Disclaimer: this post is not about RPGs, my project, or related topics, so feel free to skip it.
"The Audience" (1991) by James Hoff
I should have written an update about the project, but I got distracted by a "restack": a member I follow reposted something that gave me chills. Before explaining the details, to avoid any controversy, let me make one thing clear: I have no interest in speaking ill of someone I don't know. I want to use this post as a case, so let's call the author of the restacked post Mr. X .
Mr. X has a Substack with 20k subscribers! I’ll never reach those numbers, but that's another story. I mention the number of subscribers just to give a dimension of the phenomenon. Mr. X wrote a post similar to this one—somewhat cryptic, like a poem, but not really:
"Sometimes bananas are green.
Sometimes bananas are brown, almost black.
Most of the time, bananas are yellow."
Mr. X got over 3k likes, and thousands of comments and restacks. I'm stunned. I understand that studies show that using PCs, mobile phones, and generally devices connected to the internet harms the brain. But this case makes my legs tremble: in a couple of generations, we’ll be like zombies in front of a screen, finding beauty in things much worse than what Mr. X just wrote. And let me repeat: I have nothing against Mr. X; in fact, I admire his courage to write things like this and be appreciated for it.
Maybe I’m wrong, in fact, I’m certainly wrong, but:
I believe that if my Substack has fewer than 100 subscribers, it means there aren’t many people interested in what I write, but the ones who are subscribed matter to me because they are genuinely interested!
I don’t know if I’d be happy to have 2,000 subscribers, knowing that only 100 are genuinely interested (the others are the ones who leave like on posts similar to Mr. X’s one).
I would love to find more curious, thoughtful, even challenging (because they disagree) minds, instead of this mechanism that crushes brain cells with no chance of recovery.
Given the situation, I humbly apologize if anyone feels offended by this rant.
I’ll leave you with a solution, a recipe to save ourselves from this future: one request, or rather, a prayer: please read (carefully!) a small 80-page book, it's The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis. That is the possible cure to our disease.
Please, please, please read it!
You’ll gain two huge benefits: you’ll understand the point of my post, and you might get off the path leading to mental flattening.
Thank you and to you a great weekend!
(I will be back with my beloved project soon!)