"What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience …"
#HannahArendt, From The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
@strypey Goddamn, that was the most intense article I’ve read in a long time. I have her ‘Banality of Evil’ book at home and was quite familiar with her work, but this was the next piece in the puzzle and it left me feeling deeply pensive. I gotta stop reading such heavy articles first thing when I wake up, haha.
"Totalitarianism uses isolation to deprive people of human companionship, making action in the world impossible, while destroying the space of solitude. The iron-band of totalitarianism, as Arendt calls it, destroys man’s ability to move, to act, and to think, while turning each individual in his lonely isolation against all others, and himself. The world becomes a wilderness, where neither experience nor thinking are possible."
This is the best explanation I've seen yet for why recommendation media DataFarms are tools of totalitarianism.
> Totalitarianism uses isolation to deprive people of human companionship, making action in the world impossible, while destroying the space of solitude
Even genuinely social media, like the fediverse or matrix networks, have a potential for...
> destroying the space of solitude
Maybe we can balance the downsides of this by consciously designing apps to support human companionship, and making action in the world. Mobilizon is a good example of a project with this goal.
"By injecting a secret meaning into every event and experience, ideological movements are forced to change reality in accordance with their claims once they come to power. And this means that one can no longer trust the reality of one’s own lived experiences in the world. Instead, one is taught to distrust oneself and others, and to always rely upon the ideology of the movement, which must be right.
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