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Abstract

Friction Forges: identity and community

Although we have forgotten ourselves, we have lot lost ourselves. Base reality is always there to remind us of where we came from, and what we've been given. In the world of information we attempt to speak ourselves into existence - but that has already be done. Our role is not so much to speak as to do - to embody through ritual the speech of Another. To do, we must grapple with the friction inherent not only in doing, but in becoming as well.

Outline

Memory (callback to 01)

  • Forgetting ourselves means forgetting our father (HF 24, 25)

Doing vs saying

  • In the simulation, we do nothing, and therefore are nothing
  • Embracing the physical, which contains our memory (HF 188)
  • Story (HF 40)
  • Ritual (Jonathan Pageau Zero Hour 87)
  • "living models" (Dreher 116)
  • "Spiritual arms" (Poulos, 73)
  • Embracing imperfection (HF 54)

Doing stuff is hard

  • By engaging with everything all at once, we are committing ourselves to less
    • "We would prefer not to" (Barba-Kay 69, 165, 166)
  • "Perfect usefulness is to capture our attention by allowing us to act on it... Attention is not neutral. It is the act by which we confer meaning on things and by which we discover that they are meaningful." (Barba-Kay, 63, lots more there, more on 64)
  • "To express the necessary friction between the present and the future - this is the stewardship of the world." (Barba-Kay 86)

Relationships are hard (Pablo, Scott Mann)

  • "To the extent that we can express unqualified approbation of any 'community'... is it also a sign that we don't inhabit a real one." (Barba-Kay 96)
  • "That such associations should then seek to mimic or simulate the experience of rooted belonging, that we should wax rosy about 'community' as an unadulturated good are all symptoms of the sentimentalization of the freedom to be bound that we specifically lack online." (Barba-Kay 98, 102)
  • "Sheryl Sandberg can assert that 'faith organizations and social media are a natural fit because fundamentally both are about connection' - a vacuous statement on its own merits, but one suggesting how easily the neutrality of the platform can be thought of as somehow encompassing doctrinal differences under the category of "connection", thereby neutralizing them and colonizing them. (Barba-Kay 220)
  • "By allowing us to be in frequent contact at a distance, online associations make it easier to move away." (Barba-Kay 99, 102)
  • "All manner of new digital community platforms are, for all these reasons, not simply simulating offline communities, but helping dissolve them - and then selling the narcotic self-indulgence of 'belonging' back to their users." (103)