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Aug 12, 2021Liked by Zach Campbell

Online addiction to "the Discourse" has become it's own meta-text to be memed and passed over: "touch grass, terminally online, take the grill-pill, return to monke (invoking Ted and the primitivists)." It's impulsive to say these things before delving into a trending topic. Even alt-right appeals to "trad life" try to replace The Ornament - or, more accurately, The Spectacle - with the old way of living, pre-internet. Like Fischer's Capitalist-Realism, there is no alternative to online-Realism, unless you are literally a monk, hermit, or heretic.

It's a massive victory if I don't look at Reddit or Twitter for a day. Opening a book or going somewhere my built-GPS can't predict or just doing nothing - that's freedom, and it feels like freedom.

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Aug 12, 2021Liked by Zach Campbell

I dunno, I still feel that it's possible to tame the Internet. That does involve a lot of refusal, muting, etc. And there's still the issue of whether a helpful Internet is worth the time that it takes out of one's novel-reading budget...

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