I was reflecting today on many things that ordinarily escape my awareness. It was a bit of an accident.

I realized that many people who seem bold and declarative on facebook… might actually be entirely different in any ordinary context. Some of the ridiculous declarations I often see here are the result of insecurity, isolation, vulnerability… and confusion.

And those are all qualities I know in myself.

This software is exceptionally toxic in a wide variety of ways. The algorithms used and developed here were designed to take advantage of specific vulnerabilities in users. Like the next evolutionary phase of the diseases we call ‘news’.

Every person is unique. Each one of us has specific strengths, gifts, weaknesses and needs. It’s truly bizarre that instead of something resembling a network where we can learn, grow, and develop together… this monstronsity was the first to dominate the field… and seed it with truly awful forms of infotagion.

Language itself is actually far weirder than we ordinarily suspect. The other day, someone posted a text that said something like: We don’t have knowledge, we only have stories. In a discussion about this, I remarked that this statement was evidence that the author didn’t understand the scope of the terms he was using, because if he did, he’d realize that the statement referred to itself … because it was a universal declaration. No knowledge. Only stories. Of course this means that this statement is a story, because if he had knowledge of the fact that we only have stories… then he cannot have that knowledge… because it, too, is ‘just a story’.

But as I was reflecting on these things, I realized just how incredibly delicate we are as human beings. All the living beings are incredibly delicate. We’re vulnerable, breakable, and easily destroyed by almost any relatively casual incident. Our emotions are easily rendered incoherent when immersed in lethal nonsense (and that’s what our ‘societies’ largely are), our minds collapse into warlike self-opposition under stress (and that’s most of what many of us experience).

And I just felt absolutely humble for a moment. And I felt love. Deep waves of love. For all the humans around the world and in my vicinity. For every person I saw. Because I saw how delicate they were. And my response to that was adoration… and respect.