GMG is the clearest successor to Gawker, which for some reason was being underwritten by Univision for a while but no longer. As private equity realizes they’re past the buildout and onto the shakeout phase of digital media, the millennial media types who are into unionizing and being oh-so-woke are obstacles, and the money will exploit their audience-mismatch vulnerability of the latter to try and break them on the former.

The same forces of mindless capital that built woke media up are preparing to discipline it

“11 days after I have to save myself from choking to death, the Facebook advertising algorithm somehow realizes and starts pitching me gadgets to do it again” is some powerful 2019 energy

kontextmaschine:

I’m sorry, I just see so much stuff that’s just so 2019 and I think this might have been the one that broke me, I’ve been giggling about this for 5 minutes now

anosognosic:

Triggering successfully resignified as universal object of scorn, good work everybody

A big part of the generation change coming up is like

The bourgeois respectability bubble that had been reinflating since the 80s popped

kontextmaschine:

hm

@megapope said: what in the hell

@cyprinodont said: Men are not real

Like, when I told you that if you keep your eyes on the right part of the horizon you can see post-consent culture working itself into being… Like, if you haven’t been following the Fsub sexual media stuff, have you at least noticed stupidpol?

And boy, wait until you hear about the infohazard.

argumate:

but yeah “Europeans lived peacefully in small communities following their traditional religion until their way of life was disrupted by brutish migrants who brought disease and strife and ultimately replaced them entirely and those migrants were YOU” isn’t the slam dunk gotcha to right-wing populism that some people seem to think it is.

Yeah it’s weird what a transparent displacement of “mass resistance against the government” into meme space the Area 51 thing is, but that’s how cooption works in reactionary periods, Rambo started off as a PTSD longhair killing cops

So in talking about the distinctive porn- and social media-mediated post-millennial sexual culture…

“sexual media”. okay I’m gonna use that

So in talking about the distinctive post-millennial sexual media culture, I’ve been talking about how it “reenchants heterosexuality with power gradients” and it’s heavily Fsub, but there’s an exception that on thinking about it really just proves the rule

And it’s the borrowed-from-hentai concept of the “Yandere”, the “crazy eyes”, obsessive, Cluster B, baby-trapping stalker, or knifeplay rapist psycho

And it’s not exactly like that’s a new idea in American culture, Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction basically limned the type 30 years ago. The conceit of Gone Girl, signal text of our current sociosexual moment, was that Amy Dunne was a yandere the whole time underneath the “Cool Girl” persona she was performing, a lot of noir “femme fatales” were, effectively, yanderes

But in a moment full of all sorts of fetishized Fsub idioms – ageplay and impreg-as-conquest tropes are basically everywhere – it’s like the only* Fdom idiom gaining traction, and that’s striking. Not practice, maybe, a lot of streamer culture is basically mainstream findommeing, but it just shows how much of the sexual consciousness is in a “Make Heterosexuality Predatory Again” space when imagining a woman taking the sexual lead means imagining a woman as a predatory threat.

*okay not really, there’s a much smaller rise in a “tomboy” idiom for assertively but consensually taking a sexual lead. I guess that makes sense, they don’t all grow up to yell discourse in the #butch and #FtM tags, some of them become those Tinder girls with pictures of their CrossFit abs. Still, “the idiom for non-predatory sexual assertion is ‘not really being a girl’‘ is pretty striking in its own right.

Like, you all realize that consent culture already peaked, and the next thing coming, already starting to show up, is “re-enchant heterosexuality with power gradients”

In a bar where someone’s introducing the concept of Chick Tracts (“no, T-R-A-C-T-S”) to illustrate what a backwards world they came from

quoms:

Amazon Ring Will Survive the Anti-surveillance Backlash

In most cases, when police want to search your neighborhood, they need a warrant and a reason to believe something’s amiss. Now “reasonable suspicion” is going the way of dial-up. Fifty police departments across the United States are partnering with Amazon to collect footage from people who use Ring, the company’s internet-connected doorbell. Some are offering discounted or free Ring doorbells in exchange for a pledge to register the devices with law enforcement and submit all requested footage. Amazon has also filed patents to expand its Ring line beyond doorbells and into cameras mounted on motor vehicles, inside wearable “smart glasses,” even atop security drones that circle your home and call the police if they detect a disturbance.

Other notes from LA Tinder: the trans girls are extremely passing (and honestly, so are the cis girls) and say, in the first two lines of the profile that gets displayed over the first picture, that they are trans girls, because they have clearly been burned by guys who didn’t click through to read

This contrasts with Portland, where so much of the time you certainly don’t need to read the text to clue in, tending to a let’s be charitable and say nonbinary genderfluid vibe, where you get the sense they just rolled out of bed, put on lipstick, and flipped the switch to “F”

quoms:

US government blocks League of Legends in Syria and Iran amid escalating tensions | Dot Esports

As tensions between the U.S. and Iran begin to boil over, the conflict has had an unexpected side effect. League of Legends, one of the most played video games of all time, has been blocked in Iran and Syria by the U.S. government. […]

This is an extraordinary occurrence that hasn’t been seen in the esports sphere before. Tariffs, trade sanctions, and threats of military conflict are frequent sights when countries are in active dispute, but the step of blocking civilians’ access to video games is a novel course of action. It’s quite a change from politicians regularly debating the dangers of loot boxes and microtransactions. This can easily set a precedent of conflicting countries disabling access to games as part of ongoing tensions.

The ban hasn’t stopped some ingenious players from cheating the system, though, and using VPNs to get around the authentication process upon log-in (the part where the client flares up a message that says “Due to U.S. laws and regulations, players in your country cannot access League of Legends at this time”). But this still makes it quite difficult for League players in these affected countries to play anyway since VPNs can be quite expensive in these areas.

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I fucking hate 2019 dude