Saturday, December 10, 2022

When Parasociality is Godless Communism

Let's talk about procrastination. 


Blogging is a parasocial relationship, except you're not being paid, and neither am I. It is insane. Either I'm giving away valuable things for free, which is Literally Communism, or I'm giving away valueless things for what they're worth, which is a waste of everyone's time. 

This is why every good blogger stopped blogging. Underpaid folk quit their jobs. 

Maybe if I lived in Russia or China I would try Substack. I assume Moldbug switched from attempted-master to cope/seethe. Gray Mirror is cope for seething readers. The seethers value the cope, so Yarvin gets paid. Maybe it's more complicated than that, but it will boil down to the same sort of thing.


The other solution to parasociality is to make it a social relationship. 

The correct thing to do is sort of ease into it. Start small, work up. Come online a bit like a loose connection. Unfortunately, I am autistic. It's 0-100 in 1 second flat around here.  

Unfortunately, I am autistic. Having a look at my next series of posts: this habit won't go anywhere, even if I attempt it. It will be one uncomfortable post that's unpleasant to read and doesn't fit into the overall structure. On reflection, let's not talk about procrastination.

Which, in retrospect, makes sense. If there was a proper social form of blogging, someone would have tried it already. Every good blogger quit or otherwise annihilated their blogging presence, because there is no solution except to quit.  


Twitter has a very noticeable split; I take it to be representative of parasocial media in general. Either the persona is all-vulnerability or no-vulnerability. Either they refuse to admit there's a mortal behind the account, or it's all feelings all the time and they hate nothing more than ideas. Pure lunar path or pure solar path, except this lunar path is a circle and the solar path is play-pretend, using shadow puppets, not chasing the sun. Parasocial media is training for narcissism and maintenance of a narcissistic culture.

You don't want to hear what's really going on with a cashier.
I could force it, but even if I did, to be honest I'm not interested in forcing it more than once or twice anyway. 


Maybe it won't be completely inapplicable, so I'll be brief. 

In me, procrastination is the fact that doing what I'm supposed to do is intolerable, and I split the world cleanly into supposed-to and not-supposed-to. Doing things well before the deadline is the norm-al thing to do, hence I cannot do it. Et cetera. 

The solution is to notice I'm doing it. Actually, "supposed to" isn't a real thing. This silly idea is the kind of thing that sunlight disinfects. It requires concealment and covering to survive. Patronized by Calypso.

This opens up a secondary problem, which is that the only thing I really want to do is to do what I'm not supposed to do. To profit by being anti-normal, specifically. If there's nothing I'm supposed to do, which I can then contradict, I'm just kinda lost and adrift.
But this is again merely a reaction to "supposed to." Which doesn't exist. Reacting to smoke and mirrors is irrational and meaningless. 

Why am I so opposed to acting obediently? If apparent obedience wouldn't support that thing I oppose, why would I violently reject it?

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