Jack offers a reasonable and reasoned take on my early post about 500 Social. (500.social?)
He sees a distinction between my perception that "everything is political," and his perception that "politics are everywhere."
More specifically, he writes,
I don't believe politics must be everywhere. I have conversations all the time that are nothing to do with politics, and not all of them are "happy talk" in a bubble.
To which I would say that both perceptions are true, and all conversations have something to do with politics, even if we don't always perceive it.
I go back to David Foster Wallace's Kenyon College commencement speech, This Is Water.
What does "community" really mean if we say that we "shouldn't" talk about politics, or hide what we have to say behind a content warning so that people who don't want to know what you have to say within your community are empowered to preemptively silence you? How is that a community?
Sure, there are a lot of things to talk about that won't necessarily invoke an immediately political thought or reaction. But I submit to Jack, and anyone, that there is less than a degree of separation from anything we talk about and politics, and it all begins with the accident of birth. Whether we were born into poverty or privilege. How our parents were shaped by the politics of their time.
In some ways, many ways, I think, politics is the most important thing we should talk about. How "important" is it to discuss "tech"? It can be interesting. Pleasant or infuriating. But is it important? Perhaps in its political context. "The future is here, it's just unevenly distributed." That's a political consequence. Access to tech is economic and, therefore, political. We like to talk about technology while blissfully oblivious of all the people who never have the opportunity.
I'm not suggesting that politics is all anyone should talk about, and it seems like that's the case for too many people. I think that our dysfunctional, hyper-partisan political culture is the result of our economic system where our attention is exploited and monetized. Where we've lost the ability to talk about politics, how we wish to be governed, and by whom, simply because we haven't practiced it in a way that makes us good at it. And by "good," I mean "the good." As in "good faith."
Anyway, I hear you Jack, and I appreciate the welcome. But as I wrote earlier, I don't think I'm the kind of person Kev has in mind, and he's entitled to run his instance the way he wishes. I don't wish to impose my views on his goals and objectives. If I was a member, something would happen in politics that I would like to share my immediate emotional reaction to within my community, but I'd have to hide it behind a content warning.
Thanks, but no.
I think this exchange, between Jack and I, is perhaps a better example of the kind of online social interaction that might be possible. Social media platforms make it easy to have online social interactions, and that's perhaps their greatest flaw. Too easy, too immediate, and the nature of the platform rewards that immediacy.
When I learned that Joe Biden had dropped out the race, I genuinely missed Twitter and Mastodon. I wanted to share my immediate reaction with people I knew in the online space. But I was in a car driving in Pennsylvania. It would have to wait until we got to the hotel and I got online. By then, that feeling had passed.
That's one of the good things about feelings sometimes.
They pass.
Originally posted at Nice Marmot 16:15 Sunday, 28 July 2024