scritch & scribble

More and more nowadays I’ve been coming to the conclusion that I need to leave the social media platform known as facebook because of the overall toxicity. Is there an artistic segueway for that first sentence? A Kafkaesque reference comes to mind too quickly (I’m thinking Metamorphosis) which I think would threaten my segueway’s longevity. For now, I’ll rename the platform FuBar, after a no-longer extant night club I’d been to a few times during my early 20s.

I’ve tried filters and sub-groups for my friends list but those features are no longer available because of a variety of scrupulously nefarious reasons all pointing back to the company behind the platform. I’m thinking Kafka again but now I’m wondering what would Gregor Samsa have done if he saw someone else turn into the monstrous vermin first. What changes would he have made?

Gregor described his job as exhausting and never-ending traffic, exactly as I have often described the feed on FuBar. The constant repetition of every user to react to the same thing, often without checking the validity, time of creation, and relevant scope of said thing, is maddening and I am realizing now, a major trigger for me nowadays.

I think Gregor Samsa would make changes if he knew how. It also stands to reason that he isn’t the first one the metamorphosis happened to. While Gregor’s experience was a negative one, I’m sure for some the transformation was positive, even liberating.

I wonder now where this metaphor is leading me…either the toxicity that infects so many on FuBar is the unfortunate transformation to avoid, OR the transformation is the act of avoidance, whatever that is.

For whatever reason, I’m thinking of the scene from the movie The Matrix where Agent Smith is torturing Morpheus, specifically the part where Smith goes off-script and talks of the effects of humans on our environment. I honestly can’t place either character in my current metaphor surrounding FuBar, which from now on is the dirty streets at night around the nightclub back then.

I guess everybody works, lives, and/or goes to school in this neighborhood, which is west philly in the 90s for me but you can put it wherever you envision it best.

Going forward, including future posts, I’ll refer to this neighborhood as West Fubar.

So, now that we have that settled, I can talk more freely about it.

Today I saw a friend start yelling out loud about the ills of some collective while pointing to a book. Some engaged with him so he put the book down and went off with them, pontificating away.

I went over and picked up the book to look at the reference. It is with a mix of amusement and irritation to see that the reference is to a considerable time in the past. The amusement was added after some time went on; at the time I was just irritated but my “metaphormosis” has given me a different mindset.

Also, the way I’m describing it is painting it in a good light. A world where everybody carries around large tomes of books all with locks and clasps on the side instead of smartphones. Smartbooks, maybe.

Earlier today, someone needed to restate their false assumptions, so they accomplished this by yelling at the top of their lungs. I imagine Kepler was similarly frustrated by the failure to prove his assertion that the orbits of the planets be perfectly circular and fitting into the geometric equations he had previously stated so emphatically. He may have yelled like this.

The parallel ends here regrettably (Kepler would agree).

Actually, I can see Kepler making the same trip as Samsa in an alternate universe and perhaps needed to exercise some mechanism to prevent it.

I could use such mechanisms. More on this later.

 

 

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