I demand a discourse that is either more meaningful and important or much, much more funny
The way certain phrases/concepts like "'brain worms" and "twitter brain" and "brain rot" and social media "detox" as deployed by some types of person on mastodon and cohost is somewhat eyebrow worthy. Like, I'm not going to call folks "thought police" about it, but you're (jokingly or not) saying, "you're mentally ill (derogatory) for this."
In the annals of looks, that is not one of the great ones.
Judging people for feeling the wrong things and wanting the wrong things is a hefty task that should be undertaken thoughtfully, especially if you aren't clearly coming from a place of compassion1.
BTW this absolutely overlaps with issues of monoculture vs. diversity on these platforms in a way that is obvious when you consider that some marginalized communities have found it much easier to thrive on "worse" platforms.
I feel like the response to this from a lot of folks might be that they are speaking in part to their experiences of how certain things are bad for their own brains and how they have benefited from distance from those things. That is fine, the issue is when and how you project that experience onto others.
Pointing to someone and saying, "you're like the worse version of me from before I got better" is very loaded. Not saying it's never called for, but if you deploy this kind of rhetoric carelessly, it is likely to be more harmful than beneficial.
I think the other obvious response is that some things are designed to prey upon our brains. It's not unreasonable to assert that venture capitalism funded social media is incentivized to make us ill. But all sites are hellsites. We exist under many constant forms of oppression and exploitation constantly. White supremacy also breaks your brain, and you brought that here with you, because you cannot escape structural oppression. (You can resist it, but you cannot get away from it.) There's no such thing as an inherently nontoxic space.
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By which I mean...what I said. There are people to whom it is appropriate to be cruel, but cruelty ought to be deployed with intention and self-awareness.
because any time inter-site discourse is happening, I just see so much weird fucking online DSM shit being projected by users onto other users and I don't think it's helpful in any way