>>5337There's a famous story about Himmler. One time, he went to inspect a camp where einsatzgruppen were massacring Jews by firing squad. Himmler was visibly distressed at the horrific sight of young girls and children being lined up to die. Visibly pale and weak, he urged his men to be merciful and not to be hurt them. When a piece of her flesh splattered onto his shoe, he thew up and collapsed. But this same guy went back to his office in Berlin and was happy to sign away human lives at the stroke of a pen, ordering others to do what he couldn't stomach. The reduction of lives to statistics, signs which can be manipulated and calculated, makes it easy to be cruel. Personal computers and the internet were cooked up by PC homebrewers and hackers to empower people, but it has increased this process of transforming life into calculable signs which can be engineered according to calculating rationality. This alarming tendency is now colonizing many areas of our existence.
>detachment where the other person in the screen becomes content to us like a character and so we can forget they're people like us with complex lives and feelingsThere's another side to this. People taking 2D characters and treating them like people with complex feelings and emotions and duties. The saddest thing about the internet is you can form bonds but they are always disembodied and unfulfilled. I've heard in the dial up BBS days it was common for BBSes to have in person meet ups.
>perfect blue and serial experiments lain are both connected to this?SEL is definitely about how dehumanizing and disorienting tech has made us but also how addictive and euphoric it can be too. Its a double edged sword. The internet disembodies us and atomizes us, subjecting us to algorithms and market dynamics. This makes it hard to live a healthy embodied social life. It can open up new opportunities, but the forces of state, capital, and our own stupidity inflict damage on us.
>a consequence of memetics of cruelty that are activating in the current political climateYes. Modern political ideologies are all built on a friend-enemy distinction. A political community is defined by the antagonistic enemy (we are not them) and the aim is always to overcome, defeat, and destroy the enemy and win for your own group. You see this in democratic liberalism, Marxism, and Nazism. If you look at other approaches to politics, like medieval Platonism or Confucianism, you'll see a near total lack of this friend-enemy mentality. Western Europe was far less diverse than most Asian societies too and bred this idea of exclusive communities defined by outside enemies and aliens who must be fought and destroyed. You also see it in American Westerns and frontier mythology. This friend-enemy mentality is now how most online subcultures work but in a hyperreal environment where 'reality' is irrelevant and all that matters is owning your opponents no matter how absurd or cruel.
>"I am you, and what I see is me".What makes Western society different is its particular brand of individualism based on the atomized autonomous, independent individual with an inner self untouched by social life. People are encouraged to be responsible for themselves. So its your own responsibility to seek treatment if you're sick. If you are unhappy, its your own fault. If others are cruel to you online, well just turn the machine off. This allows people to inflict emotional damage on each other by shifting the responsibility to be emotionally unaffected on the victim. In other times and places, each person is formed by their social relationships with other people and even non-humans. Each human person is formed by the social ties that make it up and these involve mutual obligations. Emotions and kind deeds are shared and reciprocated and those social bonds are reinforced through mutual acts of giving and receiving.
You can't really do this online but you sometimes see it in a faded form, like people trading tunes or software piracy.
