Keeble

"the bird"

left wing bird, online and trying this " alternative social media" thing again. recently unionized barista. Weekly wikipedia streamer. ❤ @proxy ❤30. Avi: me!

last.fm listening


and western society has beaten most of those things out of us. sure, some of us have the American civic religion: that the institutions of the united states will bring us those three things. but the founders of America are hardly people to look up to, and the flawed society they made was in its own way a pretty neat reflection of their complex and flawed moral beliefs rather than their own failure to understand what would work infrastructurally. the us government gives us traditions that people mostly go along with bc they're a day off (do you spend your memorial day honoring military members who died?). the rituals honor things that mean nothing to most people beyond the ritual of it. and there's no community that the government supports.

some of us have (in America, generally a christian) church. but for those of us who don't believe in god and never have like me, that church has never held a real place for us.* the rituals are meaningless if they stand for something you don't believe in. and the traditions, unless you're the sort of person celebrating stuff like Pentecost, are mostly reconfigured to be in support of consumer culture and capitalism.

some of us, lacking those things, result to social media. to here. these have tradition and ritual, in their own sense, but mostly in the ways that a fandom has: shared lil jokes that are mostly by laughing at things created by other people or at other people being stupid, and the community is mostly shouting into the void without any real engagement (here is better than most but im of the opinion that social media is media first and social second and no matter what design choices you take to shift peoples behaviour when people go to social media they MOSTLY go to scroll, not to post)

none of these are substitutes for a community you see regularly, with members you may not expect to see all the time but always know one of a group will be there. a discord server is a salve, sure, but its not a replacement for a congregation or a mutual aid group or stuff like that without extensive moderation and lots of event planning to simulate the sorts of semi open spaces that real life places like elk's lodges and NA meetings and union locals and community choirs and food not bombs groups offer. a nightly discord voice call with a standard group of people who never changes is not a replacement for a community in the sense of these places

furry cons are an interesting space here, bc these things are actually are there. you go to a place, drop all relations, and engage in strange rituals like waiting in long registration lines that build camaraderie. you are surrounded by people who are in a public place where they know some but not all people and whose guards are let down. they are traditional too, after a certain point. you look forward to them and mark them on your calendar like catholic feasts. and, yes, they are community building exercises, too. many if not most people leave furry cons with more connections and friendships than they started.

but accessing these things 1 to 4 times a year, depending on how wealthy you are, is not perfect. its like being a christian who only goes on Christmas and Easter and just tries to use that to power through their identity for the rest of the year.

im not sure i quite have an answer to this, myself. but we need more. we need something. something whole and collective

*i acknowledge the work of certain religious institutions who really are trying here, and finding a way to reintegrate ritual, tradition, and community into a church setting or synagogue setting or temple setting without that dogmatic need to meet a literal god. its not most of them, though, particularly in the us where the big growth over the past 30 years has been with megachurches


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