
Mutant, librarian, poet, union rabble rouser, dog, Ashkenazi Jewish. Neuroweird, bodyweird, mostly sleepy.
I write about transformative justice, community, love, Judaism, Neurodivergence, mental health, Disability, geography, rivers, labor, and libraries; through poetry, opinionated essays, and short fiction.
I review Schoolhouse Rock! songs at @PropagandaRock
ok i actually just had a brain blast about how someone could put forward such an obvious false equivalence as 'people being loud and inappropriate in public' is the same as 'people posting mandatory CW posts that you can easily avoid ever looking at'. of course it all comes back to punishment.
ok so: the experience of the person existing in public having to listen to someone being disruptive is obviously completely different from a website user who can just not open posts with CWs that will upset them, but the experience of the person yelling and the person posting are somewhat similar. From a carceral logics point of view, they are both "getting away with" doing something "bad" and deserve to be removed from public life/made incapable of doing the bad thing.
basically, oops, their mask slipped. preventing harm is irrelevent, what they care about is punishing ppl they think are evil by excluding them. a system that prevents harm from being done without punishment is unacceptable to them, so thats why that completely incoherent analogy made sense to them
i have basically no horse in the race when it comes to social punishment through interpersonal exclusion/ostracization. yes, a lot of the "behave in the public square of the internet" can be likened to control and discipline, but i'm also not interested in punishing people who seem, to me, overly invested in the rules of social decorum and punishing what-if scenarios. there are other people who know more than i do about that, and i don't think my opinion is worth much, there. i recuse myself.
i think what bums me out the most, however, is that there is no real outlet for people to create their own spaces online; they have to rely on platforms where they can carve out a space for themselves, but then are potentially threatened by platform governance. websites and social media platforms are rarely publicly accessible but privately navigable, because that threatens the infinite growth model. so a general understanding of websites from the past 15 years are is "this website is for Everyone!" even though no website can be one-size fits all. not only that, they shouldn't be. basically, "platform migration" should be so much simpler, easier, and individually controlled. where do we feel agency online? how do we share that with others? what is the alternative to the town square model?