English is so full of violence. It’s a fight, a struggle, a war, to verb. Any value of “verb” will do. People fighting and dying, or going to verb or die trying. The language is almost as full of violent sayings as it is phrases taken from the Bible. Go a day and count how many times you say something that came from the Bible, and realize that no matter how much you don’t believe, you can’t avoid quoting scripture. Or talking about some kind of violence.

Here in the United States, we’ve had wars on terrorism and drugs and poverty and science and education, on top of all the military conflicts. (so, so many military conflicts. It’s like war is the only thing we even try to do.)

The only war that includes violence and is worth fighting is between two species that exist in different dimensions*. Biological creatures on one side, memetic creatures on the other. It is absolutely ethical and justified to kill a meme. I’d go so far as to say it’s our duty, when we find a hostile meme, to gang up on it, torture it to death, and display its corpse in the public square.

One of the most dangerous of the memes–the Hitler of memes, if you will–is the idea that by killing the right people, we can somehow make the world a better place. It’s diabolical. It keeps humans fighting each other and ignoring the creatures who are actively hurting us.

If only they would see… we actually do need to go to war, but not with people, not with nations. We don’t need to commit genocide, we need to commit memocide.

(* I mean “dimensions” in the popular, non-scientific sense; I mean it as a different place, or even a different kind of place, built on a different set of substrates than constitutes our Universe.)

The Internet has a broad range. At the very, very top, you have sites and groups dedicated to spreading positivity and pro-sociality however they can. Most of the places people spend most of their time are essentially neutral. And then there are the dark places.

There is no bottom to the Internet. It goes down forever. This is not a property of the Internet, however: it is a property of humanity. There is an upper limit to how good we can be, but there is no bound on our potential for evil.

Previous generations have been able to mostly ignore their darker sides. That’s a two-edged sword. Facing demons isn’t fun. On the other hand, the consequences of a society that hasn’t faced its demons could be disasterous.

In a mostly successful attempt to make the Internet a more accessible place for people with language barriers (including some disabilities), emoji have become part of Unicode, and expanded far beyond the limits of sanity.

Before emoji, there were emoticons. We had Latin-1 (and called it ASCII) and we made do with sideways faces made out of punctuation marks. When everybody got UTF-8 on their terminals, we gained the ability to express shrugs, table-flips, lascivious glances, and more. These are still used occasionally but they’re not very convenient for most users, so the standards are emoji and emoticons still.

Emoji have bent over backwards to be inclusive of marginalized groups. Their vocabulary is not large enough to form a pidgin tongue, but they’re trying. If there is a language barrier between two people who want to cooperate, and they both have emoji in their toolbox, it won’t be long before they’re using them. These are fantastic developments.

Emoji have one nagging problem, though: the range of states you are allowed to express is narrow, and some of that is by design. We want the Internet to be a friendly and positive place, so we make more happy emoji than sad, and we try hard not to let people express anger. Emoji give people an emotional vocabulary that is too small, and contains a dangerous bias.

Ignoring problems doesn’t make them go away. The American “it could never happen here” is quickly giving way to “oh shit, it’s happening here.” In a world where it’s now possible to instantly communicate with someone on the other side of the globe, with whom your only commonality are humanity, it’s both possible and necessary (another two-sided coin) for us to expand–no, to complete–our emotional vocabulary and use it.

According to Kurzgesagt, expressing gratitude is a way of counteracting or preventing dissatisfaction. Ongoing dissatisfaction probably contributes to mental illness (like, the associative property of multiplication is also probably a thing) so here come the gratitude posts. I hope I can get good at this.

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Connecting two dots whose connections seem obvious once they’re next to each other: you must love yourself, and whether an action is loving can only be determined by the person receiving it. (You don’t get to say “I’m doing this because I love you” if what you’re doing to that person hurts them.) So, assuming there’s a “you” and there’s a “yourself” whom you must love, logically, you should express your love for yourself in the love language that reaches you best.

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