I unironically appreciate how Facebook these days can tell you’re investing attention at bullshit ads or videos and you don’t realize until you’re like “oh huh, why have they been showing me purely this bullshit for 2 minutes now?”
Also, (also unironically) this is what you were asking for when you wished Facebook wouldn’t rely on stickiness through encouraging oppositional engagement
I unironically appreciate how Facebook these days can tell you’re investing attention at bullshit ads or videos and you don’t realize until you’re like “oh huh, why have they been showing me purely this bullshit for 2 minutes now?”
It is mildly amusing how I’ve opened a Twitter embassy in the last few months and the algorithm smoothly and gradually assimilated me to #tpot, which is basically the rat-adj part of Twitter
Also like I thought all the stuff about sliding into DMs and fefos was kinda off, [tumblr] was the one that was really a dating site right, but that was before I started using the timeline, which just feeds me a regular supply of novel women saying something clever about a topic that interests me, attached to a chance to impress or intrigue them myself which they have the option to show favor to or even draw me into their circle in response…
It is mildly amusing how I’ve opened a Twitter embassy in the last few months and the algorithm smoothly and gradually assimilated me to #tpot, which is basically the rat-adj part of Twitter
God, musta clicked something cause suddenly all my Twitter For You is all people sharing their commune dreams
I actually learned in college about American commune moments of the Second, Third, and Fourth (the hippie Age of Aquarius) Great Awakenings, they’re remarkably similar
“What if there was a place where all you and your weirdo friends could live apart from the rest of the world in a way that supported you through common enterprise” is exactly what my small town boarding school fantasy is about and it is not conceived as a commune for good reason
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
Matt Yglesias’ in his substack just repeatedly giving sympathetic, even defensive analyses of what he sees as errors in media-political positioning and consistently illustrating them in unmentioned passing with David Roberts tweets is my favorite troll going
Zoomers all “oh, banning TikTok would be a blow against us” just now realizing what an unpaid sociopolitical debt they’ve run up with everyone else in America
So, a thing about Instagram is that it is, in fact, the official networking app of yuppie creatives. Go to a gallery opening and no one is asking you for your phone number or, heaven forbid, for your Facebook profile in order to get in touch with you. The messaging side of it does get used.
But that possibly useful contact you met at the gallery opening isn’t going to DM you if they never think about you, right? (You’re not actually “friends” after that guarded, surface-level three-minute conversation, just pretending to be by mutual agreement.) Which I assume is the logic behind why every single real-person Instagram post I see seems calibrated to achieve one specific effect: to remind you that the poster exists.
And this is what I mean by people acting like Brands, because this is the very essence of what Brands do. It’s the entire purpose of advertising. It’s the colonisation of mental real estate as, like, an end in itself. Just get people to think about you and maybe associate you with a few key positive adjectives and it’ll pay off later.
That’s what makes Instagram so distinct and horrible to me. People post on Tumblr for unrestrained fun and for the love of the Discourse; on Facebook to scream their incommunicable pain and terror out to an uncaring universe; on Twitter to engage in pulse-pounding gladiatorial combat… and on Instagram to advertise. That last one isn’t something people should be doing in their general capacity as human beings. I don’t like looking at it.
if 9/11 happened today someone would post “my plane just got hijacked lol” and it would be doing numbers on tiktok before the first plane even hit the tower
I think the internet is connecting us in ways we’re not ready for because the other night a guy I went to school with who I haven’t seen on facebook in about a year made a status at 2am that just said “sick of these nightmares…”. Who could have predicted this is where technology would lead us in 2016. Live reports on the anguish of people on the absolute periphery of our lives. Nobody saw this coming. There’s no Jetsons episode where George gets a holo-call from a guy he hasn’t even thought about in three years saying “hey, I had the dream about the blood again…” and George says “hmm” and hangs up.
Also if you hadn’t heard, TikTok has discovered a way to hotwire any Kia or Hyundai with just a screwdriver and a USB cord, so that’s going about how you’d expect
You can always tell when misinformation is from TikTok. It’s genetically distinct from other internet misinformation. It always has the vibe of “some very online people having an argument where they had to take a real source and stretch their interpretations like two dogs fighting over a side of pulled pork”
Tumblr misinformation is just “OP literally made up an entire 13th century papal state that doesn’t exist”
Twitter misinformation is “simple but deeply revealing misconception of reality stated with the confidence of 10,000 suns.” A la “women are inherently bourgeois”
Facebook misinfo is your good old fashioned salt of the earth working class “your grandma repeating shit she heard on Fox news”
