Harish Alagappa

Tag: social media

Happy Thursday The 20th
A meme from The Simpsons took me on a mental journey through the second law of thermodynamics, The Simpsons, Futurama, and how to deal with existentialism.

Sometimes you just want to drive out to a desert, sit alone and watch the stars

Part I: Nature Is Chaos

The second law of thermodynamics states that everything in the universe tends towards the state of maximum disorder. It is the most fundamental law in the universe. More than gravity, more than quantum mechanics, more than the laws of cricket.

The British experimental physicist Arthur Eddington famously said:

“The [second law of thermodynamics] holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics, I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.”

Also, Arthur Eddington’s 1919 solar eclipse experiment was the first widespread proof that Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity was correct and turned Einstein into a global celebrity overnight. Eddington can thus quote Ye and say, “I made that B— famous” when talking about Einstein.

Anyway, the second law of thermodynamics is on my mind right now because of a random meme from The Simpsons. Here it is:

Part II: Thursday the 20th

The rapper in this meme is parodying Flavor Flav, from the legendary rap group ‘Public Enemy’, who’s been famous for wearing a giant clock around his neck since 1987. Flav says it’s supposed to remind us that time is the most important element in our lives and it’s always ticking away. Remember the second law of thermodynamics? It’s back! In chain form.

In The Simpsons, the rapper is wearing a gold chain that reads “Thursday the 20th”. So, obviously, Simpsons nerds like to share the image on Thursdays that happen to be the 20th of a month. Simple, right? Wrong. Because those occasions are rarer than you think.

The 20th of June, 2024 is a Thursday.

The last Thursdays the 20th before that were last year, in July and April (woo-hoo! 4/20!). Before that, it was October 2022. The next Thursday the 20th is in February 2025.

This meme requires the kind of dedication and obsession to a joke that’s emblematic of Simpsons fans. It’s also a reminder that time is always ticking away, like Flavor Flav said. This is all your fault, second law of thermodynamics! Ooh, how can I stay mad at you…

The second law of thermodynamics also applies to The Simpsons. The episode this meme comes from is from season 16 and therefore not one of the million memes that sprung forth from the genius of The Simpsons‘ Golden Age — seasons 2 to 10 (and a few episodes from 11). Those seasons are the greatest television the world has ever known. I would rate them all 10/10. It’s perfect. Down to the smallest detail.

Part III: Zombie Simpsons

The Simpsons from season 12 to now (season 32? 33? I don’t know nor do I care) are known as ‘Zombie Simpsons‘ by purist fans like yours truly. Why? Because the show is dead and what you’re seeing is its reanimated corpse shuffling around without a brain.

While most of Zombie Simpsons is a cavalcade of ‘Worst. Episodes. Ever.’, there are a few rays of sunshine that break through the gloom. These include ‘Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind’, ‘HOMR’, ‘Holidays of Future Passed’ (which would’ve been the perfect time to euthanize the show, but there have been nearly ten more seasons since), and ‘The Book Job’. What was strange about that last one is it’s the second time that Neil Gaiman got involved in a show that I once loved but was in its period of decline only to give it one of its last good episodes. The other is ‘The Doctor’s Wife’ from Doctor Who, in case you were wondering.

Part 4: Energy vs Entropy

The second law of thermodynamics says that everything in a closed system tends towards disorder, decay, and chaos. To keep things in their original ordered state requires the input of energy. And when you combine the first law of thermodynamics to that, you realize that the amount of energy required to keep things in their original ordered state will increase with time. Eventually, you will need the energy of the sun to keep a cup of tea warm and drinkable. That’s not hyperbole, BTW. I can explain that statement, but it will make this ridiculously long essay even longer.

The next Thursday the 20th is 11 months away. I will most likely completely forget the joke on that day. And if not on that one, perhaps on the one in February 2025. Or November 2025. Who tf knows where I’ll be then. Or if I’ll even be alive. But don’t let thoughts of death get you down. People die all the time. Just like that. Why, you could wake up dead tomorrow.

… Well, Goodnight!

Perhaps The Simpsons were right to stop putting energy into a system tending towards decay and chaos anyway. One day I too will be like Zombie Simpsons. An undead brainless shell on life support that’s eventually cancelled when it’s no longer financially viable.

Of course, one of the reasons behind the decline of The Simpsons was Matt Groening’s other show, Futurama, took away some of its best talent. And it is from Futurama that I shall imbibe wisdom of how to cope with my mortality.

In conclusion, the secret three-fold way to dealing with existential anxiety and panic attacks is:
1. Violent outbursts (not too violent, let’s be reasonable here)
2. General sluttiness (probably the most fun option)
3. “Thanks to denial, I’m immortal!” (my default answer)
Happy Thursday the 20th everyone. I’ll see you all on February 20th, 2025.
June 20, 2024
From Third Place to Good Place
The Third Place is a concept popularized by American sociologist Ray Oldenburg in the late 1980s¹. In simple terms, it’s the idea that as humans we spend most of our time and energy in two places – our homes (first place) and our work or school or university (second place). I know that some people might list work as their first place, but they’re a minority of either very lucky and contented people or very sad and hyper-motivated slaves.

For us normies, meanwhile, the third place is somewhere we can gather and socialize in an informal context. An example that should hopefully resonate with most of you would be our neighbourhoods when we were kids. We would return home (first place) from our school (second place) and head out to our third place where we would either play sports or just hang around and get up to no good with our friends.

The typical characteristics of a third place include that it’s a neutral ground that’s easily accessible, low profile, playful, and comfortable. This has a levelling effect on the interactions that happen at a third place. No one person has a claim over it, many people can access it on their own schedule, there’s no need for pretension, and it creates a relaxed and friendly environment where we feel free enough to be our true selves.

The Rise and Fall of The Universal Third Place

I was an internet optimist in my youth, way back in the halcyon days of Web 2.0 and early social media. The original purpose of social media was that it was a universal third place. Or at least that’s what it felt like. Then a motley crew of corporations, politicians, and previously fringe hate groups discovered that social media could be weaponized to create the late-capitalist fascist hellscape it is today.

Since by then social media (and the internet) had already become our universal third place, we were now bound to it. It was like someone had poisoned the village well and we had no choice but to keep drinking from it. And thus, we too were poisoned. People who tend to be easily manipulated, such as sheltered young people and the elderly, found themselves fully ingesting the poison until it ran through every vein in their body. Others, and I count myself in this group, found themselves feeling constantly sickened by what they had no choice but to consume. Others were inspired to create their own poison and add that to the well too.

So why don’t we just stop? Why can’t we just quit social media or the internet in general? Because Pandora’s Box cannot be closed again. It is still our third place. It is still the most easily accessible, relatively egalitarian, neutral ground where people from around the world can meet, interact, and socialize. And every human being needs a third place. Even the most introverted loner needs somewhere they can go, virtually or IRL, to have some level of social stimulation.

A New Hope: Go Touch Grass

But the last year or so has shown me that while social media cannot be returned back into the fiery chasm from whence it came, it can be relegated to a lower rung of social spaces. I would like to propose that we turn social media from a universal third place into a universal fourth place. But I don’t need to propose it, because that’s what’s already happening.

The simple retort, “Go touch grass” is evidence that our new Gen Z overlords – who I honestly relate to more than my own millennial coevals – are aware that social media is not a substitute for real social interaction.

So, if social media or the internet or television has been your third place throughout the last decade or even your whole life, here is what I do actually propose. Find a new third place. Relegate the world of the internet to fourth and find a real-life place that you can go to and be yourself while interacting with real human beings and not the caricatures we pretend to be on these godforsaken platforms.

The world is out there, not here on whatever screen you’re reading this on.
1. To be honest, I don’t know anything about Ray Oldenburg’s life and work beyond my understanding of Third Places. If it turns out that he’s been completely discredited or was a racist abuser or something like that, I’m really sorry, I had no idea. ↩︎
June 18, 2024
Zen And The Art of Influencer Marketing

The world of the 1990s and 2000s seemed to hold immense promise for humanity. The Cold War was over, and technology was bridging barriers, allowing people from opposite ends of the Earth to communicate with one another – offering hope for a more united and compassionate world.

Well, good news! That promise is all but lost.

The technology that was meant to unite people from opposite ends of the world has now been turned into a tool to divide people living in the same home. The Cold War was replaced by a Culture War. And perhaps the worst development of all, con artists, grifters, psychopaths, the vapidly vain and the downright inhumane are now heralded as heroes. Meanwhile, social media influencers brag about their material possessions and use that justify their awful behaviour, beliefs, and parasitic existence.

Fake Plastic Men

Inhumanity, a complete lack of empathy, naked greed, and bloodlust is supposedly an Alpha/Sigma/Omega/Epsilon mindset. Even though we have stories from thousands of years ago about people searching for the secret to eternal youth and how it made fools of them all, billionaires flaunt their multi-million-dollar anti-ageing procedures, while includes literally taking the blood of young people for themselves.

The fact that these purveyors of ‘masculine’ influencer content are usually revealed to be frauds, con artists, grifters, literal human traffickers, or children of wealth trying to pass off their nepotism as “self-made” riches does nothing.

Impressionable idiots are intoxicated by imposter influencers’ inane, immature, and impossible ideals, invariably immersing every iota of their individuality into an intricate, imaginary world of instant gratification and irrational beliefs.

You have “alpha male” influencers who rail against gender affirming care for trans people on podcasts where they the hawk “nutritional supplement” pills to boost your testosterone. Displaying a staggering lack of self-awareness at best or malicious hypocrisy at worst, these middle-aged uncles take PEDs to maintain their physique, undergo surgeries to look younger and more masculine, and surgically enhance their hairline, jawline, and other body parts to then attack young trans folk for getting gender-affirming surgeries or even taking hormone blockers. THIS is what self-proclaimed alpha men or giga-chads turn out to be:

We’ve Been Over This Before

I never thought I would be the one to tell people to hark back to the past, but we’ve been over this before everyone. The ancient Sumerians, Akkadians, Phoenicians, Indians, Greeks, Palestinians, Judeans, Chinese, Japanese and every other culture have age-old stories about the transient nature of material wealth and how hoarding money, or gold or resources makes you pretty a terrible human being.

The Epic of Gilgamesh starts off with the eponymous king abusing his wealth and power in much the same way modern billionaires do, before he is changing his ways and becoming a good guy. Later in the epic, Gilgamesh goes on a quest to become immortal and ultimately learns that it’s impossible, accepting that death comes for us all, even kings.

Money and looks aren’t everything. Your beautiful bodies will be a stinking rotting corpse one day – there’s no escaping this. Your massive bank account, your lavish mansions and apartments, your Bugatti, none of them will buy you immortality. You may have amassed a cult following among young boys who are extremely familiar with computers but complete idiots when it comes to anything else – but they will die too, and their children will follow a different cult.

The world was not built by men of iron, who treated everyone around them like dirt and trampled, lied, stole, cheated, raped, and pillaged their way to your idiotic idea of greatness. That’s a version of history created by the people who would simp for these horrible men to feel strong by association. These poor souls existed in the past and exist in the present, simp-ing for men who claim to be the big strong alpha man, but whose bluster hides an obviously and massively fragile ego. Both the leader and the simp are merely sad men trying to live up to impossible standards of masculinity that were thrust upon them without their knowledge. Whose fear of change and an egalitarian world leads them to dive deeper and deeper into justifying horrible behaviour.

There are eight billion human beings on this planet. None of them is illegal and all of them deserve the same opportunities and resources for life and happiness that around 50,000 people on Earth are all hoarding for themselves while radicalizing impressionable idiots to be their simps – servants, foot-soldiers and grunts who will lick their masters’ boots and die for them even though they get nothing in return in some horrible twenty-first reboot of feudalism.

It’s just frustrating to see history repeating itself, only worse.

June 10, 2024
How to Find the Time to Read Books, Even with a Short Attention Span

We all want to read more, but we also think reading books is an impossibly difficult task.

The “You millennials, always on your phones, bah humbug!” crowd have convinced us that social media and the internet got us addicted to instant gratification and that the process of long-form reading is now too tedious for our attention-deficit brains.

But here’s a different way of looking at it, one that helped me finish reading 4 books, cover-to-cover, in the first two months of the year.

It’s not an amazing number, I know I’ve still been lazy as hell, but it’s a significant improvement over my lowest point a few years ago, when I only read 4 books in a whole year.

I measured my reading speed. It’s around 400 words per minute. Not great, not terrible. There are websites all over the internet where you can measure your reading speed, like this one. Like the results of any internet site, take them with a heaping handful of salt.

An average 400-page book contains around 100,000 words.

At 400 wpm, that’s 250 minutes. With breaks, let’s say four and a half hours.

That’s like four episodes of The Crown or The Queen’s Gambit. Or one Lord of the Rings extended edition movie.

If you can binge a full miniseries in a single day, you can read a full book in a single day. Or if you can re-watch episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine after work every day, maybe use that time to finish a book in less than a week.

Originally shared on LinkedIn

June 3, 2024
Social Media for Writers: The Only Winning Move Is Not To Play
Can we finally, as a society, collectively admit that social media is no longer a force for good in the world?

I’d also say it’s debatable if it was ever a force for good in the first place, but that’s a different topic.

Social media in 2020 is the world’s largest soapbox for once-fringe morons to very effectively spread fascist and hateful agendas using disinformation and a time-tested technique of hacking the human brain’s propensity to over-engage with and widely share any content that sparks outrage.

This has turned vast swathes of generally decent (if somewhat ignorant) people into vectors of ideological disease.

And if the pandemic has taught us anything, you can counter the spread of disease with social (media) isolation.

This is part of the reason why I deleted my Facebook account, stopped using Reddit, severely limited my activity on the last 2 stragglers in my social media portfolio — Instagram and LinkedIn — and most notably, deleted all of my tweets save for my prescient-yet-obvious first contribution to Twitter back in the innocent and halcyon days of 2008:

Twitter = Orwell’s ‘1984’ by choice rather than force

— Chaosverse (@chaosverse). May 19, 2008

This has had a substantially positive impact on my mental health and sanity, while my reasons for renunciation are reinforced whenever I do end up briefly visiting social platforms for work.

As someone in content and marketing, I have to visit Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn as part of my job. Whenever I do, I try and ensure that I make a quick ingress, finish the mission asap and leave immediately.

But, like a fly in a spiderweb, I sometimes find myself ensnared by the platform. On these occasions, I end up reading a few posts (and occasionally comments, ugh!) or catching a glimpse of the day’s top trending content and hashtags.

And that never fails to absolutely ruin my mood.

I would really like it if I went the rest of my (hopefully long) life without ever laying my eyes on the problematic, programmatic, pabulum prose of Twitter or any social media site (but especially Twitter) ever again. I would love it if 2020 was the last year I was ever on social media at all. But that’s not an option anymore.

A social media presence has gone from the alternative to the mainstream to being sort of, compulsory. There’s a widespread idea that you cannot achieve any kind of engagement with a wider audience without farming attention on social media. That is not just repugnant, it’s frightening.

I would rather not turn myself into some Kim Kardashian or Donald Trump clone to further my ideas, but it feels like most of us are being incentivized to do exactly that.

Personally, I hope we can normalize (and dare I say, encourage?) not having a social media presence. Even for writers and content marketing professionals. Call it a social media absence.

But we’re not there yet. And that means, for now at least, I need to slowly re-emerge from the sanity of my sans social safe space and re-enter the fray.

So, like-share-subscribe?
Originally shared on LinkedIn
June 2, 2024
From Football to Soccer: How the Death of the Beautiful Game Could Herald Something Much Worse

There are trends afoot that could be the death rattle of football as we know it.

Sovereign wealth funds buying football clubs for sportswashing and profit. Multinational conglomerated sports team financial groups. The goddamn European Super League.

What was once the sport of the working classes – whose fans and best players emerged from the poorest sections of society – will soon be no more.

Football was about clubs, fans, and players. In its place, we will have Soccer™, which will be about franchises, customers, and assets.

Soccer™ will be a nice little social diversion for our plutocrat masters. They will spend whatever spare billions they find lying behind the couch on accruing top people for their teams as they compete with their fellow plutocrats for prestige. I expect that, much like in American sports, you’ll see the owner lift the trophy at the end of the season rather than the ~~slaves~~ players who worked for it.

But beyond my exaggerated sadness at the death of a sport that I once loved, I’m worried if this development is a portent for something I’ve feared for a long, long time.

Democracy Is Temporary, Plutocracy Is Permanent

I’m starting to wonder whether the natural order of human society is plutocracy, which eventually becomes an aristocracy anyway. Are democracy and its ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité just unsustainable?

Rome was a republic for 482 years, from the deposing of Lucius Tarquinius Superbus in 509 BCE to Octavian changing his name to Augustus and taking the title Imperator Caesar divi filius in 27 BCE. While the words Imperator and Caesar have since morphed into synonyms for ‘king’ (‘emperor’ and ‘kaiser’/’czar’), they were originally selected because they were devoid of any notions of kingship or monarchy. They were seen as simple, almost bureaucratic titles.

Similarly, modern-day plutocrats don’t use the titles and insignia of monarchs and aristocrats from the 1700s, but rather adorn themselves with more mundane-sounding crowns. Thus, we do not have lords, dukes, marquees, earls, and barons but directors, board members, executive chairmen, and founder-CEOs.

From Augustus in 27 BCE to Romulus Augustus in 476 CE, the erstwhile republic was ruled by kings who didn’t call themselves kings. Then, from Odoacer in 476 to Victor Emmanuel III and Umberto II in 1946, the same region was ruled by kings again. 482 years of republicanism was followed by 503 years of kingship by a different name and 1,470 years of actual kingship once again.

The Wheel Turns Anew

Republics and democracies also rose and fell around the same time, between the 600s to 400s BCE, among the Mahajanapadas of Ancient India. And I haven’t even mentioned Athens, the democracy that, for generations, warmed the beds of salivating western historians; whose late-night fantasies about the “birth of western civilization” completely ignored the fact that their precious perfect Greek city-states were built on the foundations of slavery and misogyny.

In these examples, we see that democracies and republics lasted but the blink of an eye compared to the thousand-year Reiche of tyrants who preceded and succeeded them. These states and societies were massively influential, but the fact that we read so much about Greek history from that period sometimes blinds us to the fact that it lasted for maybe 200-odd years at the most.

We saw the re-emergence of republics and democracy around 200-odd years ago, with the creation of the United States. In the last century and a bit, we have seen royal houses go from being de-facto rulers of nation-states to figureheads who are more important to a country’s tourist industry than they are to its executive branch.

We thought these changes will be permanent, that the era of power resting in the hands of a small elite was over.

We were wrong.

The East India Company’s Board of Directors ruled over India for a century before the Crown stepped in. I wouldn’t be surprised if, a little while down the line in human history, titles like CEO, chairman, and board member morph into royal institutions.

Or maybe I’m just extrapolating way too much from distressing news about football.

Maybe I’m just an old idealist yelling against an idea whose time has come.

A dying breed of “legacy fans” in an age of Soccer™ consumers and customers.

June 1, 2024
I Was Called Out in a Book by a “Fake” Author

I’ve been reading The Listening Society, a book on the political ideology of metamodernism written under the nom de plume Hanzi Freinacht.

I don’t know much about the real authors behind the book (and its sequel, Nordic Ideology, which I plan to read soon) but I find myself drawn to the ideas presented in it for two reasons.

First, I’m generally fascinated by post-postmodern ideas and personally feel the way forward is some amalgamation of incredulity towards meta-narratives (Jean-Francois Lyotard’s definition of postmodernism) and something like David Foster Wallace’s New Sincerity.

And Reason B. I’ve never seen a book describe me so well as these two paragraphs.

BTW, the “triple H” people described here are “Hackers, Hipsters, and Hippies” and have nothing to do (afaik) with WWE’s Hunter Hearst Helmsley, a.k.a The Game.

May 8, 2022