“We have come to a situation where we are no longer sure we exist…” ~ Sam Vaknin

What was it that Ray Davies (the Kinks) wrote years ago? “People take picture of each other just to prove that they really exist.”

It’s hard to say how long this video will be available on Youtube. I’d imagine that at some point, everything will disappear. Books have a longer shelf life and that’s yet another problem with documenting everything digitally. Ideas may just disintegrate faster and leave us to start afresh with no mile markers. Ideas do erode to sand, quite the same as mountains, but more quickly. All that said, everything Sam Vaknin says here really resonates.

I quit Facebook and nuked the account primarily because as an addict I recognize addiction and saw how I had become dependent on it and was losing touch with my “brick and mortar” identity. I was selling an online product in the same way that Amazon sells… well, pretty much everything.

Pay attention to Sam Vaknin though. Richard Grannon is certainly good, though I suspect (but I’m not certain) that his agenda isn’t merely about studying human behavior or harmful behavior. Or rather I’m not sure where his priorities are or what he thinks he is protecting. Vaknin may have ulterior motives also but he isn’t quite so transparent. Motives though in no way invalidate the ideas presented here. This is important.

Why do so many of us feel anxiety and loneliness when we spend so much less time disconnected from some means of communication? I’m in agreement that it starts here. The world has never been so small so why are we so lonely?

Vaknin says we are beginning to react to icons and representations the way we used to react to human beings, and losing our ability to react similarly to human beings. I’d imagine this is akin to how people are “desensitized” to human contact by viewing pornography, which is really only a representation of sexual contact. No pheromones. No oxytocin. No intimacy.

I have to endorse these ideas. I’ve witnessed them. People can’t be in the moment when they are busy recording and manipulating the present to present it to the future (post it) for future validation that may or may not happen. How many likes will this get? How many more will it get if I manipulate the representation of what’s happening? We are raising a generation therefore that has no history beyond actually having been at a certain place at a certain time. We sat and breathed and farted in this spot while something was happening. It may even be something we created, a spectacle, to be seen at a later date by “followers.”

No history.

No future beyond a plan to be seen at an earlier moment doing something false, or at least falsely represented.

Misrepresented.

Fuck it. Just listen to Vaknin here. “Now is the age of Social Darwinism.”

“Digital eugenics.”