Posted on 02/10/2007 8:20:55 AM PST by Dallas59
1. Not enough annoying strangers in our lives.
That's not sarcasm. Annoyance is something you build up a tolerance to, like alcohol or a bad smell. The more we're able to edit the annoyance out of our lives, the less we're able to handle it.
The problem is we've built an awesome, sprawling web of technology meant purely to let us avoid annoying people. Do all your Christmas shopping online and avoid the fat lady ramming her cart into you at Target. Spend five thousand bucks on a home theater system so you can see movies on a big screen without a toddler kicking the back of your seat. Hell, even rent the DVD's online so you don't even have to mess with the confused kid working the register at Blockbuster.
Get stuck in the waiting room at the doctor? No way I'm striking up a conversation with the smelly old man sitting next to me. Plug the iPod into my ears and have a text conversation with a friend, or play my DS. Filter that annoyance right out of my world.
And that would be awesome, if it were actually possible to keep all of the irritating crap out of your life. But it's not. It never will be. As long as you have needs, you'll have to deal with people you can't stand from time to time. But that skill, the one that lets us deal with strangers and tolerate their shrill voices and clunky senses of humor and body odor and squeaky shoes, is being burned right out of us. Our Annoyance Immune System is being weakened. So what encounters you do have with the outside world, the world you can't control, make you want to go on a screaming crotch-punching spree.
2. Not enough annoying friends, either.
I was born in a town full of people I couldn't stand. When I found myself in that classroom in elementary school, I was packed in there with two dozen kids I did not choose. Random luck threw us together. I had to try to pick my friends from that group and the experience was usually terrible.
Today, though, if I'm a huge Slipknot fan I can go find a slipknot forum and meet a dozen people there. People just like me. Same sense of humor, same interests, same outlook. We can start a private chatroom and lock everybody else out. Say goodbye to the tedious, awkward, painful process of dealing with somebody who's truly different from me, someone coming from a completely different place in the world. That's another old-world inconvenience, like having to wash your clothes in a creek or wait for a raccoon to wander by the outhouse so you could wipe your butt with it.
Now, I was about to say that this is a bad thing because peacefully dealing with incompatible people is important to living in a society. But that's not true. No, peacefully dealing with people you can't stand is society. That's literally all it is. People with opposite tastes and conflicting personalities sharing space and cooperating, through gritted teeth sometimes.
Fifty years ago, you HAD to sit in a crowded room to see a movie. You didn't get to choose, you either did that or you missed the movie. When you got a new car, everyone on the block came and stood in your yard to look it over. And some of those people were butts, I can assure you. And yet, on the whole, people back then were apparently happier in their jobs and more satisfied with their everyday lives than we are.
My parents, circa 1982
And get this: they had more friends.
That's right; even though they had almost NO ability to filter their friends purely by common interests (hell, often you were just friends with the guy who happened to live next door) they still came up with more close friends than we have now. People they could trust.
It turns out, I suppose, that after you get over that first irritation, after you shed your shell of "they listen to different music because they wouldn't understand mine" superiority, there's a sort of comfort in needing other people and being needed on a level that goes beyond common interests. It turns out humans are social animals after all. And that ability to suffer fools, to tolerate annoyance, that's literally the one single thing that makes you a human being, that allows you to function in a world populated by other people who aren't you. Otherwise, you turn into a goth. Science has proven it.
Long. But I find myself agreeing with most of his ideas.
Our world has been electronically sterilized; our gadgets are used to keep people away, to keep them at a fiber-optic cable's distance. We're starting to live in a world where it's hard to distinguish between electronic avatars and flesh and blood. Often, people become reduced to an icon or a screen handle or a ringtone.
Interesting ...
A free society is a messy one, because it requires acknowledgement and acceptance of individuality.
Isolation from and avoidance of the messiness breeds a kind of narcissism, with the inevitable claiming of "rights" by special interest hives and an appeal to a final arbiter (always government) to settle disputes in a particular hive's favor.
How can a society that's always appealing to Nanny Government ever grow up?
This guy owes me a new keyboard.
For this idea of web rather than real world interactions carried to its logical conclusion, the author has another article here. http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/games/wowworld.html
Kinda scary. I'm not sure it will work out that way, but I find it difficult to poke specific holes in his ideas.
Except that that the webworld he describes, and its residents, would be utterly dependent on technological infrastructure. It isn't difficult to think of an armed invasion by meat-worlders or even a Y2K-type event - perhaps intentionally generated - some kind of super virus, totally destroying the webworld and leaving its denizens completely unprepared to survive in the meatworld.
Come to think of it, there's been a fair amount of SF written on this theme.
I totally agree.
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