Friendly Reminders, Hostile Errors

Wow, this meme format says a LOT about our society

I feel like I’ve been getting a lot of “friendly reminder”s lately, entirely from strangers on the internet. They come in the form of public social media posts, and I know that they are friendly reminders because they start with the words “friendly reminder that…”, but then all kinds of wild stuff can happen afterwards. A lot of times these friendly reminders can feel bizarrely confrontational and can assert stuff that seems to me to be at-best wildly controversial and at-worst just flat-out wrong.

In case you haven’t seen any of these in your time online I went to Twitter and searched up a few examples (I mostly see them on Instagram but that’s harder to text-search):

A friendly reminder to stop trying so hard for people who don’t care - is your dumb infant demanding too much of you? Taking and taking and taking while never once asking you what you need? They don’t even know your name! Your bald, illiterate, barefoot, unemployed roommate has been taking advantage of women since Day 1, and we’re all sick of it.

Friendly reminder that ‘they’ want you to go electric so that ‘they’ can make you eat nothing but beans out of a can if you fail to comply. I too have identified somewhere above 100% of ‘their’ schemes for me and my life and I appreciate the reminder of this particular scheme, which I had forgotten for just a second before Kevin Sorbo personally brought this pressing matter to my attention. 

Thank you for reminding me that every single human born before me wasted their pathetic so-called lives in delusion and error, and that we’re the first people across all time to get anything right. Things might have gone differently for Lincoln if he were able to recite every stage of the Krebs cycle. Since access to technological expertise is what grants insight into the true nature of Good Constitutions I’m sure that this particular person will happily cede all political authority to Elon Musk. 

I do regret the diversion into unkindness and sarcasm but that’s just what happens to me when I see these damned friendly reminders. If these sorts of posts aren’t ‘friendly reminders’ then what exactly are those words doing? Perhaps they’re just nonsense that can justify anything, but why that nonsense and not some other nonsense? What work are these words in particular doing that gives them their viral power?

Here’s what I think: framing an assertion as a ‘reminder’ makes it seem like something that’s so successful that it’s become part of the taken-for-granted cultural background. And not because we staggered into asserting it in some unreflective way, it’s a ‘reminder’ because it’s something that’s been thought about and accepted and only temporarily forgotten about. It’s a reminder because it’s bringing you home to the proper path. 

While the contents of the ‘reminder’ might not be friendly, framing the reminder itself as ‘friendly’ frames the person who is doing the reminding as a helpful ally of yours. They’re like someone who reminds you to tighten up some loose laces on your skis before hitting the slopes - we all have to look out for each other, we all make mistakes and of course I forgive you but to forget this obvious-but-important procedure would be to court outright disaster. 

Here’s where I have to take us on a quick trip over to Heidegger - in another post I shared about how Heidegger’s whole thing is capital-B Being and how profoundly important it is and how profoundly difficult it is to talk about. One thing Heidegger asserts is that - since capital-B Being is so hard to talk about - every culture winds up taking its own ‘stand’ on Being, filling in the blanks with some implicit understanding of the fundamental significance of existence. E.g., for the Christian West, existence is a reflection of the glory of God - for the modern, secular West, existence is a quantifiable field of spacetime, there to be measured and optimized. Our age is a technological one, where everything that exists is there to be mastered and reshaped for the sake of satisfying our desires. 

When we suffer, we no longer lament our fallen condition and turn to God for relief in eternity - we see our suffering as a result of knowable, fixable social problems, problems which are caused by people who know about these problems but who refuse to fix them because they are evil. 

Perhaps this view of the world is right, factually - what interests me here is not its status as a fact, but as an existential disposition, and how it is constantly affirmed by our particular technologies today. 

We have gotten very very good at using technology to satisfy our desires, including and especially through social media. Satisfying our desires might look like something shallow, like looking at cute puppies for comfort or attractive strangers flirting with the camera for excitement - it can also look agitating, like when we are presented with a relentless parade of injustice that drives us wild with anger but that affirms us as moral agents. Your enemies are everywhere and are terribly powerful and terribly cruel, you are the beautiful and noble underdog and so very just in your resistance to them and their tyranny. Also, your enemies are so obviously stupid and so obviously weak, they blow over in a strong breeze, they run scared if you so much as look at them funny, all with eyes to see know that the time is NOW to strike against them. Also, you are perfect in your moral virtue, anyone who says no to you is the worst human alive, your asshole boss should double your salary and then commit suicide. And this is all a friendly reminder! This is all stuff that Everybody Already Knows, the good ones anyway, and anyone who denies any of this is at least a little bit of a disregardable failure as a human being.

What’s frustrating to me is that there are some really, really important insights that to me have occurred as ‘reminders’. I have been ‘reminded’ that we use ‘is’ a lot without really thinking about what ‘is’ is, that we use language for a hell of a lot more than just naming things and asserting facts. The philosophical experiences of greatest depth for me have felt like moments of returning home, not made possible by any ironclad argument as much as a simple invitation to pay attention to my life and to all the phenomena in it. 

So, too, here, I have no sociological studies or rigorous conceptual analyses to point to about ‘friendly reminders’ or whatever. All I really have is a way of looking at them, and an invitation to try that way on and to see what opens up for you. 

What I hope opens up is a small opportunity for us, as technological beings, to slowly stop abusing each other.