#using the word Sustainable fifty times because i think that's at the core of intentionally doing things always

[bogkeep]

i don't know if it's just me, but there's posts that i keep seeing that are like "people need to stop cycling through fandoms so fast," usually with a sentiment about the importance of commenting and sharing people's work and nurture their communities. i think Fandom Sustainability is a very interesting topic so i have THOUGHTS............ like first of absolutely all, that's a weird onus to put on people. Fandom Is For Fun. people don't usually control what their brainworms are gonna wriggle about. nobody should have to sign a five year contract for Enjoying Thing Together With Others. like. i understand that a lot of these posts are directed at people that are Enjoying the works of fanartists and fanfic writers, to urge them to share and react and feed their inspiration - but what about me, A Creator Of Such Things? are you making it my obligation to keep drawing fanart for a specific thing? becuase i've gotten plenty of lovely comments and feedback and all around soft and fuzzy feelings from the communities i've partaken in, but i'm only human. it's not that i lose love or interest for the properties, it's just - sometimes life happens. sometimes my momentum is unsustainable and i gotta slow down eventually. sometimes i want to draw other things! and yeah, i'm only one person, i'm not a whole fandom, and i can only speak on my experiences. i just feel like there's a narrative of "nice comments and engagement can keep an artist/writer go on forever" which i don't really agree with. reblogs and comments absolutely make me want to make more stuff! being part of a community is absolutely inspiring and fills me with ideas! but that can only take me so far. i think plenty of artists carry the same feelings of guilt for not drawing more X, or have gotten asks pleading for more Y. feeling unappreciated is not the only reason people stop creating a specific content.

my next Thought is that i think there are external sources causing fandom lifespans to shorten. i think there's a well documented phenomena that it's easier to sustain a fan community for long running, serial media with waiting time inbetween content, than it is for one-off movies or like, entire showruns premiered all at once for bingeability. and the current climate of "we're probably going to cancel this show after two seasons for capitalist rot reasons" and disillusionment with corporation and streaming services? probably not helping either!

i DO think there's something to be said for the speed of social media as opposed to, what, email lists? snail mail compendiums? but early tumblr was like, dominated by approximately five fandoms or something for years and years, so it CAN be done. clearly. maybe the change for discord servers to be the main hubs for communities, as opposed to old school forums? i think that may be one of the culprits for sure, because servers are so fast and exhuasting and there's Stuff going on all the time and you can only keep up so much before you burn out. i think. maybe it's just me who's burnt out thinking about it, because i know there can be really good servers that are well moderated and paced and sustainable! i've tried fandoming in several formats - i've done old school forum. i've done discord server. i've done Small Group Of Friends. i've done Just Vibing On My Blog/Twitter. and to me - and this is of course personal experience and not speaking for everyone else - the best longterm strategies for me has been the ones where i have the least contact with the actual fan communities. partaking in communities has been amazing and inspiring, i've made lots of close friends i'm still in contact with, but active participation in fandom is not something i can hold up forever. i can either burn in a fiery blaze for a little while or i can keep a low simmer for a long time. it's so much easier to love a story on my own terms when i don't have to be involved in every controversy of its fan community, even if it means trading away ideas and inspiration and drive. there's a balance to be struck between the two, of course. then there's like... sometimes something happens, either with the Media or with the Fandom. there's always going to be a risk with attaching yourself to a community and pouring yourself into it. do i have to keep loving something even if the creator of it makes it too weird for me? should i have to stay in a space that causes me stress or pain? sometimes the right thing for us to do is leave. sometimes we need a change. i think it's lovely when people stay to keep communities good, to keep creating good fanwork in spite of dissappointing creators. i think it's good to nurture love, but. it's a choice everyone has to make for themself. you should stay because you want to, not to martyr yourself for the sake of proving a point. last Thought i want to honor is that yeah, i believe there's Attitudes Afoot that are a sustainability drain: how old can a fandom get before it's Cringe? how large can a fandom get before it's Cringe? either we're all Cringe or none of us are. people love what they love, and is it not cruel to mock someone for something so joyful, based on arbitrary lines in the sand? if pre-2014 tumblr culture was good at anything it was to love hard and fearlessly. i DO think it's worth creating good and sustainable communities, to love well and responsibly, and find joy on your own terms. i think there's many ways to fandom and one way isn't more right than the other. a relationship is worthwhile even when it's not everlasting.

[lindsaynsmith]

Twilight of the Racist Uncles

Twilight of the Racist Uncles https://ift.tt/2OXdv5O

There is a family friend, a man I’ve known for decades. A highly educated man with total financial security in his recent retirement. A man who always had a good story to tell or an interesting side of a conversation to hold up. Then, a few years ago, he got on Facebook. Reading his timeline became an exercise in watching a man’s descent into madness. Over the summer I was surprised to learn that he had purchased three very expensive AR-15 semiautomatic rifles. When I asked why, he said, “For the race war that’s coming” in a tone that suggested no further explanation would be necessary.

If you are under the age of fifty, the odds are that you have at least one older person in your life who has gone down this road in the last few years. If you are white, I am certain of it. Lamenting our older relatives’ journey down the rabbit hole of right-wing paranoia and vituperation feels, at times, like my generation’s version of having the big talk about putting Nana in a nursing home. “Losing a parent” has dual meanings for us after 2016. We’re dealing with the loss of people who are very much alive—but who have become such chaotic stews of anger, persecution complexes, racism, and half-assed conspiracy theories that they can no longer hold a normal conversation.

Intergenerational tension is hardly new; it dates roughly back to mankind’s mastery of fire. In this case, though, more than a typical generation gap separates us, thanks to a nearly irresistible system designed to draw in old white people and get them hooked on an outrage fix they end up needing every bit as much as their Lipitor.

Though Fox News binging is typically blamed for this phenomenon, viewership data doesn’t support the argument. Fox News tops cable news ratings, but cable news is a small, declining market compared to, say, televised sports, Netflix streaming, or anodyne sitcoms. The number of people sitting saucer-eyed in front of the TV all day watching News Corp render the arts of satire and parody moot is significant in Nielsen terms but quite meager compared to the audience of Monday Night Football.

Spend a full hour reading right-wing Facebook. It is like a funhouse mirror; you’ll feel the what-was-in-those-cookies sense of having entered a fantasy world of grievance and rage.

What has truly fueled the Boomers’ transition from “means well, but sometimes frustrating” to Trumpian insanity is Facebook. There the fix is constant. There all of their worst impulses are collectively reinforced, constantly rewarded, and ceaselessly amplified.

The last generation of Americans who will enjoy anything approaching financial security in old age could spend the Golden Years we’ll never have golfing, going on cruises, driving RVs, or watching The Price is Right. They could choose to be happy, having lived their entire lives in a system from which they extracted every benefit and which they subsequently dismantled at the altar of lower taxes.

Instead, they’re spending their days on a speedball of right-wing propaganda and a platform that gives them an audience of . . . well, everyone. And it turns out that 24-7 access to reinforcement and an unceasing stream of conspiratorial thinking is pushing some of them over the edge.

Spend a full hour reading right-wing Facebook. It is like a funhouse mirror; you’ll feel the what-was-in-those-cookies sense of having entered a fantasy world of grievance and rage—a Lewis Carroll version of The Turner Diaries, a John Birch Society children’s book for sundowning grandpas. It is a barrage of propaganda crafted around the biases of old white people to exploit their deepest racial fears and authoritarian-follower personality traits. Much of it makes Fox News look tame and responsible by comparison. Toy commercials could only dream of reaching kids as effectively as the right-wing noise machine hooks our elders.

Now imagine looking at that for hours per day, every day.

What would be left of your brain after several years of that? Like the president they so blindly love, the brains they once had become a puddle of Cracker Barrel sausage gravy strewn with flotsam and jetsam[*] of the Greatest Hits of the reactionary playbook. These are randomly sampled, irrespective of time, logic, or coherence. Immigrant caravans! Soros! New Black Panthers! Vince Foster! Card Check! Seth Rich! Uranium One! MS-13! Crisis Actors! Anchor babies! Whitewater! Her emails! Cap and Trade! Thugs! Birth Certificate! Every obsession is equally relevant. And the right time to be very, very mad about all of it is right now.

Thus their thought process becomes that of a sentient car window sticker of the Punisher logo with a Blue Lives Matter overlay. It’s not pretty. And it’s going to get worse with time. Boomers have long since taken over Facebook and often feel like its only active users. Younger people have transitioned to Instagram (nearly wordless), Twitter (annoying but succinct), and Snapchat (conveniently ephemeral). What once resembled an online high school reunion now feels now like the 5 p.m. bitch session at the Peoria Applebee’s.

The magic is how it unites otherwise disparate factions of America’s very worst people and provides a single trough that all will love bellying up to. The apotheosis of Zuckerberg’s brainchild is the synthesis of AM radio call-in shows and every local newspaper’s online comment section into a single, feculent holding tank. It’s everything you could ever want, if you are old, white, and incoherently angry for no good goddamn reason at all.

For more than three years the media and public have subjected Facebook to increasing criticism on account of its data use and privacy practices. It’s fun watching god-complex tech bros criticized for the first time in their lives, like Mr. Zuckerberg’s Congressional scolding.

Like the president they so blindly love, the brains they once had become a puddle of Cracker Barrel sausage gravy strewn with flotsam and jetsam of the reactionary playbook.

Privacy concerns are not frivolous. Some of Facebook’s and other social media sites’ practices are horrendous. Yet this framing misses the point. It is a media narrative capitalizing on our desire to blame someone else when we realize just how much information we’ve fed into a mystery box.

In the long term, the damage done by Facebook will have little to do with the way it counted and sold our Likes to all comers. Futurelings will wonder not how Facebook got our data—Surprise! We gave it to them in the name of finding out “Which Game of Thrones Character Are You?” They will wonder how we ignored for so long the way it greased the skids for a large, wealthy, influential demographic of Americans to lurch toward authoritarianism. Right-wing media planted the seed. Then social media told everyone that it’s okay, everyone else is doing it too. You’re not alone. You can say the n-word out loud again. After decades of having to bottle it up in the name of namby-pamby liberalism, you can be proud once again to blame it on The Jews.

It is popular to demand that Facebook better police content, but no amount of vigilance against “fake news” or banned neo-Nazis will ameliorate the function it serves for Boomers as a place to feed off of one another’s bottomless rage. Is it good that Alex Jones was banned for repeatedly advocating violence against specific groups? Of course! Ban all the other Alex Joneses too! But that won’t fix the underlying problem, and it won’t reverse Facebook’s slide from frivolous fun to toxic quicksand.

What once resembled an online high school reunion now feels now like the 5 p.m. bitch session at the Peoria Applebee’s.

Russian bots, false information, and loathsome racist mouthpieces like Richard Spencer are all bad things. But what makes Facebook so bad is, well . . . people. Everyone’s viciously racist aunt and pull-tab uncle and dad and grandma and old friends whose mouthpiece was once limited to the forwarded chain email now have an audience the size of the whole world.

And so the aging members of Facebook’s user base feed off of one another, writhing in their grievances and anger like chinchillas taking a dust bath. Younger users aren’t ditching Facebook because of Alex Jones; they are leaving because listening to all of America’s uncles at once is our literal nightmare. It is unpleasant enough to deal with our own aging relatives. What’s the appeal of a platform that also makes you deal with everyone else’s?

Facebook didn’t invent Boomers’ susceptibility to naked racial fearmongering or their yearning for a bygone America that never was. It did offer them a convenient meeting room where they could gather to share their own delusions and learn new ones. Social media connects the like-minded. Now we see the consequences no one paused to consider—what would happen if we created a single, self-sustaining Galaxy Brain of all of humanity’s worst impulses?

Facebook’s core premise is that networking people is inherently good. It turns out that networking shitty, racist people served only to better organize and strengthen their hatreds. Old relatives who once screamed into the void now know they have like-minded peers listening, Liking, and responding in kind. Rather than concocting their own baseless conspiracy theories, the magic of Facebook unites them around the Greatest Hits—the blacks, the immigrants, the Jews, the liberals, the government—and writes the script for them. Facebook was the medium that allowed the right to homogenize reactionary politics into a single, connected mass of outrage, and the consequences we see today are just the tip of an iceberg.

[*] For the curious, flotsam is material that entered a body of water accidentally whereas jetsam, which shares a root with “jettison,” is material thrown overboard intentionally.

via Latest – The Baffler https://thebaffler.com October 30, 2018 at 06:05PM