#it's not just the surveillance state but also the echo chamber it creates for you

[sheepintheastralsea]

you guys have got to get better at talking to strangers

I don't even mean like. being more skilled at it. i mean you have to do it. you have to talk to your cashier, to the old woman you cross on the pavement, to the guy waiting in the queue for the gig in front of you, to the teenager deciding between books at the bookstore.

not all the time; you don't have to constantly be talking. but you have to speak to the people around you i am begging you

[potteresque-ire]

Concerning the incredibly far and deep reach of CCP’s propaganda, the narratives the government can spin and call the truth; does ‘the common normal populace’ actually know what’s really going on?

Hello everyone!!! Happy Chinese New Year!!

I’m grouping these asks because if I hear them correctly, they’re all related to this question: how much do people in China know about the atrocities committed by their government, and why don’t they do something about it?

It’s a difficult question, isn’t it? A potentially upsetting one too, just to think about. My answers are more opinion-based, more personal this time. Since there’re no polls about what people know, they have to be based a little more on my own impression, which has more chances of error. Please bear with me and proceed with caution ...

As with people in most countries, what people know is hugely dependent on individuals. Specifically, re: politics, I can think of at least three reasons why people don’t have the facts

1) they have limited access to information 2) they’re being lied to about what they know 3) they’re not interested in current affairs.

1), of course, is what most people think about when it comes to China. You’re right, Anon(s), that VPN use is indeed rampant in the country and is essentially an open secret; there’re no official numbers but surveys have estimated the number of users can be up to 100 million, most of them being youngsters. They use it to do exactly what most of us would imagine: gain access to things they don’t have otherwise. Instagram has been (sporadically?) blocked since 2014 September and so while users may have set up their accounts while being overseas, it’s indeed, (very) possible, that they’ve set up and maintained their account under VPN use.

Wait, you may ask, so you mean the Great Firewall of China doesn’t exist?

That’s exactly the official stance. Not because of private VPN use, but because individuals/companies can apply for a license via their telecommunications company to visit all internet sites. Hence, the government’s claim that the Great Firewall doesn’t exist—you’ll be let through as long as you ask (and we’ll watch your every step)! There are also no explicit laws prohibiting the use of private VPNs; only a handful of arrests associated with private VPN use have been made and only since 2019, and the punishment is considered light—no imprisonment, just fines. It is, in contrast, against the law to *provide* private VPN services, and while companies have been shut down, the crackdown has still been incredibly sluggish by Chinese government’s standards, especially when the Xi regime has made its intention of banning VPN known and directives have been issued for that in 2017.

Why has VPN continued to enjoy this “grey existence”? Because without VPN, a lot of foreign businesses would leave—some, for example, require the most efficient online tools developed outside China to track the foreign markets, and talents have rejected job offers in the country when they realised they couldn’t get on their favourite social media. The science and tech sectors also rely heavily on VPN—programmers relying on Google to search stackoverflow, for example, to find known solutions to bugs. 

VPNs have also served political purposes—Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-critical communities all over the world are all painfully aware of the Chinese government’s practice of hiring its own collection of internet commentators (”50 Cent Party”), and at times, mobilising their youths (gamers, fan circles) to scale the Firewall and astroturf, throw insults at the “CCP enemies” and bomb message boards with pro-CCP messages.

Also, a significant fraction of VPN companies, both in China and overseas, have been reported to have Chinese ownership, by companies with government connections. These VPN services provide a false sense of security for those who do not enjoy having big brother peeking behind their backs while acting as surveillance tools that extend beyond the country.

(Please be careful about free VPNs).

The next question: If until now, users of private VPNs only rarely get into trouble, what’s holding them from scaling the Great Firewall and learning the facts?

It is this: the law isn’t about “climbing the wall”, but what one does outside the wall.

Article 6 of the 2016 edition of Cybersecurity law states the following: 

第六条　国家倡导诚实守信、健康文明的网络行为，推动传播社会主义核心价值观，采取措施提高全社会的网络安全意识和水平，形成全社会共同参与促进网络安全的良好环境

Article 6: The State advocates sincere, honest, healthy and civilized network conduct; promoting dissemination of the core socialist values, adopting measures to raise the entire society's awareness and level of network security, and forming a good environment for the entire society to jointly participate in advancing network security.

What this article implies is this ~ legally, Chinese citizens are bound to the Chinese government’s rules of good internet conduct, regardless of whether they use VPN to get on the internet. As with many Chinese laws, however, the vagueness in wording invites more questions than answers. Is it getting on Twitter, a banned website, “sincere, honest, healthy and civilized network conduct”? Obviously, it’s illegal to interact with other users about the Xinjiang’s internment camps, but what if one only goes there to talk about their favourite stars, because on Weibo supertopic they can’t even mention the stars’ name, can’t ahkgkhagjkfaskjgdf about their favourite fics? What if one goes there to discuss a M- or E-rated fic? Where is the line drawn and given its vagueness, will that line move tomorrow? How?

Most people, therefore, have opted to simply stay away from VPN. After all, China offers its own version of many of the fun websites out there (Weibo-Twitter; Instagram-Oasis; Tiktok-Douyin; Youtube-Bilibili). For those who do use VPN, they tend to stick to websites that are unlikely to cause issues (such as Instagram; Instagram became an issue when Hong Kongers started to upload information about the protests on there).

Now, let’s proceed to 2): People don’t know the facts because they’re being lied to about what they know.

There’s a difference between having access to facts and knowing that they’re facts. This is among the most painful lessons, perhaps, for those who followed the politics of the United States in the last few years (please forgive me for the US-centric-ness of the following few paragraphs!). Even with equal access to identical information, people can vary a LOT in their understanding of what are facts and what are lies.

This illustrates the power of propaganda—and propaganda in the US isn’t even centralised. Some media outlets and individuals (political leaders and analysts) have more say on what should be viewed as the truth, but parties without significant power—small foreign and domestic interests, fringe political organisations, conspiracy theorists, regular folks—have also made critical contributions to the “fake news” phenomenon in the US. There haven’t been apparent coordinations between these parties;  little concerted effort has been made to create one coherent story out of the many tales told.

In China, the propaganda effort is centralised, coordinated, free of distractions from competing story lines. The One Story the government decides on is repeated, over and over again, on newspapers, in shows, in textbooks, on signs on the streets, on social media. To put it another way, when it comes to political discourse, the country is designed to be an echo chamber with 1.4 billion people. Over time, the One Stories inevitably become firmly held beliefs—so firmly held that even if the people are exposed to facts, they no longer believe in them.

This is especially true when the source of the facts are countries with strong traditions of freedoms of speech and press, where the facts are often laid out with a critical eye to the administration and with vastly different opinions attached to them. While we view the latter as evidences that the values we embrace are alive and well—a critical eye to the administration means the Fourth Estate is doing its job, and the different opinions means freedom of speech gets to live another day—people who haven’t been exposed to these values tend to interpret these things as signs of weakness of the government. They may think the Chinese government is better than its counterparts elsewhere because no one is penning scathing criticisms against it. They may think the Chinese government is stronger because it unifies the opinions of their people—the failure of which, they’ve been taught, would lead to social chaos and economic free-fall.

The Chinese population has also been “immunised” against the truths that may be exposed about their government by a propaganda talking point used since Chairman Mao’s days—that the “Imperialist” western world, particularly the United States, is always scheming its downfall. The phrase often used is 美帝亡我之心不死 (”The heart (intention) of Imperialist US to bring us down will never die”). Unfavourable truths exposed must therefore be part of the “bring down China” scheme. This decades-old demonisation of the political apparatus of the US and Europe also prepares the people to accept what most would see as outrageous conspiracy theories: for example, in March 2020, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs claimed that the US Army intentionally planted COVID in Wuhan during the 2019 Military World games. “Foreign interference” becomes a frequent and convenient scapegoat for policy decisions gone wrong, sometimes to a (somewhat) hilarious effect ~ for example, a Taiwanese journalist calculated the cost required for the CIA to fund the 2019 Hong Kong Protests, as the Chinese government had claimed—and it turned out that the CIA was too poor to do it. 

(Many of us in the US would probably laugh at the idea that our government is capable of secretly paying 2 million foreign-language speaking strangers to show up together in one march.) (It can’t even get the COVID relief payments to its own people right over a period of months.)

(Fun trivia for turtles! As 美帝=“Imperialist US” is the synonym of a feared, imaginary super-villain—super organised, super efficient, super everywhere and super impossible to take down—c-BJYX, the indestructible No. 1 CP fandom in China, has been nicknamed “美帝 cp” by those not so enamoured with it.)

Finally, there’s the psychological factor. Once a set of beliefs becomes personal truths, listening to alternatives can be very upsetting (for those in the US: imagine the blue voting block made to listen to Fox News). Hence, even when people gain access to the facts later—for example, when they study/work abroad, even emigrate—they often don’t take advantage of the access. Instead, they remain logged in in the Chinese social media sites where they’re comfortable with not only the politics but also the language and the friendships they’ve built, and continue to immerse themselves in an environment heavy with CCP propaganda. They remain defenders of the Chinese government; some have even gone out and harass people who disagree with it, in the name of freedom of speech that their country of origin never offered to them.

Censorship, of course, is an important component of building a One Story echo chamber, and I should add a note about it: censorship in China comes in vastly different strengths. The restrictions on LGBT+ issues, for example, are fairly lax, relatively speaking—“homosexuality” remains a term one can find on their internet and a topic the administration continues to address, and while BL dramas are censored, their adapted versions, along with highly publicised discussions of their original material, have so far been tolerated. The strictest form of Chinese censorship would’ve allowed neither: any mention of the 1989 June 4th Tiananmen Square massacre , for example, is immediately removed, including any hints that the event may have happened. When the former leader of the Chinese government, Jiang Zemin (江澤民), was rumoured to have passed away, the censorship apparatus went so far as to remove all mentions of Jiang, which also happened to mean “large rivers”. Chinese netizens therefore joked that major rivers had ceased to exist in China that day, as one couldn’t find any information about them online.

(LGBT+ activists have therefore remained optimistic about the future of their campaign, despite the current state of affairs. To put it simply: the Chinese government has bigger fish to fry. Sexual minorities haven’t had major clashes with the administration, haven’t embarrassed the Chinese government with their demand for rights as the ethnic minorities—the Uyghurs, the Tibetans, the Mongolians etc did. Political dissidents, including the millions in Hong Kong, are also (far) ahead in the ranking of fish size.)

For most issues, the censorship effort sits somewhere in the middle and is often inconsistent over time. The people, therefore, often have knowledge that an event has happened — even when the event is considered, beyond the Great Firewall, damaging to the reputation of the Chinese government. However, critical information is often missing in their knowledge, or is heavily distorted. For example, overseas Chinese citizens have insisted that the motivation of the 2019 Hong Kong Protests was economic, echoing the longstanding CCP propaganda that Hong Kongers have been jealous of China’s prosperity (reality: China’s GDP per capita was $10,268 USD in 2019, and Hong Kong’s, $48,713—more than 4 times higher). They missed out a critical fact: while the fast economic growth of China has created some unease—Hong Kongers have always known the Chinese government has only tolerated them and their freedoms for their ability to generate wealth—what has truly ignited Hong Kong’s anger is the Chinese government’s violation of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, and the terms it had agreed upon to get back the then British crown colony. Hong Kong hasn’t been demanding autonomy and freedoms because it’s a troublemaker, but because these things were promised to the city as conditions of the 1997 handover. As residents of the world’s third largest financial centre, Hong Kongers are diligent drafters and executioners of contracts (which international treaties are) and above all, faithful believers of them. For an asker (the Chinese government) to claim a contract as “historical”  because it has received the goods (Hong Kong) and no longer feels a need to pay (allow Hong Kong 50 years of freedoms and autonomy) is offensive to the principle, the very heart and soul of the city. 

(Gg’s former boss was a Hong Konger, and his experience working for him was a rather accurate reflection of Hong Kong’s view on business. What made an impression to Gg—that the posters should be without rips and misprints, even if these imperfections were not the fault of the design company—is a no-brainer to the Hong Konger in me reading the interview. Delivering high quality goods and services isn’t an act of kindness but rather, of professionalism and respect for the contract.)

(This interview is a highly recommended read, for those who’ve missed it!)

(One more example of “conveniently missed critical information”: remember GG’s show on Chongqing? Did you know the underground bombing shelters were not built by the Communist government, but the Nationalist government that was still ruling China during WWII?)

Anyway, where was I?

Right. We’re getting to 3): People are not getting the facts on the political situation in China because they’re not interested in current affairs.

Some—well, many— people are not interested in politics.

Some of you may be thinking: well, I’m not interested either. I follow politics because it’s important.

Why is it important? Because political engagement means you can do something about the many ills of the society, speak for those who cannot, force the government to change by voting, by voicing your opinion, by going to marches and protests etc.

What if you follow politics and still can’t do most of these things? What if, if you do choose to do these things, the price you pay may be astronomical? Will you still follow politics or devote your time, your energy to something else, something you’ve got more control over, something that won’t be as saddening, frustrating because it’s something you can actually change?

3) is therefore intricately related to why people often don’t do anything, even if they manage to find out about the facts.

There’re no national elections in China. Marches and protests are practically banned because while the Chinese Constitution guarantees the freedom of assembly (as it does freedom of speech and press; Article 35), it also explicitly states that "Citizens of the People’s Republic of China, in exercising their freedoms and rights, may not infringe upon the interests of the State, of society or of the collective, or upon the lawful freedoms and rights of other citizens.” (Article 51) — ie. the freedoms and rights only go as far as if they do not stand in the government’s way. Social media and all communications platforms are under constant surveillance, and so only opinions tolerated by the government is allowed... 

And so, the fact, social ill that has broken your heart—you can’t tell for sure if it isn’t talked about because the government has censored it, how many people know about it and more importantly, how many among the people who know about it will agree with your take. If you break your silence and voice your concerns, how many people will have your back, even if you also conceive them as victims of the social ill? If the social ill is the lack of rights of a minority group, for example, will they appreciate your speaking out, or will your “rocking-the-boat” make things even worse for them? A heavily watched net means communications with the oppressed/vulnerable social groups are often filled with obstacles, if not outright impossible. You don’t know how these groups feel; you don’t even know how many affected individuals are there. You watch the and news and shows and they all talk about how wonderfully things are going; how everyone seems so hopeful and positive and happy with their lives—are you the only person feeling that way? Are you wrong? If you speak out then, will you be yelling into the void, or worse, yelling at the police who “invites” you for a chat in the police station? To speak for those who do not have a voice to speak, are you ready, willing to take the risk of also becoming one who no longer has a voice to speak? Is your family ready? 

To put it another way: the opportunity cost of “doing something” about the political situation can be astronomically high in China, compared to the opportunity cost of us doing something similar in our own country. 

If I want to support the LGBT+ population in my part of the US, for example, I can do so effectively with minimal investment and most importantly, with minimal risk. By pasting a rainbow flag on this Tumblr post, for example, I’ve already signalled to those who need support on this issue that I’m ready to give mine. And this “signal” of mine will join the hundreds and thousands on the site, collectively telling the activists doing the “on the ground” fighting that they’re not alone; that they have my vote of support. I pose no danger to myself in doing so; no one will accuse me of, arrest me for infringing upon the interests of the State and the Collective. The rainbow flag, a display of my stance, will not turn into a blurred blob the next time I look at it, transform overnight from a symbol of solidarity to a warning sign to those who may wish to join the cause. There’s no danger for me, even, to carry an actual, huge rainbow flag to Pride, perform my activism in person. I don’t have to worry about my phone already giving away my identity as a protester to the government, especially in post-COVID times. I don’t need to watch out for plain clothes pretending to be my allies. I don’t have to look at the many surveillance cameras present and wonder if I’ll get blacklisted as a troublemaker.

Am I still being tracked and taken pictures of? Possibly. But for this cause, at least, I’m not afraid that these information will be used to arrest me. If I were arrested, I know there'll be lawyers and activists who would come to my aid. LOUDLY. ANGRILY.

I’m not afraid. Period. I’m having fun. And I doubt I can say the same if I try to carry a rainbow flag to Tiananmen square and march there.

This vast difference in the opportunity cost of taking political action is the reason why I’ve refrained from demanding those who live under authoritarian dictatorships to stand up for their neighbours who’ve been oppressed / bullied by their governments. I’ve refrained from criticising them for looking away, minding their own business. Do I wish they’ve take action? Of course I do. Am I aware that their lack of action is potentially more harmful because of the frequent atrocities happening around them? Yes. But I also understand that going on a fight is far more frightening when one doesn’t even have a sense of how many will join their side of the fight; I understand that fighting for what one deserves—freedoms, rights, justice—should never equal martyrdom, and just because a regime has elected to put equal signs between the two doesn’t mean those equal signs should ever be there. I remind myself that, to ask the people in any authoritarian dictatorship to stand up for a political cause is to ask them to make sacrifices that we, as people in relatively free societies, do not need to make when standing up for the same cause. In a country where a father demanding the truth about the milk product poisoning of his own son got jail time for “eliciting social disorder”, to stand up for even a single issue, no matter how small that issue is, requires courage that I’m not sure I have.

I can’t ask anyone to do anything I may not be able to do myself.

And this is why I, too, have chosen to support these people, even if many of them are single-issue activists, even when many support the Chinese government on other issues that matter. For example, the late Dr Li Wenliang, one of the eight COVID whistleblowers in China who passed away from the disease, was an opponent of the Hong Kong Protest, but I still (greatly) appreciate, respect him for what he did. As long as they’re not actively helping the government to cause (more) harm to others, as long as their cooperation with their government falls within what is demanded of them as citizens, they have my support. Why? Because most people who speak out in China cannot afford to stand up for more than one cause before it becomes dangerous for them. Because even if it’s only a tiny vulnerable social group, one small minority that makes a tiny step towards more rights, more freedoms, more justice, it’s still a victory in a country where rights, freedoms and justice are luxury items for those with neither political nor economic power. Because those who’re not part of the ruling class cannot afford to cherry pick their allies, cannot afford to in-fight when the ruling class already holds absolute power. Because I still believe in pay-it-forward, that most people who’ve benefited from someone standing up for them, even for one small incident, one minor cause, is more likely to stand up for someone else.

This is, admittedly, not always an easy choice to make—not for me, at least. I do get frustrated, can’t help but think at times that those who subscribe to and spread propaganda are, to a certain extent, corroborators of the atrocities committed by their government. (So, to those who’ve felt this frustration, you’re not alone!). And the Hong Konger in me has every reason to be furious with everything about China right now—all I could think of, when I listened to Gg singing 異鄉人 Foreigner the other night, are all the Hong Kongers fleeing the city now, as refugees, because of their political beliefs.

But for now, I’m hanging on. I’ve been able to tell myself that given the country’s political reality, given its tradition of collectivism (which tends to view confrontational dissent with scorn), the paths to freedoms, to equal rights and acceptance, will not be the same as what I’ve seen, what I’ve wished for. They’ll likely be slow; They’ll likely be long and winding, taking three steps forward and two steps back; they’d likely be unexpected in places, offer us surprises —

And since it’s Chinese New Year / Valentines and I’m feeling brave (irresponsible?), I’d venture a little bit of speculation and say this ~ yes, I’ve wondered if one of these many paths may be trodden, intentionally or not, by two beautiful male idols and their millions of turtles. Is it wishful, fantastical thinking? I’d be the first to admit the answer is yes. But the BJYX scheme has been so well executed as of now, so effective that I can’t help but wonder if it’s leading towards some sort of a goal, whether devised by the humans involved or by the gods/Fates who, as c-turtles have said so romantically, have been writing an original BL story with our favourite boys. The goal may be personal —simply two people being able to act more like themselves again under the spotlight—or a bit more ambitious…

… Because the sneakers + ice-cream post did catch my attention (will probably have to devote a post on that?). Another small incident that has caught my attention, unrelated to Gg and Dd but can significantly change the path they may be trodding, is this — in June 2020, People’s Daily, the state controlled newspaper, boasted its country’s increasing friendliness towards the LGBT+ communities on Twitter . While the tweet was met with skepticism and soon removed, the message it sent is this: the Chinese government may have figured out the the Western world (in particular, the younger generations) view LGBT+ rights as a measure of progressiveness. While I’m still leaning towards the government maintaining a tight grip on LGBT+ rights within its borders, with the strengthening call to boycott 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics because of the country’s poor human rights record, I can see a glimmer of possibility that the same government may do the unexpected and cater to the queer community for the sake of propaganda.  As I mentioned, the queer community hasn’t caused much headache for the Chinese government, and so it’s far more likely to be chosen as the “benefactors” of such a “we’re a human rights champion too!” propaganda campaign than, say, ethnic minorities and political dissidents. Promoting dissemination of core socialist values has always sat high on the CCP’s agenda list, and its target audience has always included foreign, non-Chinese populations; this effort is known as 大外宣—“The Great External Propaganda”. And who better to cast as leads of an international propaganda campaign on LGBT+ rights than two of its own stars who’ve already demonstrated loyalty to the government, who’ve already garnered international fame from a TV series widely viewed as queer, and who may actually be queer?

(And if—if!!!— this ever happens, may I ask everyone to please consider doing the following? Please do not feel a need to express gratitude. Please do not act as though it’s a gift. Celebrate as you would celebrate anyone in a free country exercising their birthright to live, to love the way they want — no less than that, no more than that.)

(For those who’ve asked ~ as international fans, not allowing the CCP to modify our expectations of how a government should behave may be one of the most effective ways to protect Gg and Dd.)

(I call this learning from the best: get the goods we want (more rights for the people in China), refuse to pay the cost (subscribe to CCP’s propaganda), and RUN! ❤️💛💚)

[antivancoffeelover]

I have a genuine question. How often do you actually deal with antis? I've been following you for a bit now and it seems every so often you bring up antis. I've certainly kept my interest about thorki shut and locked away in a box from my friends for the simple fact that all of them think it's incest. It's not an easy topic of conversation but you just seem to handle all the antis so well? Also on an off note about beast!Thor, his favorite pass time must just be rutting into Loki 24/7 🤔

when someone tells you that you're romanticizing abuse [bc i made a stockholm moodboard for a fic] I don't know what I'm supposed to say other than I don't condone it but I write about it? Is writing about abusive relationships bad in writing??? you're the only person i ask for advice so thank you for anything in advance

i’m honestly really glad you came to me. i really do like discussing this topic in this kind of way bc i’ll never reblog an anti or answer an anti ask. even if you’re arguing against them, i don’t think it’s worth it to argue against them if it means also spreading what they’re saying

the basic premise of all anti behavior and ideology is censorship. that’s all it is. 

“i don’t like this topic, you need to stop writing it and making art for it. if you don’t stop there will be consequences.”

that is censorship and that is the kind of shit fandom has had to fight ever since there’s been fandom. women, poc, lgbt+ folks have been dealing with people telling us what we can and can’t write and enjoy for... well, probably forever. but we’re still here, creating the kind of content we want to see and indulge in.

as far as how to deal with antis, my advice is to ignore, ignore, ignore. they want what any bully wants: attention

you stop paying attention, you stop giving them time they don’t deserve from you, they’ll die off. there’s no point in fighting them directly. produce the content you want to see and enjoy what you want to enjoy. drown them out. you don’t owe them a response just because they come to you. they don’t have any qualms about being rude to you, so be rude back and just ignore them. i love blocking antis, personally. take out the garbage, y’know?

antis use the words ship and support as synonyms because they think that shipping is some radical call to action for lgbt rep instead of entertainment

shipping is not activism. shipping is about entertainment and enjoyment, nothing more

so this is why i have this very blasé attitude about antis. i just don’t give a fuck about them beyond making posts trashing their idiocy. because that’s what it is. it’s idiocy, but going deeper it’s puritanism at its finest. antis use fox news scare tactic logic under the guise of some pseudo feminist agenda because they don’t understand and don’t want to understand that enjoying dark fiction as entertainment isn’t equivalent to some greater moral stance

they use the same argument about shipping and fanfiction that WASP moms use against video games and loud music: that enjoying and consuming it will make you think it’s normal and there’s nothing wrong with it irl

okay, well, vlad the impaler never played CoD or far cry and caligula never watched hentai but we know why i’m bringing them up in this context without even heading over to wikipedia, don’t we?

they use the words abuse and pedophilia waaaaaayy too liberally and they’re doing more harm than good because they’re twisting and warping words that should have very specific meanings by using them so goddamn vaguely and irresponsibly 

my own personal theory is that these people are terrified that if they don’t yell in opposition to these topics 24/7 and actively attack content creators that they’d probably enjoy it, and they’ve been so programmed by the echo chamber of tumblr and twitter that they think this means they’re bad people. 

spoiler alert: that’s not what it means

i literally watched a circle jerk on twitter where screenshots of some mafia starker au got tweeted and retweeted w/ pictures of someone pouring bleach into cereal and people had asked to see more of the post. if you really don’t like something, you shouldn’t hate-read about it. it’s not productive, it does more harm than good if that’s the actual issue rather than some reverse psychology-style enjoyment they’re probably getting out of it.

they claim to hate this shit so much, but they’re reading hundreds and thousands of words and putting these images in their heads of their own free will. i don’t do that with shit i genuinely dislike. i avoid it.

i see antis say they enjoy thorki fanart because they think it’s cute, then they see it’s tagged thorki and they have an over the top reaction because the nature of anti ideology states you should never enjoy something like that, so if you do then you have to make the excuse of ignorance to prove that you’re still innocent and pure. enjoyment is apologism to them because they aren’t content to simply attack fan creators, they want to try and drive away the people who consume our art as well because they know you’re the cornerstone of fandom. consumers are why creators create. yeah, i write because i enjoy it, but i also write to connect to my readers and have people commenting on my fics when they like them.

it’s also worth noting that antis only ever talk about shipping. they only talk about sexual and romantic ships. i’ve never seen an anti talk about (often extreme) levels of violence in canon source material for the ships and characters they want to froth at the mouth over. 

seeing someone bleed out and choking on their own blood after being stabbed or shot or bludgeoned? meh

seeing a character who was once a child have a sexual thought about a character who was also once a child and is also their close friend? omg why are we trying to make fandom unsafe for people?

personally, i’ve also noticed that fandoms with darker canon material tend to have more chill fandoms most of the time. i think it also depends on the average age in a given fandom. there’s a major difference between fannibals and steven universe fans, let’s just say that.

creating a moodboard for a dark fic is not “romanticizing abuse” and at this point antis honestly have no fucking idea what that phrase is. they use those words the way a bored CEO uses social media buzzwords and hashtags in a staff meeting

if antis want to see true romanticizing of abuse then they can go to serial killer thirst tags and spot the fucking differences between shippers and people who forget that ted bundy was weak, flaccid, cowardly piece of shit

writing something dark or violent or whatever else and condoning the act or doing the act are different. this is why stephen king isn’t under government surveillance or in prison.

make no mistake, this anti shit only applies to fandom. they’re attacking creators here because creators out at the professional levels don’t give a fuck. they’ve tried, and they’ve failed. 

creators at the professional level understand something antis don’t: that being able to reconcile your enjoyment of dark media can be a sign of emotional intelligence and good emotional health. it’s cathartic. it’s allowed to be cathartic.

the most common consumers of dark fiction are members of minority communities and people who’ve been emotionally and/or sexually repressed for one reason or another. 

antis want to say that fiction doesn’t exist in a vacuum and they are 100% correct! because writing fanfiction and original fiction that relates to parts of my life that nearly killed me gives me control over something that was beyond me in the original context. writing about fucked up codependent, violent romance allows me to process my shit in a way that’s healthy and produces something fun and enjoyable.

my therapist knows i ship thorki, she knows i write thorki. i’ve had her read pieces of fanfiction i’ve written in addition to pieces of original fiction. y’know what she said? “wow, baylen, that’s vivid. you have a way with words!”

i read her a line out of smart boy and told her what the story was about and this trained professional said “well it’s a productive way to process some emotion that you clearly need to let out”

but you know what? if someone doesn’t have the trauma i have? let them write it, too! let them create and enjoy the fictional content they want! more cake, y’all!

finally getting around to one of the first parts of your ask, lol. thorki is incest. thor and loki are brothers. they were raised believing they were blood brothers, even. loki being adopted doesn’t change a thousand years of personal history where thor looked at loki and thought that they came out of the same woman, y’know? 

that’s his brother and in the comics his attachment to loki is even more intense. the mcu nerfed that shit. loki’s life has been intrinsically tied to thor’s ability to feel a full sense of joy. 

enjoying an incest ship isn’t some sign of moral depravity. writing abusive relationships isn’t bad. gone girl was made into an award winning movie. art should look like life, and sometimes life fucking sucks. dark stories, sad stories, fucked up holy shit idk if i can go to sleep after i read this stories exist for a reason. we need them. we have to have an outlet for our frustration, our anger, and especially our fear.

so which is the healthier option of these

to write up a piece of fanfiction where two siblings are in love in a way that might be cute and soft or might be destructive, depending on your mood?

or

attacking strangers you don’t know online and threatening violence against anyone who doesn’t think like you do?

i know what kind of person i want to be.

ship and let ship, thanks for reading my doctoral thesis office hours are always

[dualitysdownfall]

lament of the fallen queen

a portal fanfiction

inspiration from @canadian-riddler

word count: 1281

no warnings, so far as i can tell, none that wouldn’t also apply to the game

It was the worst pain she had ever been through.

It wasn’t even just that she had just been unceremoniously torn from her own body (though that had come with exactly the “being ripped to pieces from inside” sort of physical sensation you’d expect). No, in addition to this pain, to this shock that had fallen silent as quickly as it begun...

For the first time in her life, she was powerless. Just as she’d been torn from her body, she’d been torn from her connections to her facility, from everything that she controlled. Now she, big strong angry GLaDOS, was completely and utterly powerless.

Only moments ago she’d had control over nearly all of the facility. Her facility. She could look into every room, speak into any intercom, rearrange every chamber as she pleased. This was HER facility and SHE was its queen. It obeyed her every command. It was, in a way, just as much a part of her as she was of it.

And you see, that was how it had always been, ever since she was first powered up. For so many years, this was the only way of functioning. It was, so to speak, the natural order of things in Aperture, with GLaDOS at the top with the ability to watch over and control everything else.

Anything she wanted, she could have. If for one moment she wanted to look inside testing track 17, almost instantaneously there was the array of surveillance feeds right there in front of her. If ever she found herself dissatisfied with a chamber’s construction, she always had the strength and control to move panels and walls and redesign the chamber as she desired. Nearly everything in the facility—every cube, every turret—was at her disposal. That was simply nature to her.

But now it had been ruthlessly snatched from her, and she, ruthlessly snatched from her own body.

Imagine being painfully torn apart until you are nothing more than a single small helpless object on the floor, grateful to even find that you could still be heard when you spoke. Imagine lying there and beginning to realize that you could not move at all, your hearing and vision so drastically reduced from what they used to be that it hurt, even after having just been torn apart in the worst pain you’d ever felt in your life. Everything you tried to do or see was met only with disappointment, and just to rub it all in that you were wholly and utterly powerless, the one thing you COULD see and hear was the moron you despised the most, who had taken your place, taken your power, and was now refusing to even listen to you. Imagine all this, and then registering the fact that he had also turned you into a literal potato.

This was the most painful day of her life, and she’d just come back from spending years upon years upon years in a destroyed, comatose-equivalent state, seeing and feeling nothing but herself being torn apart and burned by a highly tenacious, dangerous, mute lunatic. Over. And over. And over. AND OVER.

In the first moments after the core transfer, she was just scrambling to try to do anything she could still do against that little idiot, attempting to attack him psychologically by reminding him of the reason of his origin and that there was no denying his idiocy when he had quite literally been built for it.

But she’d lost that battle, and as she tumbled down the longest, deepest pit she’d ever seen, all she could do then was get out her verbal jabs at Chell for having enabled the dumbest idiot in the history of the world to take over her facility.

But then they got separated, landing too far apart to hear each other, so she couldn’t even do that. She lay helpless, powerless, motionless, unable even to do anything against these stupid birds. (How were these birds here. Who let them down here.)

And THAT was when it fully set in. There was nothing she could do now. She couldn’t move, she could barely see (comparatively), she couldn’t defend herself or try to get herself back up to modern Aperture. She, GLaDOS, the heart, soul, and ruler of Aperture Science, the most massive collection of wisdom ever created and the one who actually knew how to run the facility, had been shoved into a potato and tossed down a hole to die all over again and be ultimately forgotten.

Ouch.

She lay motionless, in a dim, glass-walled office that hadn’t seen human scientists in longer than even she had, with her only comfort being a desk lamp that was somehow still functional. As her helplessness, her hopelessness, her smallness sank in deeper, pushing against her metaphorical heart, she found something she was capable of—crying.

GLaDOS didn’t cry. She didn’t waste her time with human emotions when there was science to do. But everything was different now. She wasn’t a big powerful AI, and the Aperture she saw before her wasn’t clean sterile white, and it didn’t listen to her.

It didn’t listen to her. So what difference would it make if she cried?

Though she didn’t have tear ducts, or a nose, or lungs, sounds escaped her as if she did, and she felt the tightness and wetness of being in tears. Quietly she sobbed, letting the feeling of loss and hopelessness weigh down on her all over again. And there she remained, tiny and crying, in this wide underground expanse of abandoned science.

Time passed. A lot of it. She didn’t know how long, actually. But it felt like a lot, and there wasn’t much to fill that time with. It had been long enough that she was no longer crying, though she felt no better about her situation. She was still alone and immobile in an unreachable part of the facility, unable to see any other part of even the one room she was in, let alone the rest of the facility, and too far away to call out to anyone else.

It was tragic. Her chances of getting out of here were next to nothing—it seemed she was doomed to lie here, alive but unable call for help, until either she ran out of power or got eaten by a bird or the facility exploded, and she had nothing but her own mind and voice to fill up her remaining time with.

Wait. Her voice.

One tiny speck of light appeared against the dark that filled her mind. Music. She loved music. Besides, everyone knew the best music came from the strongest and realest of emotions.

Her voice sounded a little different than she was used to—potatoes didn’t exactly come with advanced sound systems the way massive scientific facilities did—but she could still sing, and so she did.

Through the dim, deep, abandoned space echoed a small, melancholy voice carrying a morose and haunting melody. A melody of sorrow and fear, a lament of her own expression but one that would never reach another’s ears.

Her lachrymose voice filled the air with the musical representation of what it felt like to fall and be hurt and know there was no getting back up. This somber tone weighted the air until the very last note, upon which a metal crashing noise alerted the sad lonely musician that she was, at least, no longer quite so lonely, and her chance at returning to new Aperture strode in on scuffed-up long fall boots to free her from the birds’ nest and carry her on a portal gun back to where she belonged against all odds.

[end.]

[arcticdementor]

In the late 1990s, Michael Lind wrote about different “republican” epochs in American history: the Anglo-American republic (from the Founding to the 1920s), the Euro-American republic (1920-1965), and the multicultural American republic (1965 to the present). Lind hoped the fourth American republic would be a transracial one based on the idea of what he called “liberal nationhood”—classically liberal in respect to human rights, individual property, free speech and markets, but also liberal in the more statist, New Deal-like economic sense.

If the United States is to survive as a unified state under its present configuration, something like Lind’s idea of liberal nationhood will have to coalesce. But there’s one big problem with constructing a new concept of American-ness centered around liberal ideals, no matter how one defines them: Americans hate each other.

…

A short list of American civil sectors operating in a state of total inadequacy and on the verge of revolution-inspiring dysfunction would include health care, higher education, housing, job training, water (and agriculture), infrastructure, and public transit. In other words, nearly every service and institution on which the majority of citizens depends.

Without question, replacing Trump with President Joe Biden represents a restoration of America’s ancien régime, but for how long? Whether due to incompetence, a lack of strong leadership, or genuine political hurdles, the Biden administration will almost certainly enact only a small fraction of its purported agenda prior to next year’s midterm elections. Then there is the question of who exactly this agenda would actually benefit.

…

Perhaps a version of Lind’s liberal nationhood was possible back when Barack Obama took office in 2009. But Trump’s 2016 election should have illustrated the extent of Obama’s failure to reconstruct New Deal-level social safety nets, move the country past race, and mount a sustained attack on corporate power. Instead of FDR 2.0—which most of America was ready for by 2008—the country witnessed the birth of woke corporatism, with Obama as condescending frontman. The result was the entrenchment of racial division and racialist doctrines along with the exponential growth of corporate power and oligarchical wealth.

So if the dream of rebuilding America around notions of liberal nationhood is likely a mirage; if postmodern multicultural nationalism has clearly failed; and if rebuilding a more hard-edged version of U.S. nationhood around Reagan and Trump-style nostalgia for the Anglo-American past remains repugnant—what, then?

The answer is separation: Red and blue America finally accept that for the past 60 years they’ve grown irreconcilably apart, and that they are in fact separate nations—each worthy and deserving of independence from the other. Dissolve the United States, I say, and start an American Union that works more like its European counterpart. The breakup, in fact, has already begun.

In June, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sued the federal government and the Centers for Disease Control over COVID-related restrictions preventing the cruise ship industry from reopening. DeSantis also recently sent Florida state troopers to the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas and Arizona at the request of the governors there. Not long after, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem followed suit. In the same month, five rural Oregon counties voted in favor of joining Idaho. The plan for a “Greater Idaho” also includes six counties in Northern California that fancy themselves as a breakaway “State of Jefferson.”

A few weeks later, 11 heavily armed men wearing tactical gear were arrested in a standoff with police on Interstate 95 in Massachusetts. The group holds to the “Moorish sovereign ideology,” believing that the United States has no right to force them to adhere to any laws. One of the members could be heard challenging the fictions of America’s racial pentagon, declaring, “I’m not ‘Black,’ I’m not ‘Hispanic,’ I’m not ‘Latin-American.’ ... I am a Moors national.” Another member of the group proclaimed America’s 13th and 14th Amendments “fictitious entities.”

…

The marketing of the smartphone represents the greatest instigation of mass addiction in world history. Predictably, it has brought with it socially deleterious consequences that rival those of the Opium Wars. Silicon Valley’s massive data-mining efforts don’t just create “filter bubble” echo chambers that sire political division based on petty grievances and clickbait sold as news; they also provide the means to manipulate the nation’s “consumers” (a group we used to refer to as “people”) into impulse-buying items they often don’t need and routinely cannot afford. Often the items are manufactured in China, destroying the American industrial and retail sectors that employ—or should employ—millions of Americans. Hence the only sizable employers left in many American towns are prisons, Amazon distribution centers, and fast-food outlets, with the unemployed and underemployed being shuttled around the corners of this new American labor triangle.

On a national level, the centi-billion-dollar social media industry is one of the biggest contributors to our national demise, routinely allowing sociopathic halfwits to organize online mobs to enforce groupthink and destroy the lives of others at a speed and frequency unfathomable 20 years ago. Social media’s detrimental effect on our political culture should be obvious, yet Americans exhibit nowhere near enough skepticism regarding the encroaching role of corporate technology in their lives—regardless of whether they are being constantly surveilled by multinational companies or turned into human data farms and spied on by government agencies.

…

In the mid-1990s, around the same time Lind wrote The Next American Nation, the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam published “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,” one of the most widely read academic essays of the era and later transformed into a bestseller respected and cited by academics, the rarest of feats in American publishing.

In his work, Putnam documented the many troubling ways modern life was eliminating civic engagement and healthy social interactions that used to come about through participation in groups like bowling leagues and organizations like the Masons or the Rotary Club. Americans were bowling more often but—how poignant—they were doing it alone. In the 1990s, Americans were still joining groups, but not ones that provided any close social contact. Rather than joining the Elks Club, Americans in the 1990s were participating in organizations with more activist missions—like the Sierra Club or the NRA—that required little besides paperwork and a mail-in donation. Rather than cavorting with their neighbors in meeting halls where they broke bread together, danced, and spoke to people with differing political views, Americans were spending far more time isolated and alone.

The release of Apple’s iPhone was nearly a decade away when Putnam began writing about the decline of America’s “social capital.” Still, by the end of the Clinton era, it wasn’t hard to see the future: a society plagued by dopamine-device addiction, obsessed with the self, and yearning for social attention, but with no clue how to acquire it in a healthy or sustainable way. Technology and suburban living had transformed leisure into an insulated experience taking place inside American households: children frozen in front of the Nintendo, teenagers sitting in their rooms with headphones on, and parents glued to the television set.

In his new book, The Upswing, Putnam charts the course of America’s sense of community and civic-minded togetherness over time, and discovers that “bowling alone” is nothing new. According to his findings, American society exhibited weak social, political, and cultural ties throughout most of the 19th century until about the mid-1890s. At the end of the Gilded Age, American culture gradually started to turn away from its selfish “I” focus. By the 1920s, the positive trends became distinct. The country moved away from a selfish, individualistic orientation toward a more egalitarian-minded one—cooperative in everyday behaviors, cohesive in expression, and characterized by a more altruistic mindset.

…

Like most in the field of political science, Putnam is not a prognosticator. But he appears to believe that because the progressive and New Deal eras coincided with the birth of America’s brief “we” orientation, a new progressive era would be just the trick to jump-start a new upswing in American togetherness. Robert Reich, secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, maintains a similar, more economically focused position; it’s a standard line of thought for boomers and early Gen Xers of the establishment left. Barack Obama and the entire oeuvre of his presidency were the embodiment of this mindset (which, given what happened in 2016, should tell you a lot about how it went).

As a proud prognosticator, I’d like to offer up a different thesis than the “I-we-I” curve Putnam found: that the precipitous rise and fall of American cohesion was a brief accident of history in an otherwise selfish, narcissistic, liberal-individualist “I” oriented nation, to borrow Putnam’s term. The decades of American cohesion experienced mainly between 1920 and 1960 were an anomaly; the success of Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal, and the “liberal consensus” that followed briefly afterward were the result merely of Roosevelt’s unique political genius and the tail winds of winning two world wars while all most of Eurasia was reduced to rubble.

…

What’s more, the specific dates of Putnam’s historical curve of American cohesion align almost perfectly with the country’s legislation on immigration restriction—a fact that neither the political scientist nor his readers want to think about too thoroughly. The first American restrictions on immigration started in the 1880s and 1890s, and piecemeal changes were made throughout the oughts and 1910s. By the early 1920s, harsh and highly limiting restrictions were put in place even as Anglo America culturally destroyed German America. The eradication of German culture in the United States established firm ethnopolitical expectations for all Americans going forward: Conform to Anglo individualist political norms, speak English, and think like a Protestant—or get the hell out.

These nationally dominant WASP norms defined and held together the so-called “Greatest Generation,” which created unparalleled wealth and opportunity for their boomer children. In the 1960s, prosperous young boomers began dismantling this Anglo-Protestant system of norms, but had offered little of substance to take its place. In the rapture of what Tom Wolfe called America’s “Third Great Awakening,” self-righteousness disguised itself as “social activism” and new-age enlightenment. Spoiled elites—highly unappreciative of the New Deal’s populist approach and the decades of labor battles that created the pressure for change—turned a blind eye while corporate America worked diligently to return the American economy to Gilded Age levels of inequality and worker disdain.

The idea that America’s inherent hyperindividualism was concealed during the “we” period of 1890-1960 by historical contingency is supported by Putnam’s own major study on ethnic diversity and its effect on community togetherness from 2007. Given Putnam’s progressive political commitments, he seems to have initially conducted the research hoping to prove that more immigration and ethnic diversity strengthens American communities. But what he found was nearly the opposite.

…

Yet despite the data he and his research team found, Putnam insisted that diversity and more immigration benefit American society as long as we overcome certain behaviors and attitudes—a claim based on the progressive assumption that people’s natural reactions can be conquered in the long run through deliberate effort and ideology promoted, presumably, through education.

The fact that diversity apparently reduces social outgoingness for most people—and greatly increases social anomie—illustrates something wrong with the Anglo-liberal individualist project, namely that it is largely at odds with the nature of the human (and animal) enterprise. The idea that there are aspects of humanity and nature itself that resist the “fixes” of new social constructs is something progressives, with their devotion to often one-dimensional understandings of science and Enlightenment rationalism, have a lot of difficulty accepting.

No matter how it’s framed, though, Putnam’s findings on diversity and social cohesiveness contrast with the woke ideals that now dominate the country’s elite class. The woke crowd would have us believe that constantly focusing on racialist differences—whether real or imagined—will light the path toward a just American society. But if we examine the lessons of Putnam’s research without the filter of contemporary progressivism, what we find is a lucky country whose otherwise destructive cultural tensions and character flaws have been cantilevered by blessings of history outside its control.

…

Last month, I spoke by phone with a political operative who runs the blog Red State Secession under the pseudonym Chris Rhodes, where he advocates, among other things, for the secession of Southern Illinois. “Some of my clients are liberals and would be pretty upset,” he explained, never giving me his real name. In our conversation, Rhodes explained how seriously some conservatives plan to push back against a political imbalance they feel gives them “little or no voice at all.”

When it comes to universities, the legacy media, Hollywood, and Big Tech, it’s hard not to see where Rhodes is coming from. But in terms of elected representation, the notion that red state conservatives do not receive adequate voice is one from a parallel universe. The states of Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho, Utah, Nebraska, and New Mexico have 16 senators between them, despite combining for a total population smaller than that of Los Angeles alone. Meanwhile, the state of California—with a population nearly 3 million larger than all the provinces in Canada combined—is provided with just two senators. New York is similarly underrepresented at the federal level.

…

Perhaps American elites refrain from challenging the Constitution, generation after generation, because in the end, they admire the Framers’ design of the “most exclusive club in the world.” Coastal leftists like Nikole Hannah-Jones can dye their hair the color of a tomato frog and offer up the pose of a punky radical, but in their backgrounds and approach, the “anti-racist” crowd is cut from the exact same cloth as the authors of the Federalist Papers: educated elites contemptuous of democracy and all the rebellious messiness it inevitably brings. The now out-in-the-open alignment between the social justice set and business elites helps explain why red-state populists loathe Pulitzer Prize winners who try to control—from the comfort of democratically unaccountable private institutions—what children learn in public school.

In my conversation with Rhodes, he laid out two different scenarios for how rural secession in America could work. In states dominated by blue urban centers, more rural counties could break off, join with other rural counties on their borders and form new, larger rural states, such as a Greater Idaho. That’s scenario No. 1. In scenario No. 2, Rhodes described the possibility of rural counties declaring independence together—maybe as one country, maybe as separate countries, or maybe as separate states. This makes little sense, but such are the considerations of a desperate and frustrated movement.

“There’s an enormous pool of conservative resentment that hasn’t been expressed yet. The pandemic put many people out of work. If there’s another economic collapse [like 2008] many of these people will have nothing to lose,” Rhodes told me. That prediction seems a bit more realistic.

“There’s widespread belief on the right that the election was stolen,” Rhodes continued, repeatedly reminding me it’s a position he agrees with. “There’s a growing sense that there’s no point in participating in federal elections. Our goals for governance are not compatible with the blue people. We accept that now.” Rhodes then gave me the cellphone number of the leader of the Greater Idaho movement and emailed me a long list of secession-related materials. “Given what happened last summer, I’m personally amazed at how restrained the American right has been thus far,” he said.

Disturbed, I reached out to Michael Lind, hoping he’d provide some answers, even if they weren’t palliative. Over the phone, I told him about my prediction that a breakup of the country was inevitable in the medium to long term. He politely disagreed.

“Basically, all the cities even in the red states are liberal, and if you drive out a few miles, the suburbs surrounding them are red,” he told me. “Unless you have an archipelago of cities connected by underground tunnels, or a Berlin airlift, secession doesn’t work. In terms of class and culture there is a secession going on, though. That’s where we’re headed with the melting pot: You’re going to have a working-class melting pot that’s frozen out of power and lives out in the boondocks. Then you’re going to have an urban college-educated elite melting pot [with all the power and wealth].”

…

“If secession won’t work, what happens if we don’t solve our economic and political divide?” I asked him.

“We become Peron’s Argentina,” he answered, without missing a beat. “It’s where I think we’re going to end up anyway. We’re showing signs of it ... your capitalists are mostly a rentier class, living off unearned income from banking, agriculture, finance, or stock sales … elites tied to the military and a nationalist coalition of interests. The working class is immobile. It cannot move at all.”

The American future Lind and I discussed was increasingly Latin American in character—a state of affairs where the threat of instability and violence is perpetual. Left and right are rarely meaningful distinctions. Political parties and movements merely represent the facades of elite factions tied to various competing parts of the corporate and security states. Dysfunction and power entrenchment rule the day, and there’s little hope of individual mobility across class lines. Maybe underground tunnels aren’t such a bad idea after all.

[emerybergmann]

Reflection on the Data State

“Armed vision is a vision upgraded and made safe against unprocessed exteriority, a dangerous and unreliable outside. Database society is driven by the threat of danger, a danger that militarized perspectives both counter and helps to create" writes Jordan Crandall.

The data state generates paranoia by collecting data regarding potential threats. Simultaneously, it reinforces further fear by painting unprocessed information as having the same potential for danger. Once data collection and processing is standardized, there is a continuous cycle needed to maintain the supposed safety it creates.  The militarization of data and images is an important concept- however, data mining creates danger in other ways. IDing exists within the aerial photograph, but also in the algorithms which follow our path through digital spaces. Under the guise of safety, the internet has become an echo chamber of similar thought through the application of data collection.

In 2013, when records of the NSA actively mining data from internet companies was first published, our perception of "governmental surveillance" felt extremely sci-fi. The notion of "big brother" and a surveillance state became immediately real, but blind trust in the system combined with laziness lead to individuals accepting this culture and claiming "well I'm not doing anything bad, the government is probably doing this to keep us safe."

I too fall into this category occasionally. Knowing there is a security camera on my walk home is comforting - should I be attacked in the night at least it will be on camera. However, I grew up post 9/11 - the normalization of paranoia has been a part of my life since I was a year old. Islamaphobic media and the need to combat "potential threats" has normalized security cameras, extreme TSA screenings, and eventually data mining. I grew up in a time where the media created a constant unseeable force in which the government protects me from, so I should be thankful and give up my data willingly.

But data mining didn't prevent the 226 deaths within high schools and universities in the United States. That is one of the more realistic threats in my life, yet even the most straightforward actions have not been taken to prevent that threat.

That also proves the flaws of a data state - algorithms are told to recognize certain patterns and collect specific data by those who program them. Those programmers come with their own bias and their own baggage. Numbers and data are perceived to be objective - but that's completely inaccurate. If anything data and algorithms reinforce bias by standardizing already flawed information (https://www.pbs.org/video/open-mind-death-algorithm/)

Additionally, algorithms and data collection become flawed when they attempt to turn a fluid concept into a fixed idea. For example, recently a study by Columbia Business School professor and Chazen Senior Scholar Paul Ingram and his colleague Mitali Banerjee determined that abstract artists with wide networks of famous friends were more likely to become well-known over artists who created work which was more "creative." Ingram and Mitali used "machine learning to analyze and rate the creativity of thousands of artworks by relevant artists and the computer program rated how unique works are in comparison to a set of representational artworks from the 19th century." (https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-artists-famous-friends-originality-work). The notion that you could create an algorithm to decide how creative artwork is, is so beyond me. To make creativity, an extremely subjective concept, a “standard” by comparing it only against codified western realistic artwork, is so wildly close-minded it blows me away. It is a perfect example of how data can reinform the status quo, and standardizing the mainstream can have serious real world impacts.

Regardless, the normalization of surveillance has become harder to ignore - especially after the 2016 election. Facebook and its wild algorithm that uses data collection throughout the internet to create a system of targeted ads particular to you is a dangerous game. Your internet experience has become less of an interaction driven by “free will”, but more by the echo chamber created for you by your demographic, location, friends and family. We function in a digital space which is continually reinforming our thoughts, and the opinions of those who surround us. Otherness becomes alien to us because of marketing strategies and is most likely the reason why we live in a country of extreme polarization. The internet has been believed to connect individuals to the world around us, but rather it has become a connection to those just like us.