This week on my podcast, I read “Let the Platforms Burn,” a recent Medium column making the case that we should focus more on making it easier for people to leave platforms, rather than making the platforms less terrible places to be:
The platforms used to be source of online stability, and many argued that by consolidating the wide and wooly web into a few “curated” silos, the platforms were replacing chaos with good stewardship. If we wanted to make the internet hospitable to normies, we were told, we had to accept that Apple and Facebook’s tightly managed “simplicity” were the only way to get there.
But today, all the platforms are on fire, all the time. They are rocked by scandals every bit as awful as the failures of the smaller sites of yesteryear, but while harms of a Geocities or Livejournal moderation failure were confined to a small group of specialized users, failures in the big silos reach hundreds of millions or even billions of people.
What should we do about the rolling crisis of the platforms? The default response — beloved of Big Tech’s boosters and critics alike — is to impose rules on the platforms to make them more hospitable places for the billions they’ve engulfed. But I think that will fail. Instead, I think we should make the platforms less important places by freeing those billions.
Autism: I need this specific routine to be followed for me to be in peace and working
ADHD: I need extreme flexibility and opportunity to work on what i want in different days
AuDHD: Okay, so, i need… A general routine, like, okay, i cannot funcition without a routine, right?, But after two (2) days, i cannot function with this specific routine, i need a little change, but if it’s too much change i will literally cry right NOW
queer people for years, centuries, have been oppressed for being their most authentic selves, by the people who call themselves heroes and us the monsters, even nowadays with the most recent law for allowing discrimination against queer people in America. They call themselves the good guys, the saviours, the ones completely in the right and justified for hating against people just trying to live their lives. And apparently we’re supposed to be the bad guys in this story.
i’m so glad that this movie came out when it did, the world really needs it.
I deeply appreciate how Katniss is portrayed as not at all okay from the beginning. Her dad dying, her mom’s catatonia, and almost starving to death already cracked her, but she was determined to survive. Normal people don’t think to themselves, “Ah yes, my sister, the only person I’m sure I love.” Normal people don’t “accept” hugs from their mom.
Prim being picked and the games themselves widened that crack. Having to pretend to be in love with Peeta and not knowing how she felt just further messed her up and left her unable to use supports she needed.
Actually I’ll never forgive Punk Rave and Killstar and fast fashion brands for tricking people into thinking that being goth or punk or emo is expensive. Babygirl the only goth brand names you need to know are Rit, Good Will, Etsy, and Studs and Spikes, we used to shove safety pins through our ears and then they started selling earrings that look like safety pins for 15.99. We used to dye thrifted wedding dresses black and they started selling gothic gowns for 300 bucks. We used to put studs on boots we found in the back of the good will and they started making Demonias. DIY or die wasn’t perfect it can be exclusionary to disabled people but whatever the fuck we’ve got going on right now is so much worse. It’s not any more inclusive to the disabled and it is exclusionary to the people who made punk, to the people who made goth, to the people who made emo. If you’ve got the funds and you don’t want to do diy pay someone else to do it for you but please let it be a small artist or a friend not some guy in a suit who’s made it his business to gentrify punk. You can turn flats into platforms with flipflops, hotglue and gumption don’t let anyone tell you different.
worse, the idea that being any of the above “is an aesthetic/fashion style”
all of this just makes it more difficult for people to learn what subcultures are actually about/for (community, around shared music, values and events that you make, etc). considering so many ppl just grow up without any actual subculture around them they go from watching movies and seeing magazines selling them fashion/visuals, to assuming that that’s what subculture IS. which would be natural for someone pretty young. but like…this doesn’t help anyone get out of that phase of misunderstanding. ugh.
