May 25

 Work, work, work. With no end in sight.

To say I am sick of it is an understatement.

And also employee problems.

Whilst our currently highest experienced dev is competent and can be trusted to get on with shit, in the flaws column he has a nasty habit of sulking and being a prima donna.

Its flared up badly in the past - when it was suggested he do something other than the single thing that Andy had babied him onto for a year. He basically threw a fit. And didn't want to do anything else in any other way.

He apologised after that.

Fair enough. Move on.

But that character trait still resides within him. It's not pretty. It makes my work life even more problematic at times.

It just adds to the ongoing clusterfuck that is work.

This week he had a pout when having got himself into a sticky corner because of bad tech decisions he wanted to write everything locally, completely buggering any idea of shared code base and return on investment. No dude. You made a bad decision. Fix it.

He has said he will. After pouting. Whether he does. Remains to be seen. Andy will pander to him. And I can't be arsed arguing with fucking devs anymore. This is a familiar pattern at work. Its root lies with Andy. And also a little for myself because I tend to be hands off. And so the devs, indeed all of the staff run riot under the anxious eye of Andy who can do little except kowtow.

Not enjoying it. Sick of it. Life is too short. I am considering just quitting out right again, but I suspect if I have a long rest and break. Then I could once again manage a certain level of bullshit. But eh.

Elsewise health has improved a little. But is still pretty garbage. What has changed is that mentally I am doing a lot better with it. Even when it's really quite bad. I just ignore it. And go on with my day. My mentality more now is, just fucking ignore everything, even the almost passing out and take joy out of the small things. At some point no doubt I am going to keel over or lose all remaining capability. But I am not fretting about it. Nor talking to anyone about it. 

I am rarely without the dizzies now. And stabbing pains in the chest are daily. A raft of other crap slips in and out of view over the course of 48 hours or so. The usual suspects. All very worrying perhaps. But I have given up giving a shit. Just roll fucking on. What's the worst that can happen ? I die ? Sure. Big woop. I am ready. Let's go.

Elsewise. Eh. Not up to much.

A thought and new theory is increasing in strength in me. I am still percolating on it and gathering data and repeatedly going over it in my head. But. I have a strong suspicion that the worst thing the internet does is setup echo chambers. But I don't just mean of politics. I mean of everything. Culture. Health. Psychology. Everything is, in effect, an excercise in mass suggestion. And we all get carried away in the bullshit. Everything is a reinforcing shit storm of neuroses or political lines, or culture wars. From the, everyone has ADHD. To. Raging arguments about is this or is this not abuse, and what constitutes a gender.

I think. It's poisoning us all. It's not just the news. It's *everything*. Drip feeding in. The common soundbites. The rallying cries. I suspect. We are all a lot more suggestible than is readily given credit for. I think it may actually be our chief defining feature. We are incredibly malleable. And perhaps our greatest failing is that we think we aren't. That we are bastions of rationality. Or thinking. But it's just echo chamber garbage.

Recently read an interesting psych finding that shows how suggestible we can be. A group of women were given fake scars on their face. And then told to go to interviews and record whether they felt they were being prejudiced against because of their scars. They were told it was a psychological field trial malarkey. Just before their interviews however, they were given a "last minute touch up" at which point the fake scars were entirely removed. Leaving an unblemished face.

The reports back from the participants overwhelmingly noted that that was severe prejudice because they had a facial disfigurement. And in some cases the participants recorded examples of things said to them that clearly highlighted the prejudice.

When in fact there was zero.

But their expectation was to be prejudiced against. And the expectation of being a victim was also there.

Whatever your environment informs you that you are. You end up agreeing with. Assuming you buy it. And we buy into whatever we feel matches.

I have serious suspicions that this is indeed behind the rise in stuff like ADHD. And neuro divergent diagnoses. And all of us having this or that tag. Myself included.

It is, perhaps, for a lot of it, absolute bollocks. Just a symptom of a neurotic hysteria fuelled by an always on, always echo chambering internet.

Pre internet, I've also seen other studies peformed on stuff like memory. Which clearly shows that memory is far less reliable than we think, and is actually more based on reconstruction and narration. And again suggestible. If it's suggested that something happened, people more often that not go along with it. If someone thinks something happened, even when it didn't, they are inclined to manufacture memories about it.

This has cropped up a few times in the past. But largely overlooked.

There was a lovely demonstration of the effect for TV. People were paraded past an "alien" crash. A Roswell style site. And people went from seeing a weather balloon, to by the end, full blown believing they had seen dead aliens.

These people weren't conspiracy theorists. Or otherwise highly suggestible. Just normal people. But with a few tweaks and pushes, they demonstrated that you could get people to remember anything. Complete and utter bollocks. And yet the people had clear memories of it.

I think in the end, we are horribly suggestible. So suggestible in fact that it makes a mockery of trying to make sense of much of anything. We are not computers that record information without loss, without error and then store it forever. We are engines of fairy tales and make believe. In the short term we piece together enough to make sense of a task at hand. But no more than that. We utterly believe we are infallible or close to it. And yet the actual evidence, the actual scientific data shows otherwise. And is poorly understood.

In short.

I think the internet is poisoning our brains. It is what is behind the rise in polarising politics. Culture wars. The rise of psychological disorders. Group think. Everything.

Ideas. Memes. Information. Is just like a virus. It occurs. It can spread from one person to another. It moves via communication. It exists in the metaphysical. And it changes those it comes into contact with. Sometimes for the better. Sometimes for the worst. And just like a virus it has the capability to devastate us. A bad idea. That spreads. And infects. You can think of stuff like fascism as this. One dude has an idea for doing things in a certain way. And talks to others. Who are inspired. And on. And on. Until suddenly you're invading half of Europe.

And that was pre internet. Where the speed of an idea was limited by the speed of a telephone. Or older still. The speed of a horse. And a printing press.

Now the speed of propagation is the speed of light. Zipping down a line. Flaring up in a billion houses all at once, 5 seconds after it came into being.

7 billion people. All crammed into a single room of a single small house. And someone in the corner just sneezed. 7 billion people are about to have a bad flu day.

But metaphysical. Not physical.

The internet has destroyed our eggs in many baskets defence and put all the eggs in a single basket. One infection can now wipe out everyone. Well. Everyone except perhaps a few rainforest denizens.

Still thinking about it.

But I have a feeling it's right.

News - and it's fall from grace was not an outlier. It was the canary in the cage. As the news went. So everything else will go.

The internet is good at destroying paradigms. Every single paradigm. The paradigm of stable coherent thought and social stability could well be just another one of those. Ready to fall.