1198 Days Later

I, like a lot of people, have some misgivings about Elon Musk taking over Twitter. To be fair, I haven’t personally experienced much unpleasantness or inconvenience as a result of his changes to the service. The worst it’s done for me is bring back bad memories what happens when my fellow nerds and I start thinking we can fix everything in the world.

To be honest, I’d mostly stopped using Twitter even before the Muskopalypse. And contrary to most experiences I’d heard of, I wasn’t warn down by toxic disagreement from political enemies. Rather, I was getting stressed by people with similar politics pointing out every injustice and outrage. I can understand the motivation: people feel an obligation on social media to amplify the signal of things that are important to them. But it was stressing me out, so I started to drift away.

By the way, I haven’t seen many people bring this up, but Elon Musk is still the reigning Time Person of the Year. At the time of announcement, that title struck me as at least five years late: He used to be the only guy trying to make electric cars and private space programs a reality, but by last year, both had become cliché. And Musk himself had devolved from intriguing intellectual, to, well, a nerd who thinks he can fix everything in the world.

So I followed many people over to Mastodon, the open source alternative to Twitter. So far it’s been okay, and in terms of the basic usage, not that different. But like a lot of open source software, it does seem more complex than it has to be.

If you’re not familiar with it, the idea of Mastodon is that it’s not one entity that stores all the posts and information about all the users. Instead, it’s a bunch of servers that operate independently, but can still interact with one another. And anyone can set up their own server (at their own expense) and set up their own rules.

(Fun fact: Donald Trump’s social network, Truth Social is just a modified version of Mastodon.)

So Mastodon is a bit of a throwback to harder-to-use, do-it-yourself Internet from before social media. That throwback feeling was underlined recently when famed blogger/tweeter/author John Scalzi promoted the idea that we go back to blogs as a sort of pseudo social network. I thought that sounded appealing, and I’d thought of reviving this blog recently, so I took the plunge and dusted off my old blog. Maybe it will lead to a new age of intriguing long-form commentary, and intelligent discourse and interaction. But I notice that the new Blogger interface makes it easier to add emojis than links and that does not fill me with confidence.

You (Practically) Da Man

Let's say you hear a story about someone facing prejudice. A person discriminated against at work, or treated unfairly by the judicial system. Assuming you're a reasonably compassionate person, you want to show that you care. But there's two general ways to do this:

You could portray yourself as a sort of comrade in arms, either by comparing it to your own situation ("I know what that's like") or by highlighting a common enemy ("You tell 'em! Stick it to The Man!")

The other way is to act as a representative of society as a whole ("We really need to change as a people.") Or even to take responsibility as part of the problem ("On behalf of all X, I'm really sorry.”)

Which attitude you take largely depends on who you are. If you're a member of the same oppressed group as the victim, you'll surely commiserate. And probably, if you're from a group that had suffered similarly, you'll probably also compare your struggles. On the other hand, If your life situation is quite different, you'll probably avoid comparison, and try to show sympathy from the outside.

As a straight, white, able-bodied cis-male, I'm generally restricted to that second approach. It's going to sound silly if I try to compare my experience to someone who has lived their life with systematic discrimination. ("I know what you mean, let me tell you about how long they're taking rebuilding the expressway interchange I use.") Or, to put it another way, I can't say "Stick it to The Man" if everyone knows I am The Man.

And in a society that is prominently white, many of the people I know are in the same boat. Generally, if I'm talking to someone who ticks any of the oppression boxes, it's a woman. That is, a straight, white, able-bodied cis-female. So how do they react when looking at someone else's struggle?

I've noticed that in these situations, they're pretty quick to go to that first reaction. They align themselves with the victim, and jump to a very negative view of society. This always makes me feel kind of awkward. Sure, I'm quick to acknowledge the unfairness of society, but in this case, I'm like, excuse me, The Man is right here, I can hear you.

But here's the interesting point: In recent years - thanks to social media - I've had the chance to see the perspectives of more people with many different backgrounds. And I've discovered that although white women may see themselves as part of The Oppressed, many others definitely don't see it that way. There's a widespread feeling that white women are hardly worse-off than white men, with a lot of pent-up anger aimed at them.

I don't know how fair that is. It often seems like a grass-is-greener situation, in which white women have taken on a mythical status among frustrated activists, envisioned as incredibly privileged, hardly different from folks like myself. That’s clearly inaccurate; domestic abuse and sexual assault are problems that are not easily dismissed.

But ultimately that just adds to my point: There’s a big divide there amongst progressives, and a lot of misunderstanding. So please realize that people don’t understand one another’s struggles as much as they think they do. You may not have the oppression-cred that you think, and it will look fake if you pretend you do. But conversely, you will look out-of-touch if you assume that another’s life is easy.

Over Analyzes Popular Culture, Like A Boss

I just saw that the Anti Defamation League (fighters of anti-semitism) has listed Pepe the Frog as a hate symbol. Yes, he's just a generic meme cartoon, but he's become such a favourite of of hate groups that he made the list. It's just the most extreme example of something I've been watching for a while: the way that memes can go in so many directions and mean so many things.

As an example is where I'm coming from, I grew up in the eighties, when Garfield was everywhere. Yes, today you may know him simply as one of the last comic strips standing, but back then he was one of the most widely-licensed characters in pop-culture. Of course, being a licensed, trademarked property, all the products he appeared on built on the same concept: Garfield is lazy, pro-lasagna, anti-Monday. That attitude of blandness with a soupçon of rebellion clicked with many children and their parents, and the cat's image was slapped across all kinds of products. But none of it really challenged Garfield's basic personality.

Today, I think the closest property to that would be The Minions. I see them on products, and I see them on memes passed around Facebook. I mean harmless memes, not the hateful ones. Though, I don’t know, maybe they’re on the racist memes too, after all, you’d only have to cut and paste some graphics and you’ve got Minions campaigning for white power. Okay yellow power.  But even in the part of the Internet that I frequent, I've seen the Minions used for everything from Dad Jokes to 9/11 memorials.  My point is that they appeal to the sort of family demographic, but now it's the people themselves who are deciding how the characters are used, so sometimes they stray from what the creators and marketers originally intended.

But in the social media world, any idea can be attached to any image. It’s a lot like the Winnie The Pooh trying to quote Camus that I mentioned a few weeks ago. I’ve also seen Kermit drinking tea saying some really snotty things that even Miss Piggy would think is a little harsh. And Captain Picard has been supporting surprisingly anti-intellectual concepts.

Mostly it’s just kind of incongruous, or so silly it can’t be taken seriously. Though it sometimes bothers me how it misrepresents a work. Take Peanuts, for instance. It seems that people believe a couple of things about that strip:

• The Comic Sans font looks like Charles Schultz’ lettering
• Peanuts is a good medium for Christian messages.

I can’t explain the first point, but the second is not too surprising, since it was one of the few big media properties to make religion an unapologetic topic. But Peanuts was also distinctive in being one of the very few media properties to approach religion from a troubled, melancholy perspective. Instead of giving simple and easy religious solutions (<cough> - B.C. - <cough>) it assumed that there were Christians who could discuss the spiritual intellect, and if necessary, doubt. So it seems wrong to see Charlie Brown and Linus assuring everyone - in the wrong font - that you’ll have no troubles if you just accept Jesus.

Speaking of fonts, it's also weird that The Meme Font can represent so many things.  (Apparently it's just Impact with dark outlines.) Yes, I know, it's just a font. But it used to be that fonts sort of meant things.  Take Helvetica, for instance. You can print anything you want in it, as long as you pay the royalty to the trademark holders.  But for some reason, it gets used for generic things: packaging, instructions, signs giving directions.  The Meme Font, on the other hand, gets used for anything. It could be heartwarming, spiteful, clever. I've seen it used to spread both information and lies. It belongs to all of us and none of us.

Maybe sometime soon we'll see marketers crack down on the use of licensed characters in consumer-created graphics.  Or maybe they'll try to taylor their characters to be all things to all people.  Take the Smurfs, for instance.  They each had a different personality, so whoever you are and whatever Facebook meme you want to create, you can find the Smurf for you, even if you have to use White Power Smurf.  Okay, Blue Power.