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Kevin LaTorre's avatar

A noun for your localist principles, as they develop for aesthetics and culture: neighborliness.

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Art Hutchinson's avatar

The realization that screen worlds can be deleterious to well-being has a long history. Christians have been wary of the theatre as a simulacrum delighting the eyes in a way similar to Eve's eye-rationale in Genesis 3:6. In my childhood it took the form of being told to go outside and get some exercise rather than watching TV. In the very earliest days of the Internet (before the www), Cliff Stoll, an expert on virtual realms removed himself from them entirely after epic immersion hunting hackers. He wrote about why in "The Cuckoo's Egg".

I think also of the various Silicon-Valley tech gurus who don't/didn't let their kids have smartphones. And that brings up artistic depictions of the danger of virtual worlds (screens in particular) in films like 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Kubrick may have had his own private reasons to warn and confess his culpability in creating virtual illusions... e.g., in The Shining, but we'll leave that rabbit-hole to another thread!)

Lastly (and my mind is still reeling from this one), the book "American Cosmic," by D.W. Pasulka contains some mind-blowing nuggets about how dark spiritual forces seem to love leading us by the eyes. One big idea among many: some of the founders of the Internet, back at SRI, in the 1970s were also involved in dark government experiments into remote viewing... which is basically demonic. Now, think about the Internet (and especially video on it, live or recorded) and let that thought sit for a bit. As for me and my house, it's a paper Bible every morning to get my head screwed on straight before I reach out to "places" like this!

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