Teleportation. Invisibility is a nice gimmick (until you accidentally leave it on and get hit by a car, that is).
Teleportation isn’t just incredibly convenient, depending on the distances you can travel in one hop it’d also save you a lot of time (skip your commute, instantly travel to a nice vacation destination and back), and it’d be a money maker (fastest courier in the world).
Even if it was just line of sight, being able to easily reach places that are normally hard to reach or require extensive detours would be helpful. Even just crossing a busy street without having to wait for the traffic light would be a nice thing.
“Masking” is a thing neurodivergent people talk about a lot, but it’s comparable to comparing “normal clothes” and costumes or drag. There is no “normal.” When you get dressed for the day, you’re putting on a costume. Maybe it’s a business suit or a uniform, but maybe it’s just “your look” for the day.
The thing is that “you” don’t exist. There’s memory continuity of the consciousness that drives your body each day, but how you act to other people, the beliefs you have, and the clothes you wear are all part of a complex construction that you think of as yourself. But none of that is individually “you.” If you put on a costume, you would probably act different: you’d be “in-character” but you probably don’t think about this as being a different you, you still feel like yourself, just wearing a costume.
But if you changed your clothes, changed your interactions with others, changed your beliefs, then people would say “you’ve changed” as though you had shifted into a different person.
Everyone puts on masks for different groups of people. You wear a professional mask at work, an extrovert mask when out with friends, an intimate mask (which maybe feels like no mask at all) with family. Social media puts social pressure and often monetary pressure behind maintenance of a particular mask/identity. The fact that so many people are aware of the artiface of it is what you’re seeing.
It used to be that most people’s days were split up into a home period, a work period, a recreational period, etc. With the modern “always online, always available” world, our masks have become fluid and a constant part of us. Instead of putting on your work face in the morning and taking it off after a long day, you have to constantly be ready to break out the correct persona at any time, depending on who is contacting you on the phone. This leads to more “cracks” in the masks. People aren’t “more fake,” they’re revealing more of themselves than intended because the masks keep slipping. This doesn’t necessarily reveal any “true self” either because there is no such thing. Rather it let’s the common parts slip out more (most people hide a lot of their personal selves from work colleagues) and reveals the contradictions in the other parts that normally can embe kept seperate.
My wife works in a highschool and feels like you do, not so much fake but addicted and you have to put on a facade like if you are walking to class alone you should be on your phone pretending to be messaging someone or else you’ll feel awkward
Nah you’re just struggling with mental gymnastics. I like to call it “who” and where reconstruction… It’s normal to feel that way with social media, vs real life normal conversations
You check your newsfeed, you read or see something, then get emotional, you feel like you need to rationalize a response to something that is like explaining to someone why you jumped to try to pull binoculars to see something when you’re basically just seeing funny symbols through a window.
Because that’s what looking at internet comments and arguing with people on the internet often if is. Your brain sometimes actively needs to stress test your adversity chunking models and agency detection.
Agency detection, is what you’re observing sentient or a potential threat? If so can you detect the window or scope that your looking through, can you rationalize potential bias, and adversity chunking, check to chunk what potential threats there are together into one big lump and act racist to make things easier and de-stress yourself from the imaginary threat
If you took this borderline narcissism and paranoia to the extreme you could just become a conspiracy theorist, but you could also just get a wicked sense of humour and have a better degree of self awareness, I get it because I have in the past sometimes felt the same, it’s how we are when we feel that we’re stuck in a response cycle and get a kind of emotional “decision fatigue” I dunno, that’s just my take, and I could be entirely wrong, feel free to speak your mind or challenge me, but that’s just my two cents for now and part of why I prefer not to doomscroll too much these days.
Just consider that the average person probably has heaps of compressed and distorted subconscious memories that can be further distorted, deleted or hidden entombed in lies, misunderstandings or dreams, and that from the perspective of a silicon based chip, the human mind usually knows itself better than outsiders however the landscape of a mind is a dangerous place and doubly so because if a chip or even bacteria entering the brain could inadvertently screw things up and destroy or corrupt memories it’s a wonder anyone can remember a beer or brief conversation they’ve had several years ago but forget what they ate for dinner just last week. If the human brain was to detect a silicon chip attempting to act on it, we really have no idea what would happen,…
Okay, goodnight guys hope you enjoyed reading my dumb sci-fi long ass post (my lame attempt at humour here)
asklemmy
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