apricops:

“gen z is so loud and rude and disrespectful!” good. they might actually accomplish something.

– Gen Z

Seriously, from over-drawing lessons from the 60s – and specifically, the 90s’ reinterpretation of the 60s to flatter and intellectualize the Boomers fully coming into their own as heirs to the country, and the lessons learned under later periods built on that 90s understanding – there’s this widespread youth sense that “if I’m not getting my way, it’s because I haven’t been enough of a brat about it!”

But that understanding could only bear so much weight, the 2010s was a festival of putting too much on it, and now it’s fallen through. And the rest of society has realized it doesn’t need to placate those brats, or win an argument against them, just stop taking them seriously and let it wither on the vine. You already saw it with “defund the police”!

And reimplement the pre-60s – pre-90s, really – understanding of things, which is, “you act in a way acceptable to the rest of society, and in particular your seniors running the established order, or the hammer comes down”

When I was taking Blue Bitch up from LA that one time I passed through Ukiah where they were having some sort of harvest festival, I guess on the pretense that anyone grew wholesome legal crops around there, and one of the booths was Wal-Mart, where they were just giving away vendor-level food and bags of candy, I also took a card that referenced their hopes to build a store on the edge of town. So they were cultivating goodwill, for political purposes.

That’s why ‘90s Wal-Mart was all about not selling pornography, and music only with Bowdlerized lyrics – so as to appear congruent with rural culture (that over the '80s had been significantly redefined in religious-moral terms) for political purposes, to lubricate local government approval processes their business depended on.

So if you’re trying to influence major retailers re: queer stuff in culture that’s one angle. A significant difference though is that Wal-Mart already largely built out through rural America in the early-mid 90s (and Target in inner suburbs and exurbs in the late 90s-early 2000s). And of course the big box model entirely faces challenge from online retail now, so all the pieces are going to be in slightly different places with different angles between them.

theresponseblog:

I recall @kontextmaschine getting into it a while back with Anon over “you keep saying that Woke is gonna roll back but you don’t give examples”, and it occurs to me that the recent Target Pride thing is exactly an example of how it’s gonna go. Company brings out a Liggibettequeue-theme thing, Yay We Love Queers, and then Oh No There’s Complaints And Protests (which there’s precious little public evidence of, but, y'know, protests) and where in previous times the company would’ve kept going now they have Safety Concerns and the whole thing gets shoved to the back of the store and deleted from the website and never spoken of again.

And I just read a story about some kids putting on a play where Robin Hood is actually Maid Marian, and they had to do it in a garage because the school nixed the idea, and the interesting thing to me was that the school shut it down not after lengthy and vitriolic demonstration from angry adults threatening violence but after a couple parents phoned the school and complained. And sure, you can interpret that as “oh, the Right Wing is Ascendant and people don’t want to buck them”, but as late as 2020 I would have expected at least a little pushback from the school authorities, and from the language in the story it was less “someone has made credible threats” and more “we don’t want a bunch of people showing up and making a scene because we consider avoiding scenes more important than supporting queer stuff.”

“Somehow rebounding into a cockeyed reaffirmation of gender roles via rejecting 90s Strong Female Characters” is the kinda bullshit way these things do tend to resolve.

Kind of funny how blog feminism dropped the 90s “funfeminism” thing and got like 6 years before running straight into the “fine then, we’ll be women better ourselves” thing the Second Wave warned about (complete with a side of the same “Hey, I’m a [SFF fandom] woman, and I like transgression and sexual violation in my fiction” stuff, too!)

I feel so exceptionally and specifically blessed by the universe these days I have to make a point to recall the 2010s and how grim everything looked. “This too shall pass” and all.

(“Everyone you hate has teamed up to push a meshed combo” had not yet progressed to “everyone you hate has teamed up to drop masks and bite off more than they can chew”)

devilspanties:

I mean yes, in consequence of overzealous 2010s cultural leftism, previously subdued cultural rightism has flared back up in the 2020s and is riding the backlash to contest terrain where liberalism was formerly hegemonic.

A Good Cartoon.

gallifreyriver:

Reminder that Zuckerberg actively lobbied with Republican PR firms to make TikTok illegal because he couldn’t compete with it.

Reminder that for all it’s faults TikTok has brought tons of awareness to important issues that barely got any coverage until they blew up on TikTok, and more that still barely got any mainstream coverage even after they did.

Reminder that TikTok has become the largest and easiest place for people to come together and organize, and has 150 million active users in the US.

Reminder that congress, especially conservatives, stand to gain a lot by banning it, because it means less people will hear about all the problematic (fascist) shit they’re trying to pass, such as the 300+ anti-trans bills, the bills seeking to make abortion a felony punishable by death, or how they’re trying to remove the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). They also get to ‘look tough’ against China.

Reminder that claims of concerns over data privacy are bullshit, because China could literally just buy our data if they wanted it. Tech companies just like and including Facebook collect and sell our data all the time. China wouldn’t need to build an app to get it.

Reminder that banning TikTok sets a precedent that Congress could come for literally any other social media they deem 'a threat’ and ban that too. Yes, even your personal favorite one.

Reminder that we should care about this and instead of saying “Good Riddance TikTok!” we should be actively trying to stop this violation of free speech and stop handing more power to fascists just because we personally don’t like a thing or think it’s cringe. This is bigger than your personal tastes.

Please sign this letter from the ACLU to your members of Congress and urge them to listen.
There’s also a hearing this Thursday on March 23rd at 10am EST in DC where the TikTok CEO will be testifying before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The hearing will be open to the public and will also be live streamed online.

I don’t care if you hate TikTok or think it’s “cringe.” If you all actually hate Facebook and fascists as much as you say you do, then you won’t stand for letting them win this fight to ban it.

See this is what I was talking about re: Zoomers whining not to ban TikTok completely misreading how deep in a hole they are with everyone else.

“Fooey to your geopolitical concerns, what’s important is that the kinda snot-nosed kids who go off about 'fascism’ can use social media to bend the discourse around whatever they’re on about!”

NONE OF THE GROWN-UPS IN CHARGE OF POLITICS AND GOVERNANCE AND THE DIRECTION OF THE CULTURE UNDERSTAND THAT AS A GOOD THING

If you are the type who goes for that there is a bipartisan desire for you to go away, “this measure will also limit our ability to inject social mediated youth radicalism into the culture” is understood as a BENEFIT

One way to look at it, if all the ‘10s excess ultimately just leads Gen X’s later-life conservative turn to take the idiom of “nah, let’s don’t do the 70s again” instead of buckwild Reagan or Dubya-ass stuff, it’ll more or less shake out fair

kontextmaschine:

I still remember Gamergate as when online media first started wandering away from serving its audience to indulging its sense of snobby, moralized superiority and when called on it tried to rally everyone against the audience

Consider that your (and others who came of age in this last cultural phase) sense of “reactionary” might be keying off any resistance to a marked leftward lurch in culture

kontextmaschine:

I think it would have to do with how much of the ‘90s culture was telling women they’d made it, and how much of that was really gay men holding themselves up as models for straight women to follow in order to do it right.

Like, the Sex and the City writing staff was largely gay men (cis, natch), and when you look back at it you realize how much the girlfriends were really being plotted and written as gay men about women’s topics – or not even that, about relationships with men

The foundations were laid, they’ve ever only been marching into a dead end

birlinterrupted:

this is the same thing as that one ‘satanic’ concert that they were all freaking out abt or shit like wayfairgate. not much to do other than to mock them, and i’m not sure there’s really anything an individual can do in their day to day life that is going to make a difference w this sort of moral panic

Yeah, you just mock them to lower their status and to signal to other not-them that there’s a robust enough consensus against them to continue on without trying to accommodate them and instead durably constituting them as an out-group to be coordinated against or at least without reference to

kontextmaschine:

Bunch of Twitter users in different areas of focus who spent the last decade furious that things were going their way but not as far or as fast as they wanted and performed that fury as a way to whip things on harder dealing with the new situation that things are going to be going against them for the next 15 years at least and they no longer have any traction on the situation about as well as you’d expect

So yeah, that phase is over, we’ve cleared Charybdis, now we gotta try and slingshot off past Scylla, shift our stance to defend rightward. I mean, my circle on here is disproportionately trans Jews.

Bunch of Twitter users in different areas of focus who spent the last decade furious that things were going their way but not as far or as fast as they wanted and performed that fury as a way to whip things on harder dealing with the new situation that things are going to be going against them for the next 15 years at least and they no longer have any traction on the situation about as well as you’d expect

kontextmaschine:

Oh something I’m saying when I say it’s feeling pretty ‘80s, that’s a reactionary period. We’ve had 3 major ones in the 20th century – the Reagan '80s, the 50s, and the post-WWI “return to normalcy”, and they were all marked by processes that wrecked the things that came out of progressive tendencies since the last one, wiped the board, and reset the clock. So maybe take brace position for that.

1980s: Blacks and cities get chewed up by crime, drugs, and general “urban decay”, gays have AIDS to deal with. The “Farm Crisis” also pretty much ends America’s vs long and historically quite central tradition of family farming. A rising Christian conservatism lays claims on the culture

1950s: the Second Red Scare digs out leftism which had established itself throughout national institutions through the Depression and Popular Front '40s. The Third KKK; attempts to suppress Black agitation fail largely for lack of cross-sectional unity, however, and the Civil Rights Era kicks off. Significant cultural backlash: the stifling conformity dramatized in say Pleasantville (1998) was only The Way Things Had Always Been to Boomers going through childhood; adults who had been paying attention lamented its sexual, intellectual, and cultural impoverishment compared to what came before

(1919-early) 1920s: the post-WWI Return to Normalcy. Major themes of semireligious utopianism and pacifism that had been common and somewhat challenging to wartime stance faded. The First Red Scare. The Palmer Raids rounding up leftists and deporting them to the new Soviet Union. The second KKK, Red Summer, and 2 years later the Tulsa Race Riot that Watchmen depicted, postwar Black ambition checked.

Now: well, Musk taking Twitter and deleftizing it definitely counts. Ellsworth Toohey, from Ayn Rand’s 1943 The Fountainhead was a maybe overdone portrait of a real tendency seen in period journalism of dismissively, sentimentally moralized leftism, that was part of what the '50s wiped away. The Asian split to the right in California, other minorities in general, whatever Black/Jewish shit is going on.

Some rightists think that pressing on queer stuff will work, I personally think that’s mistimed and they’ll lose that one like race in the 50s, in the process stigmatizing complaints about “pedophilia”. Covid and the fact that there’ll be appeals on behalf of the lonely and vulnerable to spend resources and control on protecting them that no government will be able to survive indulging and so will have to culturally pivot to normalize ignoring, ending the era since Clinton’s “feel your pain”.

Oh [tumblr], which used to be “the trigger warning social media site”, going all-Goncharov-all-the-time on main like half a year after I first started to see #unreality cw tags kinda counts too

(“The trigger warning social media” now is Mastodon, which mainstream media restorationists have been branding as “for hall monitors” so no one has to care about them)

So looking at Twitter and active fronts of combat now include Covid-worriers vs. normie libs and… young unionization fans? While Mastodon is apparently schisming – and given its federated architecture that’s not hyperbole –between bluecheck journalists and… trans activists?

Like, I know I had predicted this year would see the online left start to fracture solidarity and fall into infighting, but that’s some Mad Libs shit right there

So Twitter rebalancing for PvP and reinstating Trump and that Kara Swisher thread like… it’s Elon’s Carnegie library system, huh? Not run for revenue maximization but for charitable purpose of… preserving the old Internet Culture.

That's… fucking amazing. And I guess he’s the only person in the place such that he could do that. Like, going to Mars feh, even at max speed that’ll never matter in my lifetime but like, my god. That’s absolutely worth working yourself to death for.

Like, last decade when I was like “just stick in there, this wave’ll roll back” yeah, I derived that lesson from history, but let me assure you it doesn’t go this cleanly. Like, not even in half-mythical ancient history, maybe in legends.

Taking like everything since let’s say 2014, that was like a Super SSS EX++ stage clear. Oh, and plus for me at least, after confronting the fact that I am in fact attuned to the zeitgeist, and then the heimlich thing where I look death in the face and say “not today” using the exact skill set I had made a load-bearing part of my self-conception, I fell into a mystical slumber and awoke in every way perfected.

And all of this relies on things lining up so perfectly. Like, you needed the like, Incarnated Spirit of the 80s with the exact particular psychological issues to line up with the political system in the exact right way, and you needed the richest man in the world to have the exact-right Western-adjacent background and the exact right memefuck sensibility and the deal to line up the exact right way…

And meanwhile you needed a 100-year plague to show up at the exact right time, and for me with the exact right characteristics, and then I had to roll a crit on like, a d100000.

What?

Like I’ve mentioned precedents, the ‘68 NYC teacher’s strike and ethnic succession in the outer boroughs, but at least that had imaginable stakes, I’m not really clear why a Black/Jewish front of the culture war is opening up right now

Seeing dumb stuff going by and honestly it’s very easy to let it go by since the personality change, “someone is wrong on the internet” is apparently another one of those things mediated by anxiety.

But even beyond, reminding myself that spending my time analyzing it won’t convince them to do better, the bold stridence of their assertion of yesterday’s new hegemony combined with the way they don’t even notice how the ground’s shifted under their feet means they’re going to fall on their ass on their own before they have a chance to fuck anything further up for me if I keep my distance, it might be useful in “lessons learned” debriefing time in 6-10 years but it’ll be more impactful the better position I can deliver it from, and it honestly doesn’t have much anything to do with the positioning steps in the interim.

So anarkiddies on Twitter are deciding that with the anti-trans right going in on “rapists”, “groomers”, etc. that the riot grrl-90s elder types throwing around “kill your local rapist” slogans are enemies, or at least unsafe, and so as these things go to be mass-harassed and purged.

I didn’t see that one coming!