In 1966 Alan Watts published "The Book (on the taboo against knowing who you are)" [extracts] ...but 36 years later that taboo is still in full force.
This webpage is about using the Internet to undermine that taboo, with weblogging [info] as one significant weapon, posting to Usenet newsgroups as another, and publishing your research 'live' on the Web as a third.
weblogging
Keeping a weblog of your reading on the Web forces you to commit to some opinion on each link, and publishing that opinion forces you to take full responsibility for it.
The widespread campaign to dismiss webloggers as narcissists is a clearcut demonstration of how the self-knowledge taboo is currently being enforced. Capitalism (in the broadest sense) has no use for original, authentic, self-discovering individuals, because they naturally opt out of the conformist consumer culture. So the profiteers of that culture actively propagandise against self-knowledge, encouraging instead self-distrust and self-hate. ("Ewwww, if you don't fit in with us, you're not hip!")
Because weblogging takes place in an infinite 'namespace'-- ie, nobody is squeezed out even if you take up gigabytes of space-- there's comparatively little territorial harrassment, as compared to traditional publication on paper... and proportionally greater opportunity for experimental risk-taking. (The harrassment you'll get will be limited to email, and will take them a lot more effort to send than it takes you to ignore it!)
journalling
The current fashion in weblogs is diary-heavy and link-light.
The use of journalling for self-discovery is a longstanding and well-studied phenomenon, but traditionally its privacy has been seen as its greatest strength. When you write for the public, you naturally censor and glamorise the truth, which largely defeats the purpose of honest self-discovery.
The discipline of logging every web-article you find interesting and spelling out your reaction takes the journal in a very different direction, because unlike the private life-events of a diary, every weblog-reader can share the exact same experience of reading the web-article, and so know exactly what you're reacting to.
The act of self-censoring also becomes harder to rationalise if you've just read an interesting article, and you find yourself thinking "Dare I admit that I enjoyed this?"
meditation
I think real meditation is about detecting self-deception.
We're all trained by capitalism to lie to ourselves every minute of the day, and these lies all share a subjective 'tone' of 'turning-away-from' or 'burying' or not-looking that you can (and must!) learn to recognise. (See especially J Krishnamurti on this.)
Meditation means finding enough quiet in your daily life to sense this running-away directly, because once you see it you can easily get underneath it and past it.
Learning to write well also involves seeing-thru these self-deceptions, and hearing that tone in your written voice when you're running-away from truth... and writing on the Net, where every class of critic is potentially just a click away, helps focus this.
essays and newsgroups
When I have a reaction that doesn't fit in a line or two, I usually create a webpage or post it to a newsgroup.
Usenet newsgroups seem to me the ultimate interactive forum, infinitely democratic, fast and efficient. (Google Groups or GooJa is not the ideal newsreader, but it suffices, and their archiving-service is invaluable.) Random example: alt.hypertext
But newsgroups are not just democratic, they're also territorial-- perceived as a shared and limited space.
Territoriality on newsgroups takes the form of flaming [info] or more particularly what I call negative intelligence. Over and over you can see the classical educational ideal of individual discovery being sadistically crushed. And learning to withstand this social pressure in newsgroups provides a fine, self-paced training-ground for withstanding the self-knowledge taboo in general.
Newsgroup flamers run the gamut from homeless psychos to celebrity PhDs. (This free-for-all quality should ultimately prove to be Usenet's greatest strength.) But the academics are by far the scariest, because their dishonesty is shaping the next generation!
the dishonorable professions
Academia and the law often reward obfuscation as a way of making trivialities more impressive, and lies more credible.
But web-hypertext is useful to the degree that it resists obfuscation, instead laying out its insights as clearly as possible.
live research
I've described weblogging as 'reading in public', and I see the next step as 'learning in public'-- doing web-based research and posting your evolving notes publicly. [more]
Because every controversial flavor of viewpoint is now represented on the Web, creating resource-overview pages [info] that honestly try to integrate all viewpoints, becomes a powerful strategy for discovering weak assumptions in your own perspective.
The process of building a page on a given topic may involve recording your resource-discoveries 'live' as you go, gradually discovering the 'topic map' [more] of all resources available.
the experimental lifestyle
In order to learn efficiently, you have to be completely honest about what you don't know.
An enormous amount of Usenet flaming takes the form "you're stupid" and so discourages risk-taking honesty, even in the ideally simple form of asking questions or sharing partial knowledge.
Applying this principle to your life, and not just your writings, demands that one follow the artist's road-less-travelled. [more]
autobiography
Another goal you might work towards is online autobiography. [more]
I find this artistically overwhelming, myself.
AI
Paradoxically, the 'Semantic Web' movement is forcing computer scientists to confront their own lack of self-knowledge. (By analogy with the 'event horizon' of black holes, this lack can be called the self-knowledge horizon.)
Defining a universal ontology will require defining explicit categories for every variety of human experience [more], and every step in this direction must tighten the noose around the conspiracy of self-deception.
As you compile a webpage about a historical period, integrating all resources on that period, you have to seek the most detached and objective viewpoint if you're going to arrange these elegantly. Out of this effort, comes wisdom...
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