The following is announcement by the Heir regarding a cultural update to this shares base:
'I'm announcing that I'm taking a stance of a general moral indignation based on events from a longer term and a recent past, and on my personal analysis thereof, and that this immediate culture will continue to create and roll out DIY culturally specific crafts, such as an audio player I've dubbed "Tropical Soul Player," also to make clear of this culture's independence from the larger culture I maintain under criticism. The phrase "this culture" is how I refer to how I've rolled as one person differently from everyone else. The below are the past events that inform my announced stance accordingly.
'2013 was the year of Ed Snowden, and of the progressives' defense of and excuses for him. The basic facts and circumstances of Ed Snowden's leaks of the metadata program, and his conspiracy theories were when I started seeing the beginnings of the personal corruption of the 2010s. Ed Snowden defied intelligence and law enforcement by wrongly taking credit for revealing the metadata program. The progressives made no meaningful criticism of Snowden's actions and I saw them as actively encouraging him. This is because it was the "radical" wing of the progressive movement who at this point had taken over the movement almost completely. They forced all movement members to pledge fealty to Snowden, and Julian Assange, and the Anonymous hacking group, under the threat of personal attacks and public humiliation. They tried to propagandize on the Sony Hack of 2014 as merely being about a disgruntled employee at Sony, when intel points to North Korea. I saw the movement as then having lost their sense of moral conscience. I felt my already-existing political skepticism solidified, and cynically looked upon the progressives' case against public figures in the late 2010s as purely political and biased, and not based in a sense of justice or principle. My ongoing criticisms of their stances are part of my general moral indignation.
'2014 saw big tech's attempts at forced obsolescence. They fought my efforts to save money for the purpose of putting said money away for savings. Firstly, for every money-savings-oriented and cultural move I made, big tech made a countermove to try to defeat what I did. My having to purchase a new car, though not directly caused by big tech, is nevertheless such an example, since I should have been able to keep my old car running for at least one more year. All of this I call rug-pulling, because big tech sees you making important plans for things, and then they pull the rug out from under those things, claiming the rug-pulling is just a part of "disruptions" as per one of their media campaigns. The concept of "disruptions" gave big tech ample reason to do anything they want, because hey, it's "disruptions," we're just disrupting the old ways of doing things. I saw forced obsolescence threatening the terrestrial analog radio medium, as well as non-proprietary technologies such as xml-file-feed-based podcasts, particularly musical ones. Terrestrial analog radio is a first-hand reports medium that this immediate culture adopted to keep the learning of new information on things as simplistically as possible. The tech-challenged media served as a transmission belt for tech's marketing efforts, touting the "miracles" of technology, directed at ages 18-35. In doing so the media made a big deal out of the "millennials," and implied that only the young should have social value. This made actual grownups look like second class citizens whom the media expected the young to disregard and disrespect. I happened to have seen around this time a young kid walking by of that age group with a t-shirt saying, "Respect Is Earned," clearly implying that he has no intention of respecting any adults. This, too, contributed to an emerging personal corruption in the larger culture.
'These are the examples of big tech's practices I remember most prominently, and that's the threat that the practice presented to the "type B" values I established personally for myself in 2012. Many of these values are exemplified in my DIY crafts as above along the lines of intuitive simplicity and transparency. I've also done my best to adhere to values such as endurance, humility and conscience, but these values get to the idea of principle. I try to adhere to principle as much as possible. My thinking is, you don't have to be perfect. You just have to not go corrupt. This is in contrast to what I see as the personal corruption of the larger culture around me.
'Big tech's attitude of the-ends-justify-the-means was just one form of such corruption, and Ed Snowden's ways were another. A third one was a reckless social immaturity at large that I started noticing after Sandy, the morality based social inhibitions against which the apparently unbridled social media lifted.
'This was all personal corruption, and I didn't see anyone seeing the corruption I was seeing. This was bad enough, but even worse was the resulting retaliation this immediate culture suffered starting in 2015 for not going along with that corruption. I was lucky that the tech-based company I worked at did not go along with either the forced obsolescence or the personal corruption, but the company was forced out of business as a result, and I was laid off 9/30/15. The day of 10/1/15 I remember now as Nadir Day, because I tried to find a similar job at which my skills would be a match, since big tech's media surrogates insist that somehow there won't be any jobs not related to tech in the future, and biasedly mused on what they call the 21st Century work environment. But my type B and adherence to principle were not values the companies I applied for a job at shared. The companies by contrast were type A, and reflected what I saw as the larger culture's relationship to personal corruption. Both I saw using arguments such as "love your job" and "the power of positive thinking." In any case, this is why the tech-based companies simply didn't want me, and in 2016 I ended up taking a lower paid job not related to tech.
'But as it's been said countless times in history, you reap what you sow, and the chickens come back home to roost. So here are the eventualities of Snowden-style radicalism, forced obsolescence and the type A "power of positive thinking."
'Firstly was the arrests of Ed Snowden associates Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning. This was karma for progressives and various newsmedia blindly following Ed Snowden as they did in 2013 mentioned above. But Ed Snowden periodically makes appearances in interviews, and when those interviews happen I suspect those progressives that otherwise want to live down the fact they support him would then go back to exalting him as they did in 2013. They want to simultaneously live down Ed Snowden and exalt him, so I still do not see the progressives as differentiating themselves from the targets of their criticisms, and hence bearing any real sense of moral authority.
'Secondly was Elizabeth Warren starting her Presidential campaign partially by publicly proposing the breakup of big tech. She was the only candidate to take on big tech, and various points after the primary she kept the spotlight on the dark side of big tech. Up to then, almost no-one had dared question or even make issue of big tech's business practices. The one exception I saw was in early 2017, when in light of revelations about fake news on social media, there was a TV news segment on the unhealthful mental effects of an always-online lifestyle. I sent Warren's campaign a message supporting her efforts, but in that message I pointed out that a proposed breakup is only the beginning of the reform of the tech sector, and not the end. There's been an eventuality of antitrust suits and other scrutiny. Elizabeth Warren also publicly disputed Mark Zuckerberg's past assertion that Facebook is not a monopoly, by pointing out that since Zuckerberg has the social media platform, you have to go to his platform if you want to catch up on how your former classmates from college are doing. Likewise, Spotify monopolizes through many of their supposed "podcasts" by making it that you have to use their app if you're on a smartphone, because you often can't take a podcast feed and use another app even as a premium user. An observer on reddit pointed that out in February 2021, and the reddit response was largely pro-forced obsolescence. Past observations of pro-forced obsolescence attitudes are a guide to seeing the same in the present, and shows that the mere passage of time did not truly change people's attitudes. This is a continuing reason why people in general need to be admonished for having followed forced obsolescence in the past.
'Thirdly, there was the answer for the type A breeziness of the professional environment I unsuccessfully tried to find a job in, and that was in the form of revelations of public figures' connections to business crime. Those figures used the same type A breezy red herring slogan arguments that bear much similarity to "love your job" and "the power of positive thinking." Though I followed the geeky legal details with great interest, it was only three years after "the power of positive thinking" that I managed to determine that what I heard were red herring and slogan argument fallacies, to which cultural fact checking should have been applied. A more tragic karma against the arrogance of "positive thinking" was the economic fallout brought on by the pandemic. No-one is going to be insensitive enough to tell hundreds of thousands of people worrying about making ends meet in a healthfully safe manner to pretend to have a "power of positive thinking." Also, as the pandemic has brought out the importance of essential workers, it's also laid bare the classist side of the "power of positive thinking." If you take an essential work job, particularly because you're not a match for a "love your job" job, you might have been asked, why are you wasting your time here when you should be doing x? I did discover in time that maybe what some meant by "love your job" was in more pragmatic terms "best fit." So if it happens to be that an essential work job is a best fit more than a "love your job" job is, that's why you find yourself doing that job, and how it's not a waste of time. But it's doubtful that essential workers would have been recognized if not for the pandemic, so you would see a guilt trip about what kind of job you "should" be in.
'The pandemic in general presents a grievous and tragic form of the chickens coming back home to roost for a personally corrupt larger culture, but it's the hundreds of thousands who died in the pandemic for the sins of that larger culture.
'This above is the long-term narrative that has led the this immediate culture to this point in time as of this writing. The reasons why I used a narrative stream here is to historically illustrate the reasons why I make this announcement, and make answer to the expected "past events" argument. This is the argument that solely because your reasons for taking certain stances are based on the past, the stances are somehow not valid enough for others to take seriously in the present. The above is a track record of personal corruption and forced obsolescence, and points to present day situations illustrating that the past is, in fact, relevant in the present.
'Also, the fact that the above past events had later eventualities effectively justifies my ongoing criticism of the ongoing personal corruption in the larger culture, until and unless the larger culture cleans up its act and makes amends. I otherwise have no intention of ceasing criticism of such corruption where I see fit.
'Thanks for your attention,
'The Heir,
'Also now known as Tropical Soulvangelical'
