Escaping The Cave

“There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.”  “Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.” -Lippmann. At 35:25: The difference between clever & smart and more on the DIKW pyramid and what happens when citizens ignore corrupt data. 

The first 35-minutes: 

- Justin Amash and the criticism from the left.

- Mueller's fumble and the Democrat's ensuing demand that he star in their 2020 reality show/campaign ad.

- To Impeach or not Impeach: just do it or STFU!

- Democrats are politically impotent to stop anything Trump does. How does that "protest vote" look now?  

More: www.escapingthecave.com

Subscribe: iTunes and Google Play 

Technology enables, and social media perpetuates, informational anarchy and prioritizes the cheap appearance of knowledge over fostering knowledge itself.  Also, how the Internet changes cognition and the abandonment of expertise to the holy opinion: "my ignorance is equal to  your knowledge."

Also: 

-The DIKW pyramid and drowning in data.

-The Id on Parade, the natural state of man, and Leviathan.  

-What happens when reasonable voices abandon the public square to mindless mobs of roving avatars?

-When avatars attack

-A classic full-frontal Toddzilla rant salvaged from The Lost Episode about Twitter, and more.  

Elias Aboujaode's Virtually You: 

https://www.amazon.com/Virtually-You-Dangerous-Powers-Personality/dp/0393340546

Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: 

https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750

Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death: 

https://www.amazon.com/Amusing-Ourselves-Death-Discourse-Business/dp/014303653X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1558613196&sr=1-1

Need more Toddzilla?

Unsophisticated media consumers and the failure to take personal responsibility for our own intellectual maintenance. The surrender of the individual's intellectual autonomy to the conformist mob. How mobs-cells no longer need to leave the couch and are now free to anonymously molest & terrorize the "other" via Twitter, Facebook, and their phones.

Also:

• Social Media Influencers and how the Media 101 Model applies to them

Need more Toddzilla?

Haidt's elephant and how it relates to our constitutional crisis, rising authoritarianism, and our likely dystopian future. "Evolution didn't end with opposable thumbs."

• The thin veneer of civilization

Also visit: www.christophermedia.net

Parties, their power-first representatives and constituents, fundamentalist ideologues, extremists, etc. are failing everyone.

Government institutions are melting down and the faith of the governed along with it.

Hey! What could possibly go wrong?!?

Need more Toddzilla?

1) Seek help.

2) Click the links. You can listen on your way to therapy.

More episodes/subscribe: www.escapingthecave.com

Confused as to why your righteous demands aren't being met? Behold! 

• Narratives, mythology, religion, and how they bind us together

www.escapingthecave.com

https://soundcloud.com/toddzillax

Use as directed. 

Are you wondering why every source of "news" and information sucks? It's because everyone from MSNBC to NPR to FOX to Alex Jones to Social Media "Influencers" operate according to the same for-profit model: drawing eyeballs to their product to sell someone else's.

The re-resurrection begins by re-laying the foundation. More on the way.

Need more Toddzilla?

1) Seek help.

2) Click the links. You can listen on your way to therapy.

More episodes/subscribe: www.escapingthecave.com

First Social Media Disease antibiotic treatment. Starting with an X-Pod flashback to 2014, Todd discusses Cambridge Analytica before turning to more recent effects of our collective addiction to social media on society and how a bilateral abandonment of a commitment to basic common facts--in favor of tasty propaganda--is having a dehumanizing effect and rapidly eroding the social contract. Also: cyber space monkeys, avatars showing off for each other in the Matrix, and the digital-organic hybrid: meme belching Cyborgs.

Need more Toddzilla? First, seek help. Second, click the links below. You can listen on your way to therapy.

More episodes/subscribe: www.escapingthecave.com

Recorded shortly after Robin Williams committed suicide in 2014, this was one of the most popular episodes from the old podcast. It covers many topics Friar Chris and I discussed in the previous podcasts, including the fraud of "normal", misguided identity, the emptiness of success, depression, and the performers need for praise and validation. Some of the early ideas surrounding the Social Media Disease such as personal “branding” and virtual facades are here as well as kernels of things that will become familiar to the regular listener, such as The Marrow of Humanity.

More episodes/subscribe: www.escapingthecave.com

The final episode of the Friar Chris Series begins with a discussion about the differences between bicycle touring and backpacking then moves on to deeper topics, including (@ 15:45) my experience volunteering on the Gulf Coast in the immediate aftermath of Katrina and the corrosive and corrupting effects of tribalism and dogma in the Disaster Relief Industrial Complex. We then move on to (mostly) explore the fundamental ideas behind why he and I chose hitchhiking and what we learned and experienced while traveling the country as “disposable” vagabonds loitering out on the fringe. SPOILER ALERT: Sausage Party Hope lies within!

Cheat Sheet:

36:40 - Institutional incompetence, the loss of confidence leading to the rage that we found everywhere in 2008-9 which, ultimately, gave birth to Tea Party Extremism.

50:28 - The philosophy/theology of a guiding hand synchronicity operating system, audacity, and the (unresolvable?) conflict between unprovable theology and a commitment to truth.

1:04:10 - The driving fundamentals including freedom (and the resulting paradox), the search for purpose, the fear hump/internal narrative feedback loop.

1:38:50 - The re-humanizing effect of organic interaction and the authenticity one can witness when playing the role of the culturally invisible man.

1:49:55 - Hopping the freight train.

1:56:30 - The surprise of a pervasive, unexplained, and unsolicited, generosity.

2:04:40 - The folly of depending on distorting electronic eyes. (Internet/media)

2:15 - Egocentric Identity and the pain of re-birth

2:16 - The Return, The Call/Splinter, and how these ideas transcend mythology and religion

2:28:30 - On Chris McCandless 10-years later

More episodes/subscribe: www.escapingthecave.com