Reuters is reporting that internet suicide rates are up in Japan. That is folks meeting on the net to plan collective sappuku. It's a unique Japanese phenomena.
While in the West folks hide away in their rooms, by themselves, alienated from the world around them only to die alone leaving their notes on the internet. Now some commentators thought I was being harsh in my comments on this particular case, of the AI genius who commited suicide, because I failed to understand him or read his work.
But the point I was making is that he was his project. He had stepped into the abyss. All that we do is a process of self realization, one side is enlightenment the other is madness. The same goes for the technogeeks in society. They already are maladjusted in mass society, alienated individuals, being nerds and geeks, their best friend is their program or their computer. Thus they already have the tendency towards the dark side.
It's the darkside of the web, and the dark side of our culture which denies public access to information on the epidemic of suicide. As the pressures of capitalism deforms our culture it also deforms our psyches. The pace of society, the demands of work and consumerism, the social conformity demanded of us are greater than any other time in human culture. Capitalism dehumanizes us and in its twisted version of individualism we are reduced to being alone, alienated.
We lack authentic relationships, love and solidarity, as Eric Fromm points out in this essay from 1959. Love in America
While in the West folks hide away in their rooms, by themselves, alienated from the world around them only to die alone leaving their notes on the internet. Now some commentators thought I was being harsh in my comments on this particular case, of the AI genius who commited suicide, because I failed to understand him or read his work.
But the point I was making is that he was his project. He had stepped into the abyss. All that we do is a process of self realization, one side is enlightenment the other is madness. The same goes for the technogeeks in society. They already are maladjusted in mass society, alienated individuals, being nerds and geeks, their best friend is their program or their computer. Thus they already have the tendency towards the dark side.
It's the darkside of the web, and the dark side of our culture which denies public access to information on the epidemic of suicide. As the pressures of capitalism deforms our culture it also deforms our psyches. The pace of society, the demands of work and consumerism, the social conformity demanded of us are greater than any other time in human culture. Capitalism dehumanizes us and in its twisted version of individualism we are reduced to being alone, alienated.
We lack authentic relationships, love and solidarity, as Eric Fromm points out in this essay from 1959. Love in America
Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature. He has been transformed into a commodity, and experiences his life forces as an investment that must bring him the maximum profit under existing market conditions.
Man bows down and submits to the demands of his own work, his machines, his organization of production and consumption, and loses the experience of himself as creator and subject of his truly human powers of love and thought. Thus human relations become more and more those of alienated automatons.
But automatons cannot love. They can exchange their „personality
packages“ and hope for a fair bargain. Love becomes the refuge for a
„team“ from an otherwise unbearable sense of aloneness. One forms an alliance
against the world as this „egoisme a deux“ is mistaken for love and intimacy.
Industrialization has provided leisure for entertainment, mass communications
media have made it continuously available, and our consumption-oriented
economy urges us to imbibe as much of it as possible. Turn where we will our
senses are assailed by hundreds of competing forms of amusement.
The tendency of mass entertainment, especially the movies, to exalt romantic
love at the expense of other kinds has already been noted. Its other effects on
love include the following:
(a) As financial considerations require that most
entertainment programs attract the largest possible numbers, they demand very little
of their audiences. This means that they contribute to human passivity; little more
is required than to sit and absorb. But if love is an activity, as we have insisted, it
is poorly served by inducements to become, as persons, more passive.
(b) The continuous entertainment which mass media offer us has turned what is inherently the most intimate of all human relationships into the most public and ubiquitous. Never before have so many people been wooed in such public fashion.
Sentiments which were formerly regarded as deep, personal exchanges between
two loving human beings are now common promises in the wind. „I love you“ is a
pledge by a disembodied voice to an anonymous mass. It is difficult to see how
this process can continue without undercutting some of the power of love’s language.
(c) When people spend their time together, not in coming to know one
another better as individuals, but in attending to something unrelated to anyone
in the group, neither friendship nor love is advanced. In this sense, it is one of the
ironies of our culture that the entertainment designed to bring people together
actually keeps them apart.
The phrase „mass culture“ has come to suggest a number of features of
modern society which work against the individual’s uniqueness,
depth of personal feeling, and self-identity.
Cities are crowded, work is specialized, and people are mobile, all of which
means that we encounter more persons but know and are known less
thoroughly by each. We are part of the busman’s „load,“ a proprietor’s
„customers,“ a manager’s „personnel.“ Vast, centralized enterprises with
radical divisions of labor inhibit workers’ individuality and reduce them
to the status ofr eplaceable cogs.
Government, business, and labor unions are all so big as to
make us feel impotent. Alienated from ourselves, from our fellow-men and from
nature, we try to escape from our loneliness, insignificance and insecurity by
identifying ourselves with others through conformity. We dress like them, behave
like them, and hold the same opinions, only to discover that
uniformity is noguarantor of true unity.
Huddled in togetherness we remain alone. Significant human relationships are a function of lives that are confidently rooted in the individuality that mass culture renders difficult.
Mind & Body, Alfred Adler, 1931
Character and the Social Process, Eric Fromm, 1942
One Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse, 1964
The Politics of Experience, R. D. Laing, 1967
Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord, 1967
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