Still on the rules, and on the homologation.
I think I caused a debate on the rules of the BBS, in some way, but before I continue I would like to clarify one thing: the BBS is not a TV. Don't sign up to see what others are writing. A BBS is a place where people spend time in order to get better than they would have been without.
Consequently, I don't care whether or not you read my blog, or the compliments you give. What I want to know is what kind of (legal) content you want to post. That is, the contribution you intend to make.
Having said that, let's go to the debate that I am seeing born on the rules.
The first problem with the rules is that you have to know how to make them. And it is by no means a simple thing: jurists are specialists precisely because it is not easy to make a rule that has the desired results.
Centuries ago, it was forbidden to have all the books registered on an "index" in the house. Now, this might seem sensible, and aimed at the disappearance of specific books. The trouble was that no one, or almost no one, could access this "index": that is, no one except inquisitors and bishops had access.
The result was that, for fear of having index books at home, the middle class simply freed itself en masse of the few books it had.
Now, this is an example of bad law: you threaten punishment without giving people a criterion that allows them to understand if they are breaking the rule. Was it a mistake or was it deliberate? Historians are divided, I personally favor those who believe it was a mistake: in the final analysis, book printing was still a big business for the church itself, and the circulation of some books was deliberate, especially after the Counter-Reformation.
Not for nothing, the rich and noble who could afford a confessor and a tutor, usually Jesuits, had many books in the house. The confessor and the tutor, in fact, had access to the index and therefore could advise them. So it was not the intention to make all the books disappear from middle-class homes. The problem is that objectively this was the result.
Moral: making good laws is not easy. Jurists have a lot of terms (usually in Latin) to explain the mistake made in making a law that refers to knowledge that is scarcely available. Like Latin.
This is the reason why I prefer not to introduce other rules than those made by jurists who approve the rules in parliaments, and then filter them in the light of the constitution.
On the other hand, I took advantage of the "index effect" to do a similar thing: saying that the other rule of the BBS is to be able to spend some fun time, or at least worth it, I said that "spend a good time "Is the rule, but I have never defined what" good time "is. This, according to my prediction, should be a generalized “don't shit other people's shit”, and I expect that not knowing how I define “good time”, people will avoid anything that could be “shit other people's shit”.
The problem with this mechanism is that it should not be used, for example, in the case of topics that raise a debate. If I say “homophobia is forbidden here”, but I don't clearly define where homophobia begins, everyone will just say “ewwiwa il gheipraid! put down the mophobes! ”, simply… just to be sure.
But there is a debate going on in society on this issue, and stifling the debate is exactly the best way to get the most complete approval. The mechanism that, in many US universities, allows us to say that if a gay nuclear physicist and a straight one disagree on a frontier issue, the gay nuclear physicist is certainly right. To think otherwise would be homophobic.
The homologation has a small problem: the punishment for those who do not homologate is definitely the purge, a name that Nenni used to indicate the “Cancel Culture”. The problem of all this is that there is always a purer purer that purifies you , and therefore the space for maneuver and debate is reduced more and more . Until, as George Orwell said, only the word “SocIng”, the name of the Party, remains in the dictionary.
This effect is certainly present on Twitter, which by dint of purges has achieved a catastrophic boredom effect: if you want to get bored, go to Twitter . And if you think that a certain freedom given to pornographic contents is a mitigating factor, I would like to point out that even on those contents debate is not allowed: it is only allowed to enjoy the content, perhaps comment on it, but all the efforts of twitter are aimed at reduce the tone of the comments to “bravo! good boy!".
The result is that there are no interesting debates on twitter, and there are not even interesting interactions: everything is homologated and stereotyped to the point that you don't even need to talk to understand what you will hear: if they have the flag of their country they are right and they will say "ewwiwa the sovereign ', force Carbonara and frocicattivi", while if they have the rainbow flag it will be the usual "ewwiwa the gheipraid! put down the mophobes! ", and if they have the European flag then it will be" ewwiwa left, abaso destribruttizazi, ewwiwa migrants! " etc.
The empire of boredom , for a simple reason: Twitter has defined "community rules" without giving precise limits: in this way the yardstick to know how not to be expelled is to avoid anything that could lead to reports. That is, to be tremendously homologated and to produce a gigantic Abilene paradox on a large scale.
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradosso_di_Abilene
Although it is enormously difficult to make good laws, many try. And they are also oblivious to the risk they take. For example, you can make rules that, like it or not, conflict with those of the state. For example, calling someone homophobic, if the law prohibiting homophobia or hate speech thinks otherwise, can be slander: accusing someone for a crime they did not commit.
And not even the rules that come from common sense are of any use. For example, a rule like "sin is said but not the sinner" seems sensible, but like all ambiguous rules it has mischievous interpretations: I can start talking about the whore of the sinner's mother, without anyone having the right to protest. But I can also turn it backwards, and say that a sin without a sinner is like a murder without a murderer: it never happened.
In general, therefore, unless you are a jurist, it is better not to make too many rules. They will turn against you.
But a question remains: why do the big social networks all report this and that, but in the end no one points out homologation and boredom?
It's quite simple: homologation and boredom are literally everywhere. Let's make a premise: I noticed on the fediverse that the instances that exceed 10K users, who also said they wanted to be better than Twitter and Facebook, ended up becoming very similar. This personally impresses me, because from experience I know that provincial villages become suffocating just when they exceed 10K, and then stop around 200K to become a city. The city then creates a "cream", appure a "center" … which finally behaves like a village.
I don't think it's a coincidence, but the point is that by proceeding in this way everything has become boring and homologated.
Let's take a small village of 10K inhabitants: unlike small villages where personalities emerge individually because they have a name, to this extent the rules become indefinite. For example, the "decor". What is "decorum"? The "decorum" itself has no defined limits, if not the "common law", but the point is that if it becomes an absolute law anyone will avoid doing anything that is nonconformist, simply because they are afraid of ending up in their hands of the defenders of decorum. The result is, again , homologation and boredom.
The big social networks have applied this to such an extent that rather than boredom Facebook users are willing to put up with hatred. After all, is there any other strong emotion that is allowed, without the reports ending up submerging you in the name of the "rules of our community"? The complacency of many haters is simply that: I will be a hater, but I am not a boring piece of dead wood like you.
Added to this is the fact that a gigantic homologation phenomenon took place throughout the West after the 1980s. If the 80s, the period of envy, were at least a period of inventions and confrontation between different groups and individuals, the 90s were the most disconcerting period of petty play.
If before a very violent mass act was needed to make the revolution, now it was enough to eat Tofu. If before to change the world it was necessary to spread a new, very high ideal, now it was enough to change the refrigerator with one that did not pierce the ozone. If before it was necessary to vote for the right ideal, now we voted by buying the most ethical products.
Everything was reduced to such negligible smallness that one could no longer distinguish one person from the other: if before I could distinguish a right and a left person for their opinions, now I should have noticed if they had pointed shoes or square cut.
Everyone said they were revolutionaries, except that the revolution was now a hobby. Everyone was transgressive, only the transgression was the same for everyone.
This gigantic homologation process, which has produced twenty years of indistinguishable people from each other, has meant that today no one notices the extreme Boredom that exists on major social networks.
The problem of the 1980s is that they belong to modernism, that is to the idea that the new is in conflict with tradition. The girl with the miniskirt (the “new” dress) goes against traditional rules (the dress must cover the girls there and there). But in this way, the particular transgression becomes part of the identity. The girl with the mini is different from the "dark" girl, and she is different from the one who wears a t-shirt that bears a design considered "satanic".
Since in the 1980s transgression is a difference, and requires creativity, the result is that the population of offenders and offenders was a population of different people, depending on how they transgressed, or depending on which rules they were breaking. .
Hence, it was a time of extreme variety. Almost everyone transgressed the tradition, even the sandwiches who ate sandwiches in fast food restaurants instead of eating real food with the family. Every transgression, in fact, was identity.
With the 90s the transgression did not cease, anti: everyone transgressed, but there was a problem. The rules had been broken by the 1980s, and those poor fellows no longer remembered what the hell they were transgressing, and why. Indeed, transgression was the new rule. You had to have fun by transgdredbelieving, at the cost of dying of drugs to do so.
So they all started to transgress in the exact same way. And since they all transgressed in exactly the same way, the transgression became an aesthetic rule first, and a homologation later. Only the excesses were noticed.
As there was no more identity, people started pumping their egos to compensate, hoping to compensate. And to pump the ego, one must expect one's transgression to be more subversive and antisystemic than all other identical transgressions. And this could only happen with inexcusable attention to detail: I make the revolution, but I keep the bird to the right. He on the left. We are not the same.
The result was the most unbelievable, stereotyped, stencil mass of revolutionaries that history has ever seen. Each one of them felt like the one who was going to break the systembecause he kept his cock left in his underwear, which no one else had noticed but them…. let alone "the system".
The same "system" began to acquire very foggy connotations. The 80s girl who went out in a Samantha Fox miniskirt could certainly point the finger at the village priest, the bigoted family and the gossipy society.
In the 1990s, there were tattooed mothers and drummers grandmothers. Today you have tattooed grandmothers and polyamory mothers. But you still think you're transgressive for your tattoo. You are self-important: everyone has a tattoo, but no one is as important as yours, right? That tattoo that no one has noticed, as more and more parts of the "system" consider you "cool". But you are "transgressing".
I realize that, as a teenager in the 1980s, I share with my peers the responsibility of having given the last existing definition of "transgression". After breaking down the rules, no one has ever been able to write another one.
Since we also broke the rules, you have nothing left to break.
For this reason, even today, the transgressive evenings are painted as full of girls in miniskirts dancing in some discotheque. That is the 80s. The trouble is that in my day going to the disco until late was a transgression to be obtained by arguing with the parents, and the too short miniskirt was worn in the disco bathrooms to avoid being seen.
Today, your parents ARE those girls, they put the mini shorter than yours, and you start dancing when we went out of the disco to buy hot donuts from the filth. And it's normal.
With the end of the rules, obviously the transgression is over: and all you can do is pretend that the rules exist, to pretend to transgress them . To the point that you are almost glad that fascists, cattobigotti and homophobes are back in vogue: at least you will again feel that you are breaking some rules. Or that someone will notice you if you kiss someone of the same sex.
The trouble is that the fascists, the cattobigotti and the homophobes are fake products in China, or thereabouts. And since the new rules are fake, even the transgression tastes like plastic.
And here is the boring company we notice today: the same company that then pours into twitter. No one notices that big social networks are boring for this very reason: outside social networks there is the same boredom. Social networks like Formentera, the island where you go on vacation to meet your boss.
A society where they are all the same, but equally committed to giving importance to details of a disconcerting pettiness, only to demonstrate that they still possess the gift of a revolutionary transgression that no longer exists, if it exists it is false, and even if it were true it would be obsolete.
We have Italian rappers without a ghetto, racism without racism, fascism without fascism and Catholics without religion. To make it appear that two lesbian girls were a transgression they had to call a ninety-year-old nun a scene, who instead only showed that by now those two were only breaking rules that are no longer in force, except for a tiny number of people.
In these conditions you cannot have a personal identity, you cannot call yourself individualistic, because to be individualistic it is necessary to break the rules of homologation, which do not exist.
You have become a boring dust of people who fail to be approved, but fail to be transgressive, because there are no rules to be one or the other.
Your annoying, unrealistic attempt to invent rules for everything, which I see on your instances, and to applaud those who set these rules, only shows the nostalgia you have for the world that my generation destroyed in the 1980s.
Because at least, the twelve insults that formed my social identity in the 1980s gave me at least an identity as a transgressor. We knew who was a guard and who was the thief. You no.
And in doing so you are playing "thieves and thieves": a game without meaning and without roles because the roles are all the same.
Your approval is just that: you can only play thieves and robbers, because we killed the guards.
Conclusion: the number of rules never written by the law is growing exponentially on every instance of the fediverse, for the simple reason that there is the hope of finally being able to be transgressive, or at least to define the border with transgression.
And those who make these rules are applauded, in the pathetic hope that having new rules can, again, be said to be transgressive. You are sick of playing thieves and robbers, so much that you cheer on anyone who dresses up as a guard.
The problem is that these rules are imagined by homologated people, daughters of the most homologated generations, and as a result … they do nothing but homologate more and more.
The emblem of my generation is Samantha Fox in a polluted leather miniskirt, making her boobs dance on stage. Your emblem is a depressed jerk killing himself in Seattle.
There is a reason.
Are you.