These collide-oscopes of interfaced situations
Contemplating on the unsocial sociability of fragmented realities
🔊 “….who still hopes down telescopes, upon this ship of fools…”
Artwork by Eric Drass aka Shardcore / https://www.shardcore.orgDear Reader,
Here’s to another Gregorian calendar year, and peace be with you!
Before I launch into more paragraphs, I’d like to announce that I’ve been encouraged to accept paid subscription, but there will be no paywall to access some extra or special content. However else I might be creatively called to reciprocate, I’d love for this project to be a fruitful exchange. For starters, I wish to offer more personable interactions:
monthly contributions includes receiving handwritten correspondence that I’ll send by snail mail post
annual support allow for invitations to online cultural seminars with others
jolly beekeepers inclined to be generous patrons, receive one-on-one playful sessions, whether online and in-person, for private conversations, or more esoteric consultations.
your funds also allows me to commission more creation of holy hand grenade artworks!
To the many of you, who have wonderfully chosen to accept this in their electronic inboxes, I sincerely thank you again. If there are particular themes you’d like me to probe, please do get in touch: reginaradicata@gmail.com
Learning in Wartime & International Relations
The title of this newsletter is an accurate description of people’s perspectival myopia with regards to the absorption of current events via mobile phones. I borrowed it from the 1967 paperback edition of The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects by Marshall McLuhan & Quentin Fiore. Today’s mass global ville-age is electrically tangled in webs of interconnected-mess from other previous generations and cumulative on-goings. Profiles watching each other through pocket panopticon panels and channels, click-hitting like digital junkies tapping for re-ups.
We know the word medium is a noun for ‘an intervening agency, means, or instrument’, and an adjective for being halfway between two extremes of size or another quality. I’m wondering whether there’s also some sort of nominative cosmic joke going on, since people are still being pressured to affiliate with this side or that side. How many are sincerely hoping to find the middle ground amidst the extremes?
My friend Timo Peach, regularly asks “What story do you think you’re in?”
To make it more specific, what would you think about, if you did not think about what un/social media algorithms make you think about? We’ve become billions of self-facilitating media nodes, the mockery realised by the satire of Nathan Barley, and escalated by HyperNormalisation. How do we make sense of our needs for private time and solitary space, now that ‘we have become so involved with each other’?
I found it peculiar that while people flooded news streams with hashtags for #ceasefire, triggered furious fingers kept fuelling the egregores of wrath . To think that many fans of the Star Wars franchise claim they want to be Jedis, but in practice, perhaps wielding the force takes more discernment, since people are too quick to be driven by anguish. How slippery the seduction is for confusing justice with revenge, and it seems far easier to surrender to Sith emotions.
I was dismayed that outrage made some amplify the vitriol further by demanding others join flag-waving campaigns. More worrying, is the acceptability of ruthless ‘unfriending’, because apparently people can no longer remain friends with those who have divergent political opinions, beliefs or contrarian viewpoints. Liking someone now, has been distorted into fitting parameters of what we thumbs-up like. Have we erroneously measured rapport to be based on common interests only? Since peace-keeping has been relegated to some faraway external force, peace-building requires more effort than most button bashing arm-chair activists realise.
Many people have no substantial media training, nor understanding of how technology has profoundly shaped human psychology. I remain astonished how frequently current events will convert people into becoming amateur historians, by preaching influencer style content about The Past, using short-form videos that reference internet based receipts as evidence to support calls to action. Yet does possession of mobile phones automatically qualify us to be prudent citizen journalists? I certainly am hesitant to act as a trauma propagator, and as a university lecturer, I already have to calibrate my lessons to the moods of as many as 70 first year college students every week. As a teacher, I have made it my obligation to make the classroom a safe outpost for harmony and creativity.
Wherever your path might take you, may you ably navigate the madness of these times to safer harbours. Meanwhile, I hereby list some mental antidotes that may help with sobriety and serenity against the lashing waves of hysteria:
🔴 Whatever you deeply feel, you are not the first, and you won’t be the last.
Even the self professed nihilist Friedrich Nietzsche warns us: “Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein. / Whoever battles monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster himself. And when you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” To have com-passion is to sit with suffering, to give com-fort is to find the strength to observe, not just absorb. Whatever we are compelled to do, let us remember that each of us have our own calling, and perhaps we might allow for multitude threads to weave their patterns. Some men I know find credence in stoicism, and a key phrase that’s echoed back to me is that of amor fati. This amuses me greatly, for while the virtues of wisdom, justice, and courage are laudable, the super ingredient is Love. What if it’s less about controlling the course of our reality, and more about breathing and living life as though it’s already a done deal, and with love as compass, we spend what time and energy we’ve got, to focus in the creative dancing of destinies.
🔴 Pay particular attention to words that make and create worlds.
How might we express our grief, lamentation, sorrow and agony, yet avoid sowing seeds of bitterness? We make our peace, in pieces with everyone. Other people’s reflections also provide spiritual balm:
I heartily recommend once more, this essay written by C.S. Lewis in 1939 — he reminds us that our humanity reveals itself in myriad endeavours, and provides advice on exercising self-control in place of excitement (or anxiety), focusing on having faith instead of fixating on frustrations, and trying for sobriety in place of fear.
Before I went to the last war I certainly expected that my life in the trenches would, in some mysterious sense, be all war. In fact, I found that the nearer you got to the front line the less everyone spoke and thought of the allied cause and the progress of the campaign: and I am pleased to find that Tolstoi, in the greatest war book ever written, records the same thing – and so, in its own way, does the Iliad. Neither conversion, nor enlistment in the army, is really going to obliterate our human life. — C. S Lewis, ‘Learning in Wartime’, Autumn 1939
If you haven’t already read Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, it’s worth reflecting on what your ‘identikit’ accessories are made of. If we are are supposedly the average of the five people we spend the most time with, then what happens when we plug into more than that? What the internet does to us, is that it over-extends our physical participation, so we end up appropriating the miscellaneous psychological and conceptual situations of our contacts. One of the medicinal minds I am grateful for is that of a fellow bookworm and cultural augur:
Without having taken a meticulous magnifying glass to each of the countless photos of these demonstrations, I noticed one thing. All of the flags raised were of nations or nation-states. If a flag is to represent or symbolize a particular place, people, identity or ideology, how come none of them emblazoned the peace sign or symbol - the tripod and rising pole enclosed by a circle? Where were the flags of white doves, olive branches, broken rifles, and white poppies? Have you seen any? —
🔴 Focus on tangible acts of service towards Serendipity & Sanctuary.
While I might agree with Mexican poet and academic Cesar Cruz’s notion that “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable” — How can each of us be conduits of pastoral care?
What does it mean to ‘stay with the trouble’, as suggested by Donna Haraway? Each of us are tasked with finding the restorative recipes to symbiosis, that is not merely “to stir up potent response to devastating events”, but “to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places” AS WELL.
The practice of yoga, is not to achieve the perfection of a pose, but to condition both body and mind through numerous positions, which helps us better calibrate our emotional states. The literal and symbolical process involves breathing through situations to find ease within the circumstantial discomforts. How often have you been hearing people use the phrase of ‘holding space for someone’? I’m aware many have come to mock the cliché “Have you tried yoga?”, so I invite you to revisit the quest of this challenge.
Yoga comes from the Sanskrit root yuj युज् and translates as ‘union, to unite or to connect’ — how can we transcend (trance end) the perpetuation of othering our enemies? How might we learn from the stillness of elders, rather than judge each other’s productivity. Rather than ‘what a waste of time just sitting under a tree’, or ‘are you taking refuge in that cave when evil empires kill children?’ — is it possible to become warriors in gardens?
Choose your own caritas / agape / sadaqa / tzedakah / sadhana.
I’m for consolidating outposts of healing, through the spirit of the hospitable, by serving as paramedics and nurses in hospice/hospitals. Just being a soulful host for broken bodies, such as:
- Breaking bread with the homeless and hungry, maybe add pomegranate + lentils + aubergine to make rummaniyeh
- Adding chairs to tables, maybe play backgammon (sheshbesh/tawlé)
Probing the flow of the status quo
How wise is it to follow trends of consensus and being offended? As some of you may have previously noted, I am rather evangelical about the prescient sagacity of Marshall McLuhan, who also wrote War and Peace in the Global Village: An Inventory of Some of the Current Spastic Situations That Could Be Eliminated by More Feedforward (1968).
A. Wait, WHAT?! What is a spastic situation?
The term ‘spastic’ is no longer deemed acceptable, since being called a 'spaz' devolved into a derogatory description of people with disabilities. Yet invention of behaviour, such as ‘derangement syndrome’ or even ‘impostor syndrome’ suggests that the 24/7 information overload is critically affecting our social dynamics. Cerebral palsy, is a group of disorders that affect a person's ability to move and maintain balance and posture. Spasticity is the medical symptom or complication of many different neurological disorders in which normal muscle movement patterns are disrupted, and muscles contract, or tighten, involuntarily. This manifests as clumsiness, sometimes associated with overexcitability, excessive energy, involuntary or random movement, or hyperactivity. One could also add over-sensitivity to external events, that lead to a startled response, a ‘jumpiness’ that could be associated with other idioms that refer to automatic and unthinking actions, such ‘knee-jerk’ reactions or emotionally ‘jumping to conclusions’
For the purpose of this query, I sought to identify the berserk situations influenced by the uncritical consumption of media, and have listed some categories below (and do add your own annotations):
Backlash → Bullying → Bulldozing
Brigading / Bandwagoning / Bullying — Joining together to perform a coordinated action, such as rigging an online poll, downvoting or disliking content, or harassing a specific individual or group.
Click-bating — Writing sensationalized or misleading headlines in order to attract clicks on a piece of content. It often relies on exaggerating claims or leaving out key information in order to encourage traffic
Comment Wars → Unfriending → Blocking
Default Ticks — Social Media platforms are training ‘users’ to default interactions, for example, buttons for – Like, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, and Angry – but in reality our emotions are more mixed, varied and textured!
Doxxing — intimidating someone by invading their privacy and causing them to fear for their safety, especially due to the threats they often receive after having been doxed.
Going Viral
Oversharing / TMI (Too Much Information)
Rage Farming — posting intentionally provocative political content in order to take advantage of a negative reaction that garners exposure and media attention.
Shit-posting — using an online forum or social media page to post content that is satirical and of ‘aggressively, ironically, and trollishly poor quality’; similar to ‘trash talk’; intentionally designed to derail discussions or cause the biggest reaction with the least effort. It may even sometimes be orchestrated as part of a co-ordinated flame war to render a website unusable by its regular users.
Shaming / Trolling
B. So what kind of ‘more feed forward’ could be done?
Instead of truth pills, what if we simply improved our cognitive immunity? How might we have keener awareness of the cultural codes to better comprehend the sequence of consequences? When we’re all spinning our bridge threads - let’s also note that The Map Is Not The Territory. What sorts of patterns are we all embroiled in, and could we sharpen our perception awareness techniques, to become more conscientious about our media consumption?
Hi, I’m Rina, cultural ecologist and chief enchantment strategist for Rogue Futures Initiatives. If you’re intrigued and keen to explore a joint collaboration for an educational roadshow and other ventures such as ‘Sanctuary Suppers’, please do get in touch! Am also a games sommelier and kundalini yoga instructor should you wish to implement any wellbeing projects for others, and/or for yourself!
Gratitude to Joel, who owns Friction Books in Nova Scotia, and to Chris in Oaxaca, for both being kindred ‘print oriented bastards’ and sender of beloved books. Special mention to Rufus for libations that facilitate the flourishing of cityphiles.
Diggin’ yr flow! 😎👍🤘🍻