Happy Friday, Idiots

The year kicked off with my favorite type of online interaction, favorite type here being a bad thing. TikTok user Tamara posted about a fairly simple concept: having a visual representation of the passage of time so she can better feel how far into the year she is and motivate herself to do more with her time. The medium selected was 365 buttons in one container, and each day one of that number being deposited into a second container. It’s cute! It’s a cute idea (I have no idea how to reasonably acquire 365 buttons but that’s not my problem, that’s Tamara’s problem). A flurry of interaction, comments finding it also cute and interesting, then comments demanding explanation of how exactly it works. A desire to find a trend within this idea started to fester. Tamara wasn’t into it. In response to the clamor, she said “it only has to make sense to me for me to do it and I don’t feel like explaining it to anyone else.” Which, fair. Funny, even. But it was deemed a bratty, ungrateful (ungrateful for what???) response. You can’t win!

It’s just another day on the internet. Users poisoned by instant access to public figures, shuttling through the digital space and banging against the windows of private citizens, demanding the same curated intimacy. The average netizen’s confusion is, as ever, rooted in being trained to think any face encountered in the town square has made the same contract as the person who’s job is to be known. Tamara’s response to the virality was fascinating in that it was a rejection of being known. A true harbinger of the great logging off and digital detox that we keep threatening. It was a public post, but not with the intention of leading a charge but rather a general ask for input, improvement, some ideas. A communal and collaborative approach to the internet, something I almost forgot could happen. Kind of sucks that SNL did a sketch about her. Bright side: SNL’s idea of topicality is the sketch comedy equivalent of a bank shoehorning “6 7” into its marketing, so a sketch is proof that the culture at large has long since moved on. Godspeed Tamara, I am so fascinated how you sourced all those buttons, but that’s none of my business.

Just started this book by David Boarder Giles. Like a lot of leftist, anti-capitalist reading, it’s a lot of things I already knew or felt on an instinctual level. So there’s a little bit of, how do I put this, I feel like I’m being pitched something I’ve already agreed to. It gets a little annoying. It’s good to get data, though. Stats about food waste are helpful, especially when put into the context of how much money goes into maintaining the US as an imperialist war machine hell bent on murdering the world while letting its citizens starve. Book opens with dumpster diving in Seattle, which is hilarious because the very first thing on Food Not Bombs’ FAQ is a refutation against the suggestion FNB dumpster dives. They definitely had to put that there because of A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People. Kind of like the Mormons having to say on their site they don’t believe they’ll get their own planet because of Book of Mormon.

It’s an interesting read so far, it is kind of spurring me to want to figure out how to get involved in food security in my neighborhood. There’s a food pantry nearby but it’s on a church’s property, which I know from talking to folks can be a huge deterrent. Finding a way to set up a pantry not attached to a religious org might be worth my time, who knows. Frankly, I think there should be a free breakfast program in every neighborhood, which is an idea I’m lifting from what I’ve been reading about the Young Lords. That and a homework hour in the evenings. Kids need to eat, kids need a quiet place to figure out fractions. …I’ll email my local library.

POLITICO: Caroline McCarthy writes about the new media landscape shaping how politics are done and won. Focusing on shock jock candidates, the hybrid digital-and-IRL grassroots campaign of Zohran Mamdani, and the value of having a clear and definite policy when running as a candidate. In my opinion, it’s all a matter of branding. The item on market can be eye-catching and loud, but if there’s nothing of substance to back it up, no true authenticity, the consumer can smell it and the consumer will abandon it. We’ve long since been in the era of politician-as-product, our own political parties operate more or less like NFL rivals. This piece takes recent examples of this and presents it in a digestible manner (it doesn’t sound as tinfoil hat as I often do).

THE FACE: in a piece that teeters on the edge of Hunter S. Thompson at the Kentucky Derby, journalist Biz Sherbert visits the University of Alabama to get to the source of #RushTok. There she encounters the true curation of gender performance. Biz flows in and out of these youth spaces, observing the spun sugar structured pageant of femineity for the benefit of a bunch of spoiled boys, hoping to ensnare them romantically. And within the same moment, she is warned away from these same boys, the threat of rohypnol hovers like a poison cloud over their pressed chinos and sport jackets. It’s amazing that most of the girls spoken to only went to college for the opportunity to marry and live at the financial mercy of a rapist.

…and I’m literally always saying that!!