#they're scat porn. they're just infamously weird pieces of scat porn. there. spoiler given. so don't google them.

[astraltrickster]

Y'know I have to wonder...I'm not the first person who's noticed that the push toward algorithmic Content Delivery(TM) pretty much EVERYWHERE but here and AO3 is probably at least partially responsible for a lot of no-problematic-content-allowed-on-any-social-media-ever kind of thinking. I'm not the first one to notice that "you need to curate your own experience" probably rings pretty hollow to people who "live" primarily on Twitter and TikTok and YouTube and Instagram and Pinterest and wherever else just decides to throw stuff related to ANYTHING you've glanced at into your "personalized" feed - easier said than done! Like, this is an underappreciated part of why those of us who remember it miss the internet's wild west days - people fell down radicalizing rabbit holes, but those rabbit holes didn't come incessantly banging on their doors, filling up their autoplay lists, all because they accidentally clicked on some troll link once. Imagine if your morbid curiosity about why everyone was grossed out by that 2girls1cup video (don't Google that), your desire to prove you were Tough Enough to laugh through your disgust, or even just your foolhardiness in clicking an unfamiliar link that happened to lead to it ended up filling your feed with extreme scat porn for months - because that's what would happen today, along with a whole bunch of other shock porn, some gore, all that "fun" shit that tended to be related. You see Tubgirl (don't Google that) once, you probably go "EWWWWWW LMAO GROSS HOW AND WHY WTF" and move on with your life...maybe with a lingering twinge of morbidly amused curiosity through your disgust as to how the FUCK someone figures out they can DO that - but if you see her or someone similarly, uh, talented every 20 posts, to the point where you can't browse your feed in public or around your friends or family anymore, because the algorithm is convinced, well, you clicked through out of morbid curiosity as to whether that thumbnail was REALLY as gross and graphic as it looked so OBVIOUSLY this is a good way to keep your attention, yeah that's a LOT worse. Hell, imagine if a 4chan troll stole your friend's account, sent you a link to a beheading video pretending to be them, and suddenly you're FLOODED with snuff vids because you DARED to trust a link that was sent by "your friend"! If we had the culture and in many cases lax rules we had then with the infrastructure we have today, that would very likely be a daily occurrence. That shit had the potential to be traumatic enough then - well, if you lived through it, now imagine if the internet would never let you escape it from then on, the algorithm would keep chasing you down with more and more material running the gamut from just plain gross unless you share some very niche fetish to outright traumatizing just on its own; this faceless, unfeeling entity coldly retraumatizing you again and again and again and again and again.

If that's your template for the ONLY way the internet works - hell, if you're so spoiled by these Jitterbugified content discovery methods that you don't know how to find things you like manually anymore and the very concept sounds like too much work - then of course you're going to end up wanting most sites to be pretty conservative in what content is allowed. There are, of course, better solutions; we HAVE them and HAVE had them in the past, but it is very human for better and worse to look for the easiest quick fix.

But what I can't help but wonder is if this norm is having a cultural effect that's broader than just internet fights, and making people more sympathetic to far-right calls for censorship in the real world.

Look. It's not 1998 anymore. The internet isn't some niche thing that stops affecting people the moment we log off. It's rarer to find someone without social media than with anymore. Sure, okay, some people have VERY distorted ideas of the importance of individual posts and petty arguments between 5 people, but just because the stakes of your ship war or your debate over model train scales or the argument over whether that blurry bird photo is a crow or a raven may be exaggerated doesn't make it suddenly untrue that online disinformation has severely harmed public health, or been used for election interference, or all kinds of other awful shit with SERIOUS real-world consequences in recent years. In fact, the signs of the regressive movement we're facing now WERE visible in the rhetoric being used to justify some of those terminally online takes about inconsequential subjects months to years before the same rhetoric started being entertained on national stages, with gradually increasing frequency until those ideas became Acceptable To Say In Meatspace - the people who mastered the delicate balancing act of being Online Enough to see this but Offline Enough to recognize what rhetoric was at risk of breaching containment from those petty online nothing arguments, THOSE were the people who saw this shit coming!

So, when the internet has this potential to have this kind of stochastic impact on culture, I then have to wonder...is Silicon Valley's obsession with algorithms and ads and bridging the physical world and the digital world actually convincing people on some level that even offline, if something is allowed to exist at all, they're OBLIGATED to see it, try it, and welcome it into their homes, more than conservatives already were before? And if it is, is this particular layer intentional, or is it just a happy little accident for these tech corporate fucks that it ends up pushing people farther and farther to the right without realizing what's happening?

#tech #internet culture #serious tag #also please note my cries of ''don't google that'' are not reverse psychology i'm not trying to trick you into doing it #they're scat porn. they're just infamously weird pieces of scat porn. there. spoiler given. so don't google them. #especially not in public #they were very popular to trick people into looking at back in the day