JW Consciousness Stream - 21 November 2025
This entry represents something like my stream of consciousness for Friday, 21 November, 2025. This is basically like a journal entry that I work on throughout the day and then don't go back to correct errors.
Originally published as: https://deliverystack.net/2025/11/20/jw-consciousness-stream-21-november-2025/
Today's edition touches on:
- How technology including social media is hurting us (likely to be exacerbated by what we're currently calling AI)
- Some songs
- My personal values
- Tintin
It seems that YouTube is getting better at surfacing content that both interests and potentially benefits me, but I am also concerned that it is manipulating me. Either way, I found this one valuable yesterday:
It's worth watching, but because I know attention spans are short and I'm better with text than video, I used this to generate a transcript, which is easier for me to analyze:
Then I got too lazy to analyze it and asked google's gemini "AI" to summarize that transcript in 10 bullets. I wouldn't mind reviewing the video content again, but I've already assimilated some and I have other things to do. Wow, these "AI" tools are useful, but I don't see them being highly profitable.
- Mass Amnesia: A "slow fade" and "blur" of memory is creating a quiet, unnoticed crisis of mass amnesia, making people feel foggy, off, unfocused, and not quite themselves.
- Algorithms Curate Reality: Algorithms manipulate what you see, feel, and crave (anger, attention, loneliness), effectively building who you become rather than reflecting who you are.
- Structural Erosion of Self: This algorithmic curation is a "structural erosion of self" and identity, where instincts dull and beliefs soften, leading people to be "led somewhere" by manufactured reality.
- Overstimulated Nervous System: Constant scrolling, swiping, and artificial inputs overstimulate the nervous system, resulting in feeling numb, constantly reactive, and swinging between apathy and agitation.
- Breakdown in Memory Encoding: Modern life prevents deep, undistracted focus, which is essential for transferring short-term experiences into long-term memory, leading to a breakdown where experiences are "written in disappearing ink."
- Cognitive Drift and Loss of Self: Attention fragments, a state called cognitive drift, which in this era becomes something darker--forgetting not just moments, but your core identity, passions, and sense of meaning.
- The Blueprint: Fracture Identity for Control: The ultimate goal is to fracture memory and identity, so you willingly control yourself and "buy any story they give you," thinking the numbness and silence are your own ideas.
The last three bullets are about six steps for recovery, or finding the way back, so I followed up with the AI by asking it to list those.
- See the Fog: Start tracking every reach for your phone and every scroll. Don't fight the trance; just notice the trance and become aware of it. The fog loses power when it is seen.
- Drop the Mask Completely: Refuse to be obsessed with how people perceive you. Say three true things that you have never said before, even to yourself.
- Get Into Your Body: Return to the instrument of your being. Get mindful, feel your ribs move, and breathe like it's your only job.
- Return to and Recover What You Buried: Recover a dream, a passion, or some "wildness" that was exiled but not extinguished from inside you.
- Make the Ordinary Things Sacred: Your words shape the future. This practice is about using neuroplasticity to get your brain back by assigning significance to everyday actions and words.
- Leave a Trail: Write down one sentence (e.g., "I was here and I remembered") and tape it anywhere you are going to see it to constantly remind yourself and assert your memory.
Basically, the rich and powerful, including the tech oligarchs, want to turn your brain off so that you can produce and consume for them without questioning the global injustices that they perpetrate in the background. Their purpose is to make you soft and lazy. The people controlling the planet have studied psychology and know of weaknesses such as your need for social inclusion and status. It is your responsibility to take action and avoid this outcome that will be disastrous to human society on a planetary scale and only benefits those that are already wealthy. Finding yourself requires and being honest with yourself, retaining your own memories and sense of individuality requires silence, inactivity, and maybe some level of boredom without external stimulation. It starts with being aware of your use of technology and curating the content that you consume rather than letting the algorithms manipulate you.
Next I'll plug Jim E. Brown, who is a sort of sad humor musician for the modern era. I like the concept and the comments, though some of the music can be hard to take. I can relate, and maybe it actually makes me feel better about myself to see this productive 19-year-old lad with a situation more undesirable than mine.
Some more songs:
- Edie Brickell & New Bohemians - What I Am (Official Music Video)
- Edie Brickell - A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall: This is a cover of a Bob Dylan song. I can't seem to find the cover I'm after. I often find Dylan covers better than the originals, but Dylan does this one relatively well.
- The Jimi Hendrix Experience - All Along The Watchtower: Also a Dylan cover.
- Boyz II Men: Motownphilly: I actually saw these guys once in Portland once, relatively later in their career. When I first heard this song, I actually thought that "philly" was a reference to a horse (filly - a young female) rather than Philidelphia.
- Arrested Development: Tennessee
Tuesday, 19 November, was International Men's Day. Nobody sent me a card.
Related to a previous post about what being a good person means and why it is important to me:
In contemplation on re-evaluating my core values, I came across Schwartz's theory of basic human values:
This defines ten types of values:
- Self-Direction: Freedom, creativity, independent thought. These would be some of my primary values.
- Stimulation: Novelty, excitement, challenge. Boredom, or time without stimulation, is also critical.
- Hedonism: Pleasure, enjoyment of life. Seeking pleasure can be dangerous and must be balanced against others.
- Achievement: Success, demonstrating competence. I prefer to have goals than accomplishments, but both can enhance feelings of self-worth.
- Power: Status, control over resources and others. I have lost interest in status and hope that I do not want to control resources or others.
- Security: Safety, stability, order. In this context I seem to prefer chaos and insecurity.
- Conformity: Obedience, self-discipline, social rules. Other than self-discipline, hell no.
- Tradition: Respect for customs, cultural or religious norms. These all require individual evaluation, but I try to respect others.
- Benevolence: Care for close others, loyalty, helping. I am re-evaluating these, where I have focused in the past.
- Universalism: Concern for all people and the planet: fairness, tolerance, environmentalism. Virtues, compassion for the planet, and reducing suffering for all sentient beings are important to me.
These ten values reflect two major tensions: Openness to Change vs Conservation (autonomy vs. maintaining the status quo) and Self-Enhancement vs Self-Transcendence (pursuing personal gain vs. caring for others.).
- Openness: self-direction, stimulation, (hedonism partly).
- Conservation: security, conformity, tradition.
- Self-enhancement: power, achievement (hedonism partly).
- Self-transcendence: benevolence, universalism.
The values can be arranged in a circle, where adjacent values are compatible but opposite values conflict.
This also came up:
"Value theory, also known as axiology and theory of values, is the systematic study of values. As a branch of philosophy, it examines which things are good and what it means for something to be good."
So much to read and write, so little time.
It's almost 10:00. I published something about values:
Now it's 10:40. I'd like to work on my book, but I should work on my estate plan, including confidential information such as passwords that I need to pass to my brother, who will be responsible if anything happens to me.
Its 11:40. I did some work towards my estate plan, but got lazy and started watching something about Hergé, creator of Tintin:
I appreciate Tintin and bought all of the books I could find as soon as my first son arrived, in including one I had never read about the "Land of the Soviets" and even the unfinished "Tintin and Alph-Art". I couldn't find the Congo issue, which may be one of the most "controversial" - likely with overt racism. Hergé's depictions of Asians might also be considered racist, but from what I've seen and people I've asked, apparently not by Asians in Asia. Some of his other cultural charicatures have not aged well. I had always thought that the Blue Lotus was late in the series but now I realize that I had somehow confused that one with Lake of Sharks, which had some child characters that I didn't like, an unusual drawing or printing style, and did not have the standard 62 pages. That one is actually based on a movie (possibly even screen grabbed from the movie) and maybe not even by Hergé.
Anyway, I had never heard of Hergé being a possible Nazi collaborator until I watched this, which is like a short documentary about the man:
If you are a Tintin fan, I have found the TV series episodes to be worthwhile, if a bit abridged.
I never saw the Tintin movie.
I just watched this short piece about authritarian capitalist international history: