St. Frances de Sales on the sin of detraction:

Thus we can never pronounce a man to be wicked without danger of falsehood. If we must needs speak, we must say that he has been guilty of such an evil deed, at such a time he misconducted himself, or he is now doing so; but we should not condemn today because of today, still less tomorrow.

But whilst you give good heed to speak no evil concerning your neighbor, beware of falling into the opposite extreme, as some do, who, seek to avoid slander, praise vice. If you come in the way of a downright slanderer, do not defend him by calling frank and honest-speaking; do not miscall dangerous freedoms by the name of simplicity or easiness, or call disobedience zeal, or arrogance self-respect; do not fly from slander into flattery and indulgence of vice, but call evil evil without hesitation, and blame that which is blamable.

He goes on to add certain conditions, particularly as it becomes necessary to speak in front of others:

When you blame the vices of another, consider whether if it is profitable or useful to those who hear to do so…Above all, you must be exceedingly exact in what you say; your tongue when you speak of your neighbor is as a knife in the hand of a surgeon who is going to cut between nerves and tendons. Your stroke must be accurate, and neither deeper nor slighter than what is needed; and whilst you blame the sin, always spare the sinner as much as possible.

From Introduction to the Devout Life. This comes directly after his meditations on rash judgements. Providentially, this has been my spiritual reading for the last couple of days as I’ve also concluded that I need to maintain a foothold on one or two social media platforms. I do this with extreme reluctance.

For one, I’m not keen on being at the receiving end of The Algorithms. If I let myself go down the Reels rathole, for example, the minor adjustments to the feed because obvious pretty quick and things get porny in a hurry. No thanks. Second, the engagement based on anger or fear works on me just like it does on anyone else and I can function just fine online without using a front-end which monetizes the worst. I have a decent daily rhythm of RSS reeds and other text-heavy sites and can stay pretty well informed as far as news and daily events, but there are plenty of local organizations and groups which don’t publish via RSS and only push out communications on Facebook, Instagram, or X. I wish it weren’t so, but there it is.

On the other hand, keeping up with the constant news cycle puts me alongside everyone else who’s doing the same, and who is it that I desire to serve, anyway? It doesn’t feel like I can just opt out and go completely monastic; that’s neither my station nor vocation. On the third hand, I can’t give what I don’t have, and reasonable peace feels like it’s pretty short supply so I will, once again, try to look into the craziness without wading into the middle of it. Because, let’s be honest, there’s nothing social about it it at all. When everyone’s feed is exquisitely tuned to the viewer, there is no shared experience. A bathroom wall is more democratic; at least we’re all looking at the same graffiti.

THEY PAINT THE WALLS TO HIDE MY PEN, amirite?

Wherefore now, o Poet?

Retreating into the relative silence of text is what I want to do; but this begins to feel like a withdrawal from the world (such as it is) in a way that’s at odds with diaconal ministry. And by text, I mean it: I run a local RSS aggregator called Miniflux and follow daily 160 or so feeds of varying activity. I also skim a handful of other news sites using elinks, and all of this behind a pi-hole for the times that I do use a full browser.

Anyway, I feel obliged to keep up so I don’t think this is FOMO masquerading as concern. I would happily punt it all, smartphone included, but people expect me to know what’s going on and responding with lol idk what that is doesn’t seem particularly helpful.

Unrelated: I went down a long rathole this weekend, guided by the Extropia’s Children series of posts at Gradient Ascendant. Part of this included revisiting the cypherpunks list archives from the mid-90s. I lurked on that list for quite a while but eventually drifted away because of a lot of craziness. One thing that strikes me now is how conditioned the discussions were based on the technology of the day: email. So much time spent obsessing over email: securing, authenticating, remixing/remailing anonymously, and so on. Remember anon.penet.fi? It seems so quaint now, 30 plus years later.

My opinion is that the future will look on a lot of the rationalist/extropian stuff the same way we look at the teeming chaos of 4th century gnosticism. It all seems cut from the same cloth, and will probably come to the same general ends: either death or Christ.