#Atomization

[fuckyeahfluiddynamics]

Miniature Ice Stupas

Ice stupas are conical artificial glaciers built with snow cannons; they're used to store water for spring irrigation. Here, researchers explore a miniaturized lab-grown version made from atomized water droplets.  (Image credit: D. Papa et al.) Read the full article

#2023gofm #atomization #droplets #fluid dynamics #freezing #ice formation #physics #science

[istmos]

[a language to become]

#a language to become #expansion #dispersion #atomization

[sunder-the-gold]

Collectivism versus Individualism

@gsirvitor @philosophicalconservatism @lockedkey

Could you provide your own thoughts to help me sort out these concepts?

Axiom A: American Conservatives tend to be individualists, whereas Progressives tend to be collectivists. Both in terms of personal versus collective responsibility, and in terms of independence versus codependence. [Some on either side of the divide define 'individualism' and 'self-reliance' to the point of 'living as a hermit', but I think most individualists do not interpret it so.]

Axiom B: Yet American Conservatives tend to believe in the value of family, particularly nuclear family, blood ties, and marriage. Whereas Progressives tend to abandon their families for any ideological disagreement, prefer self-selected friend groups ("found family") over biological kin (and will disown them just as quickly), and put much less stock in getting married or having children.

Axiom C: Progressives / collectivists accuse American conservatives / individualists of promoting the atomization of society, whereby communities break apart into completely disconnected individuals who only look out for their own self-interests.

Axiom D: Yet a society where everyone depends more on government welfare than on their family, and more on social security (paid for by total strangers) than their own children for retirement, and in fact where no one gets married and children are artificially bred and owned by the state... is not only the most atomized that humanity could be, it more closely resembles the society that progressives want than the one conservatives want.

Thesis Question: Why would collectivists simultaneously decry and yet advocate for a fully-atomized society, while individualists would seek to promote and preserve interconnected families and communities?

Hypothesis A: Collectivism dismisses each individual as a fungible, identical, completely-interchangeable member of a larger group. A single grain of sand on the beach. To atomize society is to realize collectivism, therefore collectivists promote that outcome in practice even as they want to believe they act against it.

Hypothesis B: American conservatism sees each individual as unique, non-fungible, irreplaceable. A distinct organ within a living creature, where an eyeball and a kidney cannot be switched without consequence. To see other individuals as sacred is to build families and communities.

#collectivism #individualism #atomization #community

[f0restpunk]

#Berenice Abbott #automat #the automat #'50s #1950s #loneliness #atomization #isolation #All The Lonely People #nyc #New York City #New York City history #NYC History #photography #classic photography #great photographs #great photographers #NYC Psychogeography

[datamodel-of-disaster]

Sometimes I become really desperate when I consider all the ways people keep wilfully cutting themselves off from one another.

Paraphrasing some things I saw in my Twitter feed today;

“Phone calls are rude because it’s you demanding someone’s attention at your own convenience! You better be dying if you call me!”

“If somebody ghosts you, just accept it, don’t ask why! You’re not entitled to knowing others’ thoughts and feelings!”

“What kind of person talks to people on public transport, holy shit these earbuds are there for a reason”

“I hate in-office work and talking to coworkers, urgh. Wish I could just make money never leaving my house.”

“I just want to exist completely unacknowledged by anyone ok”

Coworkers and strangers are not the same as friends. But there is incredible societal value in these superficial exchanges, tangible reminders of the shared humanity of people we don’t actively care about. And the pitiless eagerness by which we cut the presence of others out of our life these days is… concerning.

Idk, maybe I’m just old, but I cannot help but see a connection between how desperately lonely we all are, and the way we have fostered an active hatred of even interacting with strangers, while also becoming ashamed and hesitant to lean on or bother those we consider our friends… and perhaps not for no reason, because left and right you also get the advice to distance yourself as much as you can from people who “ask too much”.

We keep cutting and cutting in order to remove stressors, remove things that take up our bandwidth, avoid things that feel like a burden -and it does nothing but make what bandwidth we have smaller and smaller and smaller. And meanwhile we keep trying to make ourselves smaller and more self-sufficient, ask less, take up less space… all to not in turn get cut out from the lives of the people we care about.

It doesn’t work.

#disaster thoughts #alienation #loneliness #atomization #ghosting #stop eroding society ffs #we need each other #stop being so fucking afraid of other people

[the-funtime-autocrat]

That means that, ironically, the most individualistic people will likely be those who make it known the loudest just how much more "collectivist" they are than the next man, with extreme exaggeration being the obvious mark of the faker.

Edward Dutton.

#virtue signaling #Atomization #Individualism #Social Status #Sociology #Groupthink

[morlock-holmes]

So I have a question about your Bowling Alone discussion: why do you find it hard to arrange a game night? In my experience it's because everyone I'd do it with is already busy a lot of the time! You seem to be saying that everyone is lonely but also unwilling to do fun things for... Some reason?

Okay, Anon, fine, you goaded me into doing actual work instead of just half-remembering things. I hope you’re happy.

The following quotes and screenshots are taken from Bowling Alone chapter 6: Informal Social Connections:

“The bad news is that we are [connecting with each other] less and less every year. Consider some of the startling evidence of change over the last quarter century. In the mid- to late 1970s, according to the DDB Needham Life Style archive, the average American entertained friends at home about fourteen to fifteen times a year. By the late 1990s that figure had fallen to eight times a year, a decline of 45 percent in barely two decades. An entirely independent series of surveys from the Roper Social and Political Trends archive confirms both going out to see friends and having them over to our home declined from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s (See figure 18 for details.) Yet a third archive (that of Yankelovich Partners) reports a decline of nearly one-third between 1985-86 and 1998-99 in the readiness of the average American to make new Friends.”

Then we are referred to Footnote 15, Page 458, which says

“15. The top half of figure 18 is based on DDB Needham Life Style data; the bottom half is based on Roper Social and Political Trends data. Because sampling and wording differ between these two archives, the two halves of figure 18 are not directly comparable, but the fact that two such different archives show similar declines in social visiting is all the more significant. DDB Needham Life Stye surveys also show that dinner parties (given or attended) declined from 7.1 per year in the mid-1970s to 3.7 in the late 1990s. Yankelovich Partners Inc. report that that agreement that “I have very little room in my life for new friends these days” rose from 23 percent in 1985-86 to 32 percent in 1998-99… Mediamark Research annual surveys show a drop of one-fifth between the early 1980s and the late 1990s in the frequency of “entertaining friends or relatives at home.” Finally, eight times between 1938 and 1990 Gallup pollsters asked about one’s “favorite way of spending an evening.” Over the whole period “dancing” and “playing cards and games” dropped sharply, and after the 1970s “visiting with friends” and “dining out” also dropped. “Watching TV” and “home with family” rose over this period, suggesting a cocooning pattern consistent with the Roper and DDB Needham data. On the other hand, because of changes in wording, I am less confident about the Gallup trends. (See George Gallup Jr., The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion [Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1986] 104, 130.) According to the General Social Survey, the frequency of spending a social evening with “friends who live outside the neightborhood” more than once a month rose from 40 percent in 1974-76 to 44 percent in 1994-96. Of the six national survey archives that I have discovered with trend data on friendship over the last several decades, this is the only series that does not show significant decline. (Unlike other measures of friendship, this GSS metric is also inexplicably more common among men than women.) See also Robert J. Sampson, “Local Friendship Ties and Community Attachment in Mass Society: A Multilevel Systemic Model,” American Sociological Review 53 (October 1988): 776-779; Fischer, To Dwell Among Friends; Claude S. Fischer, Robert M. Jackson, et al., Networks and Places: Social Relations in the Urban Setting (New York: Free Press, 1977)."

Bolding mine.

Putnam, in Bowling Alone, doesn't address the niche hobby of RPG game playing, but as you can see some of the data he looked at was collected in a way that would be expected to measure time spent on games in general.

There's a left-wing and particularly rat-adj narrative where "atomization" is good, because it represents the triumph of chosen pursuits and chosen friendships over coercive groups such as the church.

But the data Putnam collected shows a decline even in purely voluntary social pursuits. He doesn't see massive increases in the prevalence of dinners with friends, time spent in gaming groups, etc, but rather a decrease in the prevalence of these pursuits.

And I get frustrated because the response is just blanket denial. @self-loving-vampire has sort of responded with "I feel like I do this a lot, which means that there can't be a downward trend."

It's like if I said, I don't know, cable subscription rates were down and a bunch of people said, "But I still have cable!"

Like... Who cares? I didn't say that nobody has cable, I said that rates were declining.

And denial doesn't come with different polling data, it's just a blanket denial. There must be a constant upwards trend in positive, voluntary social engagement because...

I really don't know why; I have yet to be offered any reason why the positive things that "Atomization" is supposed to bring must be actually increasing, there's simply this emphatic, committed declaration that it must be so.

It must be true that found families and voluntary connections have been getting stronger and more prevalent over the last half-century.

Why though? Why must it be true and how would you explain data which seems to suggest exactly the opposite? If we value these kinds of voluntary, found connection for their emotional and material benefits, then shouldn't we want to look at actual data about whether they are really increasing in prevalence and power? Shouldn't we be concerned about data that says that they aren't?

#bowling alone #discourse #friendship #atomization

[moa-broke-me]

Loneliness and Capitalism.

It sucks how atomized we've all become in capitalist society, how normalized that is, and most of all, how it's become a matter of 'personal responsibility' like everything else.

Obviously nobody's required to like you or be your friend, and obviously if you have a shit personality and are repetitively mean, dismissive, self-centered, et cetera, nobody's gonna wanna hang out with you until you start to work on that, and that's perfectly within their right. But putting aside how personal change isn't as easy as snapping your fingers and becoming a better person automatically, most of the time there's nothing that even needs changing. Not within yourself, anyway.

You may not have enough time or energy to meaningfully participate in social life as a result of grueling hours at your job. Maybe your mental health needs aren't being adequately met because you can't afford therapy/meds, causing you to self-isolate or subconsciously sabotage existing relationships because you don't believe you deserve to be happy, or even to neglect basic hygiene, causing people to avoid you out of disgust. Maybe you're part of a marginalized group (disabled, queer, POC, etc) so people don't want to associate with you, or on the flip side, it's you who doesn't want to associate with them, because you're afraid that underneath their polite plastered-on smiles, they have some ugly bigotries bubbling under the surface, or are willing to excuse their bigoted friends and family.

In all of these cases, you can blame capitalism. It's capitalism that ranks people based on how much and what kinds of labor they're capable of performing, how easily they can be marketed to based on their adherence to the cultural hegemony, how many future laborers they pump out. It's capitalism that makes mental health services so unattainable for so many. It's capitalism that milks as much of your time, your energy, your focus, your labor, out of you as they can get away with.

And yet, we're expected not to notice.

#notpjo #capitalism #theory #loneliness #isolation #atomization #marx probably wrote something about this

[jaimeblancarte]

@jaimeblancarte Qro, 2022

#photos #photographer #photography #fotos tumblr #fotos #mextagram #urban #urbanexploration #urbanphotography #artists on tumblr #tumblr mexico #mexico #so cute #love it #best of tumblr #plancha #atomization

[cotyledonal]

“The benefits that I’ve shown in my research is that it’s good for your mood,” says Gillian Sandstrom, a social psychologist based at the University of Essex, originally from Vancouver, whose in-depth work on the minutiae of everyday interactions and the fears and inhibitions many of us associate with them, has recently been covered by NPR and NBC among others. “If you’re in a bad mood, the last thing you want to do is talk to someone,” she says, “but probably it’s going to be super-effective at pulling you out of that bad mood. That’s partly because we put our best face forward when we’re talking to someone we don’t know; we’re on our best behavior.”

The remarkable mood-lifting effects of breaking social silences have been demonstrated in a number of studies. Notably, in a series of experiments conducted on Chicago commuters by Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder a few years ago, it was found that when people were instructed to lob some opening gambits on trains and buses, they consistently underestimated two things: How glad to talk their fellow passengers would be, and how much more chipper a casual chat would make both themselves and their targets feel on the way to work. The researchers — who are currently repeating the project on a grand scale in the U.K. with the support of the BBC — conclude that this “broadly suggests that people could improve their own momentary well-being — and that of others — by simply being more social with strangers, trying to create connections where one might otherwise choose isolation.”

I hope we get more research + mainstream coverage like this on the effects of social atomization in the coming years. not to go all “hurr durr Natural Is Better!!”, but human beings are built to be social creatures, and the way that many modern countries keep innovating new ways to be as stratifying as possible is literally just bad for our brains. Anyway go out and tell someone you like their shoelaces

#atomization

[trashylvania]

Most people in our building are old folks who fled war or civil conflict back in the day (but are actually mad nice even to people who are aesthetically bizarre in comparison,) but nowadays we got new people moving in around our age, and they have zero respect or concern for collectivist mentality. Loud, obnoxious, overtly rude, nosy, and as gossipy as high schoolers. I'd rather have normie picket-fence millennial types; might not make easy friends but they'd at least be pleasantly distant neighbors. Instead we are seemingly cursed with having the most annoying motherfuckers in the entire tri-state area

#trash.txt #sorry for all the typos i'm using a new app that darkens my screen so i don't get swarmed by fucking mosquitoes #but unfortunately i cannot see what the fuck is going on sometimes on this godforsaken screen #had to edit this a million times as a result in order to make it even somewhat coherent #literally struggled for 20 straight minutes to make this bitch readable bc i can barely fuckin see anything and am a degenerate swype user #atomization

[dndspellgifs]

look, I know I've talked about this essay (?) before but like,

If you ever needed a good demonstration of the quote "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", have I got an exercise for you.

Somebody made a small article explaining the basics of atomic theory but it's written in Anglish. Anglish is basically a made-up version of English where they remove any elements (words, prefixes, etc) that were originally borrowed from romance languages like french and latin, as well as greek and other foreign loanwords, keeping only those of germanic origin.

What happens is an english which is for the most part intelligible, but since a lot everyday english, and especially the scientific vocabulary, has has heavy latin and greek influence, they have to make up new words from the existing germanic-english vocabulary. For me it kind of reads super viking-ey.

Anyway when you read this article on atomic theory, in Anglish called Uncleftish Beholding, you get this text which kind of reads like a fantasy novel. Like in my mind it feels like it recontextualizes advanced scientific concepts to explain it to a viking audience from ancient times.

Even though you're familiar with the scientific ideas, because it bypasses the normal language we use for these concepts, you get a chance to examine these ideas as if you were a visitor from another civilization - and guess what, it does feel like it's about magic. It has a mythical quality to it, like it feels like a book about magic written during viking times. For me this has the same vibe as reading deep magic lore from a Robert Jordan book.

#off topic #literature #language #linguistics #science #science history #science fiction #fantasy #physics #atomic theory #anglish #chemistry #robert jordan #the wheel of time #uncleftish beholding

[taylor-5724]

Fuck this obscured legal murder

Stealing most of everyone's life

For some reason we have allowed it

To get past this wide rubicon

They lead us like sheep to the guillotine

That should be descending on them

But we've lost all the power

We can't stand up to fight

We're just leftover fissile fuel

I doubt that was any mistake

Un-unified, like jenga, we fall

We need glue, but that's now out of stock

#creative writing #poetry #novice writer #words #poetry literature #writers and poets #writers on tumblr #writing #poets on tumblr #anti capitalism #capitalism #communism #wage slavery #socialism #atomization

[a-forger-and-a-point-man]

Don’t forget the first victims when you go see Oppenheimer this opening weekend. Unforgivable not to include them in the narrative.

We love us some Nolan and Cillian but this is also a story that should never have taken place.

For further reading:

This is what happens when the US government goes nuclear-crazy during the Cold War and mines a shit ton of uranium. Lambs born with three legs and no eyes, and human stillbirths and agonizing deformities for those that survive. For decades it was referred to as a Navajo-specific hereditary illness. No one made the link to the mines and the drinking water.

#oppenheimer #atomic bomb #nuclear weapons #trinity test

[the-funtime-autocrat]

Rather than playful beings, we are often encouraged today to be calculating beings, that is to say to get the most we can as individuals. This is a familiar idea in the current era of individualism which promotes self-interested behavior across the board, from the economic to the personal. Trust has been eroded from all sides, we stand alone against everyone and we are supposed to enjoy it.

Nina Power, “What Do Man Want?” (2022).

#Individualism #Men and Women #Male and Female #Feminism #atomization #Human interaction #Masculine #feminine #masculinity #Femininity

[morlock-holmes]

I'll try to say what I mean again because this is something that kind of really frustrates me in rat-adj circles.

"Atomized Individualism" is one of those pop philosophy terms of art which changes meaning depending on who uses it, but I feel like I do actually have a pretty good handle on what rat-adj people tend to mean, and it's something like this:

In ye olden times, survival depended on a series of informal but coercive relationships, with examples being things like churches, families, and perhaps clan or feudal lord or what have you.

These systems were informal in the sense that the people at the top of the hierarchy had a large degree of discretion in how they applied the rules, and coercive in the sense that individual members policed each other and often used force to prevent people from leaving or contradicting the understood leaders.

Examples that have survived into the modern day might be, say, churches; The church might, for example, offer volunteer babysitting services, or operate a homeless shelter, but they might also pressure you, overtly or covertly, to profess the proper religion or else they will stop offering you those services and turn you out on your own.

Atomized individualism is the process by which this coercive structure is replaced with a better one; rather than being forced to kowtow to cults of personality in order to fulfill his basic needs, the modern, Atomized man instead relies on a combination of bureaucratized systems and a sort of bustling market of voluntary, low-control personal connections.

The welfare office, the thought goes, will not ask you to prove you are Christian to get welfare; your boss doesn't care how you act as long as the work gets done. And what social needs can't be met by work or government will be met by a large, competitive marketplace of ideas, fostering the growth of voluntary, low-control groups as replacements for the high-control groups that older societies would have forced you into contact with.

I'm not saying that the people who profess this idea are pollyannas; they are fully capable of recognizing that, say, in practice your boss may subtly or openly discriminate against people of the "wrong" religion; but he is more heavily enjoined from employing such discrimination than he would have been in, say, the 17th century.

The thing is, if we use that model of "atomized individualism" then Putnam presents strong evidence that atomized individualist practices declined precipitously from 1970 to 2000.

In fact, rather then an increase in atomized individualism in the rat-adj sense, he documented something that is almost, but not quite, the opposite.

Basically, nearly all forms of what we might broadly call socializing declined in that period of time.

What's worse, family and church, which are used as the quintessential high control group which social atomization protects us from, weathered the slump Putnam documents better then lower-control competitors. Unions, Social Clubs and Card Clubs collapsed precipitously during that time, while church membership remained much more stable.

Like, Church attendance might have declined in that period, but Union membership declined even more, leaving the religious bloc, for example, more powerful as a political force than the unions.

Instead of a world where people meet their social needs through a series of voluntary, low-control groups, the story is more that, from 1970-2000, Americans became more isolated, but less Atomized (In the sense described above). Rather than a plethora of voluntary associations arising to meet the social needs once met by religion and family, we see a world where people sort of resign themselves to not having their social needs met, while low-control groups that could meet those needs decline precipitously in membership and the high-control groups hang on by the skin of their teeth.

So while those high-control groups may have, in many ways, been reduced in power over that time period, the later in that period you get the less competition family or church have when it comes to actually providing for social needs.

If we value atomization in the sense I outlined above, I think it's worth looking at that and having a vocabulary to talk about it!

The internet will have changed things, and if anybody is interested in reviving the social club as a force in communities, it's rats, but disappointingly I'm not aware of a 2020 follow-up to Bowling Alone so it's very hard to say what the actual trends are from 2000-2020.

I guess I get frustrated when people say, "Social Atomization is good and we shouldn't go backwards" because for the first fifteen years of my life, there's very strong evidence that we already went substantially backwards.

#bowling alone #atomization #social atomization #discourse