SOCIAL MEDIA.CON | The Illusion of Inclusion
AdviceEducationFamilyPatreonRevolutionsocial September 9, 2021 admin 0
LIVE WRITING
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PREAMBLE
A failure on social media personally or in business is a failure of you–not the platform and its conniving manipulative modes of operation
There is a plethora of info out there on social media as a phenomenon from every conceivable angle. But what about a deep discussion of social media in relation to the African consciousness and Pan-African development? Is it a tool or a weapon? Whatever your verdict it must be agreed that we will only know that through a discussion. Social media is a game-changer in the story of humanity, just like the invention of electricity. It has profound implications on all aspects of our life, not excluding mental health and human struggle.
It is our belief that social media, while it has many positives has a largely negative impact on the African conscious struggle, which actually makes sense considering that we have no agency. And because we lack agency the same thing has happened to us as with globalization, capitalism, religion has adversely affected us. Social media is a storm that has caught us out in the open (again) lacking a secure identity, unified Pan-African agenda, work ethos, and ethics as such what could have been an opportunity for progress has given us an even heavier burden to carry than previous generations. ((I say again because when modernity came it left us unprepared, when globalization came we were not prepared and most of our burgeoning industries were destroyed)) We struggle with concepts like viral; the rate at which ignorance can circumnavigate the globe. Do we have counters for that? Do we know how to deal with the death of reading? The popularity of flippant attitudes and goldfish-like ((A goldfish is one of the dumbest fishes on the planet, you can put them in a bowl no bigger than themselves and they are always discovering new territories to explore. ))attention spans? The instant gratification that lures people out of building constructive relationships? Have we built a strong enough culture to protect us from the sophisticated manipulative nature of social media? The false bravado and discard for basic manners? The trivialization of intellectual hierarchy and expertise. Scholarship and ignorance are flattened and made equal and authority is dismantled.
Social media is like the lotto, some make it, most do not, yet all play the rigged game
No Facebook when they were around–yet
We are sold the lottery dream, albeit, in a new format, that social media has allowed greater social movements a voice. That is utter nonsense and we need to press pause right there. For who? Gay rights groups? What is their evidence of this? Oh, look at the BLM movement. What a wonderful example, anyone else? Just a little historical reminder, prior to social media apartheid fell! Prior to social media, we had the likes of Malcolm X and MLK and even before that Denmark Vesey, Sojourner Truth, Nat Turner, NOI, Garvey making at the head of the greatest movements in African history and all they got to show as proof of the perks of social media is BLM? I rest my case. The lotto dream is because Oprah and Obama made it, the world has now opened up. ((Lotto dream gives the impression anyone can win when the odds are so slim of you winning they might as well not exist. It allows misrepresentation of things by cherrypicking examples of success, what about the 1000 other examples of social movements drowned out by social media or marginalized)) It would be safe to say that since the advent of social media our revolution has hit an iron mountain. We see the triumph of ignorance and vanity, loud and ignorant, vulgar and irresponsible.
If Junk food is dangerous, what about Junk content?
There is a film called Supersize Me where a guy only eats junk food for a long time. Can you imagine if all you do day in day out is imbibe junk content? If junk food destroys your body what does junk content do for your brain? Are we discussing this? Very few of us monitor the quality of the air we breathe daily, but we know a little about declining air quality. The quality of content is something, like air quality, should also concern us. This website used to get 10,000 clicks on a good day, a good day is now 200 clicks. When we started a Facebook page we use to get about 100 engagements per post (not all of them healthy) today it is about 2 – 5 engagements regardless of how urgent the topic is. What has changed globally on social media is the quality of content that people are willing to engage. Serious has been replaced by flippant trash. The very same themes that would once attract 20 comments now attract no one. Has the great issue of education discussed in 2015 changed now it is 2021? No, the people have. The content creators that push the trash have realized there is a way to stay relevant and it is to absolutely avoid discussing anything too heavy or making any sort of demand of their audience (such as asking people to take action and change their condition). A page will go from 2K likes to 200 likes when they start asking people to support.
A Tictok mind once exposed is not ever going to be able to return to deep reading.
And when you fail on social media please remember there is absolutely nothing wrong with social media— it is only a tool. And you have to learn how to use the tool correctly. The correct way to use the tool is to usually drop your ethics and adopt the most vulgar methods of capitalism. A gun is also a tool that can be used to get what you want. Do we then have to ask ourselves how far are we prepared to go in demining ourselves (by posting selfies, junk content, lies, tricks, fake sales, celeb content, shock, baby photos, sex lives) to get our “message” out?
What lessons are we learning when we always need an instant reward for our actions?
INTRODUCTION
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Facebook is an exploitation of our social instinct, that people-based social bonding that is so critical for our success as a species on planet Earth. That longing to find validity and comfort in groups. To be seen, to be known. To know. To stay relevant and in the light, to be listened to and loved. There is trust in mass decision-making. Even when the decision is to rob, burn and loot it seems okay when we do it as a group. We can kill the “other” as a group (Rwanda, Ethiopia, South Africa, Nazi Germany, Vietnam) This is in our DNA. We are not as sophisticated and “independent” as some make out. And social media is the drug that satisfies our desire to be in a group. The new tribe is online.
There are only two types of people on platforms like Facebook; products and clients. Most people have their info harvested and sold to Facebook’s clients. That is the entire gig. If I am in business selling Islamic clothes to women, as a client of Facebook they, for a premium fee, with finding that audience and help me generate leads. But a big film company like Working Title that made Baby Driver and Greenzone and generated $100,000000 from one single film gets fewer likes than a broke influencer in Kenya. So you pay to engage as a business because you are a client of the platform profiting from your engagement. The product is being sold to the client so your post engagements are being used to generate data which is later sold. This is why a post by a company might reach 4 people, and the same post on a personal page might be identical yet reach 200 people.
The new currency has gone from gold to paper to ‘likes.’ as with those former currencies people are willing to sacrifice everything to have them, despite them having zero real-world value. So, for the first time in history, society is reduced to how many people can click like buttons. They “like” and go back to the system. If enough people click “like” the sky will thunder and something will fall out and save all oppressed people and give them instant cash. The question from scanning the content of Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter is are we getting dumber, or is our dumbness just more on public display with the rise of social media? In a dystopian society full of extremely dumb people. Advertising, commercialism, and cultural anti-intellectualism have run rampant and dysgenic pressure has resulted in a uniformly stupid society devoid of intellectual curiosity, social responsibility, and coherent notions of justice and human rights.
One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people’s motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans—anything except reason.— Thomas Sowell
And the format is perfect for fake revolutions that give us the positive quotes that social media has empowered the average man. LOL, How exactly did it do that? If it did that I am wondering how come the best thing Africans have seen out there is BLM powered by “trained Marxists.” Is that revolution the same revolution we saw in the 1960s? So review all the great revolutions in history and ask the question again. What revolution? Lots of noise is not lots of quality struggles to advance anything. A lot of focus is on noise that still does not liberate. And it is repetitive noise over and over again. Like a pop song that uses the same tired money-making formula time after time. Pro-Black pages post the same melanin power nonsense day in day out, never do they shift the conversation for fear of isolating their audience. It is impossible to break out of this cycle and discuss anything more elevated than this monolithic superficial trash. No way to acquire new information outside of their narrow sphere of interest since it will be attacked by the antibodies of ignorance in their bloodstream.
Imagine a system that has people willingly giving up all their personal data (address, credit card info, family connections, location, likes and dislikes, attitudes, religious status, marriage status, sexual orientation, the high school they attended, favorite food, baby photos, political affiliations, places they want to visit in 2023) all of that surrendered willingly. Can you imagine a better picture of BIG BROTHER? Wow, all of that intel into the private files of Mark. The first place police look when doing forensic files these days is your social media account. Yet you will find the conspiracy theory group with pages on Facebook warning people about spying hacking and 5g doom. Ironic at best. the question, what do you think Facebook does with all of that information? All of that information in one centralized place sounds like something even Orwell could not conjure up.
THANK THE ROMANS
They give the Greeks credit for philosophy and democracy and they gave the Phoenicians credit for the script. But boy the Romans gave us control, the kind that we actually want more of; the distracting spectacle of the arena. Where no matter how dirty the streets were, no matter how empty your belly was you had the spectacle to look forward to at the weekend. You could be knee-deep in excrement but no one cared about anything but the grand distraction of the Colosseum. And if a wheel works, why reinvent it?
WHEN IS IT AN ADDICTION?
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0j0xzuh-6rY
Before we get to this question we need to check that people are still monitoring themselves? Because if there is no problem and the question never came up then there is a good chance there is no point discussing social media as an addiction. But we all know what a drug addict looks like. What does a social media addict look like? Well, someone during family dinner drops their sweet chicken to reply to a Whatsapp message. Someone who at 11 PM at night who is watching a film with the family who stops watching it to reply to every single message that comes in. Because greater than the action sequences in the film is what their friends replied to their message. You would swear blind they were discussing building an online supermarket. There you are having a conversation about business with them and that little ring comes in and you lost them in space. Their child could be shivering in the bath but they have to chat! In the middle of sexual intercourse, a phone beeps and they stop to send back a LOL to a friend’s comment.
And the damage is done, and it is deliberate. If true for TikTok and China what about Mark and Fakebook? This world does not reinvent the wheel that works.
Leave that phone alone time is not even something that can be discussed. Because that is their entire identity and hook on “reality”. But it is anything but the reality it is the illusion destroying your reality. We, humans, are affected by time, and social media has infinite time to keep us busy.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
The shortest path to the greatest profits has been a model that has worked from the BLM((The idea that protesting and marching will bring changes overnight was reinforced when the media praised the movement globally, feeding people the illusion that change was that easy and that this nonsense path was not only the best path for African victory but the end to all other meaningful paths )) to every advert about losing weight or becoming a millionaire in 1 month. It is the exact same model but dressed in different clothes. And we need to be cognizant of this, that same does not always look the same while it ultimately is selling the same thing.
SUCCESS ON SOCIAL MEDIA
Paid $40,000 for a camera to try and get popular on YouTube so that is $151 per like for 264 likes.
Using celebrity culture to get people to visit a history page.
ALGORITHM
And here is how Fakebook comes into this. The minute I post those images Fakebook already knows to lower how many people see this post. They have a database of all the pictures out there and look at word patterns and know how to handle them. You say Ocacia, you say, Malcolm, you say whatever, and it is processed by an algorithm. You would not know this unless you are a computer programmer with access to Meta. All images have tags. And when that shirt is put up there it knows– Pay or you do not get to play. And if you think Fakebook is the devil, then Google is the devil’s Father! Because Google affects next to everyone and affects us in total darkness and silence.
Ocacia Jeans, Not Levi, Not Made in China, but made by hand in Africa
DEATH OF CRITICAL THINKING
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The company decided not to add a “dislike” button for one simple reason: It’s too negative.– Facebook((It is intrested that Facebook is concerned with negative. But dislike is not negative–it simple means “I did not like that” in a progressive society we are capable of apprciating like and dislike. If Facebook is worried about negative why then do they have emojiis for angry and happy? Freedom of speech in the hands of a White supremist bigot is pretty negative for everyone non-white))
Level of Disagreement
Critical thinking dies every day with the rise of social media. We are more trusting of memes and quotes without sources. And it is because social media promotes no such deep thinking (which takes time). It is quick consumption and processing of data at rates that would make 5g look like dial-up. No one has time for that. I mean how do you discuss the problems of social media in a Tweet?
Utter trash under the banner of consciousness
Ignorance is so dangerous. It is a form of self-destruction and counters to our development. And you would need to live for 2000 years to debunk all the trash online. But this message is less about that trash and more about you who consume it. There is a very good reason trash floats freely on social media. There is one joker who said in one post that Africans have more DNA than anyone else. Apparently ‘science has found’ makes rubbish sound researched. I think a little info is deadly because they confuse things. It is the same idiot that said a Black man invented the helicopter in the ’60s. He must have been really special because the Hewy flown in Vietnam was already in operation. It is like the rumors about ‘the mother of the matrix’ it is a clear-cut case of copyright infringement except to everyone who knows about copyright. A lay undertaking does not help us function in this world. It handicaps us, it makes us end up fighting African consciousness. Because as the saying goes in their binary mindset; you are either ignorant and loud and with them, or you are the enemy. And the things they will fight you over is if you question if a Black woman really wrote the Matrix. That is the level they are on. Denying that makes you an “agent.”
LITERACY ON SOCIAL MEDIA
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I did not hear you as I was too busy talking
People are very good at writing, but not so good at reading. They THINk they read something and jump to the comments in rage. Do you know why they do this? Because social media promotes the ego, it promotes a binary way of reacting. So things are either (as fast as the eye can blink) good or bad. And there is a kneejerk reaction. People hold very permanent and simplistic views and have default responses to the most complex of human discussions. What we also find is this rush to state an uninformed and often ignorant opinion. After reading 2 lines of a 200-page book they rush to comment on what they do not know. You give them a link to say Ocacia.com and in 2 seconds they are off giving critical advice on prices, markets, designs, what you are doing wrong, etc. They know nothing, but that does not stop them.
AHS: War is bad
But they will only read “War” and then rush to the comments to lambast you.
AHS: Please read this article on the complexities of African culture
Blackrage: Africa is not a country it has many diverse cultures and pages like from the Diaspora do not have a clue about Africa you all think all we do is beat drums all day long.
AHS: BTW Did you get a chance to read the article?
Blackrage: No, I just saw the title.
Beware of Woke Police who get high on exposing others’ mistakes, even when they make none.
FAKE NEWS/HISTORY
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“Don’t believe everything you read on the internet.” – Abraham Lincoln
4.1K for utter garbage((If this post is true how then does it explain the African condition? A continent that produces no final goods, and only offers the world raw materials? ))
Why is rubbish history popular on social media dangerous? Cabral told us to tell no lies and mask no challenges. Karenga said we have a moral duty to remember. Is it remembering if it is a lie based on shabby work? If anyone without qualifications or reputation can seduce our people with misinformation then how is this the pursuit of African excellence our ancestors and elders left for us? How do we create a new generation of Diop’s if the standard is the more trash you talk the more reward you receive? How are you carrying on the traditions of Diop if you throw all of his quality standards to the wind and teach people nonsense? I want to know what happened as best as I can know what happened. This means every single generation needs to stand on the work that came before with a critical lens.
A Real African Scholar
Scholarship did not start nor did it die with Diop. But today we are pissing on his grave with this rubbish slackness that liters so-called “pro-Black” sites. How on God’s Earth do they do it? Because their audience created and rewarded this cheap fast food sugar-coated history–they do not act alone and should not be blamed in isolation of the mindset that empowers them. Uncritical people who love romance create opportunism. This is why the pastor/politician exploited us because we love to hear sweet things uncritically so charlatans are plentiful amongst disenfranchised people.
Even back in the day, the lowest of the lowest populist Afrocentric historians at least use to do research. Some of them had some sort of qualification to be heard by their audience. Today it is the wild wild West you have DJ/Historians with social media pages who have more influence than learned scholars who publish proper work.
Counter-revolution is something we must discuss we have seen it recently with Islam and before that with communism, they have done it everything and everyone and it works so well, why stop? If tomorrow all our ideologies started to create serious unity for our people and we starting building industries and wearing our culture. I promise you the best way to tear us down would be to send in people who look like us, talk like us yet use the patina of consciousness with a root of destruction.
Next Pan-Africanism would be a dirty word. There is next to no one who is serious about scholarship, that I know, at a university that wants to get thrown in that Afrocentric box. Why? Because of association to all that trash. What about the truth in Afrocentrism? It got drowned out by those infiltrators (conscious and mostly unconscious) who were allowed to promote trash. How do places like FakeBook do this is by making sure they find people with radical conscious leanings and push this trash in their face to make sure they go down a pointless path and never discover something more progressive. And the last critical point why on God’s blue Earth would white people always be engaged in the comments of these pages? Because they stoke the flames and keep our people busy. Busy on a useless page is much better than busy on something conscious. Again, we have seen this done with Islam, with varying degrees of success. It is why Celebrity Jihad exists, who is behind this– Zionist familiar with Islamic rhetoric. Why stop with Islam?
THE FOOLS PLATFORM
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THE ART OF DISTRACTION
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CLICKBAIT DEBATES
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Religion a popular clickbait debate to get likes
The religious debate is 99% of the time a stupid debate. I think one of us was invited to talk about religion on an African-centered talk show and we declined. Now how come we would decline? When we discuss religion all day long on our website in such detail? Because religion is a clickbait topic. Simple as that. It is that crap we keep talking and talking about with nothing progressive being added to the debate. And it is that conversation that comes at the expense of every other topic we should be discussing. I mean how many times will we talk about foreign religions and avoid talking about all the foreign shit in your house owned by white people? Or this foreign mind-destroying media system we imbibe 24/7? And if you notice the back and forth of a religious debate is so damn boring. One person believes in the Bible and another cursing it for how it was used in slavery and later colonialism. Not one single exchange of new ideas occurs.
THE TRAP
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Social media is not the work, You do not get points in the real world for a Facebook page that does not support anything but itself. You check #BDS you check everyone else and see what I mean. Not one of them has a presence exclusively on social media– social media is when they have 3 minutes in a 24 hr day to spare. Yet leading “master teachers” of the African world only on Facebook. Their legacy ended up on social media they have classes in African studies on social media in the format of memes and orphan quotes.
Tic Tok distractions
We should be very careful with the rubbish you post and the rubbish you read: It is a bottomless pit. This space is temptation and it celebrates stupidity, it does not promote erudition. The minute you start using WhatsApp status and the like for nonsense idle jokes memes and misinformation you will contaminate your intelligence. Soon the smart person you were, who would be able to discern between sensible and important things, will be lost to the noise. I have seen people I consider intelligent so wrapped up in stupidity that now you cannot even hold a serious conversation with them; they are all over the place jumping between jokes and black power memes. The world is getting more serious and we are laughing ourselves into our own graves. That is what social media is doing to our brains–killing our intelligence. And the gateway is these funny videos and silly memes that dull the sharpness of your mind.
GOFUND PURE NONSENSE
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Some would suggest Africans are poor and have no money. Take a look at GoFund me and the ridiculous things people sign up to fund. Imagine what Africans could do if this money was channeled in productive ways? And there are legitimate causes that you should fund. But where is the regulation to say this thing is authentic and this thing is fake? No one checks these things. We did some research and it was strange that we barely raised $300 to build our African Holocaust site, some people noted $1000 for a man to build a university that was never built! The goals are like 2 million without one shred of accounting on how that number was acquired. Where are the business plans, where is the cost forecast, and what not? Not needed, but a real business went out of business because they could not pay their 2 staff $200 a month in South Africa, and Africans have money for pastors, and all kinds of magic makers.
LET THE ILLUSIONS BEGIN
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From deceptive selfie angles that make average-looking people appear attractive, to curating your Facebook feed so it looks like you’re having more fun than you actually are, social media has taken neoliberalism’s self-centered mantra and pumped it full of cocaine-laced steroids. –highsnobiety.com((https://www.highsnobiety.com/))
happy family jumping together on the beach
Here is a photo shared on social media. Everyone clicks like. and says WOW you guys are really doing well, you have such a beautiful family. All of this is based on a photo one person decided to share. What they did not share, where all the other photos that happened before this particular picture was taken. Social media is not reality– it is the biggest illusion ever created. It is my narrative as I want you to think it is! So I post a wise quote–and you think me wise. I post a joke–and you think me funny.
Social media has colonized what was once a sacred space occupied by emptiness: the space reserved for thought and creativity.
LIKES
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The more like a currency you can get, the more important, cool, relevant you are on social media. But let us ask what does like really mean? There is a guy running a small business in a township in South Africa, he is very content with his “success” because he pays $10 a week and gets about an average of 250 likes on his post. Another business must pay $200 a week to get that many likes. So what is the difference? Who is clicking like.. So if you have 2 people clicking like on your page and those 2 people are Xenobiologists and your post is about Xenobiology then the quality of those two likes is greater than 250 likes from school girls and boys whose parents need a government grant to pay for their food. And Facebook knows this and knows how to milk everyone according to their means. Facebook is a master of knowing your VALUE. It knows that a married White home owner who vacations in Paris and drives a BMW is a higher product than some 16-year-old African girl in Nigeria on a cheap Android phone. Facebook is not politically correct, but they do offer the promise of equitable exploitation.
How can a trash page
LIVING FOR THE VIRTUAL
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Future’s made of virtual insanity now
Always seem to, be governed by this love we have
For useless, twisting, our new technology
Oh, now there is no sound – for we all live underground — Jamiroquai
“Our attention spans have been reduced by the immediate gratification provided by smartphones and social media.” – Katherine RyanSocial media is something of a double-edged sword. At its best, social media offers unprecedented opportunities for marginalized people to speak and bring much-needed attention to the issues they face. At its worst, social media also offers ‘everyone’ an unprecedented opportunity to share in collective outrage without reflection. – Roxane Gay
BIRDS OF A FEATHER
And while people are throwing their powerless power around on Facebook the system is free to run without interruptions. B/c the creators and the pundits had to think, “what happens if pages like AHS become the norm?”– then you would have a social revolution of consciousness. But they know human behavior and they know what gets the mob off.
In our productions why did we say “Open your mind?” I think people heard it but did not hear it. Maybe they thought it was just a cute phrase. How can you “Open your mind” but be unable to grasp concepts and arguments that are different from what you believe? I do not have to believe in evolution to understand the argument of an evolutionist. I can read about Nihistic societies and capitalism, and Hinduism and understand them without ever believing in them. And I can do so without prejudice. That is what having an open mind means. I am not locked into the world of being an African or being from America or being a democrat or being Islamic. Because that is what is wrong with people. They are White and American and GOP and eat meat and those things lock them out from understanding anything else. This is why it is very hard for people to have a conversation at different levels because they are LOCKED into knowing only what they are.
ALGORITHMS
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One reason why true revolution on social media will never happen as a main tool is because to think about who is controlling who gets to see this post. Facebook figures out how relevant this post is, and pass it over to your feed. The next factor that determines relevance is popular stupidity, the trend shows that memes, jokes, useless content, terminal quotes, pictures, selfies, and stupid clichés are what the populous fool prefers over something important to their development like educational/economic discussions or conscious products and services. And since those things are primary in any people’s struggle social media by its very nature is very limited in liberation.
THE BLIND LEAD THE BLINDER
If one tries to navigate unknown waters, one runs the risk of shipwreck. – Ancient Egypt
Smoke sunthin biiiiitch! (206,000 Likes) ~ Lil Wayne (10,000 comments). 9,687206,492Like · · Share
Has anyone had a look at Lil Waynes page? What should worry us is not the utter crap and trite self-indulgent nature of it (that is to be expected – it is what it is). What should concern us is how do you get 40 million people to find this acceptable.40 million people who find completeness in this endless publicity cycle of trite emptiness.
POWER TO THE NOBODY
People bring about their own undoing through their tongues. ~ Ancient Egypt
And in all this anarchy the power structure still walks unchallenged. Because it is strange that with all of this social this and that are we any closer to any of our goals free from the oppression of the system. If this Facebook page and the pages of the other serious causes represented the majority then the answer to this question is a strong YES. But the problem as we have stated time and time again. Is pages like this are not even 2% of Facebook content. Most are preoccupied with posting pics from their iPhone of them at a party last night. Or some viral photo of a Cat riding a skateboard.
Many people are talking, everyone is a scholar, everyone has an organization, everyone has a blog, everyone has an opinion and a solution. The pressures for unity has even less allure, why unite when I can be a diy solo revolutionary? In the new noise created by the clash of social media and human ego the new victim – more than ever before in history – is the work. One may ask, how do we discern who is who? Matthew said “by their fruit”,
What do you use a spoon for? What do you use a circular saw for? Certainly not drilling holes. What about a hammer? Certainly not cutting glass. All these tools are very useful in their own right but you don’t try to plant crops with a stable poon. But we must know what each tool is for, and the limits of that tool! And most do not.
They all sign up for this new social experiment. Like wildebeest crossing, crocodile-infested water in the Serengeti, all in mass without a second reflection, negotiating teeth and tides. Once scared people, so nervous they do not own credit cards, believe the system is out to get them. Have all 3 installments of The Matrix, yet voluntary their most scared information to a private company on the US stock exchange market, subject to the laws of USA. Yes, the same USA that has been invading, imposing, colonizing, spread war, famine and death for the length and breadth of its legacy. The same USA that owns every GPS satellite in orbit. It is not a conspiracy theory is a string of factual statements in one sentence. If one believes, they are trustworthy, then read no more, and go on supplying them with your critical information.
Social media raises to serious social concerns, privacy and the ownership of information and second the issue of the new culture of human behavior which is new for our species and untested. People have died in Korea playing video games, people get divorced over Facebook. Terrible secrets are revealed, identity information stolen and used. Social media exploits a basic human trait, safety in numbers. If everyone is doing something – then it must be safe. In tiny increments they seduce you and your natural hesitation is allayed as they extract information about you, you didn’t even know about yourself. All stored on a private database.
There is a Western culture of thinking we have a RIGHT to be heard, even though we have nothing to say. OPINIONS? What is that, even a 2-year baby has an opinion. Back it up with some serious arguments or shut up with it. Tell it to the Oprah – write “Dear Oprah I think…” well nobody really cares, no one read, it no one replied– but you feel better. Social con.
“The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” ― Isaac Asimov
Its far greater than “The West”, there is no longer “a West” there is power and then no power. I cannot even get into my phone without a Google account, Google is owned by the USA, Phone is owned by Asia. F.B is a wonderful evil. b4 they had to tap your phone to get your POV, they had to terrorize you to give up your details., now we do it for free. Who is your wife? Go to F.B, Where do you work? Go to F.b, What do you think? – Go to f.b, what you ate last night? – go to f.b. Which article on CNN you liked? – Go to F.B, are your friends with…? – Go to f.b. Banks couldn’t do that. even the FBI didn’t have that much intel.
And we (as a people) are drifting out of Africa and into some multicultural White supremacy soup of noise. I would not even call it European, but maybe modern Eurocentric. Because the false pages which dont care one bit about you, it is just pure marketing, pure selfishness, but people prefer it, cuz you can be you, you can say what you want without fear. and that is more important today than truth, growth, and understanding. I have a view, and that is that. Is your view correct? Does it stand up? It is not that subjective when you bring nothing but “I think”.
THE HAPPY USER
The best sign of a healthy relationship is when it does not appear on Facebook
While surfing all the photos and wonderful comments of the Facebook user’s one sees the smiles, the birthdays, the happy holiday photos, the memories and images of self they chose to show the world. As a collection, it gives the impression of a continuous success story of birthday parties, weddings, holidays and great days with friends. What about the in-between reality, the sad days, the days when the electricity got switched off? So Facebook is a mask, a mask the user puts on and shows to the world, a public face for every private citizen. Scanning the lives of old friends there photos always seem to make you feel like you are missing something. Here they are in Barbados; there they are at this film festival, meeting some semi-notable person, at a party laughing. And you ask yourself my life is so dull compared to their constant party. The online state of perpetual bliss.
STRAW MAN
I have not read any of your articles, or ever will, but here is my comment, you might recognize it, it is the same opinion unchanged, unaltered, devoid of nuance from the 60’s. In addition, I will assume the argument you are making and then argue against what I think/hope you said. – Facebook Fan
B/C our world is so polarized and predictable.
Some people save themselves the effort of reading and assume you fall into box a or box b. They have a defense for box b, so they just apply it irrespective of anything actually written. It is a very sad day when we assume, skim the surface and then post a conclusion.
“Some of your solutions are limited” is not of any use to anyone, as anyone can almost say that for everything ever written and not be tied into anything meaningful argument to why the solutions are limited. What solution? How are they limited? Do you even understand them? Have you really read them? This is the first thing we need to fix, to end jumping before we look. And Facebook rewards empty critique. You can almost copy and paste this sentence to every and any single post and come off as semi-intellectual.
REVOLUTION IS PAINFUL
You dont petition the SYSTEM to release you from its shackles, that is just God Damn stupid simplistic. You identify and understand law and act to lobby amendments. But our people call that boring, they rather the spectacle of marching and throwing eggs at police cars. Or creating facebook pages which they think on their own can be used to really educate and mobilize people. I am sure they can but not if you dont know what you are doing. You cannot throw stones at the moon and hope to hit it, likewise, you do not take down imperialism with a page on Facebook which has a net value of $100 billion and is one of the biggest and most successful big brother products. So you would have to really start by starting a basic course in “how the world works” before trying anything drastic.
Lets face it most of us love being AFRIKAN (with a ‘K’ on Facebook) we dont go to work with that Love. You tell them why not give your baby an African name. They go coy. When you come to Africa? “When I learn to speak Afrikan” — Let the real revolutionaries stand up!
YouTube and Facebook do not give out Degrees. Even books (which are critical) cannot give you life experience. You can read a book on running an economy, starting a company, making a film, running the owenshahadah.com website. You know when you realize when you go the minerals or not? When you actually go and do it, and succeed, when you celebrate your 1st decade of actually doing work. This is why hierarchy have to exist. Why we have elders, learned people, scholars as a classification to say “this person has earned their stripes– show some respect” thats really what it means.
We were given a tour of a new media centre in a township. 22 New Mac computers. Brand new, high speed internet. We were “WOW” this is revolution. We went back one year later and went in to use the internet. You know 100% of the students were in there on youtube and facebook, downloading and watching videos, listen to music. not one said let me really work on my C.V. I will never deny Youth culture’s attitude to these things which is beyond race, but at the same time even when Given we have this natural habit of disrespecting and wasting, from a people who cannot afford to be like this.
CAUSES AND ONLINE PETITIONS
When you actually go and do it, and succeed, when you celebrate your 1st decade of actually doing work. This is why hierarchy have to exist. Why we have elders, learned people, scholars as a classification to say “this person has earned their stripes– show some respect” thats really what
ONLY IN OUR DREAMS
The kind of Pan-Africanism we got going on in the world is the kind of the Pan-Africanism that lives on Facebook and Youtube, it has zero power to even change a light bulb in Africa. Zero lobby action, zero real on the ground networks, media houses, assets, trade deals, yet we fool ourselves into thinking Pan-Africanism is some powerful force. With 180 time more Africans than Jews we have no AIPAC or lobby power in the Western World.
the challenge outstanding is what steps are being taken to realize these things right this second? Not everyone has money to invest, but they might have time to write a letter, but how many people do anything to change our African world. I mean as an African Diaspora person there is almost NO country in Africa you can go to on the bases of your African identity. You and the White man with a similar passport standing behind you in the Visa line have the same rights.
FACEBOOK ORDER AND CHAOS
The traditions of classical Europe do not favor the rants of uninformed idiots. Neither does Africa (at any point) see the Griots. So that is why we cannot just call it Eurocentric. It is modern chaos. the voice of the fool who studied nothing. The voice of the raving uninformed. I can speak so I speak. I can’t think, but I still speak and speak LOUD. Thank Q facebook. PhD from Facebook will be next.
The camera has created a culture of celebrity; the computer is creating a culture of connectivity. As the two technologies converge —broadband tipping the Web from text to image; social-networking sites spreading the mesh of interconnection ever wider—the two cultures betray a common impulse. Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. This is what the contemporary self wants. It wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves—by being seen by others.– Chris Hedges
Without clear structure and protocols revolution can descend into chaos. We see the rise of all types of social media but has it really assisted the liberation of African people, or has it added another vacuous distraction for vampiring their time? The trend shows more voices online, more opinions, more egos, more random YouTube post, more repetitive mantra, more rhetoric, but where is the unity that builds schools, creates Pan-African lobbying, makes films, organizes unions, creates wealth and jobs? 100% people are doing these things but most of the time you have to look through a lot of hay to find one needle. If every 5 minutes uninformed people have the power to go from getting out of bed to creating a space on Facebook and attracting 1000 fans just so they can repost a Youtube link or quote from Malcolm X then what is that page offering you that the next one didn’t. If it is offering nothing then what is it’s purpose? To add clutter and chaos to the burgeoning trend of “causes” and “virtual organizations.” It took no track record to create, it took no study, no permission and ultimately no responsibility.
So one guy wakes up and feels the urge to demand reparations, he creates a Facebook cause, has he contacted N’cobra? Has he contacted Parcole in the UK? Has he researched the issues around reparations, its ideological arguments? But without doing any of the aforementioned things he is prepared to solicit 2000 feel gooders to sign a pointless, badly written, empty, hollow and ultimately counter-productive poorly argued petition for reparations under tha banner of “Doing something is better than nothing” When challenged, what format should the reparations be paid, and to who… silence. What is the legal argument for reparations… “We deserve it” —
CHOICE
The illusion of personal power over a world that dictates so much about our lives yet allows us to believe we have some type of freedom. I agree we have the “right” but 120,000 years of human history says we dont. because as social animals we behave in a very very predictable. way. How else did so many people voluntarily give up such personal information about themselves on some unknown systems called Facebook? I just clicked on your name and learnt all kinds of things about you. So despite us having “choice” we generally choose to behave per the instructions of the system. So this illusion of choice turns out to be not that great a choice after all.
So how did a cautious populous go from being guarded and private to being so public? From my business is my own to sharing birthday parties with 1 billion people? From private space to public space, where one click and we can see a photo of inside your house, your children, your work place, your mom, your dad, your cousins cousin? With locations and dates!
SILENCE CONSCIOUS
The first attempt at silencing consciousness these days is to a sophisticated appeal to ego, they whisper in your ear “I prefer your pointless fiction and self-glorification work over all of that historical political stuff” or “less of that race stuff you are alienate your audience… speak more human and universal, “talk more about yourself, let the audience connect with you”, appealing to everything in your ego. It is a corruption that doesn’t happen in one day, but a gradual process until you cannot find your way home. Actually you don’t even know you have a home.
So u got 20,000 fans and every day they post shit about themselves “I I and I and I did…, I saw, I went, I am..” you got a famine in Somalia and they would not even put a link to help those people. You go a war in Libya and they would not put a link to direct their fan base to stopping imperialism. You got good work being done by others and you cant say “Support these guys..” They will not use their resources –for risk of losing favor with their superficial fan-base.
CONFLICT RESOLUTION
You see now and then, in every complex society, people will disagree, some disagreements have the potential to split nations apart, causing ill effects for everyone involved and uninvolved. So one of the hallmarks of societies with longevity is conflict resolution. One conflict resolution is to blow up people that disagree with you, but then you run out of people. Hunter gathers solve conflicts by moving to new areas–cant work in a complex society because we live on top of one another. So we might as well start making an investment in the science of conflict resolution because it is one discipline we will always need to call on.
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African Holocaust (Est. 2001) is a non-profit civil society dedicated to the progressive study of African history and culture. The society is composed of diverse array of African scholars and writers, who share the desire use critical thinking to represent and restore an authentic, reflexive, honest, inclusive and balanced study of the African experience, past and present.
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