#Control Societies

[1000rh]

The ultimate coup of control society is not so much the continuous influence of the border crossing or the passport control, not so much data mining or facial recognition algorithms, but that it has eviscerated history, not by banning dissent, but by accelerating the opportunities and channels for critical thought to infinity and therefore making it impossible to think historically in the first place. Thus the central challenge within control society will be not simply to resist the various new nefarious control apparatuses, but to rescue history from its own consummation.

– Alexander R. Galloway, "Computers in the Superfold" (2012)

[yaoigagarinsblog]

"The coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill"

— Gilles Deleuze, Postscript On The Societies Of Control (1990)

[yakityyaku]

very funny (irritating) to me that everyone whined and yelled about stupid rainbow capitalism and how performative wokeness/allyship is a net bad we should all refuse to support and now like.

tumblr is doing nothing for pride and target isn't selling much (if any) of their pride collection offline except at certain stores (in democratic areas, basically) and build a bear has a much tinier collection than normal and all the actual pride stuff is on their "adult" website (not sure if it's in stores, but pride = adult is a hell of a message)

there are genuinely good criticisms for performative allyship in all its applications. it shouldn't be the only thing we expect from people and companies. but if all the shit I see being called performative stopped tomorrow then in terms of the LGBTQ+ community especially we just. wouldn't talk about queerness or queer issues or celebrate pride or do anything.

open your fucking eyes. we are very close politically to having gay marriage rolled back. now companies are basically being let off the hook to even make a miniscule effort (which matters to the people who don't have access to any other kind of support in their communities! which normalizes the community in public spaces!) because the only reaction they have gotten over the last few years are negative ones from BOTH sides.

we are so entrenched in discourse at all times for the sake of our OWN performance of who is the wokest and who is REALLY an ally or a good community member that we have basically handed over all the work of activists of the last several decades to the other side because we'd rather scream at each other over fucking chicken restaurants and shit than the real life backsliding that's happening.

and this goes for other shit too. feminism, poc rights, all of it.

also. trans rights aren't discourse and aren't just culture war arguments. in case any terfs think they can spin this to be antitrans.

[chameleon3]

masterlist of every robert sean leonard film i could find free on youtube bc i’m bored

dead poets society is officially out of commission :(

The Boys Next Door

Tape (2001)

my best friend is a vampire is also out of commission :(

Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead (just ethan hawke)

In the Gloaming

Married To It

A Painted House

Bluffing It (this one has a fucked up start and horrible quality but at least there’s baby rsl!)

A Glimpse of Hell

Safe Passage

Ground Control

Chelsea Walls

The Invention Of Love (play)

The Boys Next Door (if it’s not available where you live)

A Painted House (if it’s not available where you live)

Dead Poets Society (Google Drive) (special thanks to @moon-walkman!!!)

MAJOR shoutout to this playlist, which is where i sourced many of these :)

lmk if i missed any, i’m currently scouring youtube for more so i’ll update this as i find more!! (btw i haven’t watched most of these all the way through, just checked to make sure they actually have my darling boys in them so lmk if there are any issues!)

[kettle-bird]

You know that old myth about lemmings and cliffs? Dunno why it's been on my mind.

[rejectingrepublicans]

“Before the release of the first three episodes, the series was review bombed on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb with a high number of negative audience reviews, which Casey Loving at TheWrap said had become common for MCU projects featuring women, people of color, or LGBTQ+ individuals as leads.”

-From Wikipedia

The point of this post isn’t to discuss the popularity of the show. The point is there is a coordinated MAGA campaign to “review bomb” everything remotely “woke”. Republicans have billions in dark money and they use it everyday to try and reshape our society. They will never stop until they are forced to through severe measures.

[deadpoetsandlivinglegends]

Something something every time Charlie isn’t fighting to be the center of attention, he is always looking around to others to gauge their reactions and silently observing them all something something he is searching for connection, to fit in and be loved but he doesn’t know how to ask for love so instead he gains their attention by acting out in ways he knows they’ll notice and tries to pretend their attention and love are the same thing

[shittysawtraps]

when your friend says “i’m becoming the joker,” reply, “well, i’m becoming jigsaw” to one-up them. do not elaborate on what this means

[1000rh]

Many young people strangely boast of being 'motivated'; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It's up to them to discover what they're being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of the serpent are even more complex than the burrows of the molehill.

– Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on the Societies of Control" (1990)

[milkywayes]

I'm curious how you feel about Shepard(s) wearing Garrus' colony markings? I have a feeling I know and that we share the same opinion, but I'd love to know your thoughts if you're willing to be put it out there

oh dear LOL. well without trying to yuck anyone's yum or be the fun police, you're completely right assuming i'm not into it. i don't read fic that includes the trope and i don't reblog art of it either.

stop reading here if colony-markings!shepard is your favorite thing, thank you.

romance genre is saturated with misogynist tropes and i don’t think that this is the worst offender by far even in shakarian fandom… but it’s still on the list. i don’t think enjoyers of it put much more thought into it than “it replaces wedding rings, how cute,” so i’m not trying to accuse anyone of anything here, but that doesn’t make it not misogynist to put a male character’s visual characteristics all over the female character’s face, oftentimes permanently, to show belonging (ownership). it feels too much like brand-marking cattle. i already hate that a woman was ever expected to take her husband’s surname, and this is that times twenty. it’s viscerally uncomfortable to me. marriage is a patriarchal institution, so tradition in the context of it is often… well, exactly that. we can step away from those traditions and make marriage about sentiment and equal partnership instead, but many still romanticize all the sexist flavorings that come with it. i think this is just an expression of that tendency, again.

that’s my biggest reason for avoiding it lol. but it’s not the only one.

as someone who really likes world building, it just doesn’t make any damn sense to me either. as you said, they’re colony markings. canonically, they show geographical origins. holdover from the unification war, yadda yadda. they are not clan markings, and there is nothing in canon that indicates that turians have family clans at all or would consider them important—that’s the krogan. turians are a meritocracy, and what that means is they value an individual’s contribution to larger society, and they really, really hate nepotism. you don’t get family clan mentality without nepotism or showing excessive pride in something that has nothing to do with an individual’s achievements towards the betterment of turian society. 

while the unification war did reveal a tendency towards tribalism, this was about entire colonies rather than lineages, and about a unit of people brought together by working tirelessly towards the same goal (betterment of the larger social group, again. contributing to the colony. one for all and all for one.) the issue was simply that this social group had shrunk from “all of the hierarchy” to just “all of the people where i live.” a natural consequence of a people spreading out from their homeworld all over the galaxy, i think: it’s easy to lose loyalty to something abstract that you cannot see (the Hierarchy) in favor of what you do see and can directly affect (local community.)

family clans don’t really mesh with what we know about turians. garrus’ colony markings don’t have anything to do with his family line. they’re about where he’s from. to quote a friend, shepard would be getting her partner’s zip-code tattooed on her face. 

nothing about any of that is romantic to me. and well, uh. i also think it kind of looks really bad. so there’s that.

[otherclawdeen]

spot the difference

[inkyrainstorms]

Martian Stan AU - An Encounter

Spoilers for Chapter 4 :)

Comic under the cut!

…and this is why answering doors is a Bad Idea forever, kids. Take it from Ford.

Obligatory Tag list bc you all deserve to see Martian Stan for the Multimedia fic/au it is: @aroace-get-out-of-my-face @empressofsamoyeds @pinefamilycatsau @littlelilliana15 @pleasantartisanhottea

[shadystranger]

Im just saying that if sam was a girl dean'd have fucked her from the first episode

[strawberrysamara]

"Kaidan Alenko is boring" WRONG. Kaidan Alenko is one of THEE characters of all time. He's Canadian, he's Schrodinger's man of colour, he's DOWN to fuck and still didn't manage to figure out that he's bisexual until his thirties, he killed a man as a teenager and almost caused a diplomatic meltdown bc of it, his tits are bigger than yours, he's constantly getting migraines, he has autism but doesn't know it AND he glows. What more could you want

[krumpkin]

I think it's important that we remember politicians will always be politicians 🤔

[metanarrates]

worth bringing up as sort of a corollary to my severance thoughts is that severance does an excellent job of showing that different forms of power & control (cult/corporation/family/government) tend to bleed and overlap and propagate in similar forms. in that particular vein, speaking as a cult survivor, it's worth saying specifically that it doesn't do much good to exceptionalize cults as a rare oddity of how societal power can sometimes take shape. lumon, though fictional, is a really good example of how those mechanisms of control exist in many forms throughout society and should be broken down and scrutinized when they do appear.