Against English

~detritus

Good day, good morning.

~bartender, I'll have an infinite amount of coffee today.

It's been a while since I last posted around these parts of the web, or anywhere on the whole internet, for that matter. Indeed, I've been mostly away for the last few months. Not that I've been completely disconnected, I do watch stuff on youtube, though not as much as I used to, and not the kind of content that the so-called algorithm tries to force-feed you with. In other words, I've been judicious in my use of internet content.

I have actually been frequenting the pub, both the midnight pub and the smol pub, but mostly as a viewer, reading every new post but not actively participating. Whenever I open a web browser it's either to find the meaning of a word, perhaps some concrete piece of information (such as the location of a city or the date of a certain event), or to peruse the pubs and see what is new. I've been staying away from "social media" and from anonymous boards and all that garbage. Which brings me to the topic of today's discussion.

For many years it was the English-speaking internet where I spent the vast majority of my time online. For one thing, English has been the "lingua franca" of the Internet, and for many of us also a sort of promise of opportunity: opportunity to engage with people from all over the world, to access the largest body of information, in all sorts of formats: videos, blog posts, books, sites for discussion on very many different topics, you name it. But that is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Recent events are rapidly eroding the desirability of the English language as a source of information and contact with the world, I've been aware of this for a number of years already, though this awareness has been gradually becoming. After a number of years of frequenting English speaking sites I started to notice many cultural assumptions that belong mostly, if not exclusively to the countries where it is the dominant language. For example, politics. Whereas the (already vanishing) status of empire has meant that it's politics do affect the rest of the world, even today, participating in English-speaking sites does mean being inundated with news of politics which are not directly relevant to one's country, if one lives almost anywhere else in the world. Moreover, putting a particular countrie's internal drama at the center of the stage has tricked us into confusing the interests of the empire above those of our own countries, I imagine a lot of people here may be quite familiar with this situation.

The problem goes beyond mere politics, though, and I would say it even becomes existential and epistemological. For example, if I go and read the despair in which an anglo-american is drowning today, and they say how """The World""" is in shambles, I pause for a moment and wonder.... what is the world to them? Clearly, ""The West"" is in shambles. As for the rest of The Actual World, things are actually... quite varied, as they have always been. And of course, for many parts of the world, the biggest problems actually do come from """Western""" countries. In fact, I would say that the present century is marked by a conflict between the world as a whole, and each nation's sovereign interests, and those of the imperialist """West""", and the damage "modernity" has been doing for the past 500 years. Which brings me to my next point. Where I said that the problem becomes epistemological I am not being hyperbolic. Ever since western science came to dominate thanks to the big technological advancements that is has made possible, it has also been pushing all sorts of eurocentric, imperialistic notions about the world itself and the nature of reality. Notions which are themselves unscientific and, again, serve imperialist modes of thought have surreptitiously inserted themselves as the "learned" view on the world through inocculation by the successes of science itself. To name two particularly nocive and pervading concepts, are the reductivist-atomistic, newtonian-galilean view of nature, and the darwinistic-malthusian doctrine of all interactions among living beings of all kinds. Elaborating on this is beyond the scope of my little rant today, and I am preparing an essay where I will try to argue all these points and more. What I want to point out right now is that these views on reality are deeply embedded in the english language itself, and that every online discussion, especially those that treat world matters, history, economics, ecology, and even the nature of science, almost every online discussion underlies these assumptions, and so the discussion itself runs on shaky premises which are, in my opinion, quite harmful to all but the "modern project", one which necessarily leaves out anyone that is not of European origin.

This has already become a bit of a long rant, but these are points that serve as the background to the problem I am facing, and the point of this whole rant: Should I keep using the English language? For one thing, I've grown in the internet anglosphere, and I am quite used, as you can see, to writing in this language, I feel comfortable with it, to some extent. I also feel like I can reach a wide readership. Also, and this is important, while the smolnet movement, gemini and gopher do have sites in most other languages, it is mostly in the English-speaking community where they have a somewhat large adoption. Gemini is scarcely known in the spanish speaking internet, and in that sense, we've been colonized (or, as some would say -- siliconized), and most spanish speakers know only how to use Big Tech, silicon valley sites. This is sad but true. On the other hand, while I was able to write this little ran in a single run as I am used to, I brew it for days before I sit at the keyboard and start typing. I usually do this while I am working, and I must say, starting to think in English and wording my thoughts in that language puts me in a mental space that I, for the most part, want to extricate from my thought processes themselves, mostly as I try to consume the least possible English content on the internet and I try to immerse myself more on the other languages that I am studying. More than anything, I want to start steering the use of the internet away from the English language and more into the great diversity of languages in the world, particularly since Spanish is the language with the second largest number of speakers worldwide, right below Mandarin and just above English. I think that, as the Dollar loses it's "reserve currency" status and international transactions are now being carried out in local currencies, just as well (and now with pretty good LLMs the only good thing they are good at being translation) the internet can stop becoming an anglo-centric medium and a truly international one.

I leave this to your consideration, and cordially invite you to *use your own language* more, consume less english speaking content and participate in discussion forums in your own language. Language is the vector of culture, and it is not just a medium but it does carry many cultural connotations which are not overt but always underlying the way we thing when we discuss. Given that the time of the hegemony of English speaking languages has already become a thing of the past, I suggest we also stop giving it pride of place in our interactions with the world and the information we receive from it. If we watch english speaking videos which pretend to teach us something, be aware that we are also being taught notions which are alien to our own localities and more often than not serve the interests of the cartoonish evil that is now destabilizing the whole world and seeding war wherever it's financial arms can reach.