Oh look another ramble, and I will spend the section of text that people get to see as they scroll down going ‘oh god what is she on about now?’ limbering up my writing parts, rather than getting to the point.
Some data points:
It is becoming a tediously regular happenstance for one or other of my friends to be temporarily booted off the FB for unspecified behaviour that allegedly outrages their ‘community standards’. In my head, that phrase is spoken by someone with their glasses on chain and their mouth like a cat’s bum.
I got a ‘warning’ which is now on my ‘permanent record’ (I have no fucking idea what one of those is because I am old and English, and no that is not an opportunity to explain it - I can grok from context, TVM) for … transphobia. Because the earnest and American PHP cannot understand sarcasm.
If you’re sitting there and wondering why you’ve never had yr FB collar felt, then just maybe you’re a nice white cishet person. The people being given the full Josef K by the FB morality police are … not you.
(And the notion that I am a marginalised person disproportionally affected by this, is very very weird. Also I wrote that as ‘cisproportionally’ and thanks brain. Clever wording. Cheers.)
Meanwhile, a couple of days ago, someone else pointed me at some woman on tiktok apparently making a climbing harness out of webbing straps. I mean, probably. It could have been something rude or cosplay or meme-appropriate. I have no idea. I poked around a bit to see if her other tikstok could provide context, but instead I found something cut together of her venting in her car about having lost faith that the ‘network’ would ‘have her back’ and that she was to be mostly found on Insta now.
Which, look. The nasty old unix admin attitude would have been to write some cynical malarkey about bloody young people and ‘Don’t place faith in human beings/human beings are unreliable things’, but y’know Twitter is 30% people being cynical and victim-blaming and it is Real Fucking Old.
However, here are The Kids who live on The Socials, who on one hand have the sort of opportunities to express/explore themselves in ways unprecedented and envied by the likes of me (God. I am just imagining/recalling Being Queer on Cix and it was a howling shit-show), and on the other are having to self-censor in order not to lose their access to their friends. And that self-censoring is pretty much like Kremlinology because the Product is not permitted to know the size and shape of the Rules that Govern.
As I wrote elsewhere, abdicating responsibility for the running of our social spaces to the forces of capital was a mistake that I suspect we cannot row back from.
I mean, I’ve gone pretty quiet on The Socials (an excellent phrase I lifted from SPF.DJ) because Trans Discord exists, and having to code-switch back to cis is … weird now and WHO EVEN AM I? WAT.
Further meanwhile. While looking for something else in a directory tree that a long time ago was a different HD, I found a copy of the Humppa Radio Show from What The Hack 2005. Which is/was a set of OpenBSD hackers drinking beer, talking rubbish, and playing humppa tracks. As an exercise in nostalgia, it is a fine artifact. However, listening to it with trans and 2021 ears, I prefer the word notstalgia. It is a grim parade of sexism, a handful of dimensions of -phobia and kinkshaming… And there they are bagging on ‘those GNU dudes’ while behaving in exactly the same way that RMS + chums have made famous. The link is trivially discoverable on my old LJ, but JFC it needs a content warning.
… It also makes me wonder about what the same sort of malarkey would look like, but gleefully inclusive and Queer As Fuck. That might be an Interesting Premise for an EMF thing.
