The destroyed the dislike button a few days ago. On YouTube.
Maybe I should say the “dislike meter”. The button is still there.
And I’m sure a few millions of could feel our stomachs turn. Our lower lips clench. Our eyes take in air as they flared.
As we said to ourselves, “the ability for people to express themselves died a little today.”
As we felt “the accountability of creative money makers rotted a little today.”
“The ability for humanity to un-fuck itself from bad behavior was hurt today.”
It was like the death of a piece of human will. Benevolent urges that live on outside of us.
The desire to correct the nasty, the unhelpful, the hateful, the irresponsible, and the just plain damn destructive among us was damaged that day.
The dislike button was like a fairy tale creature. No matter what your views were, or what content you liked, or which creators you supported, you could totally roll with keeping that meter around.
Everybody fantasizes about the un-fucking of the human experience. You might crave it more than your own very life. You might even die for it. Or of course, live for it. You don’t know when or how or why it would happen but you want it to happen.
And it can’t happen if people can’t say that something somebody does totally sucks ass. You know that can’t happen.
Some corporate guy looked at the hordes of dislikes on video game and movie announcement trailers, and said, “yeah, can we just negate this shit?”
And basically everyone disagreed. I mean, even if it makes YouTube a little friendlier of a place for people to be on, reality should be a contest to see who’s doing things right!
People have to be able to say that something isn’t right! It’s like you’re stifling the evolution of humanity! It’s worse than immoral!
It’s more tragic than people dying on the battlefield, or at home, or old age! Worse than the loss of shared memories! Worse than the obliteration of art! Worse than covering history! Destroying the dislike meter…..it’s like you’re spitting on space and time itself!
On something broader than the idea of a deity or collective consciousness! That raw and pungent urge to make something less bad than it used to be!
It makes you want to bang your head into the wall! It makes you feel like your mouth’s been taken away, and the mouths of everybody who ever lived and could live who had a small chance at making being a human slightly more bearable have been taped up for some crude imitation of what it means to want to be nice to any other human being!
AAAAAGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
WWWWWWWWHHHHHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK
And yet the rage falters.
While looking at a very small and hilarious YouTube channel, I thought, for just a second
“it’s nice this person can’t get shat on by the public”,
and I felt my resolve, my scorn, my appetite for justice waver. And I felt embarrassed.
It’s sad, right? Something deep inside you that you’ve been wanting to out.
Your suspicion is correct. At least, more correct than incorrect. Broadly, to be sure.
It’s that people, for the most part, really do want to do valuable things that un-fuck the world. Or rather, you could say, there’s a
spark of this that never really doesn’t take part in our actions.
You can tell all the jokes you want, go on all the tirades you want, conduct all the satire you want, scream as loud as you want, even grab someone by the throat and slap them as hard you want, and still….
they’ll feel like they’re not doing something truly ugly. They’ll feel like the anti-ugly. They’ll feel an inner beauty. They might even have….an inner beauty.
And nothing can be done to really fight that wrong feeling version of inner beauty.
Especially in a world where voices are silenced by big business.
Turn the lights down, friend. Cool off for a bit. I don’t want you to lose hope.
There is a way to deal with that “bad version” of inner beauty. There’s a theory. There’s a method. There’s a will and there is a way.
I’ve illustrated it right here. It involves these three truths that you already agree with-
- It’s possible to see anything as connected or disconnected to something else to some degree, and people know how to exploit that.
- People enjoy being excessive with others, but also have a good taste for fighting that such excess, even to the point of fighting passive kinds of excess.
- When you feel just the right kind of inappropriate, a person will feel immutably awesome, in a state that feels like an evolution of childish dreams of being nice.
By injecting these three statements into your skin,
by really getting what the hell I’m actually telling you,
you’ll be able to make being human a little more bearable.
And extracting the good vibes from people will become a big bit less of a fantasy.
This I promise. I totally promise, it will help you, at least a little,
wrap your head around why other people feel like “not the problem”.
Go and read Seasons 5 and 6. Take the hour or two. Just keep reading. Don’t stop.
For what other strange means could the world holding hands with itself possibly come into being? What other time, than here, in 2021?
Help me with this plan. Make the dislike button unnecessary.
Make beautiful feeling behavior something we can tame.
And it will be the greatest thing since we learned to control fire.
Well, what are you waiting for! This is the internet’s final form! Go and consume it!
Mwahahahahaha.
The Found Emotion (Invoke Yourself) 