An Artist Draws Near!

An older noodle thing to vent out my heartache. The ending should've been a bit different, but it has been left unfinished for a long time and I want it out of my drafts. It was a finishing speedrun today.

Just look at HEMA. Using my sport as an example, HEMA attracts a lot of white supremacist chuds. So what does my club do to alienate them? We state our values up front, and we live those values. Every single one of us.

When I joined the beginner's class, the coach walks in front of all the new students and says, "HEMA stands for Historical European Martial Arts. Some people mistake 'European' to mean 'better than everyone else'. If you believe that, there is the door. In this club we respect people's identities and pronouns, if you cannot do that, there is the door. "

Even if the chuds stick around after that, eventually they do leave. Why? Because we make all of our values explicitly known through our interactions with each other in the club, and we shut their bullshit down whenever they try something. The fact that so many of us are queer, or trans, or just real as fuck allies alone does it sometimes. That we don't tolerate any amount of fuckery and if somebody says a racist or homophobic or misogynistic "joke", they get shut down by the bearded white cis men who they incorrectly assume will have a laugh with them. And then those dumb racist sexist fucks leave. And never come back.

We don't have to kick them out. We will take their money as membership fees until they either change their mind and grow as a human being and become an actual respectable human being, or until they cower and leave. They always self-select for us.

The internet represents one of the few ways young people can escape the totalizing power their parents have over them. That these apps have been crafted to control their attention does not mean children should be banned from them, it means they should actually be regulated. If the internet is like "junk food" in their analogy, then the government needs to make the food safe to eat, not ban children from eating them.

They are an Assistant Professor of Media Industries at New York University and literally just finished writing The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal, a book on the history of the computer industry in the 70s.