#extremely online

[robbies-treehouse]

Who up awakening they union?

[punishedsaints]

[decreeofthedeeps]

so apparently tiktokers are currently debating whether lesbians have it worse than bisexuals. man am i glad i deleted that app

[totally-a-wizard]

The Tumblr/Twitter urge to describe extremely difficult moral actions as the easiest thing in the universe to do.

We're allowed to acknowledge that attempting to fight personal failings and entrenched systematic issues is, like, extremely difficult to do. They're worth it, of course, but that doesn't make them easy. I think everyone should keep that in mind, "Is this hard to change? Sure, but it would still be worth the effort."

[adjectivenounnumber]

Anyone else notice how dismissive insults like “please go outside” and “touch grass” get leveraged almost exclusively at autistic people for caring about things “too much”? Maybe it’s time to retire those phrases js

[cartoonscientist]

[obstinaterixatrix]

ok we’re on the plane for our 13 hour flight (😔) I was also a fool and didn’t load up on series to watch. well this weekend I’m doing nothing but watching shows, I accidentally jumped ship halfway through kaito yamaneko years ago so might as well actually watch it for real

[arathyputhillam]

✌🏽back to my roots ✌🏽

[cloudbrooksblog]

I know this is just how the internet is, but like

i hate the internet so much sometimes. this was a child who was trying to escape a bad place. the kid died. we arent desensitized, people just fucking suck. people say a lot "oh we're desensitized to tragedy we make jokes about it" but like. yeah maybe you can make that argument about the kids who made fun of the shooter, but thats kids making jokes about an event THEY were a part of - that's happened forever. this isn't the same thing, and im already sick of it. It happens IRL too, i hear people making shitty jokes about tragedy like that (even terrifying and heartbreaking ones like the one above, which would usually be sobering if you bothered to process what you were looking at for five fucking seconds). i'm only a kid, i'm only 17, and i know older people will look at me and scoff or whatever. but i'm already sick of this place. i've had adults tell me "well MY generation turned out fine" but the thing is... that's survival bias. the teen suicide rates show that the jokes about tragedy and this whole suffocating atmosphere of making fun of people who are already in bad positions... it doesn't just "not affect people", yknow? like, sure, maybe a lot of suicides are because of other reasons. but you have to admit a decent amount of common suicidal thoughts are about "nobody will care" and "if i said something, nobody would care". nobody does care, and when tragedy happens, the most heartbreaking kind, you go "this looks like an album cover tee hee" like god im so sick of this. im sick of this place. a 19 year old dies in a submarine he didn't even really want to be on, and my friends are like "its fine though cause his parents were rich" like what. no. thats such a terrifying death, right? imagine dying like that. one of the worst i can imagine, you know? a nightmare. and i think back to hearing that a teenager dived in the pool and hit his head and needed CPR and shit. i never found out if he was ok, but people get stabbed and overdose around here all the time. all my parents do is laugh and say "that's why they say not to dive!"

i'm so sick of it. i want out of here, but there's nowhere to go except inwards. to "sanctuaries", where the people are more like me. yknow, i hear that the cool (gay) people are around the "sex, drugs, and rock n roll". but they've always died around me, so i guess i'll just look for more silver linings. the main reason i'm not dead is because if i survived an attempt and became paralyzed like someone else in my family, unable to even speak. That would be the worst possible ending. and a large part of me thinks it could happen. and everyone would just laugh! say silly things about it, meme on it. and if my friends died, people would laugh. and if a teacher dies at the school nearby, will they laugh if the teacher wasn't well-known? will they find any pictures "aesthetic"?

i once went to a crisis stabilization center. for the fifth or sixth time. the place was bad, but its the only one nearby. anyways. we met a kid who was 9 who we nicknamed the gravedancer. he fortnite danced on peoples graves. hilarious, right? i feel sick.

[crumbthethrowable]

Not explaining the context for this just let me know if there’s anything I should add or change (also my writing/reading comprehension is ass so let me know if there are any grammar mistakes)

⚠️=this is just my opinion, I don’t hate you if you say this/disagree

[llendrinall]

I knew a lot of the anger had to do with my critics’ being Extremely Online, a condition where social media compels us to read thinly, strip out all context and get to the part where we can be insulted as efficiently as possible. - Tressie McMillan Cottom

This, oh my, what a way to put it. To be able to be insulted, because that's the end goal. To feel attacked.

From a NYT opinion here

[sillypeachduck]

Anyone else ever get slapped in the face that your a terminaly online need? Cause I just did.

Considering how much of life is conducted online nowadays, I can't be the only one who has been slowly submerged into the bowls of the interent.

I was trying to explain the twitter apocalypse to my dad, and I had to give him so much context. He didn't understand why people were falling for the fake verification checks, or why it was such a big deal. In his mind, all people had to do was double down and do thier own research.

But it's not about that, it's about how twitter could let this happen in the first place. No one was fooled by the fake checks, but the negative press from the trolls still tanked a few multi billion dollar companies stocks.

And I tried explaining this to him, and I think he sorta gets it, but at the end of it he just didn't care. And it kinda made me think about all the other stuff that goes on on the internet that he wouldn't care about, or would misunderstand.

I just learned about the bots scraping Ao3 to learn how to write and that pissed me off, as someone who reads fanfic and as an artist and writer myself. I'm getting real sick of hearing about people's work being stolen by AI.

And then I stopped to think; if I told my dad about this, would he care? I don't think he would see it as a big deal. And I don't know what that says, but it sure says something.

[anarglitch]

about twitter (or how I learned to get back to worrying and stop loving the bomb)

Maybe a global 'public square' doesn't lead to worldwide empathy, but to a planet-sized arena of miscommunication where a 15 y/o english student with ADHD fights a 53 y/o cuban programmer over the ethics of self-diagnosis with both sides throwing personal anectodes at the other.

I don't wanna think that's the case, I wanna believe in the promise of the internet, but I'm not sure I can point to the algorithm filter bubbles or even the low character limit and state that that's the cause of all our problems.

It makes things *worse* though, don't get me wrong.

Wait, no, my whole point is that you *will* probably get me wrong, cause we probably don't share the same (or are even cognizant of each other's) cultural background, experience, neurodivergences or even mother tongue, twitter is a final fantasy boss designed by Wittgenstein.

All these barriers *can* be crossed if we come from a place of curiosity rather than judgement and take the time to learn about each other, but we're not gonna (and can't) do that to 500 strangers every day, and that sucks, I love the lack of structure in twitter .. in theory.

But maybe tumblr (and even reddit) work a bit better *because* they're more atomized (tumblr isn't as organized, but you're still far less exposed to random stuff from completely outside your circles), the dream of the mega-agora is appealing, and maybe someone somewhere will make a version of it that really will nail it, that will lead to people understanding and valuing their differences, but the versions of it we've had so far just remove all context from everyone we meet, which lead to more and more generalizations, cause that's how we came to think about each other.

My primarily experience with "popular tweets" was seeing broad sweeping statements about "men" or "women", or "incel cryptobros" or "leftist sjws", even sillier labels like "swfties" or "k-pop stans", the average interaction there is trying to figure out which boxes someone fits to speedrun human interaction, and that's... how an algorithm thinks.

I don't even think it's wrong, I did my best to communicate I fit the boxes "anarchist", "adhd", "non-binary", "artist", "retro sci-fi anime fan", I block alt-right weirdos on sight and make fun of checkmarks, I have practically pre-written replies to some kinds of people, but every now and then I feel the slight existential dread of realizing I could program a bot to do *the exact same thing*.

That's not what I wanna use my brain for, I've read big threads of different people fighting in different years play out virtually the exact same way, we're responding to decontextualization by adopting the same generalized signals, and I don't wanna become a bot, man.

What I mean is that neural networks trained to "sound human" are fed countless tweets by random people from all walks of life to try to mimic this amorphous idea of a vague human who doesn't have any of the individual qualities of a person.

And that's what I was doing, too.

I had a tumblr before, ages ago. I was still checking boxes then, mainly about fandoms, and every version of living online will involve some of that. But I believe that there's a healthy version to be achieved, communicating shorthands for who you are and what you like so you can find potentially likeminded people. Maybe I can achieve that here, again.

I think I did once, when I was too young to even realize it, and then I left it all and swam towards the social media event horizon.

See, the thing about working from home, online, is that I never really stopped spending the majority of my time in a computer, more than most of my IRL friends, most of whom have real world jobs and are sure as hell a lot closer to a balance than I am.

I kept thinking of the internet like entertainment, not too different from TV or video-games, so I kept looking to what drew my attention more effectively, just go where the current takes me, why would I put rules on fun? But it hasn't been fun. It hasn't been fun for a while, now. Because I didn't give myself rules, and the "current" metaphor doesn't work when there's an actual poseidon made of code controlling the direction of the currents.

Sometimes, you have to consciously chase the fun.

So, you know, hi.

[mezurbo]

Looking at fashion tumblr, and I mentally become the type of person who dresses in neutrals and hangs out in art galleries while drinking green smoothies.

[misterjt]

“Whiteness, masculinity, and Christianity are becoming more tightly yoked in the public imagination, with people hyper-invested in one category apprehending a need to invest in the others outwardly. These are historically knotted categories, the very concept of race an outgrowth of gendered Christian thinking about Jews. As scholars like M. Lindsay Kaplan, Willie James Jennings, Magda Teter, and Tudor Parfitt have shown, conceptions of Jews as dark, weak, fleshy, and fated to servitude were extended to debase people of color and authorize their enslavement. American legal arguments about the inferiority of Black people, such as the Dred Scott decision, echoed European arguments about the inferiority of Jews. So it’s ironic that Candace Owens, a Black woman, would seek to “own” Shapiro, a Jewish man, with the phrase “Christ is king.” It’s also a sign of just how badly some right-wing influencers will contort themselves for acceptance by the white boys online.”

—Audrey Clare Farley on the rise of “Christ is king” as an anti-Semitic slur

[arathyputhillam]

my roommate was watching euphoria the other day and when the end credits rolled to still don’t know my name… I got a pandemic whiplash 😭