Real quick; the title phrase comes from a Belgian documentary called Empire of Dust. I assume you haven’t seen it, because no matter how fervently I recommend it, and no matter how much I know the person to whom I’m recommending it would appreciate it, literally no one ever watches it.
Even if I go so far as to cue the film up and put it directly in someone’s face, no one cares or bothers to watch it. I’m not even gonna tell you a single thing about it. I know you don’t care. I’ve wasted enough words and breath promoting the fucking thing. Unless you’re one of apparently the twelve people who’ve actually seen it, your loss. I give up. Go watch that gay Marvel crap that’s obviously so much more important in real life, rather than something you can actually learn from.
God. It’s all so tiresome.
Yes, this article is in text that you have to read instead of me speaking it to you in a video you’d probably bother to watch, because I’d look awkward and nervous, giving you justification to insult me in the comments. I type better than I speak, and it’s a hundred times easier to proofread than it is to edit a video recording (not to mention quicker). For fuck’s sake; you scroll through drivel all day on social media. Presumably, your attention span lasts long enough to digest at least some written words.
Speaking of the difference between text and speech, you know what’s really tiresome? It’s known as “up-talking”? It’s a crutch that people who aren’t confident speakers use, where they turn up the end of every sentence like it’s a question? Even if it’s declarative? Oh, and it’s not just girls who do it? There are more and more guys doing podcasts, who unfortunately speak that way? Even though it makes them sound really timid, like they can’t back up their statements? Are you hearing it in your head as you read this? Am I making it clear enough how annoying it is? Hopefully I’ve made you more aware of this infernal practice? Maybe we can breed it out of the species somehow? Please?
It’s tiresome.
Someone who can write a joke can’t necessarily tell a joke, and vice versa. Just because I wrote something here doesn’t mean it’ll sound good coming out of my mouth. I don’t understand why so many “content creators” shun written text for on-screen speech. Unless you can splice in added images or video, or change things up with different angles, it gets boring real quick. The best podcasts are all pretty slick. Yes, there’s a surfeit of thots who gawp into a webcam while collecting superchat shekels, but their audience is limited to simps and/or trolls. The streams with the widest viewership tend to be simple only on a superficial level; when you really pay attention, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes.
Blogging used to be a way to sharpen your writing skills, in front of a free live audience. Then phone cameras came along, and suddenly there was “vlogging”, which sounds like an arcane word for a cat expelling a hairball. Thus an organic writing exercise and relatively healthy use of the internet was supplanted by an easy way for spoiled rich girls to get attention doing nothing. Whether you’ve noticed or not, it’s almost impossible to get anyone to click a link to read an article. Even The Onion and Babylon Bee spend the lion’s share of effort crafting a perfect parody news headline, because they know that most people aren’t going to follow through and read the rest of the “article” (which, sensibly, rarely goes on longer than a paragraph).
Parody papers probably make out the best on social media, other than short TikTok videos (which by the way, come from a platform controlled by the CCP). The average browser of Facebook would likely admit that even with real news links, they almost never read the article, preferring to get all necessary info from the headline and page blurb. Like it or not, when someone is scrolling away on their phone (or even desktop), they’re fine where they are and don’t want to leave.
So for the most part, as well as tiresome, social media platforms are useless.
Good thing post-lockdown (results may vary outside of the US), everybody uses social media on their phone and that’s it.
This is great, because people now spend all day every day in their own ideological bubble, learning nothing new, while indulging nothing but guilty pleasures. People now spend every waking moment reinforcing their own basest tendencies. They celebrate and hate the same things in a constant, never-ending loop, over and over. For months. For years.
Does someone on social media hate cops? Then so they always shall. They will never allow anything to change that pretense; they can’t, because they’d be contradicting themselves. Nothing can possibly change their mind. A cop could save their family’s lives and they’d still have “ACAB” in their profile, until the day they die. They’ve attached their very identity to an idea; to abandon that idea would be unthinkable.
Does someone on social media hate God/Christians/Christianity? Then so they always shall. Every post will be a meme calling for Christian annihilation, or an insulting image spotlighting an egregiously stupid example of the faith. Not even divine intervention could possibly soften their animosity, which, by the way, you will be reminded of every time they post. Because there will never be negative consequences. There’s no “Christian Anti-Defamation League”. No one will sue, or find the offending person and blow them up. So it’s a convenient method of impotently raging, like taking your own two-year-old kid behind closed doors and beating the living shit out of them. No immediate or noticeable repercussions; job well done. Might as well keep it up for the rest of your life, which is exactly what happens.
There’s a guy I won’t mention or dare to opine upon who was president of the US until January of 2021. Here in 2022 there are still people on social media who continue to complain about this guy, even though he’s not the president and none of us can afford rent, gas, or food. It’s pretty motherfucking tiresome.
Social media is like a lake where one of us caught a fish once, so all of us sit in our boats trying in vain to catch another one. No one ever catches anything, yet here we all sit, because much like the lottery, if it happened once, it can happen again, right? It’s bound to, just by the law of averages! So what if no one’s so much as seen a fish in ten years; do you want to be the one who could’ve caught one and didn’t? Who in their right mind would?
And who in their right mind would ever leave said lake, for any reason? What if there were no other lakes, and when we came back, the one lake we knew was dry, or overcrowded? What if we came back, and everyone was up-talking? Making everything sound like a question? What if, by that point, we talked like that too?
Are you starting to see the programming? Are you finally realizing how easily the media took over the lives of almost everyone you know? How it controls literally every decision they make in the course of a day?
How it controls you?
Because it’s made you so tiresome to be around.
It’s made it all so tiresome.
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