Now, more than ever, we’ve got massive homogenizing weapons. The effects of radio and television pale in comparison to the mental conditioning pushed by social media, and the prospects for AI-based education are darker than any sci-fi cautionary tale could predict.
Just the other day, that silly Mr. Lovenstein strip was censored on Facebook for "encouraging violence" (above is the social-media-approved version). It would be understandable if Facebook were a place for toddlers, but you can’t even join under 13. What they’re saying is that adolescents and adults looking at this are too stupid and vulnerable to understand it’s a joke - and the comical consequence of that censorship is that, in one generation, adolescents and adults will actually be too stupid and vulnerable to understand it. But I’ll get to that later
In the comments, a user said "One time I was in FB jail for a week for a "Realistic threat of violence". What did I do? I said that people abusing helpless cats should have their legs [evicted] from [their nether regions] and have their heads [lovingly massaged] with those legs."
A realistic threat of violence, uh? In an increasingly online society, people are no longer allowed to rant or vent their frustrations and feelings truthfully and in a liberating way, for they’re punished for it. Although I can’t conceive of the effects this domestication and emotional suppression can have on art, this might not even be the worst part of this Pavlovian dystopia we’re living in. On the most popular platform ever, YouTube, newspeak is already a reality. If you say words like rape, suicide, genocide, torture, etc., you get your reach screwed, your videos removed, your channel demonetized, and finally you can get deplatformed. The consequence? Channels about history and war reporting are massively censored and removed... but what would be the consequences of this massive, worldwide Bowdlerization for society? Does sweeping ugly words under the rug eliminate the problems or just help hide them?
George Orwell comic adaptation by Fido Nesti. I hate to be That guy who says "This is just like 1984",
but sometimes it's just too ominous.
Everyone is policing their own words, the way and how they express themselves on the internet, afraid of the social sanctions it can impose. Unaware of "ungood", unironically unalived has already become a word for suicide.
The weird thing that no novel thought about is that this is being pushed not for a power project for an oppressive totalitarian State, nor a religious moralistic repression of humanity, no, Big Tech doesn't give a shit about that, it's all money. The stupidization of people is just a by-product of capitalism. Sponsors don't want to see their products advertised next to some themes, Coca-Cola doesn't want their ads next to a history channel talking about the Japanese massively raping Korean women during WWII and these women becoming pariahs in the Korean society, nor does McDonald's want their ads next to a cute bear talking about stabbing people, so these are a No-No.
We already have a whole adult generation raised on Big Tech thought control, everyone that had their childhood and early adolescence in the last 15 years was subjected to it, and man, interactions with individuals of that generation that were oversocialized in social media can often be painful. People who overly fixate on meaningless stuff because it's a taboo to them, it doesn't matter what context you say something, if you said something that is a Big Tech No-No their brains shut off and they can't comprehend it (kinda like people reading The Boys and completely missing what it is about just because of the violence, bad words and sex. Man, I always get back to it hahaha). Five years ago someone posted a question on a Soulseek community, asking if they could involuntarily download harmful files on it, and I said that OP (Original Poster) sounded like the kid who downloads LiNkIn-PaRk-NuMb.exe, referencing a popular P2P joke, as we were inside a P2P community, and then I proceeded to explain he chooses what files to download, he can see the file extensions, and then I gave my own list of banned extensions to avoid unwanted stuff. Since then three users messaged me to say I didn't have to be such an asshole about it, somehow every two years another person found the thread and got offended by it... yeah, they really thought my joke about LiNkIn-PaRk-NuMb.exe was offensive. For someone so unbelievable stupid infantilized, I guess that Mr. Lovenstein strip would indeed be confusing.
ps: About fixating on something and blocking the rest. They found the joke offensive and ignored the helpful advice. They can't form a coherent logical stream of thought that If I wanted to bully OP, Then I wouldn't help OP... also, I feel very sorry for full-grown adults who managed to find it offensive. It must be hell being so miserable and glass-half-empty that you see everything as an aggression.
My most recent interaction with this kind was on Letterboxd. When I was going to log Dogs in Space, a movie about the late '70s Melbourne punk scene, written and directed by someone who was there living in those shared houses, and who wanted to do an homage to a friend lost in those days, I saw a punk saying the movie wasn't really punk because [I have no idea what he considers "real punk"], and then I saw the same person saying the same thing about Suburbia, a movie written and directed by someone who was there living and documenting the early '80s Los Angeles punk scene, saying the movie didn't depict punks correctly, that despite the "visual side of punk is displayed relatively well" they did not understand anything about the punk subculture... I was baffled by the crap he was spouting, but instead of just calling him out, I just very politely asked if he thought the same thing about The Decline of the Western Civilization, a 1981 documentary with everyone from the early LA punk scene, by the same director of Suburbia. And I recommended that he read some basics like Please Kill Me, Dance of Days, and collected editions of zines like Touch and Go and even Maximum Rocknroll, that are pretty easy to find, so he could broaden his vision of punk history, and said those movies depicted the punk scene of their times, and not the current punk scene.
I also once knew nothing and thought I knew everything, but I met a lot of fantastic people in the punk scene, even those who mocked me for young-age ignorance and naivety helped me - because yeah, my brain is well-formed enough to discern a friendly mockery from bullying and aggression. I always liked reading and learning, and the natural consequence of learning is discovering you know shit. My introductory statement to this Letterboxd user was saying that I had been in the punk scene for more than 20 years and I'm still a novice, I didn't want to evoke some authoritative tone to what I was saying, I was just recommending reading material. I hoped we could talk about this subject I like so much. In those years I played in bands, I had a distro, promoted gigs, even with illegal energy connections at abandoned places, I got to host or help punk, hardcore, crossover, anarchopunk, crust and grind bands from the UK, Sweden, Italy, Japan and Canada, 15 years ago I actually had one of the most visited blogs where you could download Brazilian punk music at the time, with lots of stuff I ripped myself (all links long dead), I even had a short essay about the history of Street Punk and Oi!, which I wrote because of local gang violence I experienced myself, and I extensively talk about all the fascist and antifascist groups that formed the scene in the world, it was published and distributed by several anarchist presses here, and I know it was translated and distributed by an antifascist collective in Mexico as well (and I assume after the translation it might have reached other Latin American countries), and I list my lifetime of reading references to books and fanzines, no superficial wikipedia crap (if you are interested in reading it, it's in Portuguese and the language extremely colloquial, but AI translation tools are getting quite good these days, so here is the link). In my message to that user, seeing his complaints about homophobia in those movies, and knowing he is British, I referenced an interview of the British anarchopunk band The Apostles in the fanzine Homocore in 1989, mentioning how they were rejected by the anarchopunk scene in the early '80s when two of their members came out as gay, and that the band The Mob also suffered just because they lived in the same squat. So yeah, homophobia was a sad reality of the scene, even in the more political side of it.
What happened? The guy deleted my comment and blocked me. He didn't want to know his view of "real punk" wasn't the absolute truth. This generation is being raised in echo chambers, and even the slightest contradiction triggers them. They think it's an aggression. Those are the adults we see having mental breakdowns and throwing tantrums when faced with adversity and opposition. You can't even have a normal conversation because they can't deal with anything that is not an echo chamber. Their anxiety rates are off the charts.
What about me? I'm also being pavloved. As I mentioned in the update of a previous rant, Facebook removed my page. Most strikes were about nudity and themes related to suicide. Anything that relates to suicide is a big No-No. This page from the 1989 July edition of Heavy Metal was the last one, and it seemed to have been reviewed by humans after their bot flagged it... The kind of people that can read it and not understand it really scares me, because they are fucking idiots!
I police the images I post in my new page, I have now learned their censorship standards and I'm being able to avoid it fairly well, like good well-behaved tamed drone. The only place I can still post what I want, and not treat the viewer as stupid, is my blog. I no longer post my personal life on the internet anyway, and I only use social media to share the movies and comics I like. But I don't measure my words, and I will keep repeating this: All this condescending conditioning can suck my cumdescending cock.
