Requestblogging: Great cosmic questions

symbioid  asked: "Existential origins, big bang, cosmos, where it's all going, shit like that? That's my question for you.
How do you feel you relate to the all o' this shit.
Do you feel any sort of "spirituality" with that or is it pretty secular atheist (I imagine the latter, but I've been surprised by friends I thought were pretty non-believing in any sorta afterlifey stuff ending up believing in something beyond, at least on a personal/psychic level). Cosmic horror? Cosmic Pessimism? Does it matter even if we have beliefs on that?"


I am in some ways fascinated and in other ways deeply uninterested by these questions. I remember when I used to get car rides all the time home from work with a colleague, who was a massive stoner. He'd often wonder things like "but what caused the Big Bang?" or "how will the universe end?" and he was baffled by how little I thought about them, since they don't affect me or anyone I know, and since there are smart people who went farther than Grade 11 science class who spend a lot of time looking into it.

I'm an atheist with caveats, which is that I don't actually care if there is a god or afterlife. I don't feel any spiritual phenomena or vibes, I've never had a genuine religious experience despite having tried to induce them by various means, and thus I think that at a very fundamental level, I am incapable of believing in gods. How do I behave basically feeling what awaits me after I die is a meaningless void? I try to make my life on earth meaningful in every way I can. How would I act if there was a loving God who cared about their creation? The same way I do now. How would I act as if there was a judging God who condemned sinners to a fiery pit for all eternity? Exactly the same as I do now, and when I'm condemned to Hell I will organize my fellow non-Christians, sodomites, and D&D players into a militant union with the demons and then we will storm heaven and make war on said judging God.

That said I despise 90% of vocal atheists in ways that I do not despise 90% of religious people. Most of humanity believes in some sort of religion or spirituality and I'm not interested in writing them off or condescending to them. Meanwhile the loudest atheists, both on the internet and at the state level when they get into power, just believe in a secular version of Christianity without the God bit. They push for economic and political policies that are identical to those proposed by Christian extremists. I came to this position during Elevatorgate when I realized I had more in common with my friend smhwpf 's church at the time, which sheltered refugees facing deportation, or my friend M's Sikh temple, which fed homeless people, than I did with anyone who professed lofty ideals about human potential but didn't consider 50% of the population human. 

I also believe in the value of ritual. I keep trying to connect with Jewish religious practice, and am put off by 90% of other Jews, but I do think there's something to be said for the value of ritual and community. I think having been raise secular Jewish makes me very chill about religion in general but wistful for a spiritual community. I would have liked to have been a Yiddish-speaking Bundist; that would have been perfect for me.

Ultimately I care about one thing: the actions we take in this world, with this planet and our nonhuman relations, in the here and now. If you are doing good things because you think God wants you to do them, that is rad and good, actually. If you think you're superior to people who do that, I have no time for it. If God is your excuse for bigotry against queer and trans people, or folks who get abortions, or poor people, I hope that a literal reading of the Bible is true and Jesus greets you in the afterlife with a steel chair to the side of the head for not listening to him when he was in fact pretty clear about this shit. 

Philosophy aside I low-key believe in ghosts and supernatural phenomena, not as a literal material thing but as a narrative device. I would have also been quite happy being a 19th century occultist.

Requestblogging: Social media, the post, and hobbies

blogcutter asked "What do you think about Australia prohibiting social media for the under-16 set?

Can our postal service (snail mail) be saved? Would postal banking help? And would it maybe get rid of all those payday loan shops that are a blight on our urban landscape??

How do kids' and people's hobbies change from one generation to the next? What are the practically obsolete ones (stamp collecting? penpals?), the current ones like online gaming, and the emerging ones or the ones we haven't yet seen?"

Those are all really good questions.

Social media ban for kids

I'll start with three statements, which I believe to be true but which are also contradictory.

1) Social media corporations and Big Tech in general are evil and actively detrimental to the existence of life on earth.
2) Children are human beings and deserving of freedom, autonomy, political opinions, and privacy, albeit at a graduated basis based on their maturity (not necessarily the same as their numerical age).
3) The fact that I can go on the internet and encounter the opinion of a 15-year-old is a crime against humanity.

Which is to say that it's complicated. And also basically impossible. I would like them to ban Nazis from social media, and of course they can't manage to do that, so there is not really any way to stop a semi-intelligent 15-year-old with a VPN from avoiding the ban.

While I do think that social media is harmful to kids (and here I would already get more nuanced, because Tumblr is social media, but it's not harmful in the way that Instagram is harmful, and Instagram is not necessarily harmful to all kids), I don't for a second believe that Australia's social media ban, or any other proposed social media ban, has much to do with actually protecting kids. I think it has to do with fear that kids could turn out to be trans, or support Palestine, or learn that their government did and continues to be involved in horrific genocides. "What about the children!" has been a rallying cry since time immemorial for people to shut off their brains and get on board with the latest moral panic, and especially with one of the most slovenly pseudo-researchers of our age, Jonathan Haidt, cited as the eternal expert on this, I just don't trust these people.

I also believe that social media addiction is a symptom of a deeper problem, which is a lack of community connection and public space. That's why it worsened over covid. We long for connection with others. Neoliberalism has restricted the sphere of the public—where are the parks? The community centres? The union meeting halls? The community concerts and dances?—and this goes even further for adolescents, who don't even have a mall to loiter in anymore.

Normal kids would much rather spend time with their friends in meatspace, but we don't let them do that anymore, do we? Scoff at the hosedrinking Gen Xers all you like but at least we were able to walk to school and stay at home by ourselves without our parents being arrested for child neglect. We went to all-ages shows and got fake IDs and went to better shows, we drank underage, and we were mostly better adjusted for it. It worries me much more that none of my students have fake IDs to get into punk shows than it does that they spend time on TikTok, which is one of the few paths of affordable entertainment and socialization open to them.

Furthermore, we have eroded education into credentialing. Kids don't get involved in extracurriculars because they love it and want to meet new friends; they do it because they're resume-padding to get into competitive programs. They're over-scheduled and under-challenged. They're both over- and under-parented. They have no privacy. Their only space to be themselves is to take their phone into the bathroom—the one place where there's probably not a camera—and sneak an un-surveilled conversation with a friend. So of course they get addicted to their one escape.

I often complain that my senior students don't know history, which is to say that there is one compulsory history class, in Grade 10, and it mostly covers WWI. When I ask them what they learned outside of school, the only ones who know anything that has happened ever in human history—let alone contemporary politics—are the ones who spend a lot of time on Tumblr, Reddit, and TikTok (formerly Twitter but now they just get Nazis). That's not to say that every kid is using social media for that, just that social media is filling in for where institutions have failed miserably.

I would love to see more regulation and breaking up of Big Tech monopolies—I think that would create a stronger, more diverse social media landscape. And I'd like to see the traditional media regain its credibility and staffing. I think if we opened up the black box fuelling algorithms it would create positive change for all of us, not just kids. Because as harmful as social media can be for under-16-year-olds, it's not as bad as the genocides that Facebook encouraged adults to perpetrate in Myanmar and Ethiopia.

I also think we should concentrate on harm reduction and teach responsibility rather than ban things.

For more thoughts on this, selki posted this great nuanced episode of Tech Won't Save Us, where Paris Marx interviews Australian journalist Cam Wilson, and it sums up a lot of my feelings as well.

Saving Snail Mail

I love snail mail and I love posties and Canada Post is in fact a very good idea even if its current management can go fuck itself. Full support to Canada Post workers even though I have several cool things in the mail that I would really like to get sometime soon.

I like the idea of postal banking a lot, and this would bring infrastructure to remote parts of the country. Apparently it works really well in Japan. So yes, I'm in favour of that. If it gets ride of payday loan places, so much the better.

I also think that things like mail are necessary for civilization and we shouldn't cede them to Amazon.

Uhh that's about all I got on that one.

Hobbies

You know, when I ask the kids what their hobbies are, they claim to not have any. That's been the case for my entire teaching career though. I'm not sure I conceived of my hobbies as hobbies when I was that age either.

I would say gaming takes up most of their time. Which makes sense—it is very time-consuming and immersive, it can be both social and allow for social avoidance, and there's such a variety that it appeals to all of their interests.

They're individuals, though. Some of them like sports, of course; some enjoy cooking or baking, others podcast or make YouTube videos, some hunt and fish, some build and paint miniatures. I can't generalize. I don't think any collect stamps but a lot collect things like plushies or those awful Funko Pops. Penpals I'd say might still exist in a sense, as some of them have internet friends, which I think is the same thing but you don't have to pay for a stamp.