Urban v's the Commentariat
- Thread starter Belushi
- Start date
Innit. I'm forever grateful that the internet didn't go mainstream until I was well in to my twenties.
NoXion
Craicy the Squirrel
So I take it you're absolutely certain that each and every one of these "kids" (and how do you know they're all kids? It seems more likely to me that they're adolescents, you know, that age at which one first starts having political opinions) will completely and fully grow out of this kind of Tumblr echo chamber without it having any kind of effect whatsoever on their later actions and thinking?
Am I to also understand that you think there is absolutely no link or avenue of potential influence between the commentariat and these identity politicians with training wheels?
I on the other hand am disinclined to believe that such things arise in a total vacuum. Where do kids get these ideas from, hmm?
Which other adolescents should we waste our time with, combing their social media for idiot things they've said?
And yes, of course people's adolescent musings inform them as adults - but I think it's much more likely that their grown up politics will be influenced by this crap if there's attention paid to it now than if they're ignored and left to work it out among themselves.
Seriously, google gloomgender - pretty much every single result is just someone going 'WTF?' - it's nothing anyone should give a shit about. Just some dramatic kid in eyeliner making a twat of themselves.
And yes, of course people's adolescent musings inform them as adults - but I think it's much more likely that their grown up politics will be influenced by this crap if there's attention paid to it now than if they're ignored and left to work it out among themselves.
Seriously, google gloomgender - pretty much every single result is just someone going 'WTF?' - it's nothing anyone should give a shit about. Just some dramatic kid in eyeliner making a twat of themselves.
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
sounds like a character class in AD&D
Fozzie Bear
Well-Known Member
I think gloomgender is exactly the kind of stupid shit that teenagers should be into.
Talking about this kind of crap in threads like this risks giving it legitimacy and validation IMO, as well as being a waste of time. I never hear about anything like this except when someone posts something about it here, with a 
- just like 99% of the other references to it you can find on the web.
But then what happens is it gets held up as typical of silly left-wing views, and used as a way of driving people away from considering real, important issues around gender and identity (and left wing stuff in general). It's nothing. Let 'em get on with it.
- just like 99% of the other references to it you can find on the web.But then what happens is it gets held up as typical of silly left-wing views, and used as a way of driving people away from considering real, important issues around gender and identity (and left wing stuff in general). It's nothing. Let 'em get on with it.
NoXion
Craicy the Squirrel
I wasn't suggesting that this thread be used to pick over the Tumblr postings of each and every angsty teen who thinks they're being politically progressive, just as I suspect that you think this thread would be a waste if we picked over the comments of every single web "journalist" who fancies themselves as the next Penny Dreadful. But to dismiss it all as "kids being kids" strikes me as going too far the other way. Why are they choosing this way of expressing themselves, and can it be purely a coincidence that they're choosing those forms at a time when this thread on the commentariat has reached 355 pages?
Do you really think that U75 is that influential that if we dare to discuss such things in even general terms, it'll spread across the web (let alone the world) with the alacrity of the pox in a bordello? Judging from polls and the general behaviour of the membership I didn't get the impression this was a site popular with teenagers.
As for "gloomgender", it strikes me as indentity politics taken to its logical extreme (for a certain value of "logical" in any case). Yes, the reaction from the vast majority is going to be WTF (as was my reaction), but that's merely the most obviously ridiculous cherry-red tip of the whole festering boil.
el-ahrairah
forward communism, forward gerbils!
i think i saw them at the Walthamstow standard in 1993
kids have always chosen things like this as ways to express themselves. It's just all there for people to pick over and laugh at now.
not at all - we have no influence whatsoever over what teenagers think. But we do perhaps reflect (and maybe influence? we can hope...) some trends in the wider left. I think it would be of benefit to us at least (and more charitable to the kids being laughed at) not to overstate the importance of teen goth idiocy and shrill student bubble politics. Plus, we can spend our time arguing about things that matter instead of kids stuff.
nope, it's just bollocks.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Back on topic (sort of) - there's some interesting points in this Mark Ames peice - when he's not whining about his old paper that is - i'm more interested in how this plays out in non-social media situations and the dynamics behind those encounters (i'm thinking back to that vid of those US students in a class protesting a while back) and how people not coming from that background would react if faced with this when say organising themselves around say, a housing selloff:
The geometry of censorship and satire
That’s because the Internet and social media have pretty much flattened whatever remained out here of the old media hierarchies with a new sort of horizontal dystopia. In theory, as we all know and have heard a bazillion times, the Internet and social media were supposed to bring something far better than the old vertical, top-down, elite distribution of media and journalism. Under the bad old ways, the media “elites” imposed conformity and consensus from the top-down, foisting their “elite” interests on the rest of us without any real debate. It was this vertical, “elitist” control over media and information that supposedly was the real cause of all of our political problems, and our political disasters (Iraq, financial crisis)—at least according to the popular cant of today. The solution to “elites” controlling our narratives is therefore supposed to be horizontal, decentralized structural power, i.e., the Internet, and especially social media—which, again, levels and flattens old media hierarchies and makes it possible for other non-elite viewpoints and narratives to break in.
All this Internet utopian cant about flattened, decentralized power networks—derived originally from corporate managerial theory, but that’s another depressing story—jibes nicely with one of the most enduring middle-class romantic dreams that we’ve inherited from the hippies and never quite shaken off: the dream of leaderless, horizontally-structured utopias in which power itself dissolves along with the old oppressive vertical hierarchies. It’s an enduring middle-class dream up to this day. If anything it’s grown stronger since the hippies turned their dream of horizontally-structured utopias into a series of disastrous real-world communes, before turning to corporate consulting about decentralizing corporate structures, a la Stewart Brand. This same romantic “horizontalism” framed the Occupy protests, both their spectacular start and their embarrassing failures; and more to the point, it’s the major premise in much of the cant you hear from cheerleaders for the Brave New Media.
But there’s another, darker aspect to horizontal power beyond the utopian cant—a new hyper-conformist culture accelerated by social media horizontalism. You see it most clearly on Twitter, which was just launching around the time that Sergei Dorenko riffed on the Western media’s horizontal censorship.
...
Twitter’s horizontalism does more than flatten out old elitist relationships (such as between reader and Twitter-engaged journalist)—it also flattens out time and space, cultures and contexts, and brains. It has a way of empowering credulous idiots and outrage addicts, who brandish their ignorance like a virtue. And reptilian ignorance is a virtue in social media’s horizontal model. Which is why, at some point, you figure, it’s not worth arguing with them. The whole platform can be as toxic as a Komodo Dragon’s gums.
...
Fact is, Swift today would be hounded off Twitter for “promoting child cannibalism as a solution to Irish poverty”; demagogic satire-shamers would trash Swift for “punching down, not up”—because as every social media Stalinist will tell you, “satire should punch up, not down.” And it’s all effected without the crude, violent methods used by the Kremlin censors—we do it to ourselves, thanks to our decentralized new utopia.
The geometry of censorship and satire
That’s because the Internet and social media have pretty much flattened whatever remained out here of the old media hierarchies with a new sort of horizontal dystopia. In theory, as we all know and have heard a bazillion times, the Internet and social media were supposed to bring something far better than the old vertical, top-down, elite distribution of media and journalism. Under the bad old ways, the media “elites” imposed conformity and consensus from the top-down, foisting their “elite” interests on the rest of us without any real debate. It was this vertical, “elitist” control over media and information that supposedly was the real cause of all of our political problems, and our political disasters (Iraq, financial crisis)—at least according to the popular cant of today. The solution to “elites” controlling our narratives is therefore supposed to be horizontal, decentralized structural power, i.e., the Internet, and especially social media—which, again, levels and flattens old media hierarchies and makes it possible for other non-elite viewpoints and narratives to break in.
All this Internet utopian cant about flattened, decentralized power networks—derived originally from corporate managerial theory, but that’s another depressing story—jibes nicely with one of the most enduring middle-class romantic dreams that we’ve inherited from the hippies and never quite shaken off: the dream of leaderless, horizontally-structured utopias in which power itself dissolves along with the old oppressive vertical hierarchies. It’s an enduring middle-class dream up to this day. If anything it’s grown stronger since the hippies turned their dream of horizontally-structured utopias into a series of disastrous real-world communes, before turning to corporate consulting about decentralizing corporate structures, a la Stewart Brand. This same romantic “horizontalism” framed the Occupy protests, both their spectacular start and their embarrassing failures; and more to the point, it’s the major premise in much of the cant you hear from cheerleaders for the Brave New Media.
But there’s another, darker aspect to horizontal power beyond the utopian cant—a new hyper-conformist culture accelerated by social media horizontalism. You see it most clearly on Twitter, which was just launching around the time that Sergei Dorenko riffed on the Western media’s horizontal censorship.
...
Twitter’s horizontalism does more than flatten out old elitist relationships (such as between reader and Twitter-engaged journalist)—it also flattens out time and space, cultures and contexts, and brains. It has a way of empowering credulous idiots and outrage addicts, who brandish their ignorance like a virtue. And reptilian ignorance is a virtue in social media’s horizontal model. Which is why, at some point, you figure, it’s not worth arguing with them. The whole platform can be as toxic as a Komodo Dragon’s gums.
...
Fact is, Swift today would be hounded off Twitter for “promoting child cannibalism as a solution to Irish poverty”; demagogic satire-shamers would trash Swift for “punching down, not up”—because as every social media Stalinist will tell you, “satire should punch up, not down.” And it’s all effected without the crude, violent methods used by the Kremlin censors—we do it to ourselves, thanks to our decentralized new utopia.
I'm not sure why it took Ames so long to figure this out. It's pretty obvious that you can't have a rational debate on Twitter, because rational debates require nuance and subtlety. Quite apart from the allegedly ignorant audience, there simply isn't room for a serious discussion on Twitter. If you try to have one there, you'll end up degrading your own argument with relentless simplification. Best left alone.
Theisticle
Well-Known Member
The mosque allegedly received death threats after Cathy Newman made some claims about being 'ushered' out of a mosque. CCTV tells a different story. She's apologised though, of course, no 'harm' done. In spite of her creating headlines as a result. But I'm sure this won't get picked as much.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/02/05/cathy-newman-mosque_n_6620026.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/02/05/cathy-newman-mosque_n_6620026.html
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
I was in the following mosque.
Gloomgender lol, leave em to it
It appears that several posters on here are Gloomgender, naming no names like:
Flavour
hang the bankers
"All this Internet utopian cant about flattened, decentralized power networks—derived originally from corporate managerial theory, but that’s another depressing story—jibes nicely with one of the most enduring middle-class romantic dreams that we’ve inherited from the hippies and never quite shaken off: the dream of leaderless, horizontally-structured utopias in which power itself dissolves along with the old oppressive vertical hierarchies.
Didn't realise corporate managerial theory was that old.
Didn't realise corporate managerial theory was that old.
Speak for yerself. Anything can be a gender now. I'm Drunkgender I am.
It's Oldgender.
J Ed
Follow Back Pro Expropriation
What a dickhead
Twatgender.
Actually I've found a great new gender: Neutrois. That's what I am: Neutroisgender. Just got to work on the dysphoria a bit, anyone got any tips?
rekil
to menny cranks
Laurie's contributions to the #AdviceForYoungJournalists mess on the twitter machine really are something. So something, she posted a storify of them.
Lo Siento.
Second As Farce
I note that "join a union" isn't on there.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
If you're a cub/fresh journalism grad then "pitch, pitch and pitch again" is likely to get you shit, not work, bearing in mind that the person on the other end of the phone will have already heard every pitch under the sun by about 10.00am. I'd recommend trying to sell a finished story, rather than pitching to get a story commissioned.
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