Today’s Surprise From History - 🖇️ Truth From Ted - not that one.
Today’s Surprise From History - 🖇️ Truth From Ted - not that one.
Today’s Surprise From History - 🖇️ June 2022 - it all seemed so innocent
Today’s Surprise From History - 🖇️ A 3 year old enhancement request that IMHO remains a good idea but has. not been implented.
Today’s Surprise From History - 🖇️ 2019 - a silouette
Today’s Surprise From History - 🖇️ Hell remains frozen - but it was only a couple of months ago.
Today’s Surprise From History - 🖇️ My 2021 Three Words
Today’s Surprise From History - 🖇️ NASA and Shovels
Today’s Surprise From History - 🖇️ in 2020 - proud of my ‘Drafts Inbox; having only 6 entries. - compare and contrast to 259 as of this morning.
Today’s Surprise From History - 🖇️ Biggest surprise here is that it is still marked 🚧 - so I guess I need to finish it off!
The internet was supposed to celebrate differences. Instead, it’s weaponised conformity. We’ve narrowed acceptable discourse to a narrow band. A band where ±1 standard deviation seems to be too wide and anything outside the ‘consensus’ gets you piled on. (Consensus with a very loud and increasingly violent minority.) The phrase vive la différence is nearly extinct in modern English, and it shows. We are not ignorant of diversity - we’re terrified of it. So we hide the messy, interesting parts of ourselves and perform an acceptable vanilla version for the town square.
The result? A society suffocating under its own self-censorship. The crowd isn’t forcing us to conform - we’re doing it preemptively, trading authenticity for safety. We’ve accepted the bargain that you’re either with us or against us, and nobody wants to find out what happens if you dare explore the edges.
The road less taken isn’t less travelled anymore; it’s invisible.
This prompted on reading Om this morning: Our Algorithmic Grey-Beige World, but it isn’t a new theme of mine … or indeed others …