Tuesday, November 25, 2014

What went wrong? III

These are my opinions and not necessarily the truth.  My perspective is (particularly) limited, as all of ours are. Feel free to discuss or criticise.


1. Death of discussion

- Loss of anonymity found in forums during WMT's heyday due to FB profiles led to positive reduction in flame war but also reduction in debate because people are unwilling to be proved wrong or right as it directly and often publicly reflects on whatever identity they are nurturing.

2. Increase in sychophancy and mutual back scratching

- financial and social incentives for this

3. Positive behaviour management systems (in place all over the world) lead people to  value affirmations of their behaviour/ideas more than challenges to it/them. Increase in inability to handle criticism.*

- likes, +1s, etc

4. Trends of conformity and need to be accepted, intensified as awareness of cliques successfully marketed

- any challenges to behaviour or ideas can be deleted at the click of a button leading to self-affirming circles of people (block, delete, unfriend, unthink) which can enforce narratives by ostracising others.

5. Author status or desire to become author leads to more idea hoarding (for books, presentations, etc) and less idea sharing, increase in need for sales as opposed to idea propagation

- overall reduction in growth of WMT due to decrease in effective dialogue, the rise of ''chat''**

6. Blogs become diffuse, contentless or perhaps worse become repositories of content other than that needed (i.e. rather than blog about actual material and subsequently create discussion WMT blogs become places to moan, to sell, or even worse to share socio-political ideas rather than metaphysical ideas - political overwhelms spiritual***).

7. Blogs lose activity - blogosphere contracts.  Social networks increase at expense of blogosphere.  ''Chat'' therefore increases.

8. Intermediate material ceases to exist as nowhere now exists for such discussions to take place - majority of transactions occur between questionable ''elite'' groups or teachers**** and their students.  Real life events (seminars, webcasts, etc) generally mirror the 101 teacher-student (lecturer-audience) relationship as opposed to peer-peer relationship.

9. Continued proliferation of 101 material and accompanying students that can be harvested for financial/social gain.  Blogs become ads.  Networks become ads.

- lack of development of research skills that are necessary to success in plumbing the ancient depths leads to overall decline in average calibre of average WMT student, decline in tradition's ability to pass successfully into the next generation.

10. Increase in ''chat'', decrease in ''work'' - insane levels of spiritual flakiness/tourism*****

- coupled with pro-''nerd'' but anti-intellectual (???) = most dangerous trend for WMT

11. Increase in sense of individual identity (via narcissistic networking) and all its minutiae increase sense of loss of community and isolation of said individual.

12. Fragmentation into disparate ''micro-traditions'' or patchworks of such traditions as central ground of QBL despoiled by scandals from main WMT orders (GD et al) and WMT QBL's own logical inconsistencies.

- micro-traditions have less ability to interact as shared language (however faulty) is lost.

13. Loss of interest in mess that is WMT, high calibre student material lost more and more to Eastern mysticism.


14. CHAOS and DISSIPATION.



*One should beware the charming man.  Embrace your critics.  Here is the bard:

''Now this overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the censure of the which one must in your allowance o'erweigh a whole theatre of others.''

**Patrick Dunn once wrote that the law of ''keep silent'' actually could be interpreted to mean ''don't chat''
***I understand the political can be spiritual but when more than 75% of your post is about the economy, identity politics, or conspiracy theory you are operating a different kind of (activist?) blog with a metaphysical slant.
****Questionable in knowledge, understanding or questionable motives (money acquisition, the various scandals of late)
*****How much work does one have to do to be considered non-armchair these days?  Ritual every day?  Ritual once a week?  I am interested - let me know.

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