Basically my take on worries about shifting/“collapse” of the American democratic order…

Like, some powers and responsibilities are being evacuated from some elements and agents of the government and broader social structure to others; this is a normal and expected progression in any institutional system. This will leave dynamics of power and government that are different than those I have grown accustomed to or been chatechized in.

But the very irregularity between and within those two categories, mixing quite distinct threads from the founding, Reconstruction, (sotto voce, the WWI war state and 1920s reactionary reconsolidation), New Deal and WWII, Cold War and Civil Rights Era, and post-USSR neoliberalism is testament to the fact this is a recurring process that need not be taken as a rupture of government or social continuity

killtheteendream:

Bring back child labor. Put kids back in textile factories 

3D printed recoilless rifle

Ukraine and the American culture war as lessons on the potential of winning victories on the defensive

The Vibe Is Shifting. Will the Media Follow?

Of course, there was that recent employee groundswell at Disney that led to the company wading into a prominent social issue dispute in Florida — and look what happened there, a result that gives Bob Chapek and every other major company CEO something to point to when they explain why they’re staying out of the next thing.

Oh shit, My Chemical Romance releasing new music definitely fits under the “scrap the ‘10s and pick up where we left off” cultural rubric, doesn’t it?

Wait, about TikTok and the Depp trial, I just realized…

The Zoomers were in school in the ‘10s. Grew up under “cancel culture”. A girl who manipulates systems of “justice” and “accountability” to get her way is their stock image of a villain.

And with POTC Depp was an icon of childhood memories from the Before Time. Even pretty feminist under the old dispensation, “girls can be swashbuckling heroes too”

And but for as long as they’ve known they know the crybullies are evil, but the Adult World props up their schemes. But TikTok is a Zoomer preserve, they can speak their truth there and it’s accepted, even hegemonic. What a thrill!

The Zoomers have joined the culture war as playable characters and their first move is to drive a stake through the '10s

I KNEW we just had to hold in there

I KNEW it

Please Respect Mia Khalifa’s Rebrand

Hit or miss, I guess you never miss, huh?

iteratedextras:

Right-Wing: “So, you’re going to stop taking sides against us.  If you can’t side with us, you’re just going to shut up.”

Corporate HR: “Excuse me, but haven’t you lost the culture war like every time?  We’re not going to obey someone who’s clearly on the Wrong Side of History™.  What are you going to do, boycott us?  Don’t make me laugh.”

Left-Wing: “Wait did she just put a trademark symbol on ‘History’?  I thought we were the ones in charge of determining the meaning of histor-”

Right-Wing: “Boycott?  I don’t think you understand.  The situation has changed.”

Right-Wing * points a gun at Mickey Mouse. *

Right-Wing: “In sport-fighting, your goal is merely to win the round.  Once the round is over, you no longer fight.  Gay marriage, abortion… we attacked these things with laws, then shook hands and grumbled after we lost the match.”

Left-Wing: “Now hold on a minute-”

Right-Wing: “But that’s not war.”

Right-Wing: “In war, your goal is to break the enemy’s will or ability to fight.  In war, you bomb the enemy’s factories, warehouses, railroad bridges and safehouses.  You capture depots and take over mines to deny the enemy resources.”

Right-Wing: “You, as corporate HR, parrot Mr. Left-Wing’s point of view, because Mr. Left-Wing thinks he has been fighting a culture war.  He leisurely creates institutional positions to reward to his own men.”

Left-Wing: “That’s not fair!  Corporations don’t pay the wages we demand! Cops still beat up our guys!  This is a struggle for our right to exist!”

Right-Wing: “Yes, we are struggling against you for our right to exist.  You made that rather clear, didn’t you?  A ‘nazi’ is someone with whom compromise is impossible.  You claimed our very existence - without even action - was ‘oppressive.’  This is a culture war, now.”

Right-Wing: “Corporate, are you a neutral producer of industrial goods and services, or are you a piece of enemy infrastructure?”

Corporate: “Uh…”

eightyonekilograms:

tarhalindur:

official-kircheis:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/04/08/algospeak-tiktok-le-dollar-bean/

“Algospeak” is becoming increasingly common across the Internet as people seek to bypass content moderation filters on social media platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Twitch.

Algospeak refers to code words or turns of phrase users have adopted in an effort to create a brand-safe lexicon that will avoid getting their posts removed or down-ranked by content moderation systems. For instance, in many online videos, it’s common to say “unalive” rather than “dead,” “SA” instead of “sexual assault,” or “spicy eggplant” instead of “vibrator.”

[…]

During YouTube’s “adpocalypse” in 2017, when advertisers pulled their dollars from the platform over fears of unsafe content, LGBTQ creators spoke about having videos demonetized for saying the word “gay.” Some began using the word less or substituting others to keep their content monetized. More recently, users on TikTok have started to say “cornucopia” rather than “homophobia,” or say they’re members of the “leg booty” community to signify that they’re LGBTQ.

[…]

TikTok users now use the phrase “le dollar bean” instead of “lesbian” because it’s the way TikTok’s text-to-speech feature pronounces “Le$bian,” a censored way of writing “lesbian” that users believe will evade content moderation.

The Internet is for pr0n, after all.

I loathe TikTok but admit it does warm my heart to see that TikTokers have literally rediscovered l33t5p34k. Maybe the kids will be alright.

3000s:

3000s:

some furry porn twitter user saying the depp trial made them feel “empowered” to post that they dont want anyone with borderline following them, this place is insane

this is kind of whimsical and magical to me

centrally-unplanned:

the-grey-tribe:

loki-zen:

loki-zen:

flakmaniak:

loki-zen:

dagny-hashtaggart:

kontextmaschine:

prostatenotpro-state:

prostatenotpro-state:

Can someone explain to me how we got to gamer being a sexual archetype of male golden-hearted innocence , ala “golden retriever gamer boy”( the new stereotypical man for a bi woman to date according to tik-tok) , like we went from gamers being childish in a violent mean spirited way to being synonymous with misogynistic nerds to this? How do streamers factor in? Are video games such a ubiquitous hobby now that all it signals is “ introverted and sorta masc?“ as oppose to sporty and extroverted?, is then an indirect autistic fetishization thing? Like manic pixie dream girl? I feel like I’m out of the loop , I feel like I missed a couple steps.

@kontextmaschine this seems like a you thing,

Thru some combination of just getting old and not making the jump to the post-text internet I’m not in touch with the youth anymore enough to be picking up on this

I’m also not really in touch with tiktok trends, but it does seem like “sweet boy next door nerd-adjacent who won’t cheat on you like the popular guys” is basically “incel” with the sign flipped

you’re right but it’s also ‘sexually unadventurous/inexperienced shy girl next door’ gender flipped and like

that is sorta new! it’s intriguing

It is an intriguing reversal! How in-demand is that? Well, I haven’t seen it in the wild, but I’m not on TikTok; I’m an out-of-touch old person for this purpose.

Yeah I’m not sure (both on the question of how in-demand and how new the concept is).

It came up in conversation with @dagny-hashtaggart yesterday that girlfan favourite Alistair from the Dragon Age games is this trope, for instance. (Okay, he’s a version of this trope that can fight, but that’s pretty required of a party member, the most salient facts about him for my purposes here are that he’s dorky, kind and iirc-explicitly sexually inexperienced.)

I mean I should point out that when I was actually a teenager it was sort of Understood that sexually experienced guys might be hot in theory, but in real life you wanted to date someone whose level of experience was not too far from your own. The sexually unthreatening boyband member is a well-established trope dating back before Paul McCartney. And Tik Tok is full of actual teenagers. So.

Hypothesis that this is less a change in what girls actually want, and more a change in the extent to which girls produce content about the attainable realistic hottie of their dreams, a once mostly-male practice (wrt stuff that got exposure)

I don’t think there is anything to explain until you show me evidence that this is a thing, and at the same time, as soon there is evidence that this is a thing, it crosses into the mainstream and will cause lasting discourse.

Its absolutely a thing; The #gamerboy tag on Tiktok has 3.4 billion net views, and gets you things like Advanced Cuddling Positions w/ Your Gamer BF and transfem gamerboy hotness clips. You can explore the tag but very apparent to see its place in the #vibe space.

As for why, well I think its two fold. One, teens have way less cultural memory, so you want to look for “breaks” in internet communities. Like Reddit wasn’t a break from its predecessors; as a venue reddit copied memes & posts from other websites and discussed them, therefore inheriting the baggage of the old internet as it evolved it. Youtube however did that much less as it grew in popularity, and Tiktok does it not at all; content on Tiktok, due to being short video ai-voiceover/text overlay content, is pretty much all unique to the platform. As such 2005 gamer stereotypes simply don’t carry over very much. 

That leads to why the new stereotypes are far more positive and weren’t just re-invented like for some other groups. I would generally pin that down to the rise of streaming and e-celebrities that became everyone’s first-brush exposure to a ‘gamer’ identity, and streamer celebs are charismatic, funny, and engaging by definition. Even though the audience for streaming is majority male its still way more approachable, its 35%+ female and reaches way more people than actually playing a game ever could. E-girl rose from twitch & youtube, gamerboy is the genderswapped version, its required.

Additionally I think avenues for teen hate are way more political these days; hating nerds is cringe, hating misogynists is vogue, but I lack confidence on that last one.

afloweroutofstone:

I’m pretty sure Jack is doing this half-seriously, but nostalgia for 20-year-old corporate marketing is one of the most succinct descriptions of US conservatism I can think of. This really is the whole ideology right here

kontextmaschine:

Was friends with a girl on Facebook and vaguely surprised she was that normie given who she was in college, she just announced she’s moving cause her boyfriend got a faculty position… with their other girlfriend, so fair

@soulvomit said: to be fair, that’s normie now

Yeah it’s weird that simultaneously with people being “O! Woe! A wave of reactionary social repression!” we’re just quietly normalizing polygamy. Like, we chased the Mormons into the desert with an army over this once! Now it’s not even getting the attention “open marriage” did in the 70s.

prole-log:

absolute-immunities:

I guess no one cares enough about abortion to discourse about it

I’m just taking the opportunity to check the feeds of every feminist I’ve ever found irritating on Twitter

On the one hand, all the overeducated twits demanding their student loans be forgiven and linking their bottom line being greatly improved by government action to some sort of last-ditch defense of the Republic are just more overblown noise from a hysterical sector that has really run their political account deep into the red with this shit already in the last decade, not to mention a petulant display of glaring lack of the loyalty that makes clientelism work.

On the other hand, as someone who constructs his life with some eye on a possible gentry->nobility dynastic ascent, including assembling a retinue, the fact that all trained characters of <gentry background now come with five- or six-figure price tags you can acquire a claim on them for has not escaped my notice.

association-of-freed-people:

This is the most perfect thing the internet has ever produced.

collapsedsquid:

Over the past decade and a half, many young, college-educated workers have faced a disturbing reality: that it was harder for them to reach the middle class than for previous generations. The change has had profound effects — driving shifts in the country’s politics and mobilizing employees to demand fairer treatment at work. It may also be giving the labor movement its biggest lift in decades.

Members of this college-educated working class typically earn less money than they envisioned when they went off to school. “It’s not like anyone is expecting to make six figures,” said Tyler Mulholland, who earns about $23 an hour as a sales lead at REI, the outdoor equipment retailer, and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education. “But when it’s snow storming at 11:30 at night, I don’t want to have to think, ‘Is the Uber home going to make a difference in my weekly budget?’”

[…]

These experiences, which economic research shows became more common after the Great Recession, appear to have united many young college-educated workers around two core beliefs: They have a sense that the economic grand bargain available to their parents — go to college, work hard, enjoy a comfortable lifestyle — has broken down. And they see unionizing as a way to resurrect it.

Sure the communists have tried sending sending the educated youths down to the countryside or to the factories in increase consciousness, but only the capitalists have innovated enough to send them to retail.

Like, I guess this is one of the hobbyhorses I’m riding now, but we are really getting rewarded so hard for gutting out the ‘10s rn it’s absurd. Like, “Elon Musk buys Twitter and the users who left Tumblr chasing clout come crawling back while the remaining userbase bonds over plans to haze them.” That’s comical. That really happened.