I help mod for /r/games and a few other places on reddit because 1) I hate the internet and everyone on it and 2) I hate myself, so it works out perfectly most of the time. The problem is that like all corporate giant fuck you machines on the internet reddit is run by a bunch of psychopaths with nothing in their heart but bullshit and nightmares. 

Mods of giant ass subs like /r/games are generally invited to these private subs where reddit admins come down from their glorious garbage cans every so often to allow the peasants to touch their robes and it's the most sycophantic mega shit ever to be seen. 

You'll have all these absolute toads crawling out of their neckbeard nests to coddle these billionaire fuck jobs and tell them how good of a job they're doing at fucking up everything all the time, like rolling out massive changes to moderation tools with zero notice and no care at all. 

The admins will go We're so sorry :( next time we'll give you so much notice you won't know what to do with it :) but they've been saying that over and over since 2010. God it is abysmal. This is what I'm always talking about, how the internet as it exists in this moment is a total misfire of a great thing.

Jon Bois did a series recently called Fighting In The Age Of Lonliness which is on its face about the history of MMA, but really it's about how things and concepts become Products. How even the idea of throwing two dudes in a cage and letting them kill each other can be consumed by a corporate conglomerate and turned into an image of the thing that it was, which already existed for entertainment. 

There's a philosophical concept called The Map Is Not The Territory, which states-- in incredibly simple terms, that it is easy for people to build a model of a thing and see it as the thing. Build a tree out of construction paper-- it's a tree! But if you cut a mountain out of a map, you don't cut it off the earth. 

If you built a map that's exactly the same as the earth, and put it around the earth, it doesn't make it any more real. It's still a map, it's still an abstraction, even if you occupy it. 

And in Simulacra and Simulation this is expanded further to talk about the internet, and technology in general. The internet is based on nothing. This isn't an abstraction, it's an idea called the hyperreal, here there isn't even a falsification of a map, the reality is this text you're reading right now occupies nothing and is in a space that exists beyond even a map, it's abstraction of nothing. Nothing preceded it, nothing succeeds it, it's not foldable any further because a thing called a blog doesn't fuckin' exist. You can't point to an object in your real life and say "This is a Youtube" "That's a soundcloud."

All this just to say that, I'm mad about some comments on a shitty website written by a team of people pretending to be a single person, using language that has been mutilated into meaninglessness by repitition and cowardice and greed. I'm mad at a thing that is an image of a thing projecting images of a thing so far into the mirror that what I'm seeing and reading canonically factually and objectively means nothing but I'm still mad at it. 

Fuck me, I've lost the plot of this post but the central thesis is this-- the idea of the internet as it once existed as a meetingplace is gone and lost, and in its stead is a box of thumbtacks stretched over the entire planet just crushing us under the weight of its absolute meaninglessness. Yet, I myself spend upwards of 12 hours a day looking directly at it. 

The problem was, until the money came and the frontier disappeared, this was a good idea. I believe it. I know it was. I SAW it. I EXPERIENCED it. I met people 20 years ago on the internet who I've never seen with my human eye balls that I think are some of the greatest people I ever knew! But now it's crawling with shit so thick and toxic it almost can't be directly observed.