daezor
2yr ago
Because all the Cool Kids are doing it, and if you don't join them then you'll find all your friends have disappeared.
I've lately begun to realize that I don't actually need a phone for anything I do by myself. Sure, I sometimes need to provide a phone number for government forms, buying airplane tickets, etc. but that could easily be done through Google Voice or throwaway SMS receivers or something like that. I know my way around town well enough not to need map apps. If I want to listen to music I can use an MP3 player. Etc.
The only problem is social: the norm of making plans and sticking to them is long gone. If I make arrangements to meet someone at location X at time Y, about half the time I'll get a text message while en-route saying "Let's meet at location Z at time W instead". If I later complained that they didn't show up to X@Y as planned, they would accuse me of being unreasonable for not getting with the times and for deigning to leave home without an always-online communication device.
I got rid of Facebook years ago and never looked back, but I have been burned at least once, when I tried to go to an event at the time that had been conveyed to me by word-of-mouth but was later rescheduled via Facebook without my knowledge. Imagine my embarrassment when I was the only person who showed up at the original time!
When COVID began, I finally relented and signed up for Discord to stay in touch with my local friends. What else could I have done? Should I instead have been all alone through that time of crisis, because of my "weird insistence" that my social life should not be mediated by unfriendly third-parties?
Don't get me wrong; I know where you're coming from. But let's not delude ourselves that it's just a matter of our own individual choices. Resistance to the digitization of social life must take place collectively, or not at all.
daezor
2yr ago
if you get off on torture there's probably something dangerous in your psyche
But why would this be so, if it really is a matter of moral indifference? Why would it suggest anything worse about someone's psyche than, say, playing violent video games, or for that matter something totally neutral and unrelated like doing pushups, singing, etc.?
daezor
2yr ago
can white people just do stuff together?
If it's a social club or political movement, sure. A hobby group, same thing - there's nothing about knitting that says it should appeal equally to all kinds of people, or that knitters need to recruit all of humanity into knitting. Likewise, a "pagan" practice like Hinduism / Shinto / etc. would hardly surprise anyone to disproportionately attract Indian / Japanese / etc. people.
But a church (so I've been told - I'm not a churchgoer myself, much less part of your particular denomination) is explicitly not any of those things. The fundamental self-concept of Christianity is that it's the One True Faith and that it's desirable for all people to believe in it. When I see an organization that professes such a doctrine and yet inexplicably has a demographic profile vastly out-of-step with the local population, I begin to suspect that the members don't actually take their own beliefs seriously. This sort of hypocrisy rubs me the wrong way because it seems to demand a greater degree of deference (from both members and non-members) than would be given if they were just open about being a social/political/hobby/cultural etc. group. (I would say the same about the black church.)
You may accuse me of uncharity or of cynically bludgeoning you with Christian doctrine despite not being a Christian myself - which may be valid, but you can take it as just one outsider's impression given my limited time and ability to discern who among the vast array of characters demanding my attention, resources, and respect is actually deserving of them. Whether this is important to you and your church is something for you/them to decide.
I seem to have been shadowbanned already - if I'm not logged in I can't see any of the comments I've made. This is only my 4th comment; how did this happen? I had such high hopes!
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