Steemit Is Out Of Control
So, I started watching season 2 of Mr. Robot tonight, One of the best TV shows ever, absolutely. Anyway, it was really tripping me out. Mainly because of this part where Elliot’s father tells him that, “Control is an illusion.”
The idea that control is an illusion happened to be exactly what I was getting at in [this post] (https://steemit.com/writing/@kendewitt/the-false-promise-of-steemit). Of course I’m coming at it from a different angle, from within a lucid dream. But as I started to see other parallels, it started to trip me out even more and also disappointed me a bit that someone else had gotten to my idea first. I felt threatened for a moment, as if all the work I’ve been putting into my writing, most of which I haven’t even put out there yet, has been a waste of my energy.
Not that I’m really the first with this idea. There’s nothing new under the sun. And as I thought about it, I realized that this idea that control is an illusion has been around for a very long time, and has played a part in a lot of movies and other forms of storytelling. And it will come back, as so many tropes and themes and characters do, in different forms, flavors, and names. Like this
Control is an illusion. Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t. If it is, it’s certainly an interesting illusion, isn’t it? I mean, what would we do without it? Maybe we’d be watching the world go by, doing everything we normally do, and seeing the things we normally see, but without the stress of thinking and worrying about the outcome. Kind of like, I don’t know, intelligent machines?
But maybe it’s more fun to be emotionally involved in outcomes. To feel emotion, to have dramatic experiences, to buy into your own story.
And then, what about the idea that we can even control whether we believe that control is an illusion? Do you believe it? Did you make the decision to believe it, or did it just impose itself on the neural network in your skull? Either way, the idea is invalidated. Control can’t be an illusion.
But absolute control, that’s got to be an illusion. I mean, you can spin the roulette wheel, but you don’t get to choose where it stops. That’s controlled by randomness, quantum wave function collapse, or something else beyond human capabilities.
So I guess there are just some things you can control and some you can’t. And I’ve just told you in a longwinded way what you probably already knew. Sorry you wasted your time reading this post. Unless you didn’t, in which case, you have some explaining to do.
And then there’s Steemit, the new roulette wheel of internet fame and fortune. But thankfully, instead of handing control over to complete randomness, we are handing it over to a like-minded crowd, with basically the same hopes that we have. And if we stay with it, maybe we’ll find out that we have more control than we think.
So, are you gonna spin it a few times and give up when you lose? Or are you gonna ride the wheel to the end, and see what happens when you give up a little control?
Published on Hive on 2016-07-15. View the original post and discussion on Hive.