On Modern Spell-casting
In today’s world, I have been sucked into the highly stimulating, short-form media. Arrogantly believing myself to be immune to trends and mind-control, alas, I, too, am human: prone to human experiences, mistakes, and shortcomings. Try as I may, willpower alone hasn’t been doing me very good, and my superhero abilities have yet to kick in.
I am designing a system for living that will greatly restrict exposure to highly stimulating, short-form media. The reason I type out “highly stimulating, short-form media” is a part of the system itself. Intentionally reducing short-hand and the usage of acronyms should help with cognitive recovery. The type of media popular today, and perhaps for much of history, seems extremely similar to drugs. It intoxicates the user and the user develops and insidious attachment to that media, increasing exposure over time. This is an attempt to separate.
Earlier this morning, I was preparing food for a local store and the comparison between songs and opium entered my head. The store’s soundtrack was little more than fans, ovens, refrigerator condensers, and occasional chatter from customers. I was able to focus on my task and I felt quite relaxed by the relative silence of the morning. Many public businesses tend to have some kind of music playing at all times.
Music itself has always been used as an agent of control. Cultural memes such as song and dance are researched often from the angle of evolution, noting how populations replicate a meme. And, yes, this is observable. But, substance use also becomes replicated within a population. I grew up in a “tweaker town.” That title is true because people in that town tend to be or become methamphetamine addicts. I have observed the phenomenon first-hand. It is strange to see, but let us not digress nor be morbid. The point is, the people are seeking escape, and to escape is to forgo one’s self, leaving one to have control given to some external object (or, thing). I will expand on this idea more later. The main idea is a needed shift in perception: music usurps the listener’s power in the same manner drugs do. I consider music the equivalent of a casting a spell.
What is a spell? It is an emergence from the non-physical (digital) realm to the physical realm.
Furthermore, I believe all language to be related to spell-weaving and names to be enchantments. In the modern era of smartphones and wearable tech, people attach scrying and hexing devices to their bodies at all times. The music of today is quite terrible, but does well at manipulating large populations.
Reflecting on Gen-Y (Millennials), my generation, we were largely a party generation. We all listened to the same music via the internet. We were linked together in a way previous generations never were. Our lives are largely recorded online, so you can look back and see the evidence. The music we had encouraged partying, excessive alcohol usage, habitual drug usage, and prostitution as examples. My generation as a whole has seen and likely participated in at least one of these pass-times. We can see the death toll from the drug usage. We can see the destroyed families. We can see the online “content creator” accounts on common pornography web-pages, and its normalization.
Interpersonal language in the modern digital age is deteriorating. It is hard to avoid. We don’t read articles. We read headlines. We don’t research. We get AI generated bullet points. We all know the things that go on because we do them (even if we pretend with others that we don’t). What is advancing is the mass spell-casting.
I think of the foot fetish phenomenon of 2020-2021. YouTube had to ban feet on day. Feet became pornographic overnight. Conventions, unrelated to sexual fetishism or sexuality at all, I attended for years prior had attendees engaging in public, erotic foot play. I believe it is related to the pattern of accelerated consumerism with conditions inflicted from mass spell-casting. I use the word condition in the common RPG sense: an effect imposed on a creature which alters its abilities as a result of a spell. Similar conditions such as fear/frightened, deafened, charmed, blinded, and poisoned can be inflicted on targets from a range unprecedented due to the capabilities and presence of modern technology.