#counterproductive

Tumblr has been going wild with the adult content tags in the past week. It's been tagging many of my drafts that have literally fully dressed people on them, or just non nude paintings or cubist sculptures as 'adult content'. They should fix their algorithm if they don't want to lose users.

"The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second."

But she had kept aloof from him and had heard nothing of his sorrows. As a natural consequence of this, Phineas was more in love with her than ever.

prompt # 54

[I]t’s worth stressing that there is still no real consensus on what cancel culture actually is. Everybody has a different idea of what it means, or what it should mean, to be “cancelled”, a word I must regularly accessorise with frilly quote marks for sanity – it is used to describe the consequences of social transgressions, but used in a way that attempts to shame the critic. This vagueness of meaning allows almost any conservative or contrarian or person who’s facing a little online friction to benefit from cancelled status.   And the benefits can be vast. The beauty of embracing a cancelled identity is that it imbues on the cancelled an aura of rebellious glamour. Rather than being seen as maybe mean, possibly out of touch, perhaps a bit of a bully, they become an outlaw. This exoticism allows them to take their next steps through a cloud of virtual cigarette smoke, their opinions quickly rinsed of offence, now suddenly bewitchingly controversial. Simply by dabbling in the forbidden, regardless of what they said or did, they have become interesting. Which leads to attention, which leads to celebrity, which leads to profit, both for the cancelled and those that report on them, hi.