#youth radio

[yourbelgianthings]

twin high maintenance machines (this year)

let me die, let me die, surrounded by machines (surrounded)

and i dreamt of a factory, where they manufactured what i needed, with shiny new machines (palmcorder yajna)

let me hear the machine’s great gears squeal and grind (the last limit of bhakti)

long live the machines who never learned to work quite right (from the lake trials)

i am just a broken machine, and i do things that i don’t really mean (cry for judas)

the mountain goats and machines

[sheepstiel]

there is nuance in hating taylor swift. idc if you think she's basic overhyped or greedy or whatever or hate her music. but the amount of irl people i've heard saying they hate her for her dating habits and think her sleeping around is disgusting. your sexism is showing. find better reasons.

[magpie-trove]

Tell me some not usually thought about skills and disciplines that I should get certificates in

[jonathanbyersphd]

Damn, there's really people out there who associate This Charming Man with Steve

[akkivee]

probably one of the most important verses in terminus i think and yeah, it’s just kuukou’s way of life but also it’s kuukou’s way of life lmao

in probably over half of the stories kuukou’s in, there’s a point of how kuukou’s too inexperienced to be able to guide/lead properly;

he leaves home to show how good of a leader he is and finds out real quick lol

shakku assigns jyushi’s training to kuukou so he can be better

kuukou hits a wall training jyushi bc he’s relying on the only experience he’s had with training and isn’t looking at jyushi properly

that ‘blindness’ is the root of his conflict in harmonious cooperation, he blindly assumes he can solve jyushi and hitoya’s problems really quick and shakku literally chews him out over it, saying he’s young and to value the journey getting there (it also bears pointing out that the above verse is kuukou not rushing ahead as means of enrichment, but walking and resting)

i personally believe the curry drama tracks have been hinting at this round of drama track developments, and y’all don’t understand lmao, the way jyushi and hitoya were thinking it’d be nice if the people eating their curry could feel the effort that went into it was followed by the most poignant silence, only for kuukou to grouch there’s no point if they aren’t experiencing it themselves just feels like it’s relevant lol

like it all just comes back to kuukou and using his experience to guide. so about that ‘yesterday’s shaky retreat’ verse in terminus, it was pointed out that kuukou had said something very similar in young gun of the sun

and young gun of the sun is literally kuukou guiding based on how he knows what it’s like to suffer (and to feel so bad about a mistake he wants to die), so all this to say i think that verse is literally nothing but kuukou finding forgiveness in himself for something he did, and maybe that past mistake was so severe he thought the end of his life was the best answer

[shvcks]

is there an adult alterhuman community yet?

[jojo-schmo]

There is a faraway forgotten land in another dimension. In that land, there is an abandoned city. And in that city, there is a lone radio. When that radio is not playing the newest hit by superstar artist Neichel, it’s playing the tastiest, funkiest jams the people of that world had to offer.

(AKA the chaotic Spotify playlist with several of my favorite classic jams that I like to listen to when working on stuff like the Roleswap comic >:D)

[aronarchy]

One other thing, I don’t know what you think about this, but a failure on the… whatever we want to call it, but the Left or an anti authoritarian perspective that comes to mind. I’m thinking about this particularly in relation to children. This gets to another point that I want to ask you about: In most left or radical or anti authoritarian spaces, there are still spaces that are segregated adults and children. Usually, there are no children there, maybe in an occasional space, there’ll be some kind of childcare, but children aren’t integrated into it at all. So I feel like in that way, by reproducing the adult and minor hierarchy that we’re limited to in thinking are about the kind of collective care that you call for and Family Abolition.

To tie this historically to what you’re talking about, part of the gay liberation, the historical gay liberation movement of the late ’60s and ’70s, part of what they were calling for or in the idea of family abolition was a liberation, a Youth Liberation too, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, where children fit within this idea?

SL: Yeah. Well, Youth Liberation or Children’s Liberation are concepts I feel people have heard of even less than abolition of the family, somehow! Sometimes people have heard of “smash the church, smash the state, smash the family”—those three used to go together in Gay Liberation history. But “children’s liberation,” and the analysis of adult supremacy, those are currently forms of memory cultivated, I think, almost exclusively among anarchists, in North America, at least, as far as I can see. There’s a really great collection that came out from AK Press, by carla bergman, called Trust Kids, which has stories about confronting adult supremacy, in small, voluntarist, small-scale ways, but trying to develop scalable radical democracies intergenerationally.

I do think that, for me, abolition of the family is very much about dehierchalization. I don’t know if I really feel attached to the word “democracy,” but I do feel sure about the need for a truly de-hierarchized space in which we negotiate our need for care. This is also linked to the abolition of work and the productivism of capitalism. Because, under capitalism, elderly people and very young people are positioned, culturally and socially, very much at a disadvantage, because of their relation to the labor market. When capitalism is not yet able to use you for the production of surplus value because you’re too young, or is not anymore able to use you because you’re too old and you’ve been used up, or when you’re never going to be usable because you’ve been classified as disabled (disability can be thought of as a form of inutility, non-usefulness to capital), then you’re being marginalized by capitalism’s ageism and ableism. In that sense, there’s quite a lot of similarity and overlap between Youth Liberation and Disability Liberation. I think some people find that quite startling. They want to hit back and say, “Are you saying that disabled people are like children?” And it’s like: “Do you think that children are not people?”

TFSR: Yeah. Why is that a bad thing?

SL: Yeah. I think the history of experiments in children’s autonomy and equality with adults is quite easily criticized from a Marxist or revolutionary perspective, because they’re so piecemeal. Often it was quite small projects, or, I don’t know, clearly compromised things like fee-paying schools. Things that weren’t necessarily outside of the marketized field of education. For example: There was a school called Summerhill that was quite famous. It was in England. I think it began in the 40’s or even 30’s, I can’t remember. But it became famous in the 60s and ran for a long time. Summerhill was a radical free-school, anti-hierarchical education project. Parents sent children there and paid fees, but while the kids were at Summerhill, there was all this radical pedagogy that was being put in place, with horizontality around decision making and the making of “rules” and agreements, no obligation to go to classes whatsoever. Well, that was the theory. And people spoked holes in it and said, “Well, no, the school master, in a sense, is still a school master. He still pays the taxes on the property.” Lots of people were really keen to poke holes in it from all directions. It was ultimately a private school, right? But it was also an an anti-school. I really found it quite delightful, reading about Summerhill, and reading accounts of some of the big meetings where everyone, young and old, was equal.

It was always asked, “Could the children who came through Summerhill get jobs in the normal world?” And the answer to that was always like, “Yeah, in fact, actually, they were creative individuals who excelled at whatever vocation they decided to study in the end. Because they had only studied what—and when—they wanted to.” Sometimes, apparently, young people would not do classes or schooling for two years at a time before they felt any desire to go to a class, because they were so burned and traumatized from the world of hierarchized schooling they’d left behind. Then one day they would suddenly decide, “No, I do want to learn engineering.” They’re these stories like that. It’s quite inspiring as a tiny little glimpse into what might conceivably be possible in terms of relations between the young and the not-so-young.

With all the caveats I’ve already given, I’m in a way more and more inspired by the youth-led or youth-run collectives and social centers that are talked about in the anthology Trust Kids. Like the Purple Thistle in Vancouver. That social center is the subject of some of carla bergman’s writings. I don’t think it necessarily has the same utopian aspirations that radical pedagogues like A. S. Neill of Summerhill did back in the ’60s and ’70s. But in many ways, it’s more true to its own form, because of its attention to the actual voices and thoughts and writings of actual children, who may or may not actually share the same sorts of Youth or Children’s Liberationist ideas that people like I do!!

You run into these sorts of paradoxes and problems when you try and liberate people—against their will?—at the abstract level of theory. There’s a contribution by carla bergman’s young comrade, or kid, who isn’t really sure about the idea that “children do not belong to anyone.” That is a phrase and a concept that comes up in a poem by Khalil Gibran (“On Children”): “Your children are not your children / They are the sons and the daughters of Life’s longing for itself.” There’s a commentary on that by this teenager. And they aren’t sure it sounds good to them.

The idea that children “don’t belong to anyone but themselves”—and belong to all of us equally as a responsibility—was very popular among Black and so called “Third Worldist liberationists,” or Black and Third World gay and lesbian conferences in the ’70s. There was one caucus that resolved that children must be liberated, not just from the patriarchy, but also from the ownership model of parenthood, full stop. Lesbian parents, for example, would say, “we’re not trying to mimic the proprietary structures of patriarchal parenthood in our own lesbian communities. We want to completely revolutionize the whole concept of parenthood and the private-public distinction all together.”

But then again, you need a model for how children (who have entitlements to very specific forms of care) will be guaranteed this care. There often need to be, especially for the very early years of human life, very stable, very reliable arrangements of care provision. Extremely young people need round-the-clock hands-on care. It’s not at all clear that it has to be the same exact adults delivering this care. Clearly, it can be several. But we have to come up with imaginings for what the model might be.

For that reason, it’s nice to visit speculative fictions, or science fictions, like Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, where there’s a society called Mattapoisett. I think she wrote this in 1976. She was influenced by Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex, with its ambivalent openness to the possibility that some forms of technology could help liberate proletarian gestators—pregnant people—from the burden of necessary compulsory pregnancy if they want to be. That’s very much in a post-capitalist scenario, rather than in the present scenario of techno-patriarchal capitalism, which (Firestone is very clear!) is evil. If something like an artificial womb were to be developed in the present, it would be a nightmare, because it would necessarily be for all the wrong reasons. And indeed, ectogenetic technology is being developed right now by people with very strong pro-life commitments and “fetal personhood” commitments.

But anyway, in this speculative fiction [Woman on the Edge of Time], where working-class gestating pregnant people have thought about their needs for gestationally assistive technology, there’s a communal tank with fetuses. After the fetuses are finished gestating in this “mechanical brooder,” as it’s called, the community does the parenting, according to a three tier system. There’s an expert called a “kid binder,” who’s professionally given over to the vocation of looking after kids, because it’s a serious business, it’s a serious art. Then, everybody else is also responsible, all together, for all kids. Then the third level is that every single individual child has three designated parents.

I quite like those concrete proposals, because it gives your mind something to work with. If you know children and can talk to them about what they think about that, I think you can advance a little bit into a less abstract level of Children’s Liberation in 2023.

TFSR: Right. My experience of reading those things is always like, “Oh, my God, that sounds so exciting.” But then, that reaction that you mentioned of like, “Well, I’m not so sure. That’s such a good thing.” That speaks to another desire that could get lost in some of the discussions about wanting to be cared for. And what the distinction is between wanting to be cared for and wanting someone to have power over you. In both of the situations of caring for children or caring for sick or disabled people, that can be transformed into power and control. I mean, that’s what the right wing literally calls it, in terms of parental rights.

But there’s another kind of care, that doesn’t totally destroy your autonomy. I think maybe it’s hard to see that from our perspective now. Right? Maybe even from our desires, because we’re so exhausted of caring for ourselves, that the desire to be cared for might be some kind of totalizing desire, just like an escape, you know?

[withtheswordtattoo]

spider-man (to get your attention)

so i was sitting here doing my makeup and thinking about Officer Morale and Uncle Aaron and all that good stuff (spoilers for both movies ahead I think)

and i was thinking, how was there not some big scandal about The Prowler dying and being discovered to be the brother of Good Cop Officer Morales, soon to be captain???

weak theory 1: officer morales managed to keep on the down low that his dead brother was wearing the prowler suit and either in good faith or with money managed to have his fellow officers and the coroner not say anything.

weak theory 2: the prowler was SO GOOD at his job that nobody ever saw him and so when he died and his suit was found, nobody was concerned because nobody knew.

realistic theory: plot armor

anyway

[tomsmusictaste]

[moonchild-in-blue]

Oh mother, tell your children Not to do what I have done Spend your lives in sin and misery In the house of The Rising Sun

[shrineofprophecy]

[randomberlinchick]

Santigold Disparate Youth BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge 2012

The evening's soundtrack.❤️

"Don't look ahead, there's stormy weather / Another roadblock in our way / But if we go, we go together / Our hands are tied here if we stay / Oh, we said our dreams will carry us / And if they don't fly, we will run / Now we push right past to find out / Oh, how to win what they all lost"

Was it really so long ago that this dropped?...Good night y'all 😘

[stoneyocean]

Join the wave StoneyOcean.com 🌊🌊

[akkivee]

SOMEBODY NEEDS TO STOP RHYME ANIMA (DONT)

[mishkakagehishka]

Idc anymore i think i'm a good enough writer that i can say that when i noticed the pattern in what exactly makes a book "good" on booktok (and, bc of that, what makes it popular and top bestseller lists), it feels almost demeaning and denigrating to the entire craft. Idk if i should blame the way tiktok-esque social media has utterly rotted everyone's ability to concentrate and read more than three sentences, but literally none of those books are objectively good.

(Yes, yes, art is subjective. HOWEVER. Art is subjective when you look at style, at themes, at motifs, at plots and characters. Art is still a craft, it still requires skill. I've seen beyond the tiktok quotes of these books. Not even their editors are good given the amount of typos/spelling mistakes. That is not something that you should find in a traditionally published book.)

You look at these books, and you know the only reason for their existence is to make money. I cannot and will not accept that as art.

(I'm on Tumblr, of course I have to explain every point. Artists who make money off their art =/= people who only create art meant to be profitable. There is a difference between an artist who hopes to monetise doing what they love, who creates what they wish to see more of and who happens to then create something that other people wish to see more of, and a person who looks at what's trending and decides that making an unholy frankenstein's monster of a book that mashes all those trending tropes and motifs together would get them rich quick. The fact that a lot of these booktok books become popular because of nepotism is just the cherry on top. It's soulless.)

And to finally say what I wanted to say, it's because none of these books have any deeper message or even artistic value to them. You will find a few out of context quotes or paragraphs, ones written specifically so they'd look deep and beautiful when taken out of context, so that people would post them, so that people would buy the books. Entire books written just so those few lines could become viral and make cash. It cannot even be compared to a hook line writers would post to get people interested in their works, because in booktok's case, those are the only lines of quality and in the context itself, they are often out of place and forced.

I just hate booktok, i hate what modern social media has done to art. It's all created to be quickly consumed, for the few ☆aesthetic☆ glances, and then discarded. Just to make more money for those who are already nepo babies. As if artists needed more obstacles to jump over.