the time) expense of making a photocopy so I could read it at the same time he was stuck in it. This was a pivotal book for me back then regarding my thinking of how we approach making ourselves guinea pigs in our relationship with technology. By 1998, I needed to know how well it held up, and to this day, I’d still recommend people read this seminal book. The other title, Thought Contagion by Aaron Lynch, picked up on memes, a term I had first learned of in Richard Dawkins’ book The Selfish Gene. In Thought Contagion, the author discussed the impact of memes in our world – except that in the late 1990s, he had no idea that someday memes would be such a ubiquitous element of our online lives. Also of note, my next purchase from Amazon included Virus of the Mind by Richard Brodie: The New Science of the Meme.

Little did I know by early 1998 that the entire world would become fully dependent upon the Internet within a relatively short amount of time. As I said, I was probably more in need of this online lifestyle by then as the books I needed were not on anyone’s bestseller lists and so were not sold locally.

But what of today, with all the noise around the supposed issues surrounding social media, fake news, memes that become facts, scams, and the myriad other problems that are exploding all around us? None of that matters. They are things that must be repaired over time, but they are part of the evolution of the platform. Does anyone think humanity leapt from a weekly open-air market in the town square to the air-conditioned mall with 150 vendors selling products from around the world, allowing payment by credit card before stopping for gyros, burritos, a slice of pizza, or baked-in-front-of-you cinnamon roll, followed by a movie from Ireland in a month, a year, or a decade? The time required for services to mature has often taken decades, if not centuries, and yet, within 25 years since the emergence of the internet, which started out as a way to share very basic information without photos and send emails, we are now intertwined in a complex web of electronic services that are impossible to pull away from.

This brings me back to the title of today’s entry, Leaving Our Online Lives. Well, I’m not, and we can’t. Sure, someone might figure out how to stop using Facebook or dump Instagram, but they will not leave every vestige of a digital life behind; it is no longer possible. Yes, I really do believe this.

I could probably still do my banking offline, but that’s about it. By the way, when I say offline, I mean not using a smartphone for any of the convenience of an internet connection, either. Some will say that getting rid of something like Facebook is the easiest service to rid themselves of. Well, if all you use it for is looking at Aunt Betty’s photos of her chihuahua and checking on upcoming birthdays of relatives, I could easily dump it. On the other hand, I see it as a useful tool where notifications for international events are announced, product announcements, and updates are posted. I subscribe to a few groups where people with similar interests congregate with new information being shared, and questions asked that spur my curiosity to learn along with them while others offer support or maybe I can be of assistance. I use Facebook to stay abreast of currents of opinion from people I’ve known from around the globe and occasionally chat with them. Yes, there are forums, and there are online magazines that might cover some of these things, but they are not drawing in as many diverse voices and are often not very timely.

Not shopping online would crush me and my wife. One of my major hobbies is Eurorack synthesizers, and there are only about 25 shops on earth. Am I supposed to call them to learn what’s coming out and what’s on sale on a month-to-month basis? Wait for a catalog in the mail, maybe? The audio software I use, where would I buy a physical copy of a plugin? New drivers for a piece of hardware I own, should I write the company and ask them to send me a USB card with the files? How about graphics software? Blender 3D has NEVER been available on physical media.

Caroline’s major hobby is everything fiber arts. Without YouTube, she’d be sunk. Yarn would be in short supply as Joann’s sells the most common lowest quality inexpensive stuff on the market, many specialty yarns and fibers would be off the menu. As for weaving yarn, she’d have to sell her looms as the state of Arizona is not a hotbed for weavers; then again, nowhere in the United States is that. The magazines that cater to the offline crowd are struggling, so while Halcyon Yarn of Maine sends out their Yarn Store in a Box, just getting hold of their phone number will grow impossible as time goes by.

Food. This is what would make me break down and weep. I currently buy some of the following online: vinegar, oil, spices, beans, chilies, Mangalitsa pork, dried fruit, nuts, seeds, grains, dish soap, bath soap, salt, vanilla beans, boudin and tasso from Louisiana, sprouting seeds, honey, various ethnic foods from crispy mixed beans (ပင်ပျိုရွက်နု) used in Burmese salads to Colatura di Alici Fish Sauce because we are curious, and finally all the things that due to COVID-19 have become difficult to find such as flour, Silk soy milk, and flavored Spam.

Travel would be the other super tragic hit that would occur from not being online. From Google Maps to plane tickets, yurt reservations, and the off-the-beaten-path restaurants that feature authentic flavors instead of those popular with tourists, we’d be hard-pressed to purchase or learn of any of that. How would we reserve tickets for entry to particular places? Don’t tell me I could just call as for 1. There never was a global phone book, 2. Do you really believe Century Link of Arizona information would have access to the phone number for the Hallein Salt Mine in Austria? 3. Certain things are now exclusively online or only purchasable in person.

News. Twenty-five years ago, after moving to the United States, Caroline and I could go to our local Borders Bookstore and pick up the latest issue of the Spiegel news magazine from Germany along with Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from Caroline’s hometown along with the International Herald Tribune and a host of other international sources of news we were accustomed to in Europe. On the American side of political, economic, and cultural news, we had access to a bevy of publications that have since shrunk, were consolidated, disappeared, or become clones of aggregators as news collection is no longer very profitable. I refuse to watch television and even if I were somehow able to leave my digital life behind, I will never return to the medium of stupidity known as TV. There would still be radio, but unless NPR were available in our rural location, we’d be cut off from current events.

Uninformed, how would I vote? Unfed, how would we eat? Unaware of the world at large, how would we travel? Unable to equip our interests, how would we practice our hobbies or further our education? And now the postal service is faltering, so getting meds, sending checks to creditors, or waiting for Earth’s last remaining travel bureau to send us some literature about the Oregon coast are all at risk.

This constant chatter about our problems with online lives might be worth it if any of us cared enough to take up the skills to create alternatives to the services we don’t like. Instead, like armchair athletes, weather prognosticators, Yelp reviewers, movie critics, and the host of others that sling worthless opinions of complaint on everyone else’s incompetence, we’ll just keep on having to listen to the bitching of those unhappy with most everything in life as they kvetch about the Borg Mark Zuckerberg, the Trillionaire Jeff Bezos, or the globalist with human chipping plans aka Bill Gates.

Meanwhile, I’ll be online buying some Surströmming after a two-hour binge of watching others retching, trying to eat the stuff before turning to Chaturbate to talk on the newest social platform with participants from around the world as I enjoy a kind of global travel experience via genitalia. When I’m done with that, it’s time for some wholesome QAnon news and finally tuning in to Twitch as I watch others making music instead of turning on my instrument and finally giving it a try. Damn, I hate the internet.

Yes, the electorate of the city I live in is THAT stupid. So, just who are these mobs this candidate for sheriff is standing up to? I’d wager he’s not referring to the Sinaloa Cartel, the Mafia, or biker gangs associated with criminal activity – oh yeah, that would be because those groups participate in interstate crime, which the FBI deals with. No, he wouldn’t be so overt and racist by making an appeal in public on street corners with a sign that targets Black Lives Matter, anti-fascists, environmentalists, and protesters in general that the president of the United States has labeled as liberal extremists. Why would the general public put up with a sign that smacks of such overt racism with hints of nationalism? The easy answer is that we are collectively too stupid to recognize the blatant nature of an appeal to backward-thinking white supremacists.

I recently read this tweet from Bree Newsome Bass: “The civil unrest is a byproduct of the collapsing state, not the cause of it.” Now, I can already hear people saying that the collapse is due to this event or that one, this death, this action, this fire, these people, those people, immigrants, Facebook, the fake media, QAnon, Obama, Trump, or whatever flavor of nonsense that wraps up people’s concerns in some neat little package that isolates the problem which would then insinuate that if we could simply contain it, we can deal with it and overcome it.

Here’s some news for you: our problems are deep and systemic, and Ms. Bass is getting it right; we are in a collapsing state. The only reason we are in this situation is because of our fundamentally broken education environment. I did NOT say the education system. Our teachers are, by and large, doing the best they can, but they have to fight against a population that revels in the mediocrity of subpar intellect that is wrongly construed as a form of genius. Collectively, we are idiots, and that’s why people running for office can put up such hostile signs asking you for their vote, as did Jerry here in Phoenix, Arizona. We have choices of how to listen to opposing points of view. While many will insist that the dogma they eschew is a kind of law laid down as a liturgical device by “their” politicians and Fox News pundits, or maybe it’s an insidious canon law not conveyed by a papal pronouncement but the whimsical folly of a celebrity turned politician. However, by what method does a large part of our population gather to act as a conditioned herd of sheep, which both sides accuse the other of being guilty of? It could very well be that it is this black-and-white, either-or, my way or the highway, kind of mentality that is shooting the body politic point-blank in the head.

My analogies and observations are fundamentally worthless. My kvetching adds nothing to the larger dialog as bigger, more important voices than mine have been speaking truth to power for far longer than I’ve been alive, and their impact has been negligible at best. So why don’t I just stop hitting all these keys in front of me and get on with some good old-fashioned rolling over and accepting my own superiority I deserve for being allowed to live? Because of my dream that I won’t go to my grave surrounded by the hostility of idiots, and I mean this in the general sense. I’d prefer that my final breath would not be one of exasperation but one of envy that those who continue are doing so in a world better than the one I was born to.

Back to the mob. A citizenry operating within the context of constitutionally guaranteed rights when demanding change from a system that rightfully appears hostile to the point of being deadly to a part of our people is democracy doing what it’s supposed to do. We once asked how Germans could sit by and allow Jewish people, gay people, Sinti/Roma, and others to be rounded up and shipped off. We felt they must have been complicit in the atrocities being waged against these groups. But this is exactly where America is today as we demonize those who are risking their safety by confronting a state apparatus that is deaf to the plight of those who are not of the majority. The real mob is the thugs doing the bidding of people in bunkers and high towers. Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, not even Adolf Hitler himself ever needed to murder a single person as the officers of the Sturmabteilung, a.k.a. the Brown Shirts, the Schutzstaffel a.k.a. the SS, the Gestapo which translates to the Secret State Police, even the ordinary policeman on the beat were part of the fabric of suppression of the undesirables, of the Jewish mob, the gay mob, the scientific and art mob, the sympathizer mob who tried to protect those who would bring down the state that was only looking out for the common German worker. The official title of these law & order patriots was National Socialist German Workers’ Party or NSDAP, better known as Nazi Party.

I can imagine a reader of this being aghast that I’d draw a comparison of Nazis to American policemen and women, and I certainly and unequivocally would agree that the comparison is mostly WAY off base, but the bigger point was that to the average German who didn’t much care about Jews, gays, artists, and other ethnicities, those agencies were simply law enforcement officers doing their jobs. When your own country starts referring to its citizens (the mob) as enemies of the state and elections can use propagandistic speech as a friendly colloquial, nothing mean intended if you are on the right side of the argument kind of way, then those who would call these unfolding atrocities out for what they might be leading to, are then the enemies of the state too. But I am not an enemy, and I insist that I’m a part of our better conscience where we all strive to be better, not whiter, not angrier, not pettier.

History always catches up with those who subvert humanity, even when it means the entire collapse of an unjust empire, Reich, reign, or cartel. The criminally hateful are ultimately marginalized, with their bones thrown to the wind. From the Roman Empire, the Nazis, the Ottomans, the Mongols, and so many others that thought they could rule with iron fists, it is the collapsing state that unseats these traitors of humanity who abused the naive trust of those who believe that by eliminating the perceived enemy, they can offer you a better world. And yet, here we go again.

Plato taught Aristotle. Aristotle influenced almost everybody, including Thomas Aquinas, who likewise influenced almost everyone in the Western world. From Dante to Martin Luther and Goethe, the bible played its role until Spinoza, Descartes, Rousseau, and Kant took up the mantle of thought to influence Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and others right up to our present time. For two thousand years, the baton of knowledge and humanity’s desire to understand our place in the cosmos has been a thread passed from generation to generation. These thinkers wrote in order to distill accumulating theory into new tools that might allow others to forge better processes as we try crawling out of the proverbial muck. In their search for answers, even if flawed and, in retrospect, unenlightened, those who force us to think differently are helping us understand existence.

Some of us write to explore our existence as we become aware of our Dasein. I am referencing this German word here on the 250th birthday of Hegel, who wrote of the subject, but it is the definition by Heidegger that resonates with me most. Da means “there,” and sein translates to “to be,” so we could say Dasein means “being there” or “presence,” but you should know some German to better understand that nothing is as it appears on first blush regarding simple meaning. In English, we translate Dasein as “existence” though many things are in existence, including animals, insects, molecules, planets, pollution, and us.

Put another way, Dasein means that humans “are” in the world, that we are aware of self and of a universe of meaning constructed by humans to learn how to understand our involvement. These structures are the results of human experiences and the consciousness that cultivate the seeds of Dasein. The science of attempting to understand this is called phenomenology. It is within this realm that we explore metaphysics, and within that, some of us are concerned with the noetics of our species. So, “being there” cannot simply mean mere existence, but it demands that a person is actively engaged in exploring the most important aspects of humanity as it relates to the mind’s interpretation of our place in the realm of knowledge. That is what is meant by noetics, in my understanding.

Consider the idea of a current moment where we cannot see forward and are content with where we are; we are in our “normal.” Being in the present without knowledge or bias about any immediate demands or questioning of certain higher orders that would require a fundamental cultural or intellectual shift because things are relatively perfect as they serve us with our current awareness can be called “epoché.” People of the past all existed in their own epochés and wrote from the basis of their accepted norms as they suspended their judgment and had to accept certain rules, laws, and conventions since violations could result in death. These people’s flaws do not invalidate their contribution, although there are those here in the early 21st century who are risking making a clean break with what they see as the moral failures of our ancestors.

Herein lies a problem of living in our epoché without Dasein but also being unaware or unable to harness the noetics of invention where we map our future. Why are we here? We are wallowing in a bizarre moment of disintegration of the fabric that holds one generation to another. The roads of capitalism, industrialism, technology, climate science, greed, racism, and the need for education have all converged, though some of these trajectories are at their dead-end while others are hampered from moving forward by fear. Without our embrace of systemic change, our Dasein is frozen without knowledge or a plan for how we transition to what comes next. We are sadly stuck in this epoché while those who embrace Dasein and cherish the noetic process are marginalized by an economic system that doesn’t concern itself with intellectual capital as it’s blinded by material accumulation that demands the complacency of those who have not.

To even ask me what the hell I am talking about is to acknowledge that we do not care about the experiential knowledge found in the study of language, mind, intellect, education, and real human progress. We now measure ourselves by how adroitly we manipulate relatively primitive digital tools using gestures and voice commands as though we were communicating with the Gods and downloading gnosis. We further this in our vulgar displays of normalized greed, the indignation of those who desire progress against the degradation of the environment, and continued racism that results in death and institutionalization. This situation risks damaging 2,000 years of progress as a generation sees the failures of their parents and the controllers they’ve given power to as being so fundamentally broken that nothing of the past is really worth carrying forward.

Difficult to see in all of this is that the epoch we’ve been living in where we’d normalized the tools, paradigms, economics, and various habits we’ve been enjoying during my lifetime, is over. That normal, without consideration of thought about what comes next, is what being in an epoché means to me. All that we knew in the 20th century is losing relevance. Its logic or reasons behind why things were the way they were have not been conveyed to the next generations who are failing to see any sense in it all or are ignoring those conventions as they perceive them as hostile. So, the young are living in an epoché where they accept that nothing will change and that nothing can be done about it, while previous generations accepted that their epoché required war and violence to bring change and clarity to those too locked in paradigms that were unacceptable to the ruling class.

We are in a stalemate unless the older generation can somehow, at this late stage, force upon their children a way of life they so far have failed to impress on them. In lieu of that, their directionless offspring can wait for a generation or two of these oldies to die out and then somehow magically turn on the spigot of intellectual consciousness instead of reactionary disdain. One side cannot fathom the other, and yet neither side has any valid ideas for progress as we’ve slid into the post-industrial digitized world of the socially connected universe that is yet to receive new rules and paradigms to build dreams for the future we are entering.

Dreams of the future are where I find my idealism, but recently, I feel that the door is opening once again on the fall of humanity. Dark ages of despair seem to be the elixir of reform and harbinger of real change, as making our way into the future requires us to step over more than a few bodies. Self-awareness and building anew on Dasein are exciting times when a convulsion of circumstances propels us to leave the past behind, and no matter how foolhardy I’d like to hope that my life would not play witness to tragedy on a vast scale, I grow ever more resigned to the idea that only through a global cultural contortion of ugly consequence will a new generation be catapulted into the demands of being there.