#n the system as a whole has had related intrusive thoughts n paranoia for as long as we can remember

[kindacreepy-kindaugly]

weirdest fucking shit to fixate over but we just keep comin back to it huh

tmi in the tags probably

[albatris]

Hello hope you're well on this Saturday may I ask what the deepest fears of each of the ATDAO cast members is, thank you and goodnight

oh you’re just gonna dive right in with the hard-hitting questions I see

thank you for the ask!!

under the cut because rambles, of course, I literally do not know how to be concise I’m so sorry, you probably already knew this was coming HAHAHA

Tris’s deepest fear aside from Literally Everything In The Universe would be uhhhhh....... being somehow responsible for harm coming to the people he cares about? either directly or indirectly. I think on a big scale the whole concept of the butterfly effect stresses him out hahaha. on a small scale, he spends a lot of time stressing about his friends and family, he has a lot of intrusive thoughts about what horrible things could potentially happen to them, he worries about accidentally hurting them, etc. etc.

n I haven’t really talked in depth all that much about the specifics of Tris’s psychosis, but there’s definitely aspects of it that become pretty intense and aggressive in terms of commands and orders and “some terrible and/or violent thing will happen to your friend / sister / neighbour if you don’t do this thing”, lots of prickly parts of it that like to make threats to his safety and the safety of the people around him if he attempts to ignore or resist them. so even on good days he’s got this constant background-hum anxiety that if he chooses to disobey something or if he misinterprets a sign or if he steps out of line, his loved ones are going to be punished for it, which is just.............. a lot

a fear of helplessness and a lack of control also factors into it, like, ever since he was very very very small he’s had this idea ingrained that you can do literally everything right and the universe can still squash you like a bug at any second, n he had absolutely no way to even begin processing that in a healthy way so it just manifested in the fact that he pretty much only ever feels safe when he’s accounted for every tiny detail and is following very specific routines and has left as little room as possible for anything unexpected to catch him off guard. he’s got these rules and systems and rituals he clings to ‘cause they offer him some illusion of safety and control even though they kind of........ won’t actually do anything to stop the universe fucking his shit up

Noa’s is................. I’m not sure if “being left behind” really covers it

if we’re talking in a real broad big scale sense, I think it’s a fear of being forgotten or brushed over or not being seen, or more, people refusing to see her? it’s a fear of, like, fighting her hardest to make noise and be seen and the world just completely and utterly turning its back on her. she’s spent a whole lot of her life trying to carve out a space for herself and make her voice heard, n between illness and financial difficulties and a piece of shit dad, she and her mum have struggled to stay afloat in systems that have just consistently, consistently failed them and whose best advice is “just try harder” and “we can’t help you if you don’t help yourself”

and, like, Noa’s very full of rage about it and has made some restless peace with the fact that she has to look out for herself and the people she cares about, because no one in any position of power is gonna throw them a stick, but it’s not something she’s comfortable with and it’s a horribly alienating and frightening experience

n I guess a fear of being left behind does play out on an interpersonal level too, though it’s not really in the same vein as the other stuff? I’ve talked a lot in the past about how she’s resistant to people getting close to her ‘cause she’s got a lot of paranoia and fear and doesn’t wanna be vulnerable, but there’s also just............ a whole lot of impostor syndrome in the friendships she already has, she’s always on some level convinced that she’s somehow tricked people into liking her and one day they’re gonna wake up and realise she’s not all that special or that nice or that fun to be around. I don’t think she really views herself as someone who’s allowed to be loved just for who she is, or that “who she is” is someone who already has value or anything to bring to the table in terms of friendship

Shara’s deepest fear is the idea that there really is Absolutely No Meaning To Any Of This

that the universe is all just chaos with no purpose and no direction, that there are no bigger forces at play, that there’s nothing good and right and loving at the centre of it all, that it’s all just chance and machinery and completely unfeeling

I think one of the main ways she processes the world and is able to feel safe given the collapsing nature of reality is her desperate and adamant belief that There Has To Be An Answer, that it’s all something that can be untangled and solved, and that if she can manage to figure it out then she’ll be able to make some peace with it and things will make sense again

there’s a lot of stuff from her past that she has no real closure for, particularly the loss of one of her close childhood friends as a result of some unfortunate interdimensional fuckery, and she’s still trying to sort out her feelings about it and find a way to live her life in relation to it, she’s still trying to find a way that something so cruel can make sense

Kai has............................ a lot of fear. many many fear. I will not talk about all of it. I will talk about two of it

one of the main ones is this idea that the only reason they try so hard to care so much and help people and have a positive impact on the people around them is because deep down they don’t actually care at all, that they’ve kind of just fooled everyone into thinking they’re a good person when in reality they’re the worst, they’re a liar and a fraud

which is just kind of......... I mean, they’re not really someone who’s ever considered their own mental health at length so they haven’t really got any point of reference for what’s happening to them post-time-loop, which is basically just. panic attacks, dissociative episodes, blacking out for days at a time, not recognising themself in the mirror, feeling completely numb, not even fully convinced that this is even real life. all very understandable reactions to what they’ve just been through

but definitely the thing that hits them the hardest is the fact that they can look at the people they’re supposed to love and care about and just not feel anything at all, which fuckin terrifies them. they spend a lot of time in crisis about it, feeling like they’re an actor trying to play the part of their own life, they’re doing what they think they’re supposed to but they’re just completely disconnected

(they eventually open up to Noa about it in a full breakdown and are like “I’m a terrible person” and she’s just like “you’re traumatised you fucking dumbass let’s get you some therapy”)

and on equal footing to this and one that deserves a mention is the fact that they’ve been psyching themself up to Go Back Home for the past year and then psyching themself out again, repeat x infinity. A Lot Fucking Changed in the years Kai was gone, and their family had a funeral for them and mourned them and had to deal with all the grief and the fallout of losing their sibling / child / family member and their mum broke down in a real bad way and they’ve all spent the past seven years trying to claw their way back to anything resembling a normal life

and Kai is kinda A) unsure whether it would be selfish of them to try and re-enter their lives now, whether it would be disruptive and confusing and more pain than it’s worth given how much work they’ve put into trying to move on and create a new normal and B) fucking terrified that they won’t even know these people anymore because they’ve all changed so much and Kai hasn’t, they’re not going to fit here or be welcome anymore, and that no matter how much they try to return to normal they’re never going to have a home again

and that is just

kind of a :( note to end on but here we are, at the end

thanks for coming to my ted talk?

!!! thank u for reading if you read this far in my rambling please have an excellent night

[schaferj]

Preamble, Raison d`être

​We live in an era of disruption in which powerful global forces are changing how we live and work. ​As a global community we face​ climate change and the consequences of global warming; resource scarcity – particularly for energy, minerals and freshwater; societal ageing, as life expectancy increases and birth rates concurrently fall; a growing surplus of global poor who form an ever-larger ‘unnecessariat’; and, perhaps most critically, a new machine age which will herald ever-greater technological unemployment as progressively more physical and cognitive labour is performed by machines, rather than humans. O​ n an individual Level we face another challenge. Since Information Wants To Be Free t​ he internet has become our primary source of knowledge and guidance. What used to be ​the idea of a decentralized stateless society in which people interact with purely voluntary ideological and moral transactions​ ​is gone and the virtual space has become another battlefield. ​Our vision is increasingly universal, but our agency is ever more reduced. We know more and more about the world, while being less and less able to do anything about it. I​ f we find that play is based on the manipulation of certain images, on a certain "imagination" of reality (i.e. its conversion into images), then our main concern will be to grasp the value and significance of these images and their "imagination".

Our left behind traces are the currency in which we pay for our curiosity. ​Data is an asset, an asset that grows in value through use. A single person’s data is not very valuable. Combining the data generated by thousands of people is a completely different story. Coupling that with data generated in different situations, combining datasets, creates new insights and value for different actors and stakeholders. Marx had revealed the danger of the profit motive as the sole basis of an economic system: capitalism is always in danger of inspiring men to be more concerned about making a living than making a life. U​ nfortunately​ there is massive propaganda for everyone to consume. Consumption is good for profits and consumption is good for the political establishment.

In 2018, the Oxfam report said that the wealth gap continued to widen in 2017, with 82% of global wealth generated going to the wealthiest 1%. The 2019 Oxfam report said that the poorest half of the human population has been losing wealth (around 11%) at the same time that a billionaire is minted every two days.

Fake news travels faster and further on social media sites. Algorithm-driven news distribution platforms have reduced market entry costs and widened the market reach for news publishers and readers. At the same time, they separate the role of content editors and curators of news distribution. The latter becomes algorithm-driven, often with a view to maximize traffic and advertising revenue. That weakens the role of trusted editors as quality intermediaries and facilitates the distribution of false and fake news content.

The resulting sense of helplessness, rather than giving us pause to reconsider our assumptions, seems to be driving us deeper into paranoia and social disintegration: more surveillance, more distrust, an ever-greater insistence on the power of images and computation to rectify a situation that is produced by our unquestioning belief in their authority.

Mobile technology has spread rapidly around the globe. Today, it is ​estimated​ that more than 5 billion people have mobile devices, and over half of these connections are smartphones.​ ​Today, if you don’t bring your phone along it’s like you have missing limb syndrome. It feels like something’s really missing. We’re already partly a cyborg or an AI symbiote, essentially it’s just that the

data rate to the electronics is slow.​ In some sense we have ​become screens for giant displays.​ This screen is established by the submersion of the individual in a flux of disparate messages, with no hierarchies of principles - ​a ​flat​ s​ urface,​ on which p​ ictures or words are s​ hown​. We`re all products of our environment, therefore we need to consider how screens affect us. For instance we should look at the flat nature of screens. ​Two dimensional thinking implies concepts that are flat or only partially representative of the whole. Three dimensional thinking implies the first part of 2d thinking conjoined with intersecting dimensions rendering a deeper field of meaning.

On the other hand ​it’s not how long we’re using screens that really matters; it’s how we’re using them and what’s happening in our brains in response. ​So what happens now, that we move less around just by ourselves, that we spend more time in public transport and soon in self driving cars, always linked to our devices? ​As tranquillity vanishes, the “gift of listening” goes missing, as does the “community of listeners.” Our community of activity [Aktivgemeinschaft] stands diametrically opposed to such rest. The “gift of listening” is based on the ability to grant deep, contemplative attention—which remains inaccessible to the hyperactive ego. Screen addiction is real.

If one only possessed the positive ability to perceive (something) and not the negative ability not to perceive (something), one’s senses would stand utterly at the mercy of rushing, intrusive stimuli and impulses. In such a case, no “spirituality” would be possible. If one had only the power to do (something) and no power not to do, it would lead to fatal hyperactivity​.

What we miss is time for contemplation, to listen to all senses of our bodies. Since ​we know, that the visual part of our brain is the dominant part of and if you can get it`s attention and get it on your message it talks the rest of your brain into anything you want it to. However it is the one sense which gets triggered in particular by the two dimensional screen.

The body is nothing but the fundamental phenomenon, to which, as a necessary condition, all sensibility, and consequently all thought, relates in the present state of our existence​ meaning the body is the door to our world and the overuse of one in particular warps the general perception and further what we make of it.

This becomes even more immanent when thinking on relationship and discussion. You cannot not communicate. ​Every behavior is a kind of communication. Because behavior does not have a counterpart (there is no anti-behavior), it is not possible not to communicate. ​Therefore we miss important parts of a message, if it gets reduced to its verbality, meaning relationship and communication cannot be as strong as we wish them to be. Something is missing.

In an age when drugs or psychological techniques can be used to control a person's actions, the problem of free control over one's body is no longer a matter of protection against physical restraint.​ One must reclaim connection to his or her body in order to truly communicate - And speak about his or her body in order to understand his or her true perspective on this world.