#(<- this tag is an example of accidental conservatism)

[timelessphoenix]

"They managed to invent a generation that hates capitalism but fully buys into individualism"

I wanna weigh in here because I've never felt so recognized in a tumblr post. For the record, I'm the same age as OP.

When I was fifteenish, I started aligning myself with certain moral stances without properly realizing I was taking political stances. Once I was talking to my mom about one of these (homelessness, or raising minimum wage, I think), and she said, "ugh, you're a liberal." To which I was like, "????? huh?" Cuz I had been so sheltered that I was basically actively encouraged to not take a stand on anything until it was directly relevant to me.

When I was seventeen I took an American Studies class that went very in depth about the history of a lot of the social, political, and economic issues we see today. Since then, I've become very impassioned about learning more and recognizing when people ignorantly talk about these issues. It's very clear when people don't understand the true history behind, for example, suburbs, or corporations that dominate their industry (think J.P. Morgan, Rockefeller, Vanderbuilt, etc from the late late 19th century and compare to Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk, etc).

It took me until I was nineteen or twenty to really focus and realize that screaming into the void online or in my parents' house about Worldly IssuesTM wasn't going to change anything. I finally recognized that if I wanted to, for example, overthrow an HoA rule about which type of flowers I'm allowed to plant in my front yard, I'd need to gather community-wide support and petition to the HoA. I'm using a stupid-simple example to highlight how terrified the thought of knocking on strangers' doors and asking about flowers is to me.

I was raised in the neighborhood my parents live in and have been there for the last 15ish years. Growing up, I was directly ordered to never open the door if someone knocks, and to never pick up the phone if it rings. And if I'm in that house even now and the doorbell rings, I stay put and silent and pretend no one is on the other side of the door. Same with the phone. It is simply n o t r i n g i n g.

Me and my sibling hardly ever played outside with the neighborhood kids, and weren't allowed to travel past the end of block if we did, and we'd get punished if we did. Usually the punishment entailed nothing more than a good yell and shaming about disrespecting our parents and how dangerous the world is wherever adults we know and my parents say they trust aren't watching us, but that's super effective on young children.

All this to say, I'm not comfortable talking to anyone on my block. All the neighbors keep to themselves, and only need to talk if their square-footage is being invaded overhead by our overgrown tree. I've figured out the first step to making a change in my community, only to discover there's no community at all. And the thought of talking to a stranger that's outside my age range is terrifying because of the way I was raised.

I can fully acknowledge that being raised like this has caused some deeply rooted social anxieties and a lack of knowledge of how to interact with people, a complacency to the seemimgly unchangeable world around me, a lack of life experience and good sense, and a fear of taking risks. Amongst other things.

I'm lucky not to have experienced being tracked, because my level of sheltered and my parents' old-fashioned nature also meant I didn't have a phone to track until high school, and by then my parents were so confident of their Obedient Children (rightly so) that they didn't even think to track us (until my mom found out about it my senior year of high school and proceeded to not force us to use Life360-- thanks mom!).

Even now, as a fully grown adult with the ability to make my own choices, I feel chained to the Law of the Land when I'm at my parents' house. I feel the need to scheme around their rules when I can and should just do the things I want to do. This is actively hurting my ability to be a regular human being that knows how to operate in society.

I'm so grateful I came across this post today because I can see that I'm not alone. I grew up so isolated that it absolutely feels like I'm the only one who has figured out shit like this because I lived it, but a little differently than others of my generation lived it: I didn't grow up chronically online; I turned to books instead, and music and film and other forms of art. I wasn't tracked, though I still felt and feel the terror of not letting my parents know where I am and what I'm doing at all times. I'm grateful I realized the problem sometime in my teens, and now I'm left wishing I felt I could do something about it.

It all just sucks, and I'm feeling ao ill-equipped to continue my journey through adulthood.

here's my hot take about my generation and people younger than me (I'm 22 years old)

The reason current teenagers and people in their really early 20s are conservative on accident and have such shitty takes on the internet is because our generation was much more sheltered than previous generations and because we were raised to be ok with orwellian servailence and that is 100% the fault of our parents, Reagan Era kidnapping panics, and the rise of technology all coming together to prevent us from doing the sketchy shit that sends parents into panic mode but which is also completely fundemental to childhood development. If your parents had even a crumb of money to their name and even a shred of free time they started tracking your phone as soon as it was possible to. I did not experience this because my parents are actively trying to live like it's the 1990s and still have not gotten cell phones of their own, and did not let me have one until I was 18 years old and it was no longer their choice, but literally over half of my friends in middle and high school had their phones tracked by their parents at some point or other, and we would occasionally find this out, not because their parents told them, but when we were trying to do the aforementioned sketchy shit and their parent's car would pull up. And I would, like a reasonable person after finding this out, encourage my friends to just leave their phones at home, and their response would be "What if I get kidnapped" or "My parents are just trying to keep me safe"

This in my estimation has lead to a combination of kids being terminally online because they do have internet access and are better at deleting search history than their parents think they are, but don't have the freedom to go out and do shit without their parents' knowledge or consent, so they have the most privacy from the people who control their lives while they're on the internet, and kids not having the real world experiences they should have, not knowing how to connect with other people irl, not feeling comfortable leaving the house because of the horror story lies their parents told them to make them ok with the surveillance they were inflicting on their kids. Kids these days are growing up in the fucking panopticon when they should be out in the woods playing with knives or stealing cigarettes from their older sibling and going out to an empty parking lot to smoke them or whatever and that shit is sticking with them into adulthood. Things that were "tee hee we could get in trouble isn't this so fun and daring" in the 1990s and 2000s have become in the 2010s and 2020s things that are "If I do that without texting my parents some sort of lie to excuse where my location is my parent's car will pull up and I will get grounded for the next two weeks."

Like even when I was 19 I had a 16 year old friend who would volunteer their time at a food shelf and that's how we knew each other. We would talk about dungeons and dragons together, and the game store was 4 blocks from the food shelf. One day we left the food shelf earlier than they had told their parents they would and they got punished for that. We were literally just going to look at dungeons and dragons miniatures and dice, which was self evident if you could see where we started and how far we walked and where too. I have to assume that this isn't uncommon. It's wrong, but it's not uncommon.

[simonjadis]

When it comes to centrist who tried to "Both Sides" the whole political divide blindly, these chuckleheads always lean anti-left. They're not "right wingers" by any real stretch yet always call out leftist "agendas" in media and try to deride any discussions of diversity as a "slipperly slope towards tokenism." They never realize that they're tools for the Right Wingers to exploit with how they rally against the left.

This is true, and it’s exactly what you get from radicalization engines. From YouTube algorithms to 4ch*n and the always worse 8ch*n, there are places out there eager to catch someone and drive them into:

-cynicism (fighting for change and having ideals is foolish) -reactionism (I haven’t heard of this issue before, therefore it is bad or silly) -accidental conservatism (I’m not like those guys, my ideas just conveniently line up with them in every way that doesn’t inconvenience me)

A lot of the time, this happens when someone has a group of “buddies” who tell a toxic joke. They could be in college or they could be 40 or they could be in middle school. One of them repeats it elsewhere, and people respond with hostility but the joke-teller doesn’t understand why.

When you’re told that something that you did is bad but have not been told why, you can:

1) Find out why it’s bad, make a good faith determination of if that’s true, and resolve to either change the behavior or, if it wasn’t bad, amend your behavior for the comfort of others

2) Get defensive and surround yourself with resources and people that will never scold you for anything, which will lead to group polarization -- your own behavior will escalate.

An example would be something as simple as a racist or misogynistic joke, but for this example let’s make it a homophobic one since I’m gay.

So a 13-year-old hears a joke where the punchline is at the expense of a gay person. Maybe he reads it online or maybe someone says it over voicechat while they’re playing . . . do the kids still play forknife? While they’re playing whatever. He repeats it to someone on the bus and is shamed. He’s embarrassed and a little shocked at the reaction, since it went over so well over voicechat when he heard it. Maybe nothing comes of it ... or maybe he finds himself on forums and sites that assure him that he did nothing wrong, that the world is “too PC” or another variant of the usual BS. Others in these groups then exchange more jokes -- and enjoy the 13-year-old’s. Life is uncomplicated in these spaces, which makes the rest of the world seem hostile or even “wrong.”

In some cases, such a kid grows up to be a mass shooter or a darling of the political right. But in other cases, they’re just political moderates who seem like normal people except that they gripe about “woman with blue hair” or “pronouns in bio” or other things that are just . . . normal parts of existence . . . because they spend their time spelunking in internet spaces and social groups where everyone will nod and sagely agree that “blue hair woman bad” and that someone listing their pronouns is some sort of signal that they are “other” or part of the perceived “problem.”

I am reminded a bit of “New Atheists,” not as in brand new atheists but as in the groups of white-dominated atheist spaces who decry, for example, queer rights movements as “ideology” that they compare to churches, and feel similarly about things like feminism and racial equality. These are people who vocally eschew the traditional political right, but who have a lot of anger . . . and, as if by coincidence, a lot of socially conservative views because their distance from the political right is not based upon altruism but selfishness. These dudes don’t want to be part of the political right because they want to smoke pot and say swears and have sex with a lot of women, but if a right-wing ideology doesn’t negatively impact them and might even cater to them, they gobble it up. The Orange Man appeals to many of these people.

Tangent Time

But, for a counterexample, not every time that people get told something is “bad” is, you know, true. Let’s say that someone shared a fandom ship that doesn’t go over well. I’ll pick one that has personally repulsed me since I first saw it -- shipping Harry Potter with Snape. Someone who shares a “sn*rry” fic, say, here on Tumblr gets a hostile response. They look into it and realize that in addition to squicking some people, there are also people who have survived csa and don’t want to see fic/fanart/gifsets depicting a minor and his abuser in a relationship. They COULD completely disavow all further shipping of that, which is their choice, but they could also simply go “okay, I’m not going to post any of this here, but will continue to write it on AO3 where it’s properly tagged and labeled so that no one simply scrolls across it.” That is a reasonable response. For me, that is simply a squick, not a trigger, but I’d still be happy to be able to easily avoid seeing it.

Another sort of counterpoint is when people argue that any group with so much as a single inside joke can be an “echo chamber.” Tumblr may feel like a screaming match of endless nonsense or like a collaborative art experience, depending upon whom you follow, but to outsiders, it can sound like one singular hivemind.

But . . . while I’m not questioning that there are echo chambers on Tumblr, it is so important to note that disenfranchised minorities having friends who are similarly marginalized and friends who are simply allies is NOT the same thing. In this case, the sounds bouncing around in the echo chamber are pleasant music, not a mixtape of slurs.

Tumblr’s probably not the best example because there are, you know, nazis and terfs and similar trash monsters here. But a “safe space” for marginalized people to gather and discuss, and groups of friends online or in the flesh, are not the same as echo chambers because marginalized/disenfranchised people NEED these spaces because the world was not designed to cater to them.

In contrast, the “bad” echo chambers tend to be occupied by straight white men who feel threatened by equality -- or, in their eyes, by the suggestion that the world is not currently “equal” for various marginalized groups. They want to claim to be oppressed yet have no idea what that would look or feel like, so every inconvenience in their minds is a blow against the bedrock of humankind.