.

.

.

Seriously fuck apple hardware and their hinges that break monitor cables and their butterfly keys and their 24-step battery replacement process that involves *removing your goddamned speakers* to replace the battery.

Fuck. That.

Fuck their specialized Apple screwdrivers

And their bullshit expensive replacement parts.

Two weeks ago I added RAM to my new laptop and it took about four minutes.

I just now replaced the fan on my old laptop while I was on a call with a vendor.

Both of those things used the same phillips-head screwdriver that I got in a pack of three for a dollar fifty at daiso. And I didn't have to *use a hairdryer to soften the adhesive on my speakers* to access either of those parts, let alone a part as basic and as likely to fail as a fucking battery. Hell, I opened up my new laptop and found out that there's a spot for me to put in a second SSD with a similarly small amount of effort.

But while I'm here:

Fuck modern cars. Fuck the engine covers with breakable pins that make it a pain in the ass to do anything more than checking the oil. Fuck the use of tablets as an interface for dealing with the car. Fuck proprietary RFID key fobs and fuck tire monitoring systems that'll make you fail a smog check.

Fuck cheaply made clothing that won't last more than a couple dozen wears but is so thin and flimsy that it also can't handle being mended.

Fuck printers that require a subscription for ink every three months even if you aren't out of ink, because they'll say you're out of ink because they disable the cartridges after a certain time no matter how much or how little you've printed.

Fuck printers generally, they're such cheap and horrible pieces of garbage at the consumer level that it's usually less expensive to buy a new printer than it is to replace cartridges, and it's usually cheap to replace the rollers but the printer is such shit that your odds of snapping off some fiddly piece of plastic garbage are about 50/50 even if you do know what you're doing.

Fuck all of this shit. You should be able to fix what you own, and if you can't or don't want to learn how to, you should at least have the option to try without becoming a professional.

I keep seeing that post about wanting packaged delivered slower by happier, safer, better-paid workers and first of all: Fuck yes. But also: I want clunkier, heavier technology that is easier to fix.

If I needed a laptop that could fit into a manila envelope I would get a fucking tablet, what I need is a laptop that has some actual computing power and that I can swap the hard drive on in less than forty minutes.

The cellphone I had five years ago had a smaller screen and a thicker case, but I could replace the battery with my thumb as the only tool, and with some effort (less than it would require now) I could replace the whole screen. I don't need a seven inch screen and four cameras on the back and a thin, lightweight case, the phone that was the size of my palm and half an inch thick was fine and LOOK I know a lot of the components have become smaller; why did we move to slimmer cases instead of keeping the thicker ones that anyone could crack open to swap in a SIM or replace the battery? You could have BIGGER batteries, with longer lifespans if you still had thicker cases and smaller screens and then maybe this piece of shit phone would fit in any single pocket on my clothing instead of hanging halfway out and trying to make a dive onto the ground every time I stand up.

I don't like the attitude of "stuff in the old days used to just WORK" - in some ways it's true, in some ways it isn't. Cars in the old days certainly did NOT just used to work. But it used to be a fuck of a lot easier to get into an engine and *fix it* without having to get an entire collection of vehicle-specific tools and half a computer science degree. Printers have never, in the existence of printers, "just worked" but they didn't stop printing because of a programmed date on a chip in the fucking cartridge.

A lot of hardware from today is fine. SSDs are pretty great, and there are new manufactured hard drives that I know are going to last thirty years, just like the 40MB drive from 1987 that a customer brought into my shop a few years ago.

There are people out there who are making good stuff.

But it's so fucking frustrating the way that it feels like you have to fight to find something that isn't just the absolute shittiest piece of garbage. The amount of stuff out there that is flimsy, likely to fail, and only-user-serviceable-if-the-user-is-already-technically-proficient is really, really upsetting.

My dad has been a mechanic for nearly 50 years, and more and more he's finding new vehicles harder to fix. You can do a computer diagnosis, sure, but actually getting in and fixing it is such a damn pain.

On the issue of the ‘q slur’...

So, yesterday, I got into a rather stupid internet argument with someone who was peddling what seemed to me to be a rather insidious narrative about slur-reclamation. Someone in the ensuing notes raised a point which I thought was interesting, and worrying, and probably needed to be addressed in it’s own post. So here we go:

The word ‘queer’ itself seems to be especially touchy for many, so let me begin to address this by way of analogy.

Instead of talking about “queer”, let’s start by talking about “Jew” - a word which I believe is very similar in its usage in some significant ways.

Now, the word “Jew” has been used as a derogatory term for literally hundreds of years. It is used both as a noun (eg. “That guy ripped me off - what a dirty Jew”) and as a verb (eg. “That guy really Jew-ed me”). These usages are deeply, fundamentally, horrifically offensive, and should be used under no circumstances, ever. And yet, I myself have heard both, even as recently as this past year, even in an urban location with plenty of Jews, in a social situation where people should have known better. In short – the word “Jew”, as it is used by certain antisemites, is – quite unambiguously – a slur. Not a dead slur, not a former slur – and active, living slur that most Jews will at some point in their life encounter in a context where the term is being used to denigrate them and their religion. 

Now here’s the thing, though: I’m a Jew. I call myself a Jew. I prefer that all non-Jews call me a Jew – so do most Jews I know. “Jew” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Judaism, the same way that “Muslim” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Islam, and “Christian” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Christianity. 

In fact, almost all of the terms that non-Jews use to avoid saying “Jew” (eg. “a member of the Jewish persuasion”, “a follower of the Jewish faith”, “coming from a Jewish family”, “identifying as part of the Jewish religion”, etc) are deeply offensive, because these terms imply to us that the speaker sees the term “Jew” (and by extension, what that term stands for) as a dirty word.

“BUT WAIT” – I hear you say – “didn’t you just say that Jew is used as a slur?!?”

Yes. Yes, I did. And also, it is fundamentally offensive not to call us that, because it is our name and our identity.

Let me back up a little bit, and bring you into the world of one of those 2000s PSAs about not using “that’s so gay”. Think of some word that is your identity – something which you consider to be a fundamental and intrinsic part of yourself. It could be “female” or “male”, or “Black” or “white”, “tall” or “short”, “Atheist” or “Mormon” or “Evangelical” – you name it.

Now imagine that people started using that term as a slur.

“What a female thing to do!” they might say. “That teacher doesn’t know anything, he’s so female!”

Or maybe, “Yikes, look at that idiot who’s driving like an atheist. It’s so embarrassing!”

Or perhaps, “Oh gross, that music is so Black, turn it off!”

Now, what would you say if the same groups of people who had been saying those things for years turned around and avoided using those words to describe anything other than an insult?

“Oh, so I see you’re a member of the female persuasion!”

“Is he… a follower of the atheist beliefs? Like does he identify as part of the community of atheist-aligned individuals?”

“So, as a Black-ish identified person yourself – excuse me, as a person who comes from a Black-ish family…”

Here’s the fundamental problem with treating all words that are used as slurs the same, without any regard for how they are used and how they developed – not all slurs are the same.

No one, and I mean no one (except maybe for a small handful of angsty teens who are deliberately making a point of being edgy) self-identifies as a kike. In contrast, essentially all Jews self-identify as Jews. And when non-Jews get weird about that identity on the grounds that “Jew is used as a slur”, despite the fact that it is the name that the Jewish community as a whole resoundingly identifies with, what they are basically saying is that they think that the slur usage is more important than the Jewish community self-identification usage. They are saying, in essence, “we think that your name should be a slur.” 

Now, at the top I said that the word “Jew” and the word “queer” had some significant similarities in terms of their usage, and I think that’s pretty apparent if you look at what people in those communities are saying about those terms. When American Jews were being actively threatened by neo-Nazis in the 70s, the slogan of choice was “For every Jew a .22!″. When the American Queer community was marching in the 90s in protest of systemic anti-queer violence, the slogan of choice was “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” Clearly, these are terms that are used by the communities themselves, in reference to themselves. Clearly, these terms are more than simply slurs.

But while there are useful similarities between how the terms “Jew” and “Queer” are used by bigots and by their own communities, I’d also like to point out that there is pretty substantial and important difference:

Unlike for “queer”, there is no organized group of Jewish antisemites who are using the catchphrase “Jew is a slur!” in order to selectively silence and disenfranchise Jews who are part of minority groups within Judaism. 

This is the real rub with the term queer – no one was campaigning about it being a slur until less than a decade ago. No one was saying that you needed to warn for the word queer when queer people were establishing the academic discipline of queer studies. No one was ‘think of the children”-ing the umbrella term when queer activists were literally marching for their lives. Go back to even 2010 and the term “q slur” would have been basically unparseable – if I saw someone tag something “q slur”, like most queer people I would have wracked my brains trying to figure out what slur even started with q, and if I learned that it was supposed to be “queer”, my default assumption would be that the post was made by a well-meaning but extremely clueless straight person.

I literally remember this shift – and I remember who started it. Exclusionists didn’t like the fact that queer was an umbrella term. Terfs (or radfems as they like to be called now) didn’t like that queer history included trans history; biphobes and aphobes didn’t like that the queer community was also a community to bisexuals and asexuals. And so what could they possibly say, to drive people away from the term that was protecting the sorts of queer people that they wanted to exclude?

Well, naturally, they turned to “queer is a slur.”

And here’s the thing – queer is a slur, just like Jew is a slur, and no one is denying that. And that fact makes “queer is a slur so don’t use it” a very convincing argument on the surface: 1) queer is still often used as a slur, and 2) you shouldn’t ever use slurs without carefully tagging and warning people about them (and better yet, you should never use them at all), and so therefore 3) you need to tag for “the q slur” and you need to warn people not to call the community “the queer community” or it’s members “queer people” or its study “queer studies” – because it’s a slur!

But the crucial step that’s missing here is exactly the same one above, for the word “Jew” – and that step is that not all slurs are the same. When a term is both used as a slur and used as a self-identity term, then favoring the slur meaning instead of the identity meaning is picking the side of the slur-users over the disadvantaged group! 

If you say or tag “q slur” you are sending the message, whether you realize it or not, that people who use “queer” as a slur are more right about its meaning than those who use it as their identity. Tagging for “queer” is one thing. People can filter for “queer” if it triggers them, just like people can filter for anything else. Not everyone has to personally use the term queer, or like the term queer. But there is no circumstance where the term “q slur” does not indicate that you think queer is more of a slur than of an accurate description of a community.

If I, as a Jew, ever came across a post where someone had warned for innocent, positive, non-antisemitic content relating to Judaism with the tag “J slur”, I would be incensed. So would any Jew. The act of tagging a post “J slur” is in and of itself antisemitic and offensive.

Queer people are allowed to feel the same about “q slur”. It is not a neutral warning term – it is an attack on our identity.

This entire post really resonated with me. Especially the part where you say:

“When a term is both used as a slur and used as a self-identity term, then favoring the slur meaning instead of the identity meaning is picking the side of the slur-users over the disadvantaged group!”

Except every goat is just waiting its turn to die of pneumonia

Sorry I’m not over “if a dog barked in Kazakhstan”.

My entirely half-assed understanding of Why Horses Explode If You Look At Them Funny, As Explained To Me By My Aunt That Raises Horses After Her Third Glass Of Wine:

Horses don’t got enough toes.

So, back right after the dinosaurs fucked off and joined the choir invisible, the first ancestors of horses were scampering about, little capybara-looking things called Eohippus, and they had four toes per limb:

They functioned pretty well, as near as we can tell from the fossil record, but they were mostly messing around in the leaf litter of dense forests, where one does not necessarily need to be fast but one should be nimble, and the 4 toes per limb worked out pretty good.

But the descendants of Eophippus moved out of the forest where there was lots of cover and onto the open plains, where there was better forage and visibility, but nowhere to hide, so the proto-horses that could ZOOM the fastest and out run thier predators (or, at least, their other herd members) tended to do well.  Here’s the thing- having lots of toes means your foot touches the ground longer when you run, and it spreads a lot of your momentum to the sides.  Great if you want to pivot and dodge, terrible if you want to ZOOM.  So losing toes started being a major advantage for proto-horses:

The Problem with having fewer toes and running Really Fucking Fast is that it kind of fucks your everything else up.

When a horse runs at full gallop, it sort of... stops actively breathing, letting the slosh of it’s guts move its lungs, which is tremendously calorically efficient and means their breathing doesn’t fall out of sync.  But it also means that the abdominal lining of a horse is weirdly flexible in ways that lead to way more hernias and intestinal tangling than other ungulates.  It also has a relatively weak diaphragm for something it’s size, so ANY kind of respiratory infection is a Major Fucking Problem because the horse has weak lungs.

When a Horse runs Real Fucking Fast, it also develops a bit of a fluid dynamics problem- most mammals have the blood going out of thier heart real fast and coming back from the far reaches of the toes much slower and it’s structure reflects that.  But since there is Only The One Toe, horse blood comes flying back up the veins toward the heart way the fuck faster than veins are meant to handle, which means horses had to evolve special veins that constrict to slow the Blood Down, which you will recognize as a Major Cardiovascular Disease in most mammals. This Poorly-regulated blood speed problems means horses are prone to heart problems, burst veins, embolisms, and hemophilia.  Also they have apparently a billion blood types and I’m not sure how that’s related but I am sure that’s another Hot Mess they have to deal with.

ALSO, the Blood-Going-Too-Fast issue and being Just Huge Motherfuckers means horses have trouble distributing oxygen properly, and have compensated by creating fucked up bones that replicate the way birds store air in thier bones but much, much shittier.  So if a horse breaks it’s leg, not only is it suffering a Major Structural Issue (also also- breaking a toe is much more serious when that toe is YOUR WHOLE DAMN FOOT AND HALF YOUR LEG), it’s also hving a hemmorhage and might be sort of suffocating a little.

ALSO ALSO, the fast that horses had to deal with Extremely Fast Predators for most of thier evolution means that they are now afflicted with evolutionarily-adaptive Anxiety, which is not great for thier already barely-functioning hearts, and makes them, frankly, fucking mental.  Part of the reason horses are so aggro is that if deinied the opportunity to ZOOM, it’s options left are “Kill everyone and Then Yourself” or “The same but skip step one and Just Fucking Die”.  The other reason is that a horse is in a race against itself- it’s gotta breed before it falls apart, so a Horse basically has a permanent terrorboner.

TL;DR: Horses don’t have enough toes and that makes them very, very fast, but also sickly, structurally unsound, have wildly OP blood that sometimes kills them, and drives them fucking insane.

okay so one of the most interesting/relevant things my current history class has taught me

I learned in high school that the first African slaves were brought to America in 1619. But here’s the thing. We don’t actually know if they were slaves or indentured servants.

And here’s why that’s significant: Slavery hadn’t really fully become racialized back then. Likewise, there wasn’t yet the idea that African=slave, necessarily. In the years following 1619, there were African slaves, indentures, and free people in North America. In the 1600’s, race wasn’t really even a fully mature concept. From my reading, people didn’t necessarily see skin color as constituting “race” or see “race” as an immutable, biological quality.

What changed? European countries wanted to maximize their profits from their colonies in the Americas, and it was most profitable to own people as slaves. Literally what caused it was just that life expectancy in the colonies increased and it was more profitable to own a person’s labor for life.

It’s insane; in Virginian laws in the 1600’s you can see the transition to a racialized view of the world. In 1643 laws regulating the behavior of “servants” didn’t even mention race. Punishments for indentured servants, for things such as running away, often involved having more years added to their servitude.

In 1661, a law is passed in Virginia that uses the term “negroe.” In 1680, the law regulates the behavior of enslaved people further, making it illegal for any “negroe or other slave” to move about freely without a permit or to carry a weapon. Runaways who resist being apprehended can now be punished with death. The 1680 law has a bit that is interestingly worded: “...if any negroe or any other slave shall presume to lift up his hand in opposition against any Christian...” This is an echo of the viewpoint that religious identity was the most important part of a person’s identity. Watch what happens:

In 1691, the law punishes and prohibits “negroes, mulattoes, and Indians intermarrying with English, or other white” people, and prohibits people from setting “negroes” and “mulattoes” free. The law has fully constructed the idea of racial identity (notice that “white” exists now). Words denoting a person’s status of servitude have become increasingly replaced by “racial” indentifying terms (the law doesn’t say ‘you can’t free slaves,’ it says ‘you can’t free black people.’) IIRC, around this time laws were passed making enslaved status hereditary as well.

(All of these can be found in the book Colonial and Revolutionary America by Alan Gallay (it’s a textbook and I don’t particularly recommend it but it has some good resources) who in turn is quoting from The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature in the Year 1619.)

I guess my point here is that it tends to be taught like “Europeans thought Africans were inferior so they thought it was ok to enslave them” but it seems to be closer to the truth that “slavery was profitable so Africans were increasingly considered inferior so enslaving them could be justified.” Like the belief in race didn’t create racialized slavery; it was the other way around. People think of the idea of “race” as being obvious and racism being a Just How It Was In Ye Olden Days, but “race” as we know it? Was literally just constructed as a justification for evil. It’s not something that people naturally construct in their understanding of the world.

Likewise before like 1650 or so, we don’t see English eyewitnesses to Native American nations assigning the idea of “race” to them. English people literally thought that if English people were born and brought up in the Americas, they would look like Native Americans because they thought characteristics like skin color were at least partially environmental. (The book I read about this is Indians and English by Karen Ordahl Kupperman and I highly recommend it.) Kupperman goes so far as to argue that it’s likely that English depictions at the time showed Native Americans as having more “European” features not because the artists were intentionally white-washing them, but because from their perspective a person’s features were not important in portraiture for depicting who they were; it was their clothing and posture and dress and the objects they were portrayed with that was supposed to depict that. (She then goes into a tangent about English portraiture at the time and it slaps.)

I don’t know. I have a problem with how racism in the past is treated with “they didn’t know any better” or painted with ignorance. The idea of race isn’t even that old.

Like, literally, the Europeans didn’t think it was okay to pillage and exploit the Americas because of their belief in race. The idea of “race” was formed out of their desire to pillage and exploit.

This would be great for a children’s hospital

[src]

This. This is why i love this hellsite. Where else would you see bloodied walls and call it color theory.

It's a hard choice deciding what I hate most about it.

The whole "musket" metaphor is terrible, both for the violent imagery, and for the pre-emptive self-martyrdom of it.

The mention of tears being shed. Who were they shed for? Surely not in compassion for the queer saints. I suspect they were tears of self-pity, knowing they no longer rule the world.

The letter writer who feels "betrayed" for BYU staff taking progressive positions?

The fact that it was Elder Holland, whose rhetoric always sounded more moderate than the right-wing-all-the-time of Elder Oaks.

Seizure First Aid. 

Learn it. Share it. Know it. Use it. 

100% correct medical information on tumblr for once; also consider calling 911 if you don’t know how often the person has seizures and ESPECIALLY if the seizure has lasted 5 minutes or more (which is why the watch is critical)

I have epilepsy so making sure the word is out on how to help people who do have seizures means a lot to me.

For the record, you should ALWAYS call 911 right away unless you know for certain that the person’s medical plan lets you wait to call. And if that seizure lasts 5 minutes it’s called a status seizure — those are big deals (it’s when brain cells start dying, I believe) and you should ABSOLUTELY call 911 then, if you haven’t already. When in doubt, don’t be afraid to call!

My latest comic for The Nib was written by my friend Mike Thompson- it’s his first published comics work! 

The Nib has been a steady source of income and a huge support to me and many other indie cartoonists for years. They publish amazing work, but will be cut loose by their financial backer in July. You can read the official post about it from editor Matt Bors here.  They are still running their kickstarter-funded print magazine, but have to put digital publishing on hiatus until they figure out their next steps. If you’ve been thinking about supporting their membership program, now would be a good time. They have levels from $2 to $40 per month. I really don’t want this to be my last Nib piece! 

instagram / patreon / portfolio / the nib / etsy

you know what, THIS is how you address historical queer folks of all stripes in a respectful way. you refer to them the way they chose to be referred to, and you say “it’s impossible to know how they would’ve identified in today’s society, but they’re part of our history regardless”.

"kids these days are always on their phones, kids these days never go outside" ok how about kids these days have less freedom of movement & access to public spaces than any previous generation, forcing them indoors, forcing them to rely on electronics, when many would prefer to be outdoors hanging out with friends

this isn't about the pandemic btw, this trend has been going on for like. 20 years now. it started with millennials and gen Z only has it worse

kids these days:

kids these days want to spend time outside, time in public, time hanging out with friends in person. kids these days do not want to constantly rely on the internet as their main source of socialization & leisure. but you have stolen all their options.

you have locked an entire generation indoors and thrown away the keys, and you have the audacity to complain that the prisoners spend too much time in their cells.

I’m a rising college freshman, and the fact that I’ll be able to go places whenever I want is legitimately fucking me up. Like, my campus is small-ish but it’s somehow surprising to me that I’ll get that much space. Like... I’m allowed to exist there? For MONTHS? And there’s public transport? I’m allowed to leave without telling anyone?

What do you mean, I don’t have to beg to be allowed in public anymore? What do you mean, people won’t be irritated or annoyed or exasperated by my presence? What do you mean, it’s ok to exist outside of my house? It never has been before. Why is it ok now?

There’s a little kid somewhere in my brain that just doesn’t understand. I don’t know whether to be scared or relieved or overjoyed, and it’s so confusing and messed up. I feel like I’m doing something wrong whenever I so much as grocery shop alone.

Because I just keep expecting people to be angry.

A couple of months ago I walked to an IHOP by my house. I was going to order food online for myself and my roomates, wait there and then walk back with it. While I was still in the parking lot atleast 6 cops pulled up on me and told me to get on the ground, they put me in handcuffs and left me lying there on the ground while they ran my ss. When I asked what happened one of them said “we are looking for a guy in a hoodie, you’re in a hoodie so…”

you know how some parents do that toxic thing where they don’t notice or reward kids for improving their behavior, but every screw-up gets remarked upon and used to inflict shame? so you’re stuck in that awful cycle where there are no rewards, only the inevitability of eventual punishment?

and how that makes it extremely hard to judge your own actions or grow into a better person, because there’s no one to confirm that you actually are doing better, and are capable of improving, and are not doomed to forever be a terrible person incapable of growth?

ok so: I don’t know how to explain to you that we’ve built a social media culture that treats people the same way. with the same abusive cycle.

That sounds like cancel culture

I don’t know what to call it anymore. people get heated about terms like “purity” or “cancel” or “call out” culture, or can’t seem to agree on a meaning. I’m not talking about like. no longer supporting rich and powerful celebrities when their abusive actions come to light. I’m not talking about holding people accountable, or warning people about active abusers. but I am seriously concerned about how we treat social media users once they get even a small amount of attention, even in small niche spaces.

I am concerned about this culture of combing through years of people’s social media accounts, looking for “problematic” shit they’ve done. I am concerned with the whole culture of using “call outs” as a tool to harass and ostracize users large and small. I am concerned about the malice we spread behind people’s backs, in screenshots and posts they aren’t able to see. I am concerned with this culture of demanding apologies for things said years ago, things already outgrown and regretted, and of ignoring those apologies even while pilling on more censure. I’m concerned about this whole culture of accusation and misinformation, where the most outrageous claims and holier-than-thou performances are rewarded with notes and views, even as facts are ignored and context removed. I am concerned about the lack of accountability, the way the accused is given no opportunity to defend themselves from the onslaught, the way their responses and explanations go ignored, the way any charge can be made at any time on any evidence, with no ability to appeal or exonerate. I’m concerned about the way this culture targets minority users and turns their own communities against them. I’m concerned about the actually harmful and predatory behavior that is lost in the bog, and how we have lost the ability to distinguish between shades of gray with any level of sanity. And I am concerned by the sheer number of people who fail to realize they are perpetuating bullying and harassment.

I am enormously concerned with the way people who are “called out” are never forgiven, never allowed to make amends, never allowed to grow, how their efforts to learn and do better are ignored even while strangers callously repeat and reblog and retweet the same criticisms ad nauseam.

And I see this everywhere, happening to anyone. And yes, this applies to larger accounts and youtubers and “influencers,” and a bunch of content creators who may or may not be making a decent living off of their work, but who are certainly not “rich and powerful celebrities.” (Because apparently we spend so much time in online microcosms that ya’ll can’t tell the difference???) Christ, my blog isn’t nearly as large as some people seem to think, it’s obscure by most measures, and still I’ve been the target of mass harassment for years. I’ve seen bad and watched others go through worse, seen users with far larger and far smaller followings driven off of this and other platforms—driven off with a violence and bloodthirst that had nothing to do with making a community safer and everything to do with a toxic culture gone wrong. Fucking fix this already.

Abuse is still abuse when it happens online, when done by strangers, when done anonymously, when done en masse. Now do BETTER.

This post hit me in a way I wasn’t expecting. I read the first paragraphs, about being raised in an environment where you’re punished for every minor transgression and never praised for anything. This is exactly the environment I was raised in, so it got me seeing parallels, and none of them were to social media.

My parallels were to all the jobs I’ve held where if I was perfect my “reward” was not being screamed at. To my peers in school who would bully me for every little “weird” slip up that demonstrated that I’m neurodivergent. To every marginalized person or group I’ve heard disparaged over the smallest thing. And in a moment of unexpected understanding I realized what it is about discussions about “cancel culture” that always felt off to me.

The way we treat each other online is not new. It is not unique. It is not some modern product of the rise of ess-jay-double-you wokescolds. It’s the way we’ve always been taught to treat each other, we do it offline every day. The only reason anyone sees it as unique is that the nature of it being online means that it isn’t as precise in only targeting those who we’re taught to turn a blind eye to.

Fixing this and doing better is systemic, which I guess I should’ve seen coming since most things are systemic. I definitely don’t have an answer to this, but I can see now that no amount of “just not cancelling people” is the answer, because “cancelling” is just a fancy way of dividing twitter fights from all the other ways we’re actively taught to be horrible to each other, and if we’re not pulling this up at the roots we won’t really fix it. I feel like I should end on advice so, burn the capitalists in your heads and radically support each other? That’s probably a good first step.

some of my own observations from starting out online at like 12 in 1997 and watching things develop:

1. all thrown together: people of wildly different backgrounds and knowledge bases are all communicating and very quickly which leads to everyone essentially being embarrassingly ignorant all the time. To alleviate the resultant discomfort we lean into:

2. humans want things to be simple and easy. We want the cliff notes version rather than the nuanced and lengthy explanation and all of the background to understand it, especially if it doesn’t involve us or interest us. “That’s bad, don’t do it. This is good, say this.” Easy to remember, easy to understand, easy to preform for the above mentioned need for a reward in the form of approbation or inclusion. Details and nuance, especially with the vast amount of stuff being discussed isn’t possible, practical, or comfortable all the time.

3. technology out pacing culture: adapting socially to new technology via etiquette and convention can’t keep up with how fast everything is going. How I learned to behave online at 12 has gone out of date several times and I’m only 36, and I don’t mean the things relating to me being a child then and an adult now but that almost none of what I learned as an early teenager even can be applied to tumblr in a practical sense. Everyone keeps having to make this up as they go, and due to point 1, we all have wildly different ideas on how to deal with things and different expectations. And it all changes multiple times in your life, you can feel out of touch and dated at 25. Social norms always have their problems and are always changing, but their lack of cohesiveness and turbo speed changing online has it’s consequences. Volume is also an issue–the sheer number of new things we need communally agreed on rules for is staggering. Similarly:

4. zooooom!: even before the internet and then it’s upgrade to high speed internet the pace of life has been accelerating and this means we expect things to go fast. We’re used to things going fast and even want them to, to some degree. And includes social media feeds and communication. Long posts were more common in 2011 when I joined tumblr and there were not tl;dr summaries. There’s a difference in how I type when I chat now than back in the AIM days–more comments sent before the other person actually finished their point (other people do it to me too). You used to wait more before you replied. Now it’s go go go! That also come connects back to point 2. And in part may come from point 3 especially how we can now use our phones in small moments like waiting in line where we previously could not have been trying to interact with humanity in the same way, things have to fit into those spaces now. The word count limits and easy to understand sound bites fit into smaller spaces.

5. Everything is everywhere. tweets are shared on tumblr and tumblr posts end up on facebook and facebook posts are referenced in youtube videos and so on. Context is easily destroyed or lost even within a platform. There’s so many games of telephone going on and everyone hears things through the grapevine and this is both a natural extension of human gossip and information sharing AND used maliciously and it’s all mixed in. Point 3 and 4 mean Information literacy can’t keep up and the potential stage for point 1 is horribly massive. Also your nudes may end up out there or a video of your horrible murder may get shared with strangers for their entertainment (or so the demand justice….it depends…).

6. grip on reality. while I think we’ve moved mostly away from considering online some kind of opposite of “real life” given that many very real things like shopping and work and school can happen online, now it’s like: you can get a grandma changing outfits in a spiral across your screen from the same app you get make up tutorials from and someone teaching you to change your oil and someone with professional level production lip-syncing a pop song and….what IS real life? Plenty of what is on the internet isn’t real and is meant for entrainment even if it’s not sold to you as such but it’s all mixed in with serious discussions about politics, practical skills, gossip, real news, fake news, airbrushed/photoshopped/facetuned influencers, etc. This started to some degree with TV but has gone so much further with the internet. Do you consciously know the difference between reality and funny videos? Probably! But wait there’s more to this point! At the same time that all this is happening, along with you getting plenty of your marketed entertainment online, there’s all the communication and engagement with other humans that’s happening through a screen. You can insult someone on the otherwise of the planet now in real time or fall in love with them or find real friendships or stalk people or bully them. You can do this to people you’ll never seen and never have to deal with real world consequences for harming them or helping them. This happens often in the same apps where you talk to people you have met and may indeed experience some consequences for your actions good, bad, or complicated. Is online real? It only seems to be part of the time. Do you know, if asked, that I’m a real human with a face and a life and feelings? Probably! But at the same time I’m a voice in a sea of mixed reality and unreality. And it’s not like we haven’t had infestations of bad actors inserting themselves into conversations like this to manipulate us, that’s a thing that happens. So how much personhood does your brain assign me while you scroll by?

Is this the real life or is it just fantasy? Caught in a landslide no escape from reality indeed.

And all of this stuff isn’t necessarily negative! But how it fits together leads to some of the problems mentioned and why they’re so complex and hard to solve.

It feels to me as if many people don’t know where to place other social media users in their mind’s social landscape so they end up simultaneously demanding the accountability of a close friend or family member from them (acting as if every mistake of theirs had hurt them personally) and the public presence curation of a wealthy celebrity (treating their social media feed as a piece of fictional media).

These parasocial relationships make us hold each other to impossible standards. You can’t treat human beings as if they were a TV show just because you experience them as a “stream of content” and you can’t treat strangers as if they were personally close to you just because you have read intimate details that they have shared. It’s fucked up.

RESPECT BLACK SCHOLARSHIP

Do you ever think about Doggerland?

Like how fucked up is it that it’s just….. gone.

I tend to forget about it and then when I remember it again I’m like “Oh yeah! There’s like an entire country sized stretch of land that’s just fucking GONE.

well…. “gone”….

Things I have learned since making this post;

The running theory (I can’t remember if it was definitive proof or not but I try not to make concrete statements on history any more) is that what caused the sinking of Doggerland was not the slow heating up of the Earth leading to a gradual melting of ice and snow causing the rise of the ocean….

What flooded Doggerland was a massive fucking CHUNK of Norway FELL INTO THE OCEAN and it caused the largest tsunami we have physical evidence for on earth and it fucking flooded Doggerland IN ONE SINGULAR DAY with a rush of water so strong, large and powerful it literally had the force to rip people to shreds when it hit them

Doggerland on Wikipedia

I do think about Doggerland, fairly frequently! And I feel it’s important to point out that its disappearance absolutely was because of “the slow heating up of the Earth leading to a gradual melting of ice and snow causing the rise of the ocean”. By the time of the tsunami, the land area would already have been reduced to a handful of small islands.

In general, a true tsunami (caused by displaced water) is never going to permanently submerge an area of land, because the water displacement is temporary and it will return to where it came from (causing huge damage on the way, of course). However, with islands that were already barely above sea-level, it’s definitely possible that such a huge inundation just obliterated their topsoil and left them below water level.

It’s hard to say, though, because the end of the last Ice Age was a wild time for water moving around and getting into places it shouldn’t. In particular, as the glaciers melted you’d often get huge meltwater lakes forming behind dams of ice and rubble which might then burst, suddenly dumping nearly inconceivable amounts of water all over the downstream terrain. One of these bodies of water, Lake Agassiz in North America, was so huge that it covered multiple states, and it’s thought that it drained very suddenly into the Atlantic ocean about 8000 years ago (i.e. contemporary with the flooding of Doggerland), dumping so much water into the ocean that global sea levels rose 1-2m over the course of a couple of years.

And if you’re wondering - yes, it’s theorised that this event, or the combination of the others like it, was responsible for the flood myths that exist in so many cultures. Coastal and lowland settlements around the world would have found themselves in a period of time where the sea just kept rising - not overnight, but inexorably and seemingly without any end in sight. Many, many cultures would have retreated to higher ground, only to find a few months later that the water was once more lapping at their doors.  In some ways I find that even more profoundly terrifying than the idea of a wall of water sweeping everything away.