The Antisocial Socialist

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.

lokifan requested: "How about Grace Petrie? Fave songs, albums, etc? Have you seen her live more than once? I love her so much :D" and yhlee requested: "I would love to hear about your fave music. :)" so I'll tackle them in the same post.

Grace Petrie

Yeah I love her so much. SO MUCH you guys. I have rdi to thank for introducing me (and 2/3 of the people in Toronto who are into her) to her music a few years ago. I think everything she does is amazing and she doesn't have any songs or albums that aren't amazing. She hits the sweet spot of music that is political but not didactic and incredibly earwormy. And her love songs, mostly about unrequited love with straight girls, are gorgeous.

( specific songs )
Other Music


I never know how to characterize my musical taste. I kind of have two modes, sad and angry. If something falls into one of those two categories I'll probably like it?

( loads of videos )

 Twitter: Immolates under Elon's piss-poor management.
Twitter users: flock to Tumblr to see what's been happening there.
Tumblr: I made you a new Martin Scorsese movie, would you like to see it?
Twitter: WTAF????
Tumblr: It comes with 200 fanfics and Marxist film theory discourse.

Facebook, over in the corner: probably doing a genocide or something idk

Seriously though the Martin Scorsese movie is incredible.

After years of people telling me to do it, I deleted my LJ.

Feel sad about it, but it was a security problem (my account got hacked several times) and increasingly a pain to cross-post. There's a bare minimum of folks there who don't post here, and so I ended up just having to scroll through it every morning for the one or two entries that I might want to see. And let's be honest, even if I never go back to Eastern Europe, I just don't want Putin's goons knowing that much about my life.

It feels weird. LJ was my primary internet home for so long, and it was there I met most of the folks who would be most influential on my life and the way I think. I had a super nostalgic discussion about it on FB last night and apparently I influenced a lot of people too.



But you know. I'm still here. In case you need your Sabotabby Ranting About Politics, Etc. fix. I have many things to say about how FB and Twitter have destroyed the internet, so I'm not going to give up old school blogging any time soon.

If you needed further proof that Tumblr is a garbage hellsite, behold the notice I just received:



GREAT JORB POLICING HATE SPEECH U GUYS

Since this is likely to be my primary home for a bit, I had a gander at my profile to add "sweet sweet Soros cash" (my primary interest from now on) to find that no one else on this whole site has put "fully automated luxury communism" as an interest. I miss the days when people used interests to find friends. Anyway. I added both. My interests and icons massively need updating but I don't have time atm.

 1. Charoset that looks like vomit but tastes roughly correct:



It's a bit boozier than I remember it being. Probably because all the recipes call for Manischewitz, which has been banned in my household ever since I became a grown-up who lives on her own and drinks actual wine.

2. This logo for my new baseball league:


For those of you who aren't Canadians, it's a reference to this. I want to make baseball jerseys or hoodies or something. After I've cleaned up the design, anyway.

3. A difference in the lives of children. :)

In other news, I still have massive feels about the Black Sails finale so anyone who wants to talk about it with me, please please please. Also, I'm wondering if I should end my paid account on LJ and get a paid account on DW to get more icons.

Everyone's doing these intro posts, but I suspect things like age, relationship status, and number of pets are not particularly relevant until you get to know someone better. (But if you're curious: 37, in a poly relationship, two cats, Cocoa and Sabot.) One of the things that's always drawn me to LJ is how you get to know someone through their thoughts and opinions rather than their meatsacks.

Hence asking y'all what you wanted to know about me! Here goes.

How different would your life have been without the Internet?

Being a Woman Of a Certain Age, I can remember life before the internet was a thing. It's hard to separate what isolation was as a result of geography and age—I suspect that even now, few nerdy, ugly pre-teen girls growing up in the suburbs are particularly happy—and what because I failed to find likeminded people. i suspect my friends circle, my general knowledge, my concept of the world would be less broad but potentially more in-depth. I spent much more time working things out, socially, politically, academically, because you <I>had</I> to work on it rather than flit from one thing to another. But my life was less full. I don't know if this answers your question.


Why "a sudden absence of bees"?

It was a reference to Colony Collapse Disorder, which a few years ago we were convinced was going to end human life as we know it. The good news is that we'll probably all die from a flaming nuclear fireball now that Trump's in office.

nihilistic_kid liked the turn of phrase so much he wrote a short story about it.


What flavor of toothpaste?

Arm and Hammer Complete Care. It's kind of minty.


What you wish the last three books you read were and what were they actually?

Oh, I suffer from an incomplete literary education because they were trying to modernize the reading list when I was in high school, and I did not go to uni for anything academic. But it's a bit awkward and embarrassing to not have read Marx's Grundrisse, or Mann's The Magic Mountain, or—and this is really bad—Moby Dick. Even my knowledge of Victorian literature is shameful for someone involved in the steampunk scene.

In fact, the last three books I read were Everything Belongs to the Future by Laurie Penny, Wake of Vultures by Lila Bowen, and Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer. I'm trying my best to read new releases so that I can talk to other people about books. All excellent in different ways, incidentally.


Television commercial that makes you the angriest?

The joy of Netflix and illegal torrenting means that I no longer have to be subject to TV commercials! I don't like it when the mother is portrayed as super-competent in a condescending way—like she could have a degree in astrophysics, but she applies her superior intelligence to cleaning up stubborn stains instead, while the dad is laughably bumbling. Do they still make those? If so, who do they appeal to?


Just what is it that makes luxury space communism so different, so appealing?

There is a fantastic line in the miniseries Cambridge Spies, which you should all see if you haven't already, where privileged, white, upper class Anthony Blunt (my second favourite of the Cambridge Five, btw) is asked why he's a communist. He says that he doesn't want to tear down the structures of privilege; he wants to extend that privilege to everyone. I think this is actually something Blunt said IRL, though I wouldn't swear by it. Anyway, that's what I want—to have beautiful things and a meaningful, comfortable life, for everyone. That, IMO, should be the goal of politics.

Today, we have more than enough food to feed everyone in the world, we have technology that our ancestors would have attributed to magic, we have more knowledge at our fingertips than anyone in the history of humanity. And yet the left aestheticizes poverty and misery and a historic concept of the working class that bears no resemblance to the modern working class, and wastes time quibbling over which 19th or 20th century political theorist had the right idea about the 21st. Fuck it. A robot replacing your job should mean infinite vacation and time to create art, not desperate poverty. We should fill in coal mines and build community gardens over them.

I remember spending time with a bunch of anarcho-primitivists who criticized my bourgeois need for eyeglasses. They all came from wealthy backgrounds but had chosen a life of scavenging and poverty for ideological reasons, and considered me privileged and soft. Why? I work hard, I should have nice things—but so should everyone.

Space communism is a metaphor, particularly for those of us who love sci-fi—to be honest, I have no idea if mass physical space travel, terraforming, and colonizing other planets is ever a thing that we could do. But it's a view of progress as expansion and imagination rather than the austerity mindset that has hijacked the left as solidly as it has hijacked the right.


Tell me anything you want about hair coloring.

I do not enjoy having boring hair. Bright, unnatural colours are still unusual amongst people in my profession, so it's kind of a trademark. I've been regularly dyeing my hair since i was about 14, with increasing levels of fanciness. Currently, I have teal and violet streaks in my hair, which looks fantastic. 

Having weird hair colours makes strangers 300% more likely to approach you, for good and ill.

Green is the most practical colour to dye your hair if you are cheap, as it lasts the longest. Red and purple are the least practical, though I haven't tried pastels.

Once you bleach (which I do at an actual hairdresser, and it's costly), you can keep it fresh with Manic Panic.

Get ready to become known as the $PERSON with the $COLOUR hair.

People will develop opinions about your hair and state them rather directly and rudely. I just shrug it off, to be honest.


I think that's it! Anything else you wanna know, ask away. I'm kind of an open book about most things.

Don't bait the transphobes on Facebook
Don't bait the transphobes on Facebook
Don't bait the transphobes on Face—
—ah, fuck it.

P.S.:

I just had a bunch of surprisingly productive discussions around feminism and harassment, spurred by the stupid verdict in the case of Gregory Alan Elliott, the latest Tropes vs. Women video, and the overall imbalance in what we mean when we talk about freedom of speech.

Both of these cases have a lot to do with how the law is unwilling (I almost typed "unable," but this isn't true—they're perfectly capable of understanding Twitter threats against cops) to take into account both gender dynamics and internet culture. Elliott was acquitted (and may go on to sue his victims) because they didn't act like perfect victims. Why, one might ask—and the judge did—would they block him and continue to respond to his tweets?

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how these things work. I know, because I've had stalkers and trolls. There is no perfect way to engage with them. Your mother might have said, "ignore the bully and he'll go away," but you knew even as a child that this wasn't true.

Internet discussion is largely public. This means that if I am telling the truth and Igor the Troll is telling a lie, our discussion is witnessed by outsiders. A typical exchange might go something like this:

Igor: Obvious falsehood nevertheless believed by those who have an interest in maintaining the status quo.
Sabs: Bunch of facts in rebuttal.
Igor: Shut up you cunt bitch ill rape your eyesocket.

(If you think I'm exaggerating, you're naïve af. This is mild by comparison to some of the things I've seen.)

Now, a logical judge, not taking gender or power into account, is going to think, "well, she can block him, why doesn't she just block him?" But Igor is not going to shut up. And to an audience—because this is the internet, and there is always an audience—if I shut up, Igor looks like the winner.

This is something that just won't make sense unless you spend a lot of time around kids, which I do. If you show kids a political debate and ask them who won, the kids will not identify the person who said the most accurate facts. They will identify the person who was the loudest and who, preferably, spouted the most insults. The primary reason, I'd argue, why Trump is popular is because most Americans haven't progressed past the developmental stage that my kids are in.

So my choosing to block and ignore may be, to me (and the judge) a sensible move of self-preservation, to Igor the Troll, and everyone watching, it looks like he won. Now, I can choose to ignore this, and I probably would, but it will be galling. It will sit under my skin. Igor the Troll will not stop talking because I've stopped talking. He may go on to talk about me, to spread rumours and lies, and he's less likely to be challenged because sensible people don't bother.

I fully understand why Guthrie and Reilly wouldn't, in this circumstance, act like perfect victims and just ignore the scum harassing them. Why should they? Why does Elliott get freedom of speech and they do not? Why is it always down to the woman to run away, to withdraw, to not go out at that time of night wearing that skirt?

Anyway, one dude messaged me and said he didn't get feminists. Did we want equality or supremacy? He compared feminism to vegans, and how there are some vegans who just are, and some vegans who reminded you that they were vegan every five minutes.

I used to draw this distinction too, before I saw what was happening to a vegan friend of mine on Tumblr. She'd post a vegan recipe and immediately get anon hate. Was it any wonder that rather than be intimidated into silence, she'd get louder in response? That got me thinking to just how often omnivores remind us that they're omnivores—bacon memes, posting jokes about vegetarians murdering carrots—but this stridency is entirely invisible, because most people are omnivores. Vegans are perceived as more obnoxious about their dietary choices not because they are (I'm firmly convinced they're not) but because it's Other, and thus marked as a political statement, while eating meat is neutral and unmarked.

Dude admitted he was afraid of women, so I unpacked that. It's the old Margaret Atwood quote: "Men are afraid women will laugh at them; women are afraid men will kill them." We went back and forth for about 45 minutes, at the end of which I think he got it a bit more.

I had a similar conversation with another young man who'd posted a "political correctness has gone too far; you can't say anything without being called a racist or a sexist, FREEZED PEACH"-type rant. Now, it's probably not a secret that I don't believe in freedom of speech—as in I don't believe that it exists, period, or can exist—but I questioned him on his consistency. Did he believe, for example, that ISIS sympathizers on Twitter should have free speech? Was he vigorously defending their rights to say what they liked? Of course, he wasn't, so I walked him through his own flawed assumptions about what was violent and what was peaceful. I don't think he agreed with me by the end—I wouldn't expect him to, as he's not the sharpest chisel in the toolbox—but he remained remarkably civil throughout and thanked me.

I don't always have the time or patience to educate people about power dynamics or feminism or anti-racism, and I tend towards the hairtrigger emotional at the best of times, but I'm kinda pleased with how these various discussions went. I mean, it stresses me out that we still gotta fight these stupid battles, but what else can you do?