#extremely online

[punishedsaints]

[trans-marvin]

Who up awakening they union?

[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

[oh--jeez]

i love that the uplifting SCREAMING CRYING THROWING UP has become the yin to the yang of a much older and pejorative RED NUDE AND MAD ONLINE

I thought “screaming crying throwing up” had entered common vernacular but then I heard a podcast collab where one of the hosts was like “yeah it’s crazy one of our fans said they were so excited for this collab they were screaming crying and throwing up” and the other host was like “wow is she okay?”

I literally forget that random common-knowledge phrases online do not translate into real life at all.

[theadmiringbog]

[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

[titleknown]

@afloweroutofstone, I think this articulates better than myself what I find reactionary about how so many articles on the net handle the idea of isolation as a product of the net.

i agree 100% with what you're saying re: "online" connection and i think you explain it beautifully and it's a very important conversation. i've noticed a trend to say someone/something is "chronically" or "terminally" online as a jokey exaggeration, which has felt.. bad to me, but i'm not sure how to put it into words. it seems like criticizing how people can take things too far online has some merit, but some people have taken that criticism itself too far, if that makes sense?

It's interesting that you bring up this language--looking at it, it strikes me that it is of course the language of disease and disability ("online" stands in for the "ill" in "chronically ill," "terminally ill"). The internet is thus presented as a sort of psychic or psycho-physical contagion that can create moral disease or decay in those who are too "exposed" to it, or those who expose themselves to it without the effort, self-control, or mental or physical 'exercise' required to counterbalance that contagion. It reminds me of something I said a little bit ago regarding the idea that "content warnings create an army of weaklings who reflexively avoid any content that they don't like":

The idea that avoiding certain content makes you weak or allows for the deterioration of Brain Muscles that could be strengthened by engaging with said content heavily relies on the idea that suffering is automatically edifying. The entire concept that exercising discipline in the face of something unpleasant builds up Brain Muscles that 1. are morally necessary to build and 2. can then be put to use doing other tasks reads to me as very 19th-century muscular Christianity eugenicist-y Self Control type ideology.

Granted, there isn't a generational component that posits "chronic onlineness" to be a condition that worsens over hereditary time (that I've seen). But the idea that this mental or physical weakness can worsen within a person unless effort is made to counteract it recalls the Victorian concept of racial degeneration, which posits that certain environments (mainly those that are too lush and comfortable) can weaken racial stock. And the mental and physical weakness of being "online" is, again, described using a register that is actively associated with disease and disability--it is described this way because this language is associated with disease and disability, because these writers want to associate being "online" with the reaction of disgust and avoidance called forth by the concept or prospect of disability.

The "physical weakness" aspect of this proposed disease is always there implicitly in our understanding of the kinds of physical postures involved in being "online" versus engaging "in real life," but it is sometimes made explicit as well. A tumblr user, responding to a post referencing the neurochemistry of reward systems and reward-seeking behaviour in encouraging "those of us who are terminally online" to "log off, go outside, hang with friends," writes the following:

imo the more effort something takes the greater the reward. it doesn't actually need to be all that hard it just needs to feel difficult enough so that your brain says "oh good job you did this and deserve a treat." an abstracted social interaction in a virtual space is low effort because you're sitting/reclining/whatever. your body is not engaged and therefore it doesn't parse as worthy of greater reward by the brain. (emphasis mine)

This tumblr user (of whose scientific credentials I am unsure) doesn't specifically exclude those for whom sitting up or reclining while using an internet-connected device does represent significant physical effort from consideration, or express explicit disdain for whom all of life is lived reclining and all or most social interactions "abstracted," but they don't really have to. They don't reference any actual studies of neuroscience or neurochemistry here, but again, they don't really have to. They're drawing from an (I think, in this cultural and ideological environment) intuitively attractive sort of logic in which individual weakness and disease arising from a too-cozy environment can and must be counteracted by individual effort.

My argument is not that social media are not set up to encourage short-term reward-seeking behaviour in a capitalist economic system, or that repeated engagement with anything thus designed cannot or does not alter individuals' neurology in any way (including to their detriment). My argument is not that changing your behaviour & the ways in which you engage with people or environments online cannot be to anyone's benefit. My argument is not that physical isolation is not to anyone's detriment (indeed, the fact that it demonstrably is harmful is key to understanding the violence of imprisonment & of eugenicist responses to the coronavirus pandemic). My argument has nothing to do with neurochemistry.

Rather, what I'm objecting to is roughly: 1. the idea that any connection occurring "online" is necessarily abjected and unreal compared to any connection or interaction occurring in physical space (as if all "irl" connections are deeply meaningful? as if no "online" connections are? as if all of the internet is large social media sites?); 2. the equation of life lived in physical space to "real" life; 3. the language of disease and disability when applied to the above assumptions ("terminally online," "chronically online"); 4. the emphasis on the individual will as a site of resistance in a way that is implicitly moralised. The idea that this is a type of mental and physical disease, combined with the idea that the individual can counteract it by force of will, relies heavily on our cultural and ideological understanding of disease as a moral failing on the part of the individual. Thus many people will mock individuals for being "terminally online" as though it is a personal failing, without necessarily making an argument about how capitalism impacts the structure of social media (or anything else that can alter behaviour or cognitive functioning on the level of the collective).

The logic that blames the individual for a disease, or that connects disease to a fault of not exerting the will, is the same eugenicist logic that, until very recently, mandated graded exercise therapy as the only NHS-funded treatment for CFS. It's similar to the fascist logic that celebrates physical strength and ability as a reflex of mental ability and as the condition of possibility for a strong political movement, recently circulating in the "iron pill" far-right movement on 4chan. I earlier compared it to the logic of degeneration theory and muscular Christianity. My friend Divya @realgarn pointed out to me to the Protestant origins of much of this type of logic, and the fact that the specific genealogies of this genre of thought are no doubt different in different countries. But there's a specific logical and rhetorical through line here that, of course, does not exempt leftists' thought and arguments.

[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 😭