Because spoken words disappear as soon as they’re uttered, oral cultures value repetition to aid memory. Bards in oral societies make use of stock phrases and mnemonics to keep track of their train of thought. They traffic in epithets and “enthusiastic description of physical violence,” in Ong’s words, because conflict is more memorable than dispassionate discussion. Speakers can’t edit their words the way writers can, so they press on without admitting their mistakes. If they later contradict themselves, they don’t expect the audience to recall their earlier statements. Meaning depends on the identity of the speaker, not on any concept of objective truth.

It is unlikely that Donald Trump has familiarized himself with Orality and Literacy. But if he did, he might recognize himself in Ong’s description. Trump’s communication style is perfectly suited to an oral society. He employs epithets—“Low-Energy Jeb,” “Little Marco,” “Sleepy Joe”—that are easy to remember and repeat. He contradicts himself as though there is no record of his previous statements. Even his writing is almost indistinguishable from his speech. (It makes sense; Trump reportedly prefers dictation to composition.) His online posts are full of idiosyncratically placed punctuation, capital letters, and exclamation points. Many are memes with little text: One featured an image of an American warship hitting an Iranian airplane with a laser beam and included the phrase “Lasers: Bing, Bing, GONE!!!”

and this is why movies in general too became stupid and boring ☞

If TV crowded out the silent time necessary for reading, broadband internet and the smartphone make it nearly impossible. Not too long ago, at-home screen entertainment was finite. Shows aired on a certain day, at a certain time. If you wanted to watch an old movie, you had to put your shoes on and go to a video store. Books could compete in that environment. Some people, at least, would turn off the TV and read a book before falling asleep.

Now entertainment is limitless. There’s no hard stop—one show bleeds into the next. People watch TV with their phone in hand, monitoring social media or texting with friends. Netflix has reportedly told directors and screenwriters to assume that the audience isn’t paying attention and to constantly remind viewers what’s going on.

“The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining,”

In 1985, Postman, a friend and disciple of McLuhan’s, published Amusing Ourselves to Death. He argued that television had hijacked Americans’ attention and turned politics into cheap entertainment.

… told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier language.)

😮

And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.

“It is not that the disappearance of a library led to a dark age, nor that its survival would have improved those ages,” the classics scholar Roger Bagnall has written. The fact that the library was allowed to die showed that the dark age had already arrived.

👆

at some point Molly started customising Signal’s appearance or rather imposing a coloured theme. Some of us wrote back and we were ignored.

I went back to Signal with black backgrounds.

obtainium

when i check “battery usage” is on 3% with 5 mins screen time and 30 mins background

get the playback speed to 1.40x
he’s a slow speaker

go on then

gabagoo?

apparently they won’t be “excommunicated”

from https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/i-dont-like-that-he-made-this-donation-mullvad-ceo-reacts-to-co-founders-donation-to-controversial-swedish-populist-party

The founders themselves fundamentally disagree on several important issues."
Mullvad said it would “gladly refund” any customers who choose to cancel their subscriptions or switch to another provider due to philosophical disagreements.

as a non-citizen you don’t have the right to participate in the political life of the state. You can of course participate by influencing people who has that right but a non-citizen simply doesn’t count.

were these people always dipshits or do they become assholes when they make some money?

National Bolsheviks, in essence merging nazism with communism.

Nazism+

what an awful idea

And wouldn’t you know, the Wall Street Journal revealed that the Polymarket set up a fake version of their website and named it PoIymarket. (Did you catch it?)

PoIymarket (spelled with a capital “i” instead of a lower case “l”), is a fake version of their platform.

what difference a mono font would make with the I & l difference?

but hearing about one of the two CEOs actively supporting and financing swedish Nazis,

sources?

i would like to read about this

also i think they’re technically nazbols.

what’s a nazbol?

i joined the community, i didn’t create it.

Alternative: make a separate “selfhosted-ai” community for the sloperators.

this comment is a perfect example of what @curbstickle@anarchist.nexus is trying to eliminate/prevent.

Knee-jerk “noise”!