aurysystem

Auries

@aurysystem

Eternally tired

  • She/her: +others for headmates

weird grey ace, four partners, a bunch of headmates.
writes cursed code 24

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aurysystem
@aurysystem
darkwitchclaire
@darkwitchclaire
TheBlackNerd
@TheBlackNerd

i think the worst part about "internet activism" is people who share the worst pieces of news possible and don't have anything to say besides "we're fucked" or "we're so cooked lmao"

shut up

shut the fuck up

VeraLycaon
@VeraLycaon

it literally does nothing to actually positively affect things (no ideas for a plan forward, no call to action), and tanks morale. stop doing it!

lorenziniforce
@lorenziniforce

yep

I personally think incredibly vague calls for too-risky-for-anyone-to-actually-be-willing-to-start violent revolution type stuff is just as bad. So much "we're so cooked burn it all down" instead of actually thinking through the sorts of things that can have an effect

(Maybe because said actionable things are bureaucratic and not romantic, like campaigning in local elections)

Furufoo
@Furufoo

I have a friend who has a really bad problem with doomscrolling and making herself depressed to the point it's basically a form of self harm. I wonder how the people who keep sharing those news with zero additional commentary would feel knowing this is the behavior they're feeding. Or if they're happy with dragging more people to their misery

lorenziniforce
@lorenziniforce

a lot of times you end up with these... communities, almost of self-harm doomscrolling, particularly around specific active violent conflicts, where folks convince themselves that exposing themselves to horrible news constantly is a form of praxis.

i've absolutely seen a lot of these sorts of Posts implying that "ignoring this" and "looking away" is to be complicit in suffering and atrocity, even half the world away, and it's absolutely not a healthy attitude. it becomes a reinforcing thing, where folks become trapped by a sort of guilt, this idea that if they give themselves space from the news they are just as bad as the people responsible, or even that they're outright complicit in it

HedgeMom
@HedgeMom

I used to be really bad about this, I would chide myself for not "keeping up" with information without ever really thinking about what to actually do with it

I couldn't hold onto it and grow and develop as a person

when I started evaluating the actual "worth" of intentionally traumatizing info dumped into my lap 24/7, I saw it just immobolized me to do ACTUAL good, which you can do!!!

There's so much good in the world you can spread, so much for the better you can enact, but for me this was one of the biggest blockers to accepting that

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in reply to @TheBlackNerd's post:

jcolag
@jcolag

It's especially infuriating, because we all (should) know that that's almost always the point of the actions in the news. The people out there making society worse do it to make you feel helpless, so that you'll accept their extremist non-solutions. The scale doesn't matter, from organized crime in local neighborhoods to national political parties subverting courts, they want you to trust people less and consider joining their nonsense as a legitimate route forward...

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NotMiki
@NotMiki

I imagine these people as Doomguy in that one comic where he turns out to be the demon for realsies except instead of "rip and tear" they say "post and share"

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in reply to @lorenziniforce's post:

meritless-cur
@meritless-cur

This reminds me of a thread on this topic on another social network by Quinn Norton

People love to say "Don't look away!" then show you horror scenes of human suffering. As something of an expert on this sort of thing, let me tell you:

Look away.

The implicit story that we somehow respond to traumatic images/events with heroic action is just plain nonsense.

And of course whether it's police violence, human rights abuses, or a literal war going on right now, people on social media think the most important thing they can do is watch or make other people watch horrible things on digital devices, and then feel things.

People exposed to violent or traumatizing events will response with fight, flight, or freeze. That's not a moral failing, it's just straight up the mammalian nervous system. None of those are useful when you're in a position to either learn about an issue or render aid.

We did not evolve for media. We react to what we're sensing right now as if it were real and happening to us. Fun in a movie theater, not so much when suddenly watching human being suffer or die without any preparation for being in that situation.

It's one of the reasons I also tell people to not watch snuff videos on social media unless it is part of their job and they are on the clock when they're doing it.

To deal with an emergency or extraordinary situation well you need to compartmentalize emotion, not fall in.

That is the opposite of what people do to each other on social media, because we think the only way to change the world is subjecting ourselves and each other to mental trauma? It's nonsense, and it's causing more damage, not mitigating the evil situations of human suffering.

There is a place for being informed, and allowing that information to drive useful action. It's in education, it's in storytelling, it's built out of context, it's detached so as to not drain the learner, and ideally, has a call to action.
...Which results in useful action.

When we try to create action we need to be empowering those who we hope will act. We don't do that by depressing each other, screaming at people, showing them death and destruction -- with a few exceptions, that just paralyzes people and leads to inaction.

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ann-arcana
@ann-arcana

gestures emphatically Exactly! Traumatizing yourself on purpose is not helping anything or anyone.

A long time ago I read someone talk about how the best thing you can do whenever something like that gets shoved in your face is to walk through the steps of "does this affect me", "does it affect people I care about", and "can I do anything about it", because the process of stopping to evaluate your reaction will both help you diffuse the immediate emotional response, and decide how and if you can genuinely help instead of just freaking out.

Always take a moment to breathe.

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in reply to @HedgeMom's post:

gkrnours
@gkrnours

Things here in france got very political very fast. This pushed me into consuming more local media (specifically blast and là-bas si j'y suis) and catching up on old episode made me realize while I had a vague idea if what was happening abroad, we got a lot of crazy shit locally that totally did fly under my radar.

Like a guy who ended up minister of housing. He tried at least twice to make a law for jailing people who fail to pay they rent.

Or how they bundled minister of education, youngster, sport, olympic game and disabled olympic game and put at its head a woman who put her kid in a private school. This was made public on day one and lied about the reason and everyone called her bullshit.

That's local stuff that can happen because lot of people don't care and we should

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