There is a similar brouhaha in sports media going on regarding the arguably slightly less than 100% sensitive way in which Adam Schefter initially broke the news of Dwayne Haskins dying over the weekend. The sooner our brains and society can evolve passed taking this technology so seriously the better.
The real tragedy of Twitter is that kids no longer pick "mind reading" as the superpower they wish they had because if someone is on Twitter you already know everything they're thinking and it's usually boring or dumb or mean.
Indirectly related to this post: I have enjoyed Soderbergh's films in the past but I thought Kimi was an absolute snooze fest, even though I initially was looking forward to it. I so intensely dislike movies that consist of people interacting with computers and other electronic devices. Is it that directors find it to be a challenge to craft films that lack human interaction? Or do studios think it will make movies more relatable to their smartphone addicted audiences? It's just awful.
For a far better film on the subject of people lurking and peeping out of their own apartments, I would recommend The Voyeurs (2021). And I should point that if you are one of those people for whom Alexandra Daddario is a relevant interest, you will find Sydney Sweeney to be every bit as relevant.
I like this because I think Freddie and many of his readers would agree that mass social media-driven opprobrium *has the capacity* to be truly damaging, and is always a pain in the ass. But there are green shoots and we shouldn't give the mob more power than it deserves by failing to recognize its limits.
When one grows up with social media infused into every segment of your daily life, it's no wonder some people think it is a legitimate aspect of reality. We now have entire generations of youth who think tweeting to the nameless void is little different than an actual conversation at a bar or coffee shop. I miss those dorky early days of Facebook where the most annoying thing was someone sharing their latest Farmville escapades...
"Stop taking social media so serious. Nothing here is real. Look at this chicken 🐓🚗 it is bigger than the car."
- best Tweet I've seen in a long time (which isn't saying much because I've never used Twitter)
I think the social networks of the internet genuinely revealed the extent of the crimes of Jimmy Saville. Previously the institutions that should have been on top of it had failed miserably and it was only the anonymous sharing of stories online that led to irrefutable testimony being corroborated.
The power still does not lie with those individuals telling their stories though, but relies upon journalists to pick up the baton and do the corroboration on important stories.
This leads on to your groomer comment. It is not meaningless. It might be overused and it's importance may be getting diluted but the importance of safeguarding is often being disregarded. "Groomer" is less like "toxic" and "gaslighting" which are rhetorical flourishes and more like "fascist", "bigot" or "nazi" which are serious and real claims, the validity of which can be observed.
Take this substack today. It shows how it's been a year since the story broke of sex offenders escaping scrutiny by changing their identity.
Still, one year later, the Disclosure and Barring service offer the facility for individuals to do this.
No-one argues against background checks as an important safe-guarding mechanism. People are arguing that a certain group should be allowed to "kill" their previous identity and move to a new one though.
Groomers are no longer only the people who take advantage of these loopholes to persist in sex offending themselves, but those who enable them by disregarding the important safeguarding implication and advocate to remove safeguards purely to affirm the sensitivities of a group.
I must admit I thought this didn't square well with your anti-canceling posts from the past, but now I understand. Proportionality and consistency! If only we could have those everywhere in life.
jonathan haidt has a good article on all this in the Atlantic today. He parses the effects of cancel culture on non-famous, non-powerful people and how that is affecting social cohesion and democracy. he spreads a far wider net as well. It's a good article but ends with the usual pleas for government to do something to ameliorate the harms of social media . . . though he does make the good point that it really comes down to us in our millions using our own inherent genius and innovation to directly deal with problems we are aware of in the places we live. (Like filling potholes in streets when the city won't do it, as a very simple example.)
As usual Freddie reveals the problem with the progressive, young leftists. They can not tell the difference between enacting true social change and making posts. Haidt traces this not only to social media but to them being a generation of children exposed to over protection, not being able to play outside without supervision, or walk to school on their own, and so on. Their lament, that words are violence, that ideas are physically harmful, and so on come directly out of that way of thinking and parenting. It is a problem facilitated by both the left and the right for decades. They have been raised in bubbles and in consequence their social immune systems never developed.
I used to believe (based on some flawed sort of historical awareness) that the 60s in our time would come once more from the left (as it had in the 60s and the 20s). But it isn't and is not going to. those times were notable by large social protest movements that directly worked for structural change and identifiable outcomes (unions, women's right to vote, end the war, civil rights). They also were accompanied by great movements in art, literature, music, and comedy. It was clear then that the powerful, the rich, and the corporations were a problem and people set out to limit their power. We are not living in such a time. it is regrettably far more similar to the era prior to the civil war when social cohesion devolved into partisan attacks and physical violence and the inability of government at any level to function for the good of the whole.
I now see the nascent contemporary 60s movement coming out of what has been called heterodox thinkers. it is still relatively small but it is growing. and it is gathering members from both left and right who all have in common a belief in thinking, examining issues deeply, self-reflection, and liberal democracy. They are also slowly and continually confronting the extremes of both left and right, as well as their incredibly infantile belief systems and behavior. The exhausted middle is beginning to respond to this, most often with relief.
Ecological reclamation does not only apply to ecosystems.
I got kicked off of Twitter for calling Trump a retard. Canceled by for using a WOKE slur against the MAGA God. Best thing that ever happened to me. Twitter is the Devil.
"I suspect that these leftists tweet so much not because they think tweeting gives them power but because they are convinced that the real world never will. Change seems impossible, so let’s tell jokes."
This is what Terry Eagleton thought about the pomo, since the 60's/70's it was becoming clear that neither the Soviet Union nor the nationalist movements could bring about real (material/economic) change, erstwhile radicals became disillusioned and started to find 'revolutions' in the 'fissures', gender/race/sex/humour etc. Why they became disillusioned? Because Capitalism seemed too powerful of a force to change, it seemed that the world might come to an end but the 'system' will keep going.
I do not know who this person is, but what stands out is TWITTER IS NOT POLITICS. People do it from their phones. They have no skin in the game. Grass roots door knocking, showing up at candidate forums--that's politics. I've been a delegate to state conventions and met all the presidential candidates. I met Ralph Nader. Twitter is not in the same dimension. I can't have conversations abt politics with people who are only twits.
I've come to realize that social media was probably a mistake. It's not without its positives, but its been a net negative for society at large. And it's only made my anxiety and depression worse.
I am not a leftist, but it seems to me that much of the left prioritizes the symbolic over the concrete. Actually, this is common to the PMC in general, but since the PMC is the hegemonic class, their symbolic gestures carry more weight than those of someone without class power.
The problem comes when the PMC run into problems that don't care about their symbols and wish-fulfillment, things like "the COVID" or "the Taliban", forces that cannot be blackmailed, silenced, bargained with, or distracted with some shiny object. Forces that don't give a shit about the class power of the PMC, that is, its ability to decide what is and is not normative.
Faced with such forces, the PMC and their nostrums ("By this Sign, I thee deplatform!") fall flat on their faces.
There is a similar brouhaha in sports media going on regarding the arguably slightly less than 100% sensitive way in which Adam Schefter initially broke the news of Dwayne Haskins dying over the weekend. The sooner our brains and society can evolve passed taking this technology so seriously the better.
Well stated. Social media is cacophony, it makes me ill.
The real tragedy of Twitter is that kids no longer pick "mind reading" as the superpower they wish they had because if someone is on Twitter you already know everything they're thinking and it's usually boring or dumb or mean.
Indirectly related to this post: I have enjoyed Soderbergh's films in the past but I thought Kimi was an absolute snooze fest, even though I initially was looking forward to it. I so intensely dislike movies that consist of people interacting with computers and other electronic devices. Is it that directors find it to be a challenge to craft films that lack human interaction? Or do studios think it will make movies more relatable to their smartphone addicted audiences? It's just awful.
For a far better film on the subject of people lurking and peeping out of their own apartments, I would recommend The Voyeurs (2021). And I should point that if you are one of those people for whom Alexandra Daddario is a relevant interest, you will find Sydney Sweeney to be every bit as relevant.
I like this because I think Freddie and many of his readers would agree that mass social media-driven opprobrium *has the capacity* to be truly damaging, and is always a pain in the ass. But there are green shoots and we shouldn't give the mob more power than it deserves by failing to recognize its limits.
When one grows up with social media infused into every segment of your daily life, it's no wonder some people think it is a legitimate aspect of reality. We now have entire generations of youth who think tweeting to the nameless void is little different than an actual conversation at a bar or coffee shop. I miss those dorky early days of Facebook where the most annoying thing was someone sharing their latest Farmville escapades...
"Stop taking social media so serious. Nothing here is real. Look at this chicken 🐓🚗 it is bigger than the car."
- best Tweet I've seen in a long time (which isn't saying much because I've never used Twitter)
I think the social networks of the internet genuinely revealed the extent of the crimes of Jimmy Saville. Previously the institutions that should have been on top of it had failed miserably and it was only the anonymous sharing of stories online that led to irrefutable testimony being corroborated.
The power still does not lie with those individuals telling their stories though, but relies upon journalists to pick up the baton and do the corroboration on important stories.
This leads on to your groomer comment. It is not meaningless. It might be overused and it's importance may be getting diluted but the importance of safeguarding is often being disregarded. "Groomer" is less like "toxic" and "gaslighting" which are rhetorical flourishes and more like "fascist", "bigot" or "nazi" which are serious and real claims, the validity of which can be observed.
Take this substack today. It shows how it's been a year since the story broke of sex offenders escaping scrutiny by changing their identity.
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/does-this-look-like-closing-a-loophole?s=r
Still, one year later, the Disclosure and Barring service offer the facility for individuals to do this.
No-one argues against background checks as an important safe-guarding mechanism. People are arguing that a certain group should be allowed to "kill" their previous identity and move to a new one though.
Groomers are no longer only the people who take advantage of these loopholes to persist in sex offending themselves, but those who enable them by disregarding the important safeguarding implication and advocate to remove safeguards purely to affirm the sensitivities of a group.
I must admit I thought this didn't square well with your anti-canceling posts from the past, but now I understand. Proportionality and consistency! If only we could have those everywhere in life.
jonathan haidt has a good article on all this in the Atlantic today. He parses the effects of cancel culture on non-famous, non-powerful people and how that is affecting social cohesion and democracy. he spreads a far wider net as well. It's a good article but ends with the usual pleas for government to do something to ameliorate the harms of social media . . . though he does make the good point that it really comes down to us in our millions using our own inherent genius and innovation to directly deal with problems we are aware of in the places we live. (Like filling potholes in streets when the city won't do it, as a very simple example.)
As usual Freddie reveals the problem with the progressive, young leftists. They can not tell the difference between enacting true social change and making posts. Haidt traces this not only to social media but to them being a generation of children exposed to over protection, not being able to play outside without supervision, or walk to school on their own, and so on. Their lament, that words are violence, that ideas are physically harmful, and so on come directly out of that way of thinking and parenting. It is a problem facilitated by both the left and the right for decades. They have been raised in bubbles and in consequence their social immune systems never developed.
I used to believe (based on some flawed sort of historical awareness) that the 60s in our time would come once more from the left (as it had in the 60s and the 20s). But it isn't and is not going to. those times were notable by large social protest movements that directly worked for structural change and identifiable outcomes (unions, women's right to vote, end the war, civil rights). They also were accompanied by great movements in art, literature, music, and comedy. It was clear then that the powerful, the rich, and the corporations were a problem and people set out to limit their power. We are not living in such a time. it is regrettably far more similar to the era prior to the civil war when social cohesion devolved into partisan attacks and physical violence and the inability of government at any level to function for the good of the whole.
I now see the nascent contemporary 60s movement coming out of what has been called heterodox thinkers. it is still relatively small but it is growing. and it is gathering members from both left and right who all have in common a belief in thinking, examining issues deeply, self-reflection, and liberal democracy. They are also slowly and continually confronting the extremes of both left and right, as well as their incredibly infantile belief systems and behavior. The exhausted middle is beginning to respond to this, most often with relief.
Ecological reclamation does not only apply to ecosystems.
I got kicked off of Twitter for calling Trump a retard. Canceled by for using a WOKE slur against the MAGA God. Best thing that ever happened to me. Twitter is the Devil.
"I suspect that these leftists tweet so much not because they think tweeting gives them power but because they are convinced that the real world never will. Change seems impossible, so let’s tell jokes."
This is what Terry Eagleton thought about the pomo, since the 60's/70's it was becoming clear that neither the Soviet Union nor the nationalist movements could bring about real (material/economic) change, erstwhile radicals became disillusioned and started to find 'revolutions' in the 'fissures', gender/race/sex/humour etc. Why they became disillusioned? Because Capitalism seemed too powerful of a force to change, it seemed that the world might come to an end but the 'system' will keep going.
I do not know who this person is, but what stands out is TWITTER IS NOT POLITICS. People do it from their phones. They have no skin in the game. Grass roots door knocking, showing up at candidate forums--that's politics. I've been a delegate to state conventions and met all the presidential candidates. I met Ralph Nader. Twitter is not in the same dimension. I can't have conversations abt politics with people who are only twits.
I've come to realize that social media was probably a mistake. It's not without its positives, but its been a net negative for society at large. And it's only made my anxiety and depression worse.
I am not a leftist, but it seems to me that much of the left prioritizes the symbolic over the concrete. Actually, this is common to the PMC in general, but since the PMC is the hegemonic class, their symbolic gestures carry more weight than those of someone without class power.
The problem comes when the PMC run into problems that don't care about their symbols and wish-fulfillment, things like "the COVID" or "the Taliban", forces that cannot be blackmailed, silenced, bargained with, or distracted with some shiny object. Forces that don't give a shit about the class power of the PMC, that is, its ability to decide what is and is not normative.
Faced with such forces, the PMC and their nostrums ("By this Sign, I thee deplatform!") fall flat on their faces.