the missing piece of this puzzle is that millennials and gen z have been systematically alienated from all levers of power in society. there are no politicians speaking to us (only over us, around us), none of the political parties are training us to take over from the aging ruling class. despite millennials pushing into their 40s now, we're still treated as the terminally immature "me" generation, a bunch of entitled gold-star-for-trying whiners who don't appreciate the finer details of adulthood (ie we see that the con is a con and they absolutely cannot allow us to interrupt the con). so much of the mania around interrogating problematic texts comes down to the depressing fact that media is the only social object that still responds to us. corporations aren't accessible, politicians aren't accessible, most journalists aren't accessible, they all just do shit and build consent for bad ideas that hurt everyone and they say they do it for us because we want it and then ignore everyone who says they don't.
but if i get mad at an artist online, that artist might get mad right back. that's a dynamic relationship. that's something i have the ability to affect.
corporations like disney have done a spectacular job training us to have religious brand loyalty, to value icons over artists, to convince us that everything is fine as long as the right people are in power. seriously, most disney movies are about how hereditary monarchy is good actually. it's weird and gross and i feel a little crazy that it doesn't get talked about more.
online is the only place that feels like it belongs to us, and you can't read tone into written words, you can't have a face to face conversation, so all information is emotionally neutral. in that context, everything that disagrees with you is a potential threat to your home. when the only thing that belongs to you is entertainment, and someone comes along who tries to do something to that entertainment that you vehemently dislike, the only response some folks can summon up is "justice."
people are messy. people NEED to be messy, and fuck up, and make mistakes. we need grumpy cantankerous assholes just as much as we need starry-eyed shonen protagonist wannabes. if we had more public spaces you didn't have to pay to access, more comprehensive public transit, cheaper housing and food so you could work less and hang out with people more irl, and if our democracy actually responded to the needs of younger generations, this problem would be so much less pervasive. we don't just need better moderation and more empathetic/permissive/live-let-live attitudes about people we disagree with (that don't cause or intend to cause material harm on actual human beings, that's an important distinction), we need to claw all our public infrastructure the absolute fuck out of the hands of profit-driven private interests, so that we can actually do something about the dreadful state of online media literacy and regulate this online thing so that our spaces can't be interrupted every six months by another rich jackass with a gambling addiction. we need actual digital stability and platforms that are publicly controlled if we ever expect to actually do something about this shit
