Not playing video games is immature

People who don't video game are losers, they're also wicked immature. It's immature not to. Many want to be seen as an adult. If your primary concern is seeming like an adult, it means you aren't one, and lack the maturity to be what you are without shame. Video games are fun for all ages. Who never had fun as they watched a child chase an invaluable Pokemon in Pokemon Go! that you unleashed in the center of a six-lane highway? And there you stood gleefully with your binoculars on a nearby grassy knoll as you made someone else play Frogger and caused a seven-car pile up.

People negate the great indoors at their own peril. If shut-ins are bad, shut-outs may be worse. Realistically globalization is leading to the homogenization of culture and learning. And yes, experience is important, traveling, seeing the world, but the bigger picture, cosmic way to examine the world has always been led by the atomic study of things. Extroverts prefer the bigger scale, the day-to-day, and experience. The small scale is the inverted look at things preferred by introverts, such as the study of philosophy, and literature and arts. But the formats are polluted. Only post-pandemic are people serious about online learning, for example. If we have popstar singers, writers, and performers, it stands to reason we would have popstar educators so exceptional their courses should be reaching and teaching millions. If education is expensive, hands-off learning of rehashed ideas and textbooks are arbitrarily updated to sell more copies, there can be alternatives to the form. Text is seen as the holy grail because it's words, meaning everyone on Twitter is rich and smart and everyone on Twitch is poor and stupid. It's the opposite. A video game can be text-based, but it can also contain videos, music, and also be hands-on instructional. Most learning is not this.

In the real world, work-life balance, yadda, "gyms are important," fraternize, socialize, and send your child to a summer camp ran by Jared Fogle, whatever gives them the lived experience to write a memoir. But there are only so many life experiences, this is why art and its fantasy are popular in the first place. Yes escapism is bad as is overindulgence in most anything. To hammer against it completely is a mistake. Anything that helps with imagination and ideas is generally a good thing. There's countless scientists and entrepreneurs now who speak of the influence of shows like Star Trek or The Twilight Zone. The real world for most people isn't a nomadic state of ever-changing experiences. Most people's lives are static. They are routine. Drive to work, drive home, eat out, visit family and friends, clean, fret over responsibilities, and do your zero-to-three hobbies. Doing extracurricular things requires time, planning, and money that often people don't just have, if it's possible to do those activities in real life at all. With a VR headset or a monitor you can experience becoming a spree killer or living as a viking.

There's also the history of gaming. Sports is gaming. When the Aztecs would play soccer with decapitated heads it was the original Rocket League. Tetris is based on a Russian sort of dominos. Casinos and cards, checkers and chess are all the same thing just often less sophisticated. Chess is a poor man's Valorant, only, the gatekeeping schizophrenics who play chess and live on a park bench and think the barista at Starbucks is in love with him because she put a heart on his cup get to sound sophisticated while knocking over a toy horse with a toy castle. Nerds. And if they were on Twitch I'd roast their banal comparisons of every societal problem to the fall of the Roman Empire and they'd get even more catatonic and seek more council from the second voice in their head. No mercy for the older, either. The same people who thought video games created violence were playing BINGO. Bingo relies only on your ability to remember numbers, likely a damning condemnation of our public school system where remembering dates is the most anyone learned, people left trying to gamify the one skill they were programmed with. If you updated to Candy Crush perhaps you'd be fun enough your loved ones wouldn't put you in a home to begin with.

 Aside from the odd title, I never played video games in my twenties and before with any regularity. Typically they didn't have much story and the basis was combative and an attempt to defeat the enemy. Now the spontaneous creation, mixed in tandem with literal millions of potential online co-inhabitants surpasses anything I can think of in terms of group-learning complexity. I mean, you're creating essentially a second world, a cloned and artificial reality for which to experiment to any end.  The subsequent potential for education is limitless. No role-playing scenario in a school can compete. There's nothing that could be say, more telling in a simplified way than exploring a domesticated life in Stardew Valley. The idea that as a young person you could faux start a business and learn about the this gradual progression in a safe and fun way and how to profit using a min-max system is invaluable. Plus you can put a hat on your horse.

min max ex.

Education is most effective with interest, and with this I see it becoming gamified. Think of what happens when online learning takes over, and the millions government takes from people for campuses and books is converted to fun learning programs. Naturally when given the choice between education and education that isn't boring people will choose the latter. With virtual reality headsets slowly reaching critical mass this reality is an inevitability. Even if none of this were true, you'd still be dumb for sleeping on a form of entertainment where a single game generated more revenue than any other media ever has, and ignoring for some reason a cultural heavyweight phenomenon and removing it from your vocabulary as a reference. For those engaged, they will have the ability to contextualize if not directly create the future. For the naysayers out there, please understand if you cannot find a video game you enjoy to spend time with it is because you are too dim-witted and unimaginative to glean any value from it, and you're worse for it.

Paintballing as a resolution to war

This is how you change war. Now, as has been said, war is a continuation of politics by other means. War is the “civil” median to solve problems with violence. And yet there are rules and “war crimes,” certain acts cannot be committed. You have rules dictating the ethical ways in which you can murder and imprison your enemies. It was finally taken seriously after WWII with the Geneva Convention.

But if we can agree not to use chemical weapons, why can’t we take it a step further and make the rules of war more stringent? This is the simple new rule: all future wars are one civilized paintballing tournament.

 

This will be great for several reasons:

1. The most important of which is we can now profit from wars. I mean, not in the traditional sense of stealing natural resources, weapons contracts, securing the dollar as the reserve currency and maintaining power consolidations. We can air war footage, live and in real time. This is good, because with On-Demand streaming services no one wants to watch commercials anymore, this is a reason to tune into basic cable and more of an “event” to share, new wars will begin #trending in no time.

Because war is driven by petty, primitive behavior, all war-time paintballs, paint bombs, and paintbrushes (knives) are legally required to be an emasculating “hot pink” in color. There will be NO MORE flag burning, either. Instead, you must take your opponents flag and wash it with a basket of red underwear until it achieves the correct rosy hue.

Atomic paintbombs will blow this acrid color all over leaving cities and towns demoralized. Dejected men will walk around like barbies, slathered in this repulsive paint, more traumatized than if their platoon had actually died. You were defeated, and the town you knew your entire life is now a concrete rose garden. Worst of all your sisters, mothers and wives will say, “Maybe this defeat isn’t such a big deal after all,” as the hit up their local Hobby Lobby to find matching drapes.

This brings us to another fair point.

2. Paint-war will bring about breast cancer awareness. Why not tie it in? Apparently, no one’s aware of breast cancer. This is the true apocalyptic landscape. In all future dystopian movies you’ll have a shot of the pink statue of liberty.

3. People will still die. People will slip and die as the streets run pink with the “blood” of war. Paintbombs will kill and maim. Spraypaint like napalm will leave soldiers blinded. There will be deaths from shrapnel. 

 

Of course, activist groups will complain this is inhumane, but on the daily there are terrorist bombings, beheadings, and dead soldiers, but they are only really upset this ruins the mood of the alone time with their caviar-scented vibrators.

4. The mainstream media can remain relevant. Second to only the military-industrial complex is the media-industrial complex. They align lockstep with government historically, playing into xenophobic fears and profiting from advertising revenue as they siphon a sense of importance from tepid reportage. Without war, there is no self-aggrandizing moralism to use as a platform to place themselves above the masses.

 

image of future city destroyed by war

5. War-torn cities of the future still quite livable. Look up some photos of post war societies after foreign interventionism. The devastating toll is incalculable. Perhaps the rainbow roaded, post-war towns of the future will be the impetus for some real reflection on the true cost of war.

6. It doesn’t have to end at war. It can be fitted to gangland shootings. Spree killers might be cool for once. Members of society mimic their culture. Losers like Nikolas Cruz might think twice next time and instead go for a paintball shooting spree. Sure, they would get expelled and lose most future job prospects, but they would get their point across in a safer way and after a couple years probation they could be interviewed on Good Morning America on why they attacked church goers with waterballoons full of lead house paint.

Add any additional reasons in the comments, as this is a brilliant idea but also a work-in-progress.

Top 9 Famous Homes I'll Live In

Most of these are from movies because I don't research iconic houses

This house which I forgot the name of

The underground lair from TMNT

Jackie Treehorn house

Plagiarist fraud Jonah Lehrer owns the cool iconic Shulman House and goes to show you dishonesty pays

The House from Parasite

Zabriskie Point House - Featured in the movie and blown up, this was likely the inspiration for the Iron Man house and which was subsequently blown up. Also a cool abode used by Orson Welles movie and the documentary They'll Love Me When I'm Dead

Shadow Gallery is a chill joint

A rare good thing about the movie Tron

 Ex Machina home w/robot maids


Realistically they're all by Frank Lloyd Wright rather than these big windowed whore houses for voyeurists 

On Eyes Wide Shut

warning: written hastily and poorly.

First a disclaimer: the rated vers. of this movie is an abomination. don't see it.

What stands out in Eyes Wide Shut, and seems to evade most, is the fantasy element in the movie. That it's based on a novel titled Dreamstory should give that away. It's not just fantasy in storytelling but about the subject of fantasy in its characters. Most get hung-up on wild theories and absurd extrapolations.

Still, it's a personal story and Kubrick's only love story. Its personal having recreated Kubrick's NY apartment home, with the walls adorned with his living wife's artwork. It's personal in that the intimacy shared on screen by its protagonists was real, being a then-married couple, and this choice seems to blend reality and fiction. They even slept together on set in their for-cinema bed, for the on-time during the longest movie shoot in history. The personal nature of the film and its dissection of intimate matters puts you in a strange sort of comfort, along with the theme of Christmas permeating most every aspect of the film. Despite its strangeness and often unnerving imagery, the main thing I take away from the movie is an overwhelming warmth. It did not surprise me, and I felt this beforehand, that many critics can now recognize Eyes Wide Shut as a surreal Christmas movie. It's a strange movie I will argue celebrates the normal.

All this is backed up by the nudity of the opening scene. The "realness" is made more real when the thumping movie score is turned off on screen via an on-set stereo. Sure it is about fantasy, but as with any Kubrick movie it's grounded in reality. The main arch of the movie is in the sexual hangups and issues of jealously that can keep couples apart, but also about the secrecy of individual desire and its ability as a potent source of drive, potentially inciting even Alice to leave her family behind. It's about the suppression of those desires, the suppression of lust that Dr. Bill experiences particularly. This is one reason why I believe the edited version of this film to be one of the greatest sins of all of cinema. The entire film is about dead-end sexual frustration and failed conquests, and the movie climaxes in the middle of the film with an orgy, but the sex while completely decadent counterpoints his quests with its complete lifelessness and emotional detachment. The entire movie is a case of blue balls and the one release is so graphic yet cold, the images of sex are as meaningless as everything else. In the crime against humanity that is the edited version, you are denied the feeling of seeing humanity stripped naked in a stunted release, essentially neutering the entire message of the movie.

Kubrick seemingly throws in so many subliminal messages into the movie it's impossible to spot them all. The most obvious ones come with the hooker, with the 'introducing sociology' book and the newspaper that reads, 'lucky to be alive.' This is something Kubrick seems to have added to movie the movie fun and add to the opacity which is in line with its theme. Kubrick seems to want to you to play into the crisis of mystery his characters are having. This leads to the basic interpretation I've always had of the movie.

While deliberately ambiguous, I believe the story is as follows: Alice talks about art, which Sandor mentions he can help with. Though Alice is faithful to Dr. Bill at least on paper and in his eyes, she gives away a bit early in the movie by answering Sandor with a vague "maybe" during his attempt at sexual conquest. The dream she tells to Dr. Bill is also oddly specific. I believe she was at the party and possibly participated. A nanny is established in the movie, as well as Helena's mention of a watchdog which means her mom could have left her frightened and alone. Dr. Bill is unique in his trusting nature where as Alice sees this is a point of contention and jealously. She does not believe he does not have the same fantasies she does. This could be why she is crying at the end when Bill comes clean, where his misadventures and fantasies are still relatively quaint. Alice's friendship with with Ziegler could also give a plausible explanation for the mask on the bed. Adding to the weight of this, the acting in the sacrificial scene is so over the top I don't think Kubrick would allow it.

The picture ends fittingly reiterating the theme that the totality of their relationship and life experience is not defined by a night but also that fantasy (or dreams) are not necessarily meaningless and can be indicative of a person's true character. If the theory is correct I think it strengthens the film, outside of fun ambiguity, because it undercuts the fantasy elements and you're left with the raw emotional drive of its characters, with the rest of the happenings as an interesting backdrop. It could be about removing the barriers, removing the mask and simply seeing things as they are. Of course, you never know for sure, whether its a high powered sex cult or your significant other's fidelity. But at the end of the movie it's well understood they're awake now. They're normal people but desire is strange motivator that leads you to the doorstep of a hooker with some crumbcake before the splash of water to the face that is hearing she has AIDS and seeing that maybe monogamy isn't the worst. And maybe the mysteriousness of the cult is curious enough without needing a murder story.

Asides

I love the woman with the recently-deceased father who attempts to throw herself at Bill, mainly for marrying a teacher who looks like a poorer, soap opera version of Tom Cruise. The scene is even lit like a soap except for Bill, who of course is only there to provide the perfect words and comfort to deal with loss that her boyfriend cannot.

269 address as Domino asks Dr. Bill to “come inside” with her. 

Some post on Reddit relating it to the 40 Masonic orders that's pretty interesting as a troll if I could ever find the link again. 

Do Christians Enjoy Sex?

Andy Answers

The biggest lie Satan ever convinced us of was that he doesn’t exist. The biggest lie the atheist establishment ever sold was that us Christians don’t enjoy sex. But I’m here to convince you outside of The Word, it’s the thing we most enjoy. They call me square, and sure, as a cisgender male I prefer hetero-normative sexual behavior, raw-dogging only one female-born woman per marriage. This does not however mean, just because Christians are known for the rigorous missionary work, that our entire sexual realms are spent in the missionary position (though equally rigorous).

After a troubled youth, I graduated from youth group to youth group leader. It’s there I met ...let’s call her Claudette. For once, the tables were turned and I changed myself by vowing to change others in positions before me. After weeks in apprehensive silence, Claude confided to the group a most dark affliction, her desires and actions of a nymphomatic nature. The group gasped and groaned in horror. After the meet, I made it my specific duty to help her with this terrible illness. I took her aside and said, “Claudette, I know about your incredible lust and I personally am going to help you through this, day-by-day, inch-by-inch, minute-by-minute, I will be by your bedside. Or kitchen-side, or public park-side, or reststop-side.” She was a lovely lady only 17 years my junior, meaning that when I could be legally charged as an adult in my state, she was nothing more than a single spermatozoa creating the glint in her father’s eye. We decided to wed that very evening, vowing our love for each-other, and vowing change. A quick 26-hour round-trip road trip to Vegas later, we were spiritually and legally safe to copulate before the eyes of the lord.

But even before marriage, certain biological urges do persist. Claudette, before our engagement, was a prolific wearer of pants presumably from India known as “Yoga.” This is why we save ourselves for marriage. The first time I saw her butt, with the curvature not unlike the moon scenes in Kubrick’s 2001, I knew I had to be the First Man on it. I had to plant my stake in it. I had to go over the event horizon in through the blackhole and contemplate god’s grace enveloped in her specific clock in spacetime. And lost in the infinite blackless, of space and of its fabric, of those uber-black pants, I had this compulsion to make Space Jam. Her magnetism held great gravitational pull. There it stayed, ever-ready for a wormhole. Is that not how the Starchild is born? This great desire, burning, yearning, bubbling in the loins, ready to expel its baby-creation elixir like a white snowfall. Through divinity it melts hot unlike snow, and through the friction of passion, vaginal villages burn in embers as if lit by vicious vikings. It is no sin to consummate our marriage as such, forcefully love-making and pillaging the city of gold inside your wedded servant.

Yes, I am Christian. But if I am cut, do I not bleed? If I see butt, does not blood coagulate inside my pelvic hose as if it were bitten by the most potent venom of the deadliest rattlesnake? I was bitten, smitten with ordinary lust. All the repression, saving yourself for marriage. It’s there for a reason. Like a slingshot, you are spring-loaded, even literally, for the fateful night marked as ‘wedding day,’ marred by deep-seated psychological scars. Heathens, what they see in others is simply base sexual properties. Me, I have pure desire, I want to stare at a butt, disrobe it, photograph it, videograph it from every angle finally putting those geometry classes to use, inside and out, I want to view a livestream of a colonoscopy and feast my eyes on its rectal character similar to creatures and locations in Dune. I yearn to view firsthand with macro-mode photography and microscopic view the dreamscapes of porous hills with Claudette’s tiny blonde hairs enlarged and looking like the radiating waves of light emanating from the most saintly portraits of La Virgen de Guadalupe. Beads of sweat cover these dual moons, there as wet proof there is indeed life on Mars. I want to make my way to the crescent valley, the fireswamp of a darkness so deep you can see the stars of the night sky from there - even during the day. These are the images you get in a single instance in a moment of abstract sexual thought, when you have desires fully realized as they’re meant to be, not spoiled and gluing you to your bedsheets after your sixth consecutive Ariana Grande music video (Thank U, Next).

Women are not meant to be objectified. The ideal number of partners is one, or un-ideally for widowers, two. Only disgusting pigs need to bed several woman on Tinder like a meat market, those spoiled, past-due bratwursts disguised with spices of cheap perfume and Louis Vitton cellphone cases few straight men can resist. But resist we must, we salvage an eternity in the process. We are not womanizers like Christian Bale because never would a Christian Bail. Women were not meant to be passed around like buffet tongs. They were meant to be played like classical music, works of art, like a tuba, mouth on the bottom-hole and out comes the melancholic exasperation of ecstasy through the top hole. That’s love. That’s respect. Helping your wife put on her underwear after you make her temporarily unable to walk. That’s love. Making 69 Shades of Grey, because your home video project doesn’t need approval from E. L. James, and as long as there’s consent, you can have subject matter that would make Marquis De Sade blush. That’s respect.

Square Andy is a Christian, journalist, and recently unemployed

Christopher Nolan: The ‘That’s Clever’ Director

Christopher Nolan is the epitome of the That’s Clever director. Everyone knows and most acknowledge his strengths, so I’ll get that out of the way before this critique: he and his brother make a solid writing team, he’s visionary, his visual world-building and technical expertise is nearly unmatched, this all makes him one of the best prolific directors of the last 25 years, and his movies are interesting even when they fail, as they’re aiming high enough to make an engrossing spectacle.

Chris is brilliant but also boring, seemingly suffering from the same sort of issues as Alfred Hitchcock, in that his technical expertise didn’t necessarily correlate to strong story-telling. In Tenet, often called the most “Nolan” Nolan film, clearly all but his most devoted fans are going to have a problematic viewing experience. I wonder what motivates him. No one doubts Christopher Nolan is clever and can make a picture. I wonder if it’s as obvious and opaque as intellectual vanity. I question if Nolan’s real talent doesn’t lie more in marketing, not only of his movies, but of himself. Most care less about the movie promo than the fact he’s directed it, some refusing to watch trailers at all and having faith in the brand itself.

It’s clear from the critical and fan response people are less interested in his latest films. Tenet and Dunkirk’s most impressive accomplishment might be their exclusion in the IMDb top 250. If in the general population it’s well-understood Nolan is the holy grail, it stands to reason Nolan’s only remaining competition is Nolan, and hence the “most Nolan” praise (or criticism) is the natural conclusion as we reach Total Nolan: a Nolan film only Nolan himself, if that, can appreciate. It’s a real possibility. Tarkovsky, often touted as Russia’s Kubrick, created an almost entirely personal and autobiographical film titled The Mirror—it’s meditative and visual qualities make it a curious watch but the disconnect of the performer-audience relationship makes it vacuous. I wouldn’t be surprised if Nolan’s next project is similar, to try to tackle the lack of emotion and sterility of most of his films and try to capture a personal story and nostalgia through his rigorous use of time manipulation and precision. Undeservedly, he’s overlooked by the Academy, but also I understand a reluctance toward movies that appear indifferent to and detached from audiences. Part of this is explained in a brilliant YT video titled “Christopher Nolan’s Exposition Problem,” pointing out the dialogue in his movies often deadens the story-telling, leaving you nowhere to wonder, spelling out every minute detail before you can question it yourself.

 There’s often a missing human element. This divide is the pronounced difference between story-driven and character-driven movies. In being exercises in cleverness, I don’t care for the characters in The Prestige, Tenet, or Inception. They are no different than human set-pieces, the machinations necessary for enabling more stunning visuals. Even in Dunkirk there’s a detachment, each character and their motivations seems randomized and anonymous, and I recognize some value in depicting the valuelessness and facelessness in a war story. Do you care about Cobb seeing his kids, or Cobb seeing his kids allowing you to see some cool shit? Most people are so immersed in only the spectacle they fail to see the target in Inception is actually Cobb, years after its release. And yes, in that there’s a depth of cleverness, but that’s it. It doesn’t enhance the characters themselves or nor does it hint at anything profound. It simply makes it a better crossword puzzle, a better celluloid escape room, a better $10,000 puzzle box to solve on Youtube.

If Chris Nolan films were Youtube videos

Of course, any mention of Nolan that doesn’t acknowledge his material as next to godliness seems to inspire groveling fanboy backlash. But this criticism’s only aim is to offer alignment in how his work is perceived. The Kubrick comparisons are ludicrous. Yes, in a world with an increasingly diminished capacity for attention span the appeal is understandable. But this surface-level reaction does seem for people who haven’t seen a lot of films. You can’t have seen the story-telling efforts of Kieslowski, Kurosawa, Bergman, Miyazaki, Tarkovsky, and look at them in the same way. The antithesis of his work is probably 80s Albert Brooks movies, seeing the world through small subjects and keen insights on interpersonal relationships—an atomic approach to story-telling which is somehow more ambitious and telling. This is the counterpoint to Nolan’s galactic, bigger-picture approach where characters are tertiary. Perhaps that’s why they don’t completely work. When humans are secondary, and the zoomed-out, cosmic take of story-telling is in the foreground, like in 2001: A Space Odyssey, there’s so much we don’t know the only acceptable substitute might be the mysterious. So, by comparison, in 2001 you have the ambiguity of the stargate and the starchild, and with Interstellar you have the incredible tesseract setpiece and visual experience juxtaposed with the unfortunate voiceover of a robot explaining everything, an otherworldly sequence with the human element shoehorned in. This accessibility also placates the human desire for easy answers. It’s almost as if Nolan would be better if he picked a side, instead having a foot in either world. But with this pretense there are such high ambitions, the risk of failure is equally high.

To paraphrase James Watson: In order to break new ground you are almost by definition unqualified to do so.

And that’s my main criticism. With Tenet all his flaws become ever-more apparent. I mean, it’s so bare-bones and indifferent to anything but story mechanics the main character is simply called protagonist. That’s my takeaway for most Nolan films: "Well, that was clever." But that’s it. And that’s fine. But I would love to see his technical expertise in conveying visual events applied to psychological mood and human emotion like Scorsese did in Taxi Driver, or Demme in Silence of the Lambs, or Elem Klimov in Come and See. This too is a relevant factor in technical mastery. Or the use of subtlety and ambiguity like in 2001, the films of P.T. Anderson, Blade Runner, Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, etc.. And as I’ve seen the director in recent times since lockdowns swept the world, he’s moving away from Amish attitudes toward media and embracing fans through podcasts and delving into the joys of cynicism by bashing HBO Max and fighting the death of cinema. I await him conspiring for artistic control and against the studios and finally being the fully-realized, god-tier director decades of hype have crowned him.

The media-industrial complex

With the possible exception of access to nuclear codes there’s no greater threat than the media-industrial complex. It’s the commodification of the exchange of information. When you introduce a profit motive into speech it becomes tainted from a negligible to an incalculable degree. Whether it’s a dialogue about morals or objective relaying of factual information in journalistic reporting, a profit motive adds compromise. Some are driven to do the right thing for their own well-being and for social currency. This social currency can also be a compromised form of exchange. 

Much of the mainstream media left long ago from subscription models to advertising models. Television programs then required strict oversight and plotting. Opinions and topics got reduced to bite-size bits of vitriolic information that could be consumed in five minutes between eight commercials. This also means generally a program couldn’t insult the hands that feed them or even their sensibilities. This meant the subjects of adverts could not be criticized, and speech was generally watered down to avoid vulgarity and controversial topics. Eventually this became the online model.

The other aspect to this is social media. Of course it’s not seen as media, but it is. Everyone with a camera has become a citizen journalist. News stories break out on Twitter before legacy media has a chance to cover them. Much can be said over the endless polarization and contention found on said platforms. But this makes sense. In a world where 20 years ago mass communication was non-existent, now people video conference with others halfway around the world regularly, compete with each other in video games, and hangout together in virtual reality as it is monitored under the deafening faps of Mark Zuckerberg. Of course there were meant to be some growing pains during the meeting of the minds of billions of people, a stark contrast of violent opposition before the inevitable homogenization. That’s not even its biggest problem. 

The problem is work life and private life used to be separated. Social media brought about a social credit score, and a literal one in China. What people believe privately, socially, is now under the influence, too. Unbeknownst to many, algorithms are designed to maximize engagement, as social media platforms also exist because of a profit motive in advertising revenue. This leads to polluted opinions that tend to echo chambers and even more far-reaching extremes, and this subsequent vitriolic rage exists in a symbiotic cycle, of personal opinion, citizen journalism, and mainstream media, all driven by the limitless need for revenue generation. These social media monopolies of course have a legal obligation to create profits for their shareholders under the false assumption of infinite growth. This horror is further exacerbated and corrupting by the subliminal use of influencers. 

The things that can be so easily ruined by money can be solved when we value them. Until then I believe we’re in a dangerous fog, clouding our judgment and creating an atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia that pits people against each other. I don’t see an impetus for #integrity to trend or go viral. Generally, that happens after the disaster it could have prevented.