#<- reading more audre lorde this morning and just feeling so reflective and emotional and grateful | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

thejokesonthem · 6 years

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Full article under the cut for those who can’t access the link.

The hatchet came later. Rocks were rare in the Red Hills of Kansas, where Carry Nation lived, so, when God commanded her to destroy establishments where alcohol was served, she gathered pieces of brick from her yard and wrapped them in brown paper to look like packages. On the morning of June 7, 1900, she walked into a saloon in Kiowa, told the proprietor to take cover, and began throwing her “smashers,” as she called them, at the mirror above his bar and all the bottles on it.

Later that day, Nation did the same thing at two other bars in town, though when her brick failed to break the mirror at one of them she hurled a billiard ball from a nearby pool table to finish the job. She was detained in Kiowa, but not arrested. Her first jail sentence came nearly seven months and many smithereened bars later, in Wichita. “You put me in here a cub,” she cried from behind the bars of her cell. “But I will go out a roaring lion and I will make all hell howl.” And so she did, switching from “smashers” to hatchets after her release, and getting arrested at least thirty more times for wielding them at bars from San Francisco to Coney Island.

Carry Nation’s wrath was a response to matters both private and public: she was furious at her alcoholic husband, and furious at the legal system that let men like him drink freely to the detriment of women, children, and society at large. Although her means were unusual and her desired ends unfashionable, she was representative of a recurring figure in American history: the woman whose activism is fuelled by anger. Such women are much in the news today, and much in the streets, too, although generally without the hatchet. Since the 2016 Presidential election, countless numbers of them have set out to make hell howl—by disrupting government hearings, occupying federal buildings, scaling the Statue of Liberty, boycotting businesses, going on strike, coming forward with stories of harassment and assault, flooding congressional telephone lines, raising a middle finger at the Presidential motorcade, and attending protests by the millions, sometimes carrying with them representations of the President’s castrated testicles and severed head.

In previous political eras, women like these would have been told to hold their tongues or act more ladylike. These days, however, we are being encouraged, at least in some quarters, to embrace our anger. A slew of new books are challenging the ancient notion that rage can be dangerous for both self and society, arguing instead that women’s anger is, as the respective subtitles of these books insist, their “power,” their “revolutionary power,” even their “superpower.”

Like any emotion, anger is easy to recognize but difficult to define. We know it when we see it, and certainly when we feel it, yet most definitions struggle to wholly capture it. Philosophers sometimes describe anger as a response to the feeling that something one values has been wronged or harmed. Biologists might explain it as a feeling of pain or discomfort or anxiety, accompanied by the release of hormones, like adrenaline, that increase blood pressure. Psychologists often classify it as a secondary emotion—one that follows from a primary reaction, such as fear or shame, and can take many affective forms, from tears to screaming to silence.

This definitional slipperiness inevitably haunts any effort to make anger into a political tool—what, exactly, is being valorized, an ethical objection or a rush of adrenaline? But one thing is clear: responses to anger depend, to a remarkable degree, on whether the person expressing it is a man or a woman. In “Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger” (Atria), the writer and activist Soraya Chemaly notes early on that women “don’t need books, studies, theories, or specialists” to prove how reviled our anger is. We are all familiar with the stereotypes whereby femininity demands the suppression of anger while masculinity rewards its expression, and whereby angry women are hysterical harpies but angry men—white men, at any rate—are heroes. Rather than dwell on how female rage is received, Chemaly presents a thoroughgoing assessment of its causes: an account, organized thematically, of the private and public abuse, bias, and discrimination faced by women.

The result is both relentless and revelatory. American women between the ages of eighteen and forty-four are nearly twice as likely as men to report feeling exhausted every day; women, if they have sex with men, have fewer orgasms than their male partners; they make less money than their male colleagues; of the thirty highest-paying job categories, twenty-six are dominated by men, while women dominate twenty-three of the thirty lowest-paying categories; female patients are treated for pain less often than male patients who present with the same symptoms; one in four women lives with domestic violence; one in five women has been sexually assaulted; and two-thirds of women have experienced street harassment, roughly half of them before they turned seventeen. Chemaly deftly balances these statistics with grim stories to illustrate them, so that the cumulative effect of reading her book is not merely to legitimize women’s anger but to render it astonishing that we are not even angrier.

All the facts that Chemaly musters were true before the most recent Presidential election, but in its wake many women are refusing to stay quiet about their experiences. Chemaly says that she is calling for a change in our cultural thinking on anger, gender, and politics, but in truth she is responding to one that has already begun. It was on display on January 21, 2017, the day of the first Women’s March, and since then has grown steadily more prominent, and strikingly more personal, with the #MeToo movement. Chemaly’s book has autobiographical passages—many of her female relatives get vivid cameos—but she chooses not to emphasize her own story. By contrast, the Rutgers University professor Brittney Cooper builds a manifesto mostly from memoir. “Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower” (St. Martin’s Press) considers African-American feminists from Michelle Obama to Beyoncé, but it is chiefly a chronicle of how Cooper learned to stop disguising and dismissing her own anger.

Cooper writes movingly about coming of age as a black woman in the Baptist Church and on the campus of Howard University—two bastions of black power and, in her experience, black patriarchy. She describes carrying around Audre Lorde’s “Sister Outsider” like a “feminist bible,” and it is mostly from Lorde that she derives her account of how rage can be made useful. Lorde owns anger the way that Monet owns water lilies; no one writing about the emotion today can ignore her address at the National Women’s Studies Association conference in 1981. Delivering “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism”—a title too often abridged at the colon—Lorde described the bigotry within the feminist movement, and then argued that anger was an appropriate response, because when “focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.”

It was essential for Cooper to develop that focus, she says, in order to make use of her anger: “The clarity that comes from rage should also tell us what kind of world we want to see, not just what kind of things we want to get rid of.” Focus, of course, is really the ability to adjust our vision, measuring one thing accurately against another, and Cooper’s attention to the complex dynamics of anger is illuminating even for readers who don’t agree with the positions she ultimately takes. She weighs her desire to join the first Women’s March as an act of feminist solidarity against her anger over the long-standing failure of white feminists to make common cause with women of color. (In the end, she skips the march, but feels ambivalent about the decision.) She considers her frustration that President Obama did not send troops to rescue the Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram alongside her wariness about “getting in bed at any level with the logics of patriarchy and militarism.” (Despite those qualms, she wishes Obama had done more for the girls, many of whom have still not been found.)

That sort of self-critical reflection is often missing from the journalist Rebecca Traister’s “Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger” (Simon & Schuster). Traister, who covered both of Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaigns, is a kind of feminist first responder who writes often and sometimes instantly about sexism in America. Her columns and profiles for New York magazine are astute accounts of the daily attacks on women’s rights, and the argument she makes in her book is partly one of accretion. Women’s rage, she claims, has long fuelled progressive social change, and the women galvanized by Trump’s election are part of a grand tradition of radicalism. Traister sees parallels between the participants in the Women’s March and the members of the National Women’s Political Caucus who protested when the press failed to cover their presence at the 1972 Democratic National Convention; between the gun-control activist Emma González and the labor activist Rose Schneiderman; between the men who demand smiles from women today and those who, in previous centuries, put women in branks (a metal muzzle, also known as a scold’s bridle, used to silence and publicly humiliate those who were forced to wear it); between the women of #MeToo and those who stormed Versailles during the French Revolution; between herself when she published an angry column and Rosa Parks who, as a girl, picked up a brick and threatened to throw it at a white boy who was bullying her.

Traister writes, “I had no idea how old and deep and urgent was women’s impulse to sometimes just let their fury out without a care to how it would be evaluated, even if that expression of rage put them at risk: in young Rosa Parks’s case, at risk of death; in my case, at risk of being mocked on the internet.” Of course, the Internet these days is very much real life, and abuse there can lead to abuse offline, but the problem with Traister’s comparison is that no semicolon can bridge the gap between those two experiences. That is, in fact, a problem with the book over all: juxtaposition is not a sufficient structure for a political argument. Traister focusses on isolated episodes of anger among progressive women of various races, classes, and eras, while failing to adequately reckon with crucial differences among the circumstances that provoked their anger and the ways in which they chose to respond to it.

But those aren’t superficial differences. They are critical distinctions that lead some angry women to be applauded while others are attacked, and that lead many rebellions to fail while only a few revolutions succeed. Traister writes that she does not wish “simply to cheer” anger, and acknowledges that the rage that fuels insurrections “has the power to burn them up.” But her case for ire is undermined by a rampaging elephant in the room: anger knows no political persuasion. For every Maxine Waters, there’s a Michele Bachmann; for every Gloria Steinem, a Phyllis Schlafly. At the same time that Chemaly, Cooper, and Traister were watching their own angry takes and rage-filled tweets go viral, Ann Coulter, Candace Owens, and Jeanine Pirro were watching theirs do the same.

This failure to parse politically inconvenient anger is, as Ogden Nash once put it, “a notable feat / of one-way thinking on a two-way street.” “Eloquent Rage,” “Good and Mad,” and “Rage Becomes Her” give little space to Sarah Palin, the women of the Tea Party, and the legions of women who—in what they, too, feel is an expression of righteous anger—lend their voices to the anti-abortion movement. All of the books do, however, acknowledge a fact that undercuts their attempts to valorize women’s anger: one of the angriest demographics in America before the 2016 Presidential election was white women, and the majority of them voted for Donald Trump.

That the words “President” and “Trump” came together anywhere outside of a Mad Lib is itself perhaps the most straightforward argument against anger as a political virtue. According to exit polls and endless postmortems, many people were so furious about immigration, the economy, the election of a black President, the potential for a female one, Black Lives Matter, the War on Christmas, and any number of other real and phantasmagorical issues that they voted for Trump. Was there ever a better example of blind rage?

That blindness is one of the oldest objections to anger. The ancients generally regarded rage as uncontrollable and violent; it led to bad decisions and endangered the well-being of individuals and collectives. The University of Chicago professor Martha Nussbaum shares that view, and, unlike Chemaly, Cooper, and Traister, she is not sanguine about anger as a political tool. In “The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis” (Simon & Schuster), Nussbaum acknowledges the seductions of anger but warns against its side effects.

“Anger is a poison to democratic politics, and it is all the worse when fueled by a lurking fear and sense of helplessness,” Nussbaum writes. That is true regardless of the angry person’s gender: it clouds the judgment of men and women alike, and increases the likelihood of error. Because the sort of insults and injuries that provoke anger can occur by accident, and because their causes can be difficult to determine, it is easy to get angry at the wrong person, or to settle for a substitute for the unavailable or unknown source. Even if we accurately identify the responsible party, Nussbaum argues, we can still err in assessing the severity of the transgression or in selecting an appropriate response. Anger, according to this view, is almost always retributive; even when it does not seek personal redress, it demands the suffering of others.

History is filled with examples of how easily anger can be exploited or manipulated, but Nussbaum summons from Greek tragedy an evocative illustration of how it can be redeemed. She tells the story of how, in the Oresteia, the Furies, vengeful beings that drip ooze from their eyes and vomit blood, are transformed into the Eumenides, beautiful creatures that serve justice rather than pursue cruelty. Athena establishes a system of law, and the changed Furies are part of its foundations. To Nussbaum, Aeschylus offers a metaphor for how individual passions can be tamed by reason and how collective anger can be converted to the cause of justice.

Of course, classical mythology is one thing and contemporary reality is another. Yet resisting anger personally and rejecting it politically is a crucial, if never fully realizable, duty of democratic citizens. That may seem like a reactionary message for a political era such as ours, but it is worth remembering that this age of rage was preceded, for progressives, by an era of hope, and that earlier injustices have been fought by political movements devoted to peace and nonviolence. Nussbaum cites Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela in her account of protest without payback. (The fact that all three are men does not, needless to say, reflect a masculine attraction to nonviolence but, rather, our failure to canonize female political heroes. She could have written as convincingly about Susan B. Anthony, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Clara Luper.) Nussbaum quotes King explaining that, though anger might have brought people to his protests, an essential task of the movement was to purify the emotion so that it could serve the cause of civil rights.

That belief came partly from King’s deep theological commitment to nonviolence. But it may also reflect a tactical awareness that people who feel, even erroneously, that they are losing power can be angrier than those who are seeking it. It is the deforming nature of anger to blur the boundary between unjustified and justified; if it weren’t, only the righteous would ever be angry. Instead, rage is most often forsworn by those who seem most entitled to it, and civility is demanded by those who least deserve it. The civil-rights marchers and the Freedom Riders were the ones with the calm clarity of the Eumenides, while their white neighbors were the ones who looked and sounded like the Furies.

All these authors are right to note that a major problem with anger is that some people are allowed to express it while others are not. That disparity was vividly on view during the recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in which Christine Blasey Ford calmly testified about being sexually assaulted in high school and her alleged attacker, the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, seethed and shouted at the senators, behavior that was applauded by conservative pundits and politicians as evidence of his innocence.

It was an upsetting display, and hardly one to make the case for the virtues of anger in the political arena. Indeed, the hearing suggests that, instead of encouraging rage from people who have traditionally been denied it, we might be better off defusing it in those traditionally rewarded for it—not only for the sake of our democracy but for ourselves. However efficacious anger may seem in the short term, even righteous anger is likely to be deleterious in the long term, to the individual body and to the body politic. Repressed emotions are dangerous, but, as countless medical studies have shown, sustained anger is both physically and emotionally destructive.

Women have every reason to be livid right now, and our anger should not be mocked, censored, or punished. But that does not mean it must be celebrated, or that hard-won efforts to manage anger and discourage aggression in the general population should be reversed. Tellingly, Cooper’s book concludes with a meditation on joy, a benediction of sorts that ends with a reminder: “What you build is infinitely more important than what you tear down.”

Anger is an avaricious emotion; it takes more credit than it deserves. Attempts to make it into a political virtue too often attribute to anger victories that rightfully belong to courage, patience, intelligence, persistence, or love. These days, we remember Carry Nation’s hatchets, but forget that she sold souvenir versions of them and used the proceeds not only to pay her own bail but also to support a shelter for the wives, mothers, and children of alcoholics. Nation’s anger accounts for only a sliver of her political activism; the majority of her life was spent in constructive rather than reactive efforts, and it was also spent in community with other activists, through the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Such solidarity, rather than the rage that occasioned it, feels like the secret subject of these new books. What is powerful isn’t so much women’s anger as their collective action. That is what has changed most radically since this past election, hopefully not in a burst of rebellion but in a revolution of lasting consequence. ♦ This article appears in the print edition of the October 15, 2018, issue, with the headline “Fighting Mad.”

#terf safe #feminism #radfem #terfs do interact

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theadmiringbog · 5 years

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*wakes up and looks at phone* ah let’s see what fresh horrors await me on the fresh horrors device

–@MISSOKISTIC IN A TWEET ON NOVEMBER 10, 2016

A more recent project that acts in a similar spirit is Scott Polach’s Applause Encouraged, which happened at Cabrillo National Monument in San Diego in 2015. On a cliff overlooking the sea, forty-five minutes before the sunset, a greeter checked guests in to an area of foldout seats formally cordoned off with red rope. They were ushered to their seats and reminded not to take photos. They watched the sunset, and when it finished, they applauded. Refreshments were served afterward.

—

Bird-watching is the opposite of looking something up online.

They write: If you can have your time and work and live and be a person, then the question you’re faced with every day isn’t, Do I really have to go to work today? but, How do I contribute to this thing called life? What can I do today to benefit my family, my company, myself?

To me, “company” doesn’t belong in that sentence. Even if you love your job! Unless there’s something specifically about you or your job that requires it, there is nothing to be admired about being constantly connected, constantly potentially productive the second you open your eyes in the morning—and in my opinion, no one should accept this, not now, not ever.

Audre Lorde meant it in the 1980s, when she said that “[c]aring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

As Gabrielle Moss, author of Glop: Nontoxic, Expensive Ideas That Will Make You Look Ridiculous and Feel Pretentious (a book parodying goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s high-priced wellness empire), put it: self-care “is poised to be wrenched away from activists and turned into an excuse to buy an expensive bath oil.”

Thinking about sensitivity reminds me of a monthlong artist residency I once attended with two other artists in an extremely remote location in the Sierra Nevada. There wasn’t much to do at night, so one of the artists and I would sometimes sit on the roof and watch the sunset. She was Catholic and from the Midwest; I’m sort of the quintessential California atheist. I have really fond memories of the languid, meandering conversations we had up there about science and religion. And what strikes me is that neither of us ever convinced the other—that wasn’t the point—but we listened to each other, and we did each come away different, with a more nuanced understanding of the other person’s position.

The life force is concerned with cyclicality, care, and regeneration; the death force sounds to me a lot like “disrupt.” Obviously, some amount of both is necessary, but one is routinely valorized, not to mention masculinized, while the other goes unrecognized because it has no part in “progress.”

Certain people would like to use technology to live longer, or forever. Ironically, this desire perfectly illustrates the death drive at play in the “Manifesto of Maintenance Art” (“separation, individuality, Avant-Garde par excellence; to follow one’s own path—do your own thing; dynamic change”)30. To such people I humbly propose a far more parsimonious way to live forever: to exit the trajectory of productive time, so that a single moment might open almost to infinity. As John Muir once said, “Longest is the life that contains the largest amount of time-effacing enjoyment.”

Poswolsky writes of their initial discovery: “I think we also found the answer to the universe, which was, quite simply: just spend more time with your friends.”

... he said, with an epiphany he had while accompanying a fellow clergyman on a trip to Louisville:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness.

My most-liked Facebook post of all time was an anti-Trump screed. In my opinion, this kind of hyper-accelerated expression on social media is not exactly helpful (not to mention the huge amount of value it produces for Facebook). It’s not a form of communication driven by reflection and reason, but rather a reaction driven by fear and anger.

Obviously these feelings are warranted, but their expression on social media so often feels like firecrackers setting off other firecrackers in a very small room that soon gets filled with smoke.

Our aimless and desperate expressions on these platforms don’t do much for us, but they are hugely lucrative for advertisers and social media companies, since what drives the machine is not the content of information but the rate of engagement. Meanwhile, media companies continue churning out deliberately incendiary takes, and we’re so quickly outraged by their headlines that we can’t even consider the option of not reading and sharing them.

To stand apart is to take the view of the outsider without leaving, always oriented toward what it is you would have left. It means not fleeing your enemy, but knowing your enemy, which turns out not to be the world—contemptus mundi—but the channels through which you encounter it day to day. It also means giving yourself the critical break that media cycles and narratives will not, allowing yourself to believe in another world while living in this one.

Standing apart represents the moment in which the desperate desire to leave (forever!) matures into a commitment to live in permanent refusal, where one already is, and to meet others in the common space of that refusal. This kind of resistance still manifests as participating, but participating in the “wrong way”: a way that undermines the authority of the hegemonic game and creates possibilities outside of it.

A crowded sidewalk is a good example: everyone is expected to continue moving forward. Tom Green poked at this convention when he performed “the Dead Guy,” on his Canadian public access TV show in the 1990s. Slowing his walk to a halt, he carefully lowered himself to the ground and lay facedown and stick-straight for an uncomfortable period of time. After quite a crowd had amassed, he got up, looked around, and nonchalantly walked away.

So to a question like “Will you or will you not participate as asked?” Diogenes would have answered something else entirely: “I will participate, but not as asked,” or, “I will stay, but I will be your gadfly.” This answer (or non-answer) is something I think of as producing what I’ll call a “third space”—an almost magical exit to another frame of reference. For someone who cannot otherwise live with the terms of her society, the third space can provide an important if unexpected harbor.

Herman Melville’s short story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” Bartleby, the clerk famous for repeating the phrase, “I would prefer not to,” uses a linguistic strategy to invalidate the requests of his boss. Not only does he not comply; he refuses the terms of the question itself.

Facebook abstention, like telling someone you grew up in a house with no TV, can all too easily appear to be taste or class related.

We need to be able to think across different time scales when the mediascape would have us think in twenty-four-hour (or shorter) cycles, to pause for consideration when clickbait would have us click, to risk unpopularity by searching for context when our Facebook feed is an outpouring of unchecked outrage and scapegoating, to closely study the ways that media and advertising play upon our emotions, to understand the algorithmic versions of ourselves that such forces have learned to manipulate, and to know when we are being guilted, threatened, and gaslighted into reactions that come not from will and reflection but from fear and anxiety.

“In short, when the inattention stimulus falls outside the area to which attention is paid, it is much less likely to capture attention and be seen,” the researchers write. That’s intuitive enough, but it gets more complicated. If the briefly flashing stimulus was outside the area of visual attention, but was something distinct like a smiley face or the person’s name, the subject would notice it after all.

As an artist interested in using art to influence and widen attention, I couldn’t help extrapolating the implications from visual attention to attention at large.

In a post about ad blockers on the University of Oxford’s “Practical Ethics” blog, the technology ethicist James Williams (of Time Well Spent) lays out the stakes: We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like “annoying” or “distracting.” But this is a grave misreading of their nature. In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation, making it harder, in the words of Harry Frankfurt, to “want what we want to want.” Thus there are deep ethical implications lurking here for freedom, wellbeing, and even the integrity of the self.

In an effort to make the user aware of persuasive design, Nudget used overlays to call out and describe several of the persuasive design elements in the Facebook interface as the user encountered them. But the thesis is also useful simply as a catalog of the many forms of persuasive design—the kinds that behavioral scientists have been studying in advertising since the mid-twentieth century.

Vivrekar lists the strategies identified by researchers Marwell and Schmitt in 1967: “reward, punishment, positive expertise, negative expertise, liking/ingratiation, gifting/pre-giving, debt, aversive stimulation, moral appeal, positive self-feeling, negative self-feeling, positive altercasting, negative altercasting, positive esteem of others, and negative esteem of others.”

Vivrekar herself has study participants identify instances of persuasive design on the LinkedIn site and compiles a staggering list of 171 persuasive design techniques.

“knowing your enemy” when it comes to the attention economy. For example, one could draw parallels between the Nudget system, which teaches users to see the ways in which they are being persuaded, and the Prejudice Lab, which shows participants how bias guides their behavior.

Or that the woman in front of you in line who just screamed at you is maybe not usually like this; maybe she’s going through a rough time. Whether this is actually true isn’t the point. Just considering the possibility makes room for the lived realities of other people, whose depths are the same as your own. This is a marked departure from the self-centered “default setting,”

Last week, after a meeting, I took the F streetcar from Civic Center to the Ferry Building in San Francisco. It’s a notoriously slow, crowded, and halting route, especially in the middle of the day. This pace, added to my window seat, gave me a chance to look at the many faces of the people on Market Street with the same alienation as the slow scroll of Hockney’s Yorkshire Landscapes. Once I accepted the fact that each face I looked at (and I tried to look at each of them) was associated with an entire life—of birth, of childhood, of dreams and disappointments, of a universe of anxieties, hopes, grudges, and regrets totally distinct from mine—this slow scene became almost impossibly absorbing. As Hockney said: “There’s a lot to look at.” Even though I’ve lived in a city most of my adult life, in that moment I was floored by the density of life experience folded into a single city street.

When the language of advertising and personal branding enjoins you to “be yourself,” what it really means is “be more yourself,” where “yourself” is a consistent and recognizable pattern of habits, desires, and drives that can be more easily advertised to and appropriated, like units of capital.

In fact, I don’t know what a personal brand is other than a reliable, unchanging pattern of snap judgments: “I like this” and “I don’t like this,” with little room for ambiguity or contradiction.

The fact that commenting on the weather is a cliché of small talk is actually a profound reminder of this, since the weather is one of the only things we each know any other person must pay attention to.

(“bland enough to offend no one”)

The professional social media star, a person reverse-engineered from a formula of what is most palatable to everyone all the time.

Everybody says that there is no censorship on the internet, or at least only in part. But that is not true. Online censorship is applied through the excess of banal content that distracts people from serious or collective issues.

Our interactions become data collected by a company, and engagement goals are driven by advertising.

Mastodon... They allow more granular control of one’s intended audience; when you post to Mastodon, you can have the content’s visibility restricted to a single person, your followers, or your instance—or it can be public.

... forming any idea requires a combination of privacy and sharing. But this restraint is difficult when it comes to commercial social media, whose persuasive design collapses context within our very thought processes themselves by assuming we should share our thoughts right now—indeed, that we have an obligation to form our thoughts in public!

A counterexample would be the sparse UX of Patchwork, a social networking platform that runs on Scuttlebutt. Scuttlebutt is a sort of global mesh network that can go without servers, ISPs, or even Internet connection (if you have a USB stick handy). It can do that because it relies on individual users’ computers as the servers, similar to local mesh networks, and because your “account” on a Scuttlebutt-powered social media platform is simply an encrypted block of data that you keep on your computer.

In #NeverAgain, David Hogg writes that “[a]nger will get you started but it won’t keep you going.”

Before long, the conference would be over, and I would have missed most of it. A lot of things would have happened there that are important and useful. For my part, I wouldn’t have much to show for my “time well spent”—no pithy lines to tweet, no new connections, no new followers. I might only tell one or two other people about my observations and the things I learned. Otherwise, I’d simply store them away, like seeds that might grow some other day if I’m lucky.

Seen from the point of view of forward-pressing, productive time, this behavior would appear delinquent. I’d look like a dropout. But from the point of view of the place, I’d look like someone who was finally paying it attention. And from the point of view of myself, the person actually experiencing my life, and to whom I will ultimately answer when I die—I would know that I spent that day on Earth.

“I would prefer not to.”

#How to Do Nothing #books

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