As a child, I was never able to tell the difference between “male bonding” and vicious bullying.
Maybe this was because I was a girl, but I suspect that it may have been because there’s not actually any difference between male bonding and vicious bullying, and parents and teachers are just too willing to turn a blind eye to it.
The thing about "traditional" male socialization is that it's ALL about hierarchy, and that being "socialized" as a male is all about jockeying for/being reaffirmed of your place in that hierarchy.
You can almost think of it like a control based MLM, with people higher on the hierarchy having the privilege of exerting pain/humiliation/demands on those below them. The people in the middle desperately want to put themselves on top (because it means suffering less) so they're conditioned to put down everyone they encounter who might challenge them, even without thinking of it.
This is how a friend of my Dad's ended up nearly breaking my thumb when I was six. Upon first being introduced to me, this rough edged blue collar fellow went in for one of those painful "knuckle buster" handshakes that assholes do to assert dominance. Thing is, I was autistic as hell and didn't give him the reaction he wanted (yelping to signal my submission) so he pressed HARDER and didn't let me pull away. Dude was so insecure about being out mogged by a fead eyed firstgrader that he kept pressing till something cracked and I had to go to the emergency room.
The thing that really got me, even back then is because every adult from my parents to the doctors insisted that I shouldn't be angry or upset because he was teasing and this would toughen me up.
Like, no? All it did was make my neurodiverging ass MORE skittish around people I didn't know. There was a very good risk that I would have internalized the idea that people who are bigger/stronger can do whatever they want to smaller people which I bet is *exactly* what happened to this dude at some point early on.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
I'm sure that working in social media – dealing with people as mass statistical abstractions – is a cognitohazard, the sort of thing that could make anyone a little solipsistic, convinced that everyone else is a kind of stimulus-responding automaton lacking the interiority that you yourself experience.
But when it comes to Mark Zuckerberg, I'm increasingly convinced that he didn't acquire his worldview through the self-inflicted brain damage of his long exposure to the back-end of a vast social media system. I think the causal arrow points in the other direction: I think that Zuck founded Facebook because he doesn't really believe that other people are truly real, at least not as real as he is.
We see this in Facebook's very earliest days, as we see it today, as we see it at every critical juncture in Facebook and Zuckerberg's history.
Consider Facebook's origins, founded by a young Zuckerberg in his dorm as a means to nonconsensually rate the fuckability of his fellow Harvard undergrads:
The boy Zuck was delighted and surprised that so many of his fellow students entrusted him with their data but even then, he had no inkling as to why they would do so. Privately, he jeered at his users for trusting him, calling them "dumb fucks":
Zuck has since prosecuted history's most ruthless war on privacy, a surveillance campaign that would put the Stasi to shame and make Orwell scoff at the hacks butchering his work with over the top absurdities.
Zuck doesn't think you deserve any privacy, but boy does he ever value his own. This is a guy who bought the four houses surrounding his San Francisco home and left them empty in order to form a buffer zone:
When a single candid photo of Zuck and his family in their kitchen leaked (from Facebook!), Zuck, his lawyers, and his operatives treated it as a three-alarm fire:
https://abc7news.com/archive/8933289/
Zuckerberg's acquired a vast Hawaiian acreage and left most of it undeveloped, fenced off and patrolled by guards to prevent anyone from catching a glimpse of his private life. In order to acquire this acreage, Zuck exploited a dirty legal tactic called "heirs property," which leverages the informal basis of indigenous land claims by locating a single person with a colorable claim to their distant relatives' territory in order to force an auction of the ancestral land:
If Zuck thought other people are as real as he is, he wouldn't spy on them in ways he himself could never tolerate. He certainly wouldn't pay fancy white-shoe lawyers to steal their land out from under them. At heart, Zuck is a billionaire solipsist to beat all other examples of the form – a billionaire social media solipsist who sees others as manipulable collections of statistical abstractions, and not as people at all:
When Zuck is forcibly reminded that other people do indeed exist, he takes it very badly. He's insisted that Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former FB exec turned whistleblower, must pay him $111,000,000 as punishment for her excellent tell-all memoir Careless People. His lawyers say that Wynn-Williams violates the non-disclosure and non-disparagement "agreement" of her old Facebook employment contract merely by standing motionless and silent for an hour on-stage:
Once you realize that Zuck doesn't really think other people exist, "the metaverse" starts to make a lot more sense. Why would Zuck light $61b on fire in a bet that we will all stand still while he converts us and everyone we love into legless, sexless, low-polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon characters that he imprisons in a virtual world he stole from a 25 year old satirical dystopian cyberpunk novel? It's easy to understand if we're all non-player characters – if that's true, then the metaverse is surely our native habitat.
For Zuck, people aren't co-equals with needs that are as real and important as his own. For Zuck, people are problems to be solved. He embodies Terry Pratchett's maxim (voiced by Granny Weatherwax) that "sin is when you treat people like things."
Nowhere is this sin more on display than in Zuck's relationship to the social connections that bind together the users of his platforms. Zuck has benefited enormously from the fact that you love your friends more than you hate him, but (because hell is other people), you can't all agree on when to leave and where to go next, so you stay put on Facebook and Instagram:
For Zuck, the fact that you and your friends have trapped one another in a mutual hostage-taking is maddening, because those friends who've tied you to his platform refuse to organize their social contact with you to "maximize your engagement" with Facebook and Insta, which would let him maximize the number of ads he shows you. Rather, these friends just want to be your friends, which means that they don't want to get into stupid endless fights to keep you replying or stage little entertaining skits to keep you scrolling.
At first, Zuck tried tweaking his algorithm to replace your friends with trolls who'd bait you into flamewars. When that petered out, he stole a march from Tiktok and recruited an army of theater kids to do amateur dramatics for you in exchange for the promise of an intermittent reward schedule payment for the sketches that got the most views:
The problem (for Zuck) is that theater kids are also people and they resent being jerked around by the algorithm and ripped off by Meta's rigged revshare slot-machine. Last year, he started signaling that he would replace the theater kids – and your friends – with chatbots:
Chatbots have been a catastrophic bet for Meta, far worse than the metaverse. Meta shares are in a death-spiral as investors figure out that when Zuck fired all his coders and replaced them with chatbots while spending $300b on AI, he was excising the heart of the company's skilled workforce, pissing away all its free cash-flow, and sinking into a bottomless pit of debt to produce a substandard product that no one wants, at the expense of the company's only profitable lines of business:
But Zuck is sure that chatbots can solve his most pernicious problem: the search for a gimmick that will keep you locked to his platform that is under his complete control. Zuck doesn't want to rely on your friends with their unwillingness to maximize your engagement. He doesn't want to depend on volatile and unpredictable trolls to bait you into sticking around to argue and see more ads. He wants to be shut of theater kids and their amateur dramatics that inevitably come with demands for decent treatment.
For Zuck, chatbots dangle the promise of social media without socializing. Zuck thinks he can solve all his problems by imprisoning you in a house of mirrors where you interact with LLMs that are tuned to keep you scrolling no matter what, chatbots that will never demand anything of Meta.
He's been at this for a while, and each generation of chatbots was worse than the last. How bad? The last batch had to be killed off after they took to luring children into explicit sexual role-play:
https://archive.is/fopCh
Nevertheless, the dream of a world without people is one that Zuck can't let go of. Solipsism's seductive song convinced him to buy a company called Social.ai, which specializes in trapping people in conversations with chatbots, and now he's announced his plan to flood Facebook and Instagram with LLM slop:
The amazing thing about this is that Zuck is talking about chatbots as a way to capture a younger audience for his graying platforms. Kids hate chatbots. My 18 year old and her friends use "that's so AI" as a pejorative to dismiss anything distasteful or ugly:
For Zuck – who owns a controlling share of voting stock in his company and need not answer to his board – it's a spectacular act of delusional self-sabotage. Zuck refuses to understand that the majority of his users are on his platform because they love their friends more than they hate him. Zuckerberg is on a relentless quest to isolate you from the friends who keep you on his platform and transfer your bond to groups of people (and now chatbots) who can be commanded by Zuckerberg.
Only someone who doesn't think other people are real could believe that you'd prefer to talk to chatbots than your friends – or that a habit of talking with chatbots would be so hard to break that you'd endure an ever-increasing number of advertising interruptions to maintain those pointless conversations.
In 1993/1994, AOL connected its millions of users to the public internet. These users were unaccustomed to the internet's conversational and technical norms, and they kept coming. It wasn't that the old internet was incapable of absorbing surges of new users: every September, an incoming class of undergraduates found their way online through their universities' computer labs.
But the AOL bridge was different: the flood of users was much larger, and it never stopped. The old internet people who struggled to transfer the culture and techniques of the internet to that flood of newbies called it the "Eternal September."
For the Facebook and Instagram users who are about to be buried in an endless botshit avalanche, this is the beginning of the "Eternal Sloptember." From here on in, the slop only gets worse and thicker and harder to avoid. Zuckerberg refuses to acknowledge that he owes his fortune to the fact that his users love each other more than they hate him, so he has set out to shatter those bonds of love and sharpen that hatred.
It won't end well. Zuck and people like him call themselves "high agency," a disgusting bit of jargon meant to denote someone who has real interiority, wishes and desires (as opposed to the rest of us, who do as we're told and stay where we're put). Zuck's "agency" isn't higher than yours or mine. The difference between him and us is that he doesn't think we're really real, and we know that he's really a monster.
Zuck and people like him call themselves "high agency," a disgusting bit of jargon meant to denote someone who has real interiority, wishes and desires (as opposed to the rest of us, who do as we're told and stay where we're put).
Zuckerburg has gone well beyond proving that he just hates any form of social interaction at all and is willing to collapse entire economies so that he doesn't have to ever do so.
This is the kind of guy who reads about Dead Internet Theory and thinks it's a great idea (because he also thinks money is fake and that chatbots will have their own capital to toss around like a beanbag to simulate GROWTH.
Guys like this eventually conclude that people can't be real like them because we don't do the things they would do. Sure Zuck would spend all day chatting to bots. But most of us don't want to. For Zuck it's the same as talking to people- because he has no friends, because he's a nasty little guy who no one wants to be friends with. But it's easier for him to think of himself as the only real person on earth than realize the truth.
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I really need to do more studying and write an essay on how Americanism is a genuine folk religion which reveres capital and the vague concept of “the free market” as a god of providence to be pleased in order to lead a prosperous life, also that the founding fathers are prophetic, perhaps even messianic figures who basically gave birth to this god through the revolutionary war, and that the vast majority of conservative Christians in America revere capital more than the god they claim to serve in an ironic sort of golden calf situation.
There is a trend amongst depictions of the founding fathers to show them as literal christ figures, a trend that started very early in the nation’s life.
I’d also like to point out Washington & Lincoln Apotheosis, artist unknown, about 1865, the same year as lincoln’s assasination
The personification of America in the form of Columbia, a goddess of both the land and the concepts that America tends to inhabit. A pre-anime Hetalia. She was often used in depictions of Manifest Destiny, a religions ideal that stated that America, by God’s will, must go from coast to coast.
American Progress by, John Gast, 1872. Note the indigenous people cast in literal darkness, away from the light. The religions deification of America relies upon colonialism and white supremacy
Painted in 1865 by Constantino Brumidi, the Apotheosis of Washington in the eye of the U.S. Capitol Building’s Rotunda depicts George Washington rising to the heavens in glory, flanked by female figures representing Liberty and Victory/Fame and surrounded by six groups of figures.
christians & postchristians hate it when you talk about this
Mayor Mamdani’s plan to litter New York City with dumpsters must be stopped. The proposed dumpsters are as tall as a person and as wide as a
do New Yorkers really live like this? are you people really rolling around in open street garbage and screeching in terror at the idea of rubbish bins?
Mayor Mamdani you need to institute Maoist style anti NIMBY raids. you need to make them wear dunce caps go down to the countryside (central park) to be reformed via agricultural labour
NYC has not had containerized trash disposal for decades due to governance failures, yes, but the above article is a troll. Maybe the author actually believes it? I am honestly doubtful, if they do believe it they do so performatively, as part of their "persona".
But the author's beliefs are irrelevant - you can always find someone who believes anything. There is no relevant constituency that is pro trash; this initiative in NYC has been widely popular, and any dissent is only picayune debates over costs and implementation. However, an online news site can generate a ton of clicks by pretending that the perennial punching bag that is New York Liberals actually contains such a constituency! So they picked a nut and packaged it just right, so you would reblog it for laughs.
And I am of course right now contributing to the problem by reblogging it myself - I have a rule to avoid doing that as much as possible. But occasionally one should showcase examples that are already in the wild - and I have seen this article everywhere, the damage is done now. It's fake, even if it is real. No one opposes trash bins on principle.
It's not just that they're doing corruption, but they're doing the kind of corruption that is basically "guy hands over a cartoon money sack with dollar signs on it" corruption.
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idk man not to sound like a cartoon hippie but if your entirrrrre blog and dash is about how the world sucks and everyones bigoted i think you are going to give yorself brain worms
on another note i know i’ve ranted about this before but im mad about it again
true crime has done irreparable fucking damage to middle class white women
every time i see some middle class white mom of two saying “girlies! you need to get a visible tattoo because then a rando won’t try to snatch you in broad daylight in the middle of the walmart checkout to put you into sex trafficking!” i get pissed off because you are NOT the primary target of trafficking! poor children of colour in underdeveloped countries, indigenous women, sex workers, these are the people in danger!
true crime podcasts always talk about the rare instance a middle class white woman is taken and so these true crime girlies only ever hear about it happening to women like them and start thinking they’re the main target, but if there were a true crime podcast for every poor non-white child who has been trafficked there wouldn’t be enough data centres in the entire world to hold them all! the fact that white women are the focus of these things is because society only gives a shit about white women, and turns a blind eye when women of colour are the ones being victimized!
i’m not saying that middle class white women are completely safe in society, far from it. but the fact that these podcasts prioritize stories of white women is because of white supremacy, and comes with the underlying sentiment of “these stories matter because they happened to the group of people it’s not supposed to happen to”, and the way white women are eating it up and making themselves the centre of the issue is a huge fucking problem
people over a certain age really did have their brains cooked in their skulls by the heckin Soviets. like there's no other word except hysterics for the shit boomers pull out of their ass about heckin communisms whenever someone proposes a library or apartment blocks or even progressive tax rates. no one makes communism and the Soviet Union sound more utopian than some old cunt frothing about a new bus route
do old people not get it that when they say urban development is soviet communism young people don't think "wow urban development is so dystopian and scary" they think "woah communism must be fuckin awesome"
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