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First, I'd like to add a little update to my post on FODMAP intolerance. I've started occasionally using digestive enzymes and that's been helping some residual issues I've had. If I go out for dinner, it's hard for me to control every single little ingredient in my food so I can end up feeling ill after a great night out. I started taking some digestive enzymes for the FODMAPs I have issues with and it's great!

The other thing I've started is guided meditation specifically for IBS/stress-induced gut issues. My autumn has been so unbelievably stressful that I've reached The Wall that you can’t pass because to do so will tip you over the god. damned. edge. I can't really go into the issues I've been dealing with, but there have been several. And when one that has been going on for close to a year was finally resolved last week, my car got a flat tire and WAS IN THE GARAGE FOR FOUR DAYS OVER THE WEEKEND AND OMG WHY DON'T YOU HAVE TIRES IN STOCK??? I'm not yet sure if the meditation is helping just because my issues are so stressful and ongoing that it's going to take a lot to cut through that... but I'm trying.

Anyway, I had a lot of feedback from people from that post and have heard from people who have given up wheat and feel loads better. If you feel tired and rundown or have 'funny' digestive issues, maybe it’s wheat. Of course, it's possible that it isn't just wheat that is your issue, but cutting it out for a while would be a way to see how you feel before having an in-depth look at your diet. Again, read up on FODMAPs at Monash University and see if makes sense to you. Your doctor should be able to refer you to a nutritionist who can provide proper guidance.

Now... to the really important stuff...

Why are people so fucking stupid?

There are a lot of ways one could attempt to answer that, but right now I'm going to go with the idea that people haven't worked out that the Web isn't the real world and this is making them behave like fools. A lot of people seem to think that if, like in the real world, they see something in front of them on the web, it's actually there. They’re the 21st century version of people running from the train on the cinema screen. They've confused fantasy with reality. They've confused desires with substance. They've confused illusions and delusions with the physical world.

Thirty years ago, we all had a deep, but unspoken, understanding of how we all exist in two different worlds. There is the shared, physical world – the world that has the moons of Jupiter, the Mariana Trench, Disneyland and you sitting there on your laptop – and our own private, unique, internal worlds that exist only in our own minds. I will refer to the former as the Real World.

It used to be that we could read a newspaper report about current events and understand that the events being described by the writer took place in the Real World. There was an understanding that the reporter was trying to convey the events in an unbiased, rational way, as best they could. The reporter felt no pressure to convey whether they agreed or disagreed with the events. Of course, different newspapers would have different angles, but journalists worked hard to uncover information and find at least two independent witnesses or sources of information that could confirm the events happened in the same way. Their written copy would then go through an editing process, which would involve more fact-checking before going to print. Even if, as a reader, we didn’t know the daily minutiae of what was involved in being a newspaper reporter, we all had a general understanding that the news we read had been through a thorough process- from commissioning the article, to gathering evidence, to writing, to editing, to the layout with the stories deemed most important by the editor at the front of the paper – and we were reading something that was as close a description of what actually happened as was possible. We were reading the newspaper industry’s attempt to describe ‘objective reality’.

Fast forward thirty years.

Most of us get our news online (73% in the UK) compared to newspapers (17% in the UK⁠). Already you know there is a physically different way we read things online compared to how we read a newspaper. We hold a newspaper with two hands, held apart, opening up our chest and keeping up our head. It’s hard to slouch forward and down when reading a newspaper. We tend to read a newspaper from the front to the back, from left to right. When we read things online, we aren’t able to methodically go through the whole of the daily news from front to back- there is no front or back on a website. Online we are less likely to stumble upon a new story about a topic we aren’t already interested in than we are when reading a newspaper. Online, we may choose an article we are interested in from the home page and will then be provided with links to related stories, though they usually will be stories from days, weeks or even months previously that feature the same people, they won’t be new stories from today. Sometimes, we will be offered stories from the same local area or the same country, but again they will rarely be current. In order to see more of ‘today’s news’, we usually need to go back to the homepage that is constantly changing which stories it features. Or we could click on the ‘top stories’, which are often only ‘top stories’ because a lot of people have read them, not because the editor thinks they are important stories to read.

Maybe you follow journalists or newspapers on social media so that you have a bunch of different links to click on from lots of different news sites. These stories have been chosen by others rather than you stumbling upon them by chance in the newspaper. Newspapers’ social media accounts, of course, will want to share stories that will get the most Likes and then clicks through because the newspaper receives more money from advertisers based on the number of clicks they get on their site. Because newspapers rely more and more on internet-based advertising to pay their bills they sometimes employ writers that are less 'journalists' than they are 'activist clickbait writers' (*sideeye at you, The Guardian*), whose ridiculous and ill-informed opinions will get a lot of rage clicks, which will in turn get more ‘eyeballs’ on the ads. Newspapers online no longer are attempting to convey 'objective reality', their whole aim is attracting an audience who will pay their bills simply by clicking on their site and being served up ads.

Half of the people in the UK who get “the news” online, get it directly from social media. You choose the people that you follow on social media and the algorithm chooses what you see from them based on the kinds of things you have already shown an interest in. You will be choosing people to follow based on whether or not they make you feel relaxed, happy, cosy and comfortable. You will not, for the most part, be choosing to follow people who challenge, anger or upset you. If you do choose to follow people you disagree with, this will often be in order to further confirm your own beliefs. And everyone you follow is doing the same thing. You are not seeing anything even slightly approaching ‘objective reality’. You are being fooled. Or are you fooling yourself?

Us when looking at the web.

Also, on your phone you have your email, your calendar, your clock, your social media accounts, your banking apps, your weather app, your health apps, music apps, shopping apps, gaming apps... If your house is nerdy like ours, you also have the apps that run your house- lights, heating, security system – and your car… There are a lot of things other than ‘the news’ that can occupy your time on your phone. If you are jumping from an email a friend sent you late last night, to your food logging app, to your calendar to check what time your meetings are today, to your social media, it all feels like everything takes place in the same space… that space beyond the screen…

So, I get it. It's difficult for us to conceptually separate out the spaces we're holding in our hands.. What is real and what isn't? When you click 'off' on a light in your Hue app, it turns off the light right in front of you, but when you click Like under a post, what exactly does it do?

Philosopher Byung-Chul Han says in 'Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power':

"As a subjectivation-apparatus, the smartphone works like a rosary– which, because of its ready availability, represents a handheld device too. Both the smartphone and the rosary serve the purpose of self-monitoring and control. Power operates more effectively when it delegates surveillance to discrete individuals. Like is the digital Amen. When we click Like, we are bowing down to the order of domination. The smartphone is not just an effective surveillance apparatus; it is also a mobile confessional. Facebook is the church– the global synagogue (literally, ‘assembly’) of the Digital."

"Wait!" you might be saying, "I enjoy getting Likes on my posts. It makes me feel like there are real people out there who appreciate what I say. It makes me feel good... There isn't any kind of 'order of domination' - whatever the hell that is - going on. It's just an easy way to acknowledge that you enjoy or agree with something someone has said."

So is, in certain circles, saying Amen.

Amen.

Another way of thinking of the Like button is as phatic communication- it's like saying 'uh-huh' on the phone so that the other person knows we're still there or engaging in small talk at a party full of strangers. The words themselves carry no real value, but we do it to keep our interactions running smoothly. There is, of course, a use in phatic exchanges. They are a kind of social glue, keeping us connected, but they aren't to be taken literally or seriously. When you're asked 'How are you?' when you bump into an old friend on the street, they aren't actually interested in hearing about the issues you're having with a colleague at work that are making you consider applying for a job elsewhere. When you meet someone at a picnic and they say 'We're so lucky with the weather today', they aren't seriously interested in a detailed discussion about weather fronts. When someone signs a letter 'yours faithfully' they don't literally mean they are yours...

To base your self worth - or the value of someone else's post - based on the number of Likes is similar to tallying up the number of phatic exchanges like 'uh-huh', 'yep', 'ok' you hear when talking on the phone and thinking that the higher the number you receive the... I don't know... the better at talking you are?? That would change how you speak on the phone. You might start leaving a lot of silences in order to force the other person to say something so that you can put another tick on the list of 'Number of times someone has acknowledged that I exist'. Online everything is changing because of our belief in a "real value" of a Like.

It's strange, isn't it, that we've all - from you posting about baking squash muffins on Facebook to national institutions - started changing how we communicate with each other because, like an addict, we're all chasing Likes. I wonder how long it will take for this to change?

And yet here I am, like a fool, coming to the end of my post, thinking ‘If I don’t get any Likes because of this rant, then how will I know that anyone actually, well, likes this??’ But back in the Real World, I know that I’m terrible at small talk. It makes me uncomfortable, so don’t hit Like and make it all awkward for me. Please. Instead tell me how you actually are or tell me everything you know about weather fronts. Tell me something real…

Just don’t Like this post.