24 lines
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24 lines
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<title>a stairway, down which shattered idols tumble - Archive - MayVaneDay Studios</title>
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<p align="center"><b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b></p>
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<p><b>a stairway, down which shattered idols tumble</b></p>
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<p><b>published: 1-22-2019</b></p>
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<p> </p>
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<p>It must be incredibly painful writing for a big lifestyle blog. Or any kind of high-traffic website, really. You get a topic to write about, and then you have to spend countless hours carefully hedging your words and making your post appeal to as broad of an audience as possible so you can rake in those sweet, sweet clicks.</p>
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<p>But, fortunately, I’ve always been just abrasive enough to keep my little online abode low-traffic, so I get to talk about myself all I want.</p>
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<p>Self-improvement is all the rage these days. I want to lose weight; I want to write more; I want to stop relapsing every time I doubt my self-identity even the slightest amount. Even if it means I have to come up with every single aspect of my identity through my own effort, instead of doing the default consumerist thing and offloading the effort of thinking to a third-party entity.</p>
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<p>But that’s too much effort, isn’t it? It’s too much effort to think? It’s too much effort to not immediately fall into the trap of, “which character will I conform myself into in order to gain some validation in this dying world?”</p>
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<p>“What brand will I wear today, as if I were cattle on a ranch thousands upon thousands of miles away from here? Who will I belong to? What will make me visible to my peers?”</p>
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<p>It’s easy to forget that these identities, so carefully crafted and packaged up and delivered to you, aren’t meant to be real people. They aren’t substitutes for real-life interaction, people outside the fantasy. These corporations- they <em>want</em> you to give yourself up into these character slots. They <em>want</em> you to base your identity in their creations, because then they can keep selling you life over and over and over again, keep you sucking at their teat, dependent on their work for you to feel <em>whole</em>.</p>
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<p>I know it’s easy. I know it feels safe and comfortable. But if you keep putting mass-produced creations on pedestals and worshipping them as idols, they will only fail you again and again. You will not find lasting happiness in purchases, or quick matches made of only button presses and quick breaths, or mindlessly clicking on likes and reshares to appease others’ need for validation.</p>
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<p>Let there be no more false idols! Let there be no more false consciousness in the “fandoms”, in the hollow forms these corporations have crafted for us! There are no gods among us in these dark places you and I congregate in, naught but humans speaking to each other on a global scale. Let us be humans, with all our flaws, with all of our undiluted hopes and dreams.</p>
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<hr />
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<p>Damn, have I gone off the deep end?</p>
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<p>One of the things I appreciate about gopherspace is that there are no internet celebrities. People on YouTube constantly complain about the “Viner Invasion” diluting the site’s standards of “comedy”, and no matter which microblogging site you go onto, whether it’s Twitter or Gab or any of the Mastodon/Pleroma instances, there’s people who spend hours upon hours every day shitposting their way into a fragile sort of notoriety. But there- or here, if you’re underground right now- it’s just normal people like you and me. Sure, admins are on a slightly higher ground than the rest of us- it’s <em>their</em> servers, after all- but they aren’t some unattainable entity sitting in the clouds that we must constantly pay penance to. They’re humans too, and we can know them just like anyone else here.</p>
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<p>Perhaps it’s the barriers to entry that keeps us underground and relatively undiluted. SFTP is kinda hard to do from a phone, after all, and creating “content” isn’t as easy as snapping an uninspired picture of food and barfing it out onto Instagram. There are a few phlogs and gophersites that are more well-known than others, but the simplicity of the Gopher protocol keeps them on the same level as the rest of us.</p>
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