It's time to get the old blogging gang back together.
Like, well, practically everyone, I have fallen for the tempting grift of "less friction."
Going into blogger, writing and editing a worthwhile post, formatting it, monitoring and moderating comments (because oh my Dog, the spam, the spam, and also the weirdos, the weirdos), visiting other blogs of interest, maybe needing yet another account to comment there if I am so moved, signing in, remembering passwords -- all of them are points of friction and annoyance. Yahoo Groups took over the listserv game a couple decades ago, got everyone in one place, and then, a few years back, just POOFED away years and years of conversations and files and whole online communities. Just gone.
And The Zuck made it ever eeeeasier to interact. Schedule events. Conduct business. Sell your shit.
Until Zuckworld had sucked all the air out of the rest of God's internet while, you know, also sucking the tit of Putin's fascist trolls, that sweet sweet Kremlin troll money.
It's all great until you find that your now-predominant means of communication and commerce is capriciously cut off by a bloody-minded literalist imbecile algorithm that cannot detect irony or hyperbolic metaphor, and flags a pleasant conversation among consenting friends about interesting science, or a real pretty vintage kitchen set, as "inciting violence."
That literally confuses a straightforward statement that hunting Mike Pence with a noose is a, you know, bad thing, with advocating Pence-hunting.
Meanwhile, same day, classic Holocaust denial on a news story public comment thread -- eh, it's fine. Didn't hit any of the secret no-no words.
The automation is about as competent at grokking the hoo-mans as the Zuck itself.
Story time.
It's junior high speech class. The teacher is Mr. Stanton. Mr. Stanton is kinda a dick, but by no means the worst asshole teaching at Roehm Junior High, mainly only because of the stiff competition. The thing to know is that in 1979, the dicks and assholes babysitting the hormonal adolescents at Roehm Junior High school were empowered to beat the students who annoyed them. Literally take them into the hallway and hit them in the ass with a wooden paddle. "Swats." Some liked to brandish their beating paddles as threats, and the legendary ones had paddles with holes drilled into them for, allegedly, extra pain. The good teachers did not employ beatings or threats of beatings .But any of them were allowed to. Good times! The students who regularly received beatings for being little shits considered it a badge of honor, so the deterrence power of beatings was pretty openly understood to be zilch.
So we kids learning public speaking had to choose a topic, some political or social issue, take a side, and research, prepare, and deliver a "speech to convince." Nobody could take the same side of the same topic as anyone else, but we could take different sides. Mr. Stanton polled us alphabetically for our topics, with students lower in the alphabet getting dibs.
I announced my topic and position. Topic doesn't matter, I'm not entirely sure I remember what it was.
A few students later, one of the boys calls dibs on the opposing side of the issue.
I remember who it was, but won't embarrass him here. A popular kid who wasn't particularly my buddy, but definitely not one of the legions of junior high shithead bullies.
When he called dibs for a speech opposing my position, the kids started invoking a favorite Saturday Night Live sketch. We gonna have a Point/Counterpoint!
My classmate snapped out in a fair Dan Akroyd twang Heather, you ignorant slut. And we all roared.
You know, the way people do, when bantering, and invoking in-group memes, references that show that we all get the joke.
Stanton, that dick, did not get the joke.
We tried to explain the joke.
He did not want to get the joke.
I especially was anxious that he understand that this was a good joke that did not offend me and that my classmate was not bullying me. Plenty of nasty little shits doing that and never, ever being punished for it, but this was not that. And I particularly did not want my classmate to sustain a beating in the hallway because of me.
Nope.
Random hallway beating it was.
Seriously, fuck that guy.
Aaaanyway.
That's Zuckerworld, and also The House That Jack Built.
Hallway assault? Didn't see it. Vile, obscene provocation from the back row? Better not respond, you're gonna be the one that gets it. The useless little shits don't fear the random punishment, because they aren't doing anything worthwhile in the space, the beating just raised their status among the other useless little shits, and punishment isn't linked to conduct or its harm anyway, so they can just watch the kid who made an innocent SNL reference get whaled on for giggles.
So I am diversifying my communication channels. More blog entries, either here on blogger or possibly moved to a different platform at some point. Back to a stand-alone website for the training and farm businesses.
And I encourage everyone else who has got sumthin' to say to do the same. Unzuck yourself, despite the friction and some expense.
