#social media is awful. content creation is too much. being an influencer is a joke. i like being me and being here

[flamboyant-king]

I like Tumblr, it feels more like a community on here than the other sites. I love y'all.

[whitehotharlots]

Vicious impotence

A moment is inseparable from the ways in which it is discussed and understood. When people are aware of their inability to affect the material conditions of the moment itself, they become vicious in asserting the primacy of their interpretation of it. Well-compensated and facing neither encumbrance nor threat of censure, they screech before large crowds, bemoaning the fact that no one has listened to them. If only their interpretation had been accepted and agreed upon before the moment had happened, then it never would have happened, or it would have happened differently. They assure their audience that worse moments are still to come and that these, too, will be due to their perspective having received insufficient attention. The more they are listened to, the more they feel themselves ignored. Their inefficacy is proof of the urgency of their methods. 

Classification becomes the order of the day. Beneath that--never spoken too loudly, as enunciation leaves one’s beliefs open to clear examination--there lies a churning river of conspiratorial mysticism. This happened because the people who did it are this way, and no one should pay any mind to how being that way made them do those awful things--it just did. When those people are around, these things will happen. They always will. Presence is action and action is presence, which is why we face such a vital imperative to identify presence whenever an action has taken place. 

And so within hours of a few hundred psychotic dimwits breaking into the Capitol building, managing to kill a cop and several of their own in the process, our bleak commentariot had published hundreds of articles classifying the type of people who were involved. The raid was a coup, first and foremost, regardless of the fact that at no point was there any risk of the United States government being toppled. It was a coup because it was caused by whiteness, racism, masculinity, a lack of trans-positivity, gamergate, ableism, too few powerful women, too many bad ideas, too much free speech, too many jokes, not enough solemnity, not enough people listening to the things writers had said in the past and were saying now. Whatever you wanted to cause it had caused it, and it all came back to the presence of bad people who, by their nature, cause bad things. 

Of course, I am as hapless and internet-deranged as everyone else, and so I made my own classifications. Surveying the crowd, I see a fair representation of the Trump base: racist internet perverts; young libertarian men who read 3 books a year and consider themselves intellectuals; 40-something blonde women who have been ejected from multiple Styx concerts; senior citizens who demand the TV in the Pep Boys waiting area be switched from Family Feud to Fox News because it’s been 25 minutes since they last tuned in and they need to make sure Obama still wants to kill them. The gang was all there, reveling in the strange power of their impotence, moving for the sake of movement, existing for the sake of existence. They had been told, and they believed, that their mere presence affects outcomes. They figured that all they needed to do was break in to where they think power unfolds and just stand around and then, by osmosis, power would be what they wanted it to be. 

Like the liberals who despise and define them, the Trump people had confused moments with materiality. Those liberals share the same confusion, and they rushed to insert themselves and their perspectives into the moment. Yes, they said, these people actually did almost destroy Democracy. They had gotten into the building where elemental power is generated. Their particles brushed off into the magic power rays. Such an incursion cannot be allowed to happen again. These people must no longer be allowed to conceptually exist.

The moment trumps the materiality, as we can only influence the former. We are content to let these people wallow about in their homes until they OD or shoot themselves or their lungs melt--that’s their material demise, deserved and unimportant. But in the meantime we must erase their ability to influence the creation of moments. Their bodies can stay, for a while. Their mediated selves must be destroyed. 

What are the implications here? To ask an obvious question: how can the Democrats continue to blame the dispossessed working class for their own immiseration if they can no longer tell these people to learn to code, since learning to code necessarily entails enmeshing oneself into the massive electronic surveillance and control mechanism we're now declaring off-limits to anyone whose beliefs fall an inch to the left or the right of the Democrat narrative du jour? And what are the implications for everyone else? Ours is a flimsy society built upon layers and layers of obvious contradictions, sure, but what will things look like when those contradictions are enforced with the viciousness of our carceral state, even as they shift as rapidly as social media demands our perceptions to change?

When I said “Democrat narrative du jour,” I mean DU JOUR. As in, it changes by the day, and one day's narrative will very often directly contradict that of the previous day. This is how all cops are bastards and we should abolish all policing but also we need to give police more resources and leverage to brutalize the people who we don't like. This is how gender is both a meaningless social construct and an innate facet of one's being that is so inimical to their identity it should determine whether or not they receive access to basic social decency. This is why empowered women are every bit as tough and competent as their male counterparts and also they are delicate waifs who should never be exposed to scrutiny or criticism. This is how downplaying race amounts to a racist facade of "colorblindness" and also acknowledging race is a hateful act of dehumanization. This is how a cop can find himself getting beaten to death by a crowd bedecked in Blue Lives Matter regalia. 

You can't simply adhere to the rules, because there are no rules to follow. In order to avoid censure, one must stay connected. 

So what will become of the digitally dispossessed? If we achieve Democrat Utopia and nothing changes materially but the internet is restricted so only those who adhere to officially sanctioned narratives are allowed to attempt to make sense of anything, where does that leave the masses who were shunted away? Is this going to make them less disaffected? Less volatile? What are you idiots hoping to achieve, here?