Something in the Wind

By Iain Aschendale · Jan 9, 2018 · 700 · 5
  1. There's a weird vibe on the boards lately, something in the wind that doesn't feel right.

    Not ugly.

    Not yet.

    Not sure where it's going, but snark and sass seem to be the order of the day. Offenders? Dunno, nobody, everybody, somebody, somebody not new, somebody just new. Little things getting picked at, the edges of the scabs running a tad raw and everyone's out of that grease that Gramma carried in her purse, combination lip balm scrape lotion thread loosener hinge oiler spice, none left, tube's dry and the bits are starting to squeak where they rub up against each other, but the squeaks are turning from metal against metal to metal versus metal, small shavings falling off between the hinge plates and the pin.

    Grooves, and not the groovy kind.

    Is this just a phase, is this just part of the normal ebb and flow, the combined breathing and pulse and circulation of fifty thousand mostly quiescent minds bumping against each other in this little corner of the the vast consensual hallucination that Mr. Gibson and DARPA bequeathed us, or is it a sign of something larger, the growing lack of incivility that Horace noted so recently? Or is it just a figment of my imagination, is the break already starting to chafe? I need to be at work in a few hours, but here I am, tapping away, man was made for work and toil and strife, not electric light and heat and instantaneous connection with the outside world across the seas and continents, for most of our history we were prey, and then we were slaves, which amounts to the same thing but the master doesn't kill you cleanly, he eats you day by day over decades, we aren't cut out for this, not for freedom, not for choice, we were born to fear and lacking that fear, we grow to fear everything, which is as it should be, is that a stick or a snake, are you hungry enough to eat those new berries, was that the wind in the grass or a lion?

    The Spartan helots were mandated a certain number of beatings, whether or not they behaved, so they didn't forget their place.
    Quanta and Carly Berg like this.

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  1. Wreybies
    The gestalt ire and prickliness of which you speak certainly does come in waves. Months and months go by without me having to so much as warn a member, then a month comes where I have to ban three or four people at a swipe, satisfying some, disgruntling others. This digital connection is much like unprotected sex at an orgy, the condom of social rules and norms forgotten in the heat of passion. The clap gets passed 'round and with a quickness, leaving everyone with irritated, drippy bits.
    Wreybies, Jan 9, 2018
      Iain Aschendale and Carly Berg like this.
  2. Iain Aschendale
    I thought it might be, but I have trouble sometimes separating my own nameless fears from the actual mood around me.
    Iain Aschendale, Jan 9, 2018
  3. Wreybies
    I'm going to ramble. Appy-poly-loggies in advance:

    I was thinking about this blog post today. About the way people engage each other on the internet, especially since the advent of the trump. (lower case on purpose) It made me think of a set of books I read a while back by Greg Bear, Darwin's Radio and Darwin's Children. Have you read them? He taps a trope that doesn't see too much use these days in Sci-Fi, the trope of humans as locusts. Specifically, the idea that within our genome lies a hidden subroutine in the area of our genome that used to be thought of as "junk genes" or leftover bits of coding from past evolutionary steps. This subroutine, under certain conditions, causes a mass mutation of the host organisms - just as happens to locusts when the population hits a certain threshold - that will enact a punctuated jump in our evolution. He also made use of the newer knowledge that a lot of that "junk gene" baggage is actually endogenous viral elements, the remains of past infections we managed to survive as a species, but the coding stayed with us.

    Anyway... I don't think the internet is about to enact a hidden subroutine in our genome, but I do wonder as to how much of this particular, naked, unfiltered interaction humans can have. We're not designed for this. We're designed to function under the rules of a pack structure. There's nothing random about the fact that dogs were the first animals to find a place at our side, and by a wide margin. The core coding of canines and humans is the same. In Darwin's Radio, Greg Bear postulated a transition form for humans that shifts markedly to a core coding of a herd animal, rather than a pack animal. I guess he saw it as a natural answer to living in such high population density. Under normal circumstances the only animals that live in such population density are either herd or hive animals. It's too stressful for a pack animal. It's impossible to innately gauge one's place in the pecking order. So... I think... maybe... that this mode of communication is not something we will be able to engage for very long. Or, if it never goes away (or gets altered or more tightly regulated) then maybe it will, in fact, weed out the ones whose engagement is too aggressive, too unwilling to engage modes of self-control.

    I don't know... I said I would ramble, and I have. Just thoughts that come to my mind from things you've written. If nothing else, know your words made a little Puerto Rican dude ponder the fate of a pack animal with an overpopulation problem and WAY too much time on its hands.
    Wreybies, Jan 22, 2018
  4. Iain Aschendale
    I have read those books, but...

    I guess I understand how some of the folks who have left me critiques felt. I understood all of the words, the sentences, and even the paragraphs, but the overall stories left me kind of scratching my head. Thinking back though, that may have had more to do with what I was up to at the time; pretty sure that one of the two was one of my airplane books for the initial ride over to Japan, if so I was probably more than a little overwhelmed at the time. (I definitely remember that one of the others was Neanderthal, by John Darnton. It's SF for people who don't read SF and buy their books in airport bookstores...)

    However, there is a tie-in to what you said about phase-changes between pack and herd animals here in Japan.

    The Japanese are the rudest people it's ever been my displeasure to encounter. That doesn't mean that their behavior is worse than that of, say, the Chinese or the Turks or the Americans, but they spend half their lives telling themselves and everyone who will listen that they're the politest, nay, the only polite people on Earth, and the other half walking with their heads down or staggering backwards or walking six abreast covering the entire sidewalk or cutting in front of you in line, and here's the rub: All of this is rude behavior in Japan, but-

    But, things that would get you beat in the rest of Asia* and shot in the good ol' USA will, in Japan, earn you...

    ...a cold stare.

    Which works just fine if you're living in a rural village where everyone knows everyone else and once word gets back that the Tanaka boy doesn't pay attention to where he's walking and nearly knocked Nakamura-san down last week and you know how Nakamura's hip is there'll be hell to pay for young Tanaka, if his own dad doesn't beat some sense into him the village blacksmith will but when you're living in a city of (pauses to check Wikipedia) 2,668,586 people (greater metro area population 19,341,976) cold stares don't work so well.

    There is a story called The Country of the Kind, by Damon Knight, in which there is a society with no death penalty, no prisons, just a high tech version of Amish shunning, but the MC, who is being subjected to this punishment, realizes that he's the king of the world. As long as he doesn't attempt violence against other people, no one will stop him from doing anything.

    *okay, I've only been to Korea, China, and Turkey, and in China and Turkey they'll cheerfully admit that they don't do lines, better sharpen up those elbows, boy, or you'll never get to the ticket window. This, however, is no more rude than eating curry with naan rather than utensils is.


    Iain Aschendale, Jan 23, 2018
  5. Iain Aschendale
    Was it really there, and I just sensed it early, or was I hearing things? Two threads, one of them a sticky, locked in two and a half days.
    Iain Aschendale, Jan 29, 2018
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