Yeah, see, I am on your side but the focus on "destroying books is bad," is kind of irrelevant to the actual harm being done.
It's that they're devouring the contents of people's brains for the ability to replace them that's concerning. If they chose to do this in a completely different way that preserved the books, I would not say it changes the moral valence of their actions.
By centering the argument on the destruction of the books, it shifts it away from the actual concern.
Your empathy is in a good place, but the problem isn't how humans are broken, it's what is breaking them.
Western society* is built in a really dumb and alienating way. Humans are reduced to a labor commodity, places where people can mingle socially are being commercialized out of existence, the internet has evolved into a machine that actively profits from outrage and alienation, our governmental institutions are primarily driven by forces no regular person has any power over and we can't even feel pride in our work because it's profitable to convince us that we are replaceable and disposable.
Where's the social incentive to connect to other people? The powers that be benefit from a disorganized and isolated population, so they will do nothing to change that. Market incentives mean that media which focused on things that provoke fear, rage and anxiety are more profitable than ones that promote community, happiness or hope.
It's permeated so deeply into our culture that some older kids movies seem completely insane now. Like, think about ET and consider how wild it would be nowadays for you to just let your children vanish for hours doing whatever and wandering around wherever.
The fear and anxiety determines our actions, and there are multiple incentives on a macro-social level for that to continue.
Hell, I have watched this happen in real time during my 10+ year time on the web, where the communities of excited weirdos sharing their thoughts and feelings have been so thoroughly dominated by this that it is hard to engage with any social media without someone shoving a headline into your face that is intended to upset you.
On Tumblr, for example, the trend was so strong that the idea that you weren't constantly upset was a sign of being a bad person. You know, on the Superwholock site? Yeah, the one that wanted to fuck the Onceler.
If you want to reverse this trend, it's going to require changing how our political, economic and media environments act by changing their incentives. Otherwise, any change will be superficial and fail to produce meaningful results.
It's pretty depressing, but that's the situation as I see it.
*I'm not qualified to comment on other cultural spheres.
This reminds me of when I shadowed a librarian in high school and they talked to me about how people got really upset with them throwing away books that had multiple reprintings and were in awful condition.
Because people as a whole lack the capacity for nuance, I guess.
I just want a job with a living wage now, and it's agonizingly, dehumanizingly hard to look online. Especially if you have the extreme rejection sensitivity aspect of ADHD.
...so what about the minorities in those red states who are stuck there because of their financial or familial situations, and who lack the power to influence politics?
Wouldn't work out. World's too complicated for simple answers like that.
Leaving, even if it would produce a viable nation, would involve leaving a lot of people in the lurch. There's people in conservative states who need the counter balance of blue states to slow down their government's trend to self destruction and fascism.
Even though it's increasingly frustrating with how feeble that resistance is, it does keep things like banning gay marriage in the "difficult to pass" territory and not the "a few compromises" one.
It's increasingly hard to find things that are like that for everyone. It's an unfortunate trend that means I have to very aggressively curate my feeds to keep from being dragged into it.
Europol’s Deputy Executive Director of Operations Jean-Philippe Lecouffe said in a statement. “By dismantling its infrastructure and arresting its key players, we are sending a clear message: there is no safe haven for those who profit from harm.”
(Looks at the camera)
Just as an aside, the person who owns this new company donated millions to the Trump campaign.
Misogyny in stuff can be really complicated. Sometimes you can only really see it holistically, and sometimes it's only in specifics. Sometimes a story will give a woman a lot of focus, place her feelings and emotions in the spotlight and give her actions the most agency and power over the plot- while also having her be inexplicably dressed in lingerie the whole time with a really weak excuse, if any.
Like, I love FF12. Ashe is undisputably the actual main character in it, and her story is about being a person with authority in a time of war. It's about grappling with your own grief and desire for revenge, trying to keep in mind your principles and what you believe in. It somehow manages to be both about the divine right of kings and weapons of mass destruction and maintained it's emotional thru line almost all the way to the end!
But also, Ashe, that hot pink mini-skirt? Girrrrrl, WTF, you live in a desert. You're gonna fight things in a skirt made of two pink napkins? There's no real reason for her to dress like that, and it's definitely just for fan service!
I still love the game, but I acknowledge that it has that problem. It objectifies women because it treats them as visual treats and has them dress in bizzare ways that don't flow adequately from their characterization. This is because of structural societal things, and it sucks for a bunch of reasons.
Bayonetta is different primarily because the work's themes are, as I understand them, incredibly positive about women being active, powerful sexual people who do what they want.
B dresses like that because she likes being hot, and it's a characterization tool, and it's never a disempowering thing for her.
Like, Kill la Kill has ridiculous outfits, but I've had multiple women tell me they love it because of how it intersects with things they like. I wasn't going to watch it until one of them insisted and, yeah, it's pretty good. The sexual elements are intended and used as part of the narrative, and the emotional thru line is very strong.
So, it's one of those things that needs an exhaustive breakdown to really know about in a work. I don't know enough about this one to say, and I'm just commented in hopes that it's useful for you or someone else looking at doing media analysis of this type.
I'm forced to agree. It feels weird to do so, but, I guess yeah- the thing which should be focused on is the how and why of this and not just focus on the puritan disgust angle.
I've seen the Shaun video (linked in these replies somewhere) so I'm familiar with what's going on socially around this video game. Being upset because of misogynistic objectification is appropriate, but sex isn't inherently bad.
The pressure applied by the need for video games to act as investments is not aligned with artistic expressiveness, innovation or quality.
This is why games from smaller Companies or indie developers continue to be the huge, genre-changing breakout hits. They're still being made with the intention of making a game that's fun, weird, or interesting as a primary concern, rather than just being a vehicle for profit.
It's possible, but I don't doubt that there's going to be a continued push to consolidate people into smaller and smaller parts of the internet- quite possibly through legal means, but definitely through as many commerical ones as possible.
I don't have a lot of faith in the perseverance of the vast majority of websites, not because of their lack of willingness or desire, but because of a lack of funds.
People get poorer, needs get more expensive and things like this place become harder to keep running.
You are right, though, that it's not written in stone. I will try to hold out a metered measure of hope.
Search engines are already basically worthless, so I'm not surprised with the falling axe.
The shift from search engines actually indexing things to search through to trying to parse a question and find an answer has been the most irritating trend for me. I remember when you could just put in a series of words and be delivered unto every indexed page that had all of them.
Now I regularly get told that even common words don't exist if I insist that, no, google I do want only searches with the words I put in.
This is my old person rant, I guess. /s
This change is probably going to cause huge problems for a lot of existing sites, especially because it means Google will probably start changing their advertising model now that they can consolidate the views into a specific location and pocket the money. The article mentions this, but doesn't realize the implications.
"The internet will still be around," is only true if you hold that the super consolidated, commericalized nexus of doom is going to continue on just fine, while countless small, very useful websites made by actual people for actual reasons fade away into oblivion.
It sucks to watch something I have loved my whole life die, but it's going bit by bit because we can't convince our politicians to do anything about it.
I think I ended up with a far better grasp of my own internal environment than a neurotypical person just because of my inability to let inconsistencies go, you know? I couldn't ignore things just because it's convenient.
I also have slowly found out that I'm probably much more creative than the norm, because I misunderstood what "writer's block" meant. I thought it was when you just .. couldn't bring yourself to write, but now I know it's another thing entirely for many neurotypical people.
A blank page is no intimidation at all, provided I can align the spheres of the heavens towards motivation.
I've really enjoyed this discussion, but I haven't been able to respond because I don't have the mental bandwidth right now. Thanks for being such a good conversational partner and I think you make some very interesting points that helped me develop my own opinions.
Zaleramancer @ Zaleramancer @beehaw.org Posts 4Comments 138Joined 6 mo. ago
Very interesting resource. I found her video presentation about online gaming very informative and delightfully fair.