Time compression
Many have noted that without forgiveness there’s no endpoint to conflict, reprisal and bitterness. There's no point at which the person ceases to have wronged you, so there’s no point at which the vendetta stops.
Something that I've been thinking about is the way in which forgetfulness, specifically forgetting of wrongs, is the backbone of society. For people too immature or bitter to forgive, just not actively remembering the ways someone has harmed you can be your only way of seeing past someone's wrongs. I know in my life, most beefs I’ve had with people have gone away not out of a choice to forgive, but because it doesn’t take long for me to forget I was ever wronged.
The internet, though, seems to kill forgetfulness, or at least strike it parlous. Past wrongs are eternally recurring in this moment, saved in “the receipts”.
This even applies in cases where forgiveness should never really have been needed in the first place. Six years ago, someone I knew attacked a store full of people with an axe. She happened to be transgender. Obviously that deed will follow her for the rest of her life. Obviously transgender people in general should absolutely not be blamed for what she did and should not need “forgiveness” for it.
However, periodically some account on Twitter will post a lurid tweet with a text like "Transgender woman attacks store full of people WITH AN AXE", and it will go viral- writing as if it had happened yesterday. This happened just a few days ago and the post got 130,000 likes.
For people who lack the commonsense or common decency to recognize that the perpetrator's actions do not reflect poorly on trans people in general, there was at least the promise that they would one day forget. But the internet has cancelled this. On the internet time has no meaning, and her story will continue to be retold as if it just happened yesterday perhaps for decades, creating bitterness and fear towards an already vulnerable group- transgender people no longer have the mercy of this woman's actions being forgotten.
A lot of people talk about the spatial compression of the internet, how it pushes us all into one room to scream at each other, but I think the temporal compression- the sense of everything happening in an eternal, unmoored present, might be worse.
There’s a kind of paradoxical experience in the internet age. All the most radical events- regardless of location, and almost regardless of timing, are presented to us as happening right now. Thus we are flooded with events, but we never see change. Events are welling in and out of existence like bubbles on a stream, the stream flows constantly but in a more fundamental sense it never changes. We are squeezed into a super dense ball of all the possibilities of capitalism, everything happens all the time and no one has the agency to change anything, like an eternal sitcom where every week there’s a new story, but at the end things always reset and the plot never advances, this quality helps explain why we can’t even tell which episodes are reruns. We all assume that if the flywheel keeps spinning faster, it will eventually break, but the mechanism of action is wholly unclear. I hope write about this phenomenology more one day.
My thoughts on the Australian Voice referendum
My initial thought on the Voice referendum was that since it has no guaranteed democratic mechanism, I should vote against. There’s nothing stopping the major parties stacking it with Warren Mundine or a similarly abominable figure plus a collection of like minded individuals.
I’ve come to rethink that though.
At the moment a lot of indigenous representation in Australia works like this. The media nominates “community leaders” and “indigenous spokespeople”. In some cases they’re generally representative of the indigenous community, in many, perhaps most, they are not. The very informality of the process- and the fact that the media never explicitly says “these people represent the views of all indigenous Australians”, makes it very hard to critique this process. It exhibits what Jo Freeman called the tyranny of structurelessness.
If there is a formally appointed body of indigenous representatives though, and it bullshits, prevaricates, and betrays its constituency, that can be called out very clearly. The fog of the media driven “community leader” model who only claim to be giving their own views is gone. There is scope to say “this body that is supposed to represent me, just isn’t.”
If it has dissenting and more radical voices, that gives them scope to present an alternative agenda, and draw out their differences with the mainstream. If it has no dissenting voices on it, that gives more radical indigenous activists scope to say “hey, why are they so afraid of us that they have to rig and malapportion the voice to entirely exclude us”.
Representation creates the possibility of a critique of representation in a way that free floating, self & media appointed “community leaders” does not.
Compression of time happens in interesting ways with the “algorithmic” sites like
TikTok (or its equivalent competitors). You’ll see a video that says “our band is doing a tour and we’ll be in these cities on these dates”, but when you look into it, that tour actually ended six months ago. But the algorithm doesn’t know that *this* video, unlike the other videos by the same person, actually is timely.
I’m sure this happens with outrage porn to an even greater extent. Periodically an existing outrage video will be randomly shown to a few users, they’ll be outraged and interact, and the algorithm will think that it needs to show it again to lots of people. There doesn’t even need to be a human in the loop to repost the video!