(tbc)

A thing I get a lot is “visa seems very good at being extremely online and yet remaining somewhat well-adjusted, emotionally/psychologically healthy”. 

That’s a mouthful, so for brevity let’s call it chaos-surfing. At one level chaos-surfing is something that comes very naturally for me, and so from my frame of reference it’s surprising that everyone else isn’t also like this. But of course, it only takes a moderate amount of thinking, observing, etc to notice differences. 

I’ve tried to write a bunch about this, in part to try and help other people with the same, and in part also just to understand it. In a sense both of my books, Friendly Ambitious Nerd and Introspect, are “about” this to varying degrees. Together they’re over 400 pages long, which is a little tedious. The people who’ve read it have responded well to it, but not everyone has that kind of time. Also I think I could address the thing more directly, more effectively. Let’s try.

There are several more auxiliary materials I’ve been meaning to put together to make this really work. One is a history of media, particularly the Internet. One is a history of the world. One is a history of the smartphone. One is a history of me. This is a fairly massive project-of-projects and I have had to teach myself – a chaos-minded machine-gun brain type-  how to get better at it. That itself might be a useful thing to talk about – it could for some people be *the* most useful thing I have to say, but I’ll save that for somewhere else. (Constructive ADHD)

THE INTERNET

I won’t get into the backstory of Tim Berners-Lee inventing the worldwideweb, computers, transistors, ARPAnet and all of that, though it’s all very interesting. I’ll start where things started for me, when I was a little library nerd who sat in front of a home computer and discovered cyberspace…

We don’t use the word cyberspace very much anymore, it’s become antiquated, it has an 80s-90s feel to it. But I still really like it. 0-space.

THE SMARTPHONE

The smartphone. The smartphone changed everything. It’s still in the process of changing everything. We are living through tumultuous times. Everybody now has their own printing press, their own tv station, the opportunity to say basically anything to anyone at anytime for basically free.

THE WORLD

The world. The history of the world is something you could spend lifetimes on and hardly make a dent in. So I mean something more specific than that. I mean something like the history of man, of society, of culture. It helps to learn about a bunch of creation myths, and more broadly, mythologies from varying cultures.

If you want to understand how something works, it can help to examine how things fail and fall apart. It’s not a perfect guarantee

ME 

Me: One is a memoir about myself and my own experiences – particularly I think of being a visible misfit/minority. for shorthand I could point at people like Barack Obama and Trevor Noah, who I feel have similar origin stories. We develop charisma and social dynamism as a matter of survival. We get a lot of attention on us whether we like it or not, and so we find ways to transmute that in healthy ways. Not all of us make it. Some of us have catastrophically bad endings, turn to violence, resentment, anger, etc. the unfortunate thing about being mad at society is that society doesn’t give much of a shit about that at all. “The red washing down the bathtub doesn’t change the color of the ocean”. Sorry to be morbid.

There’s a quote from pope pius 7(?) that Marshall McLuhan mentioned that I feel captures a lot of what the issue is:

Pope Pius XII in 1950: “…the future of modern society and the stability of its inner life depend in large part of the maintenance of an equilibrium between the strength of the techniques of communication and the capacity of the individual’s own reaction.”

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(2023sep5) how to be extremely online and not insane

i’m a “natural”, so I learned this through trial and error over the years, and there’s a good chance I might overestimate the importance of some things and completely overlook others. a skilled thinker, reader, chaos-surfer won’t need the preceding caveat, because they know that this is true all the time of all sorts of things, basically truer than not. understanding something is not the same thing as being able to communicate that understanding. but alright let’s get to it. 

Being extremely online is a psychological extreme sport. Most regular people aren’t wired for it. It takes a certain kind of training. Maybe some dispositions help more than others. Maybe some early childhood experiences etc can help. 

one thing is that you have to have a strong sense of self. this is not very negotiable. people with a poor sense of self often get tormented by the internet. what does that mean, to have a strong sense of self? it’s kinda tricky when you get into it, isn’t it. But for this context we only really need to understand it in a “how does it break” way. What goes wrong? Are you fazed by insults? By people misunderstanding you? As you get increasingly online, you will increasingly encounter all manner of messages, responses, etc. You have to be able to deal with that, or you’re going to get triggered and upset. 

one thing that helps is to have a diverse group of friends/peers that you trust. if you have a great family that’s of course a huge win, like if your parents raised you to feel loved, confident, secure attachment, etc. 

One of the important things to learn is patience. To be okay with letting people be wrong, at least for some amount of time. To be okay with being misunderstood, at least for some amount of time. I remember when I was less okay with this. might be helpful to describe it.

one thing that helps is to have a sense of history, at at least a few different cycles. having some life experience really helps here – being in your mid 20s is better than being a teenager, and being in your 30s is better than being in your 20s, simply because you’ve had more life experience to reflect on. but you do have to reflect on it. there are a lot of people who don’t reflect on their life experiences at all, or worse, learn all the wrong lessons, and arrive at the wrong conclusions. (This is part of when makes your sense of self more robust.)

arriving at wrong conclusions isn’t the worst thing in the world – what’s bad is sticking with them and committing to them without considering the possibility that they might be wrong. there’s something destabilizing about chaos surfing, which i think experienced surfers forget, because they’ve learned to reorient themselves. there’s a quote by joseph campbell.