Thread by @gravislizard

it doesn't really need commentary but i am yet again nauseated by the way that corporations dehumanize us by constantly implying and acting as if our lives are movies

google facebook et al know that their "your year in review!" slideshow generators frequently produce upsetting reminders of awful experiences but it's *crucial* to their strategy that they keep doing this so that most people feel like characters in movies

because tons of people only post heavily edited forms of their life on FB and IG, they can usually get away with this, and then the slideshow tells you that you spent all year drinking with friends, putting on fake smiles on a string of vacations, et cetera

put differently: this feature enhances the behavior people already had, wherein they use services like IG to create a version of themselves that has no troubles and, more importantly, no boredom, no downtime

a movie character doesn't sit in silence for 30 minutes as they drive from their apartment to their workplace to continue a phone argument. they're just there. movie magic makes us forget that there'd be a big chunk of downtime that would have altered the tone of the situation

IG et al are how people apply movie magic to themselves. you didn't walk twenty minutes across Cap Hill and wait to order at a bar. one photo you're drinking mai tais on Broadway; the next you're drinking mai tais on Pike.

the edited version of your night was 8 hours of continuously being at the absolute peak of your social life. there was no moment when everyone was looking at their phone, not talking, not feeling Hype. that didn't happen. it was Party!!!!

the Year In Review slideshow is designed to enhance this. to show you that at no moment in 2018 were you sad, bored, on the phone trying to pay a bill you don't understand, stressed about work, stressed about your car

FB/IG and Google's continuously laughable me-too social features are all intended to make your phone and your PC wellsprings of reminders that you are stardust, that you are a hollywood creature

If your car accident photos or your dying dog show up in there, that's your fault for using the website wrong. You were supposed to only post Party.

I think this shit is revolting and inhuman on a level so obvious I actually can't really put words to it. I just gesture speechlessly at it, like "are you serious"

This is, to me, an enormous amount of what I mean when I refer to someone as a "normie"

That word could almost specifically mean "person who presents a permanently positive face to the world as the marketing industry desires"

why? why do so? what possible benefit is there in someone knowing you, but not knowing of your pain and struggles if that's what's going on? what compels people to only post Live Laugh Love Shit?

social acceptance, presumably. i have no idea because I don't know anyone who's like this, because I can't talk to them, because the substance of my conversations with all of my peers simply are not compatible with "How Are You Oh I'm Fine" Culture

it is very frankly and starkly true that when someone asks me "how've you been" I usually tell the truth unless they're literally compelled to speak to me (service worker, etc) and don't deserve to have to deal with my emotional burdens

I think this is true of most of the people in My Culture, that we do not see it as socially unacceptable to respond with "oh the last couple weeks have been hell" and to just *go into it* and I think a lot of that is because we know we won't get alienated

I've worked with so many people (work is the only place I meet Facebook People) who have just... never, seemingly, encountered anything negative in their lives. No chronic pain, no car failing smog, no roommate trouble.

If you tell them something awful is going on with you they have *nothing to say.* they're completely incapable of relating. i always wonder how this can be possible.

how can I tell from across the street whether someone has ever been sick for a month straight and nearly lost their job? I don't know, but I can.

I think that just breaks the ice in a way that fundamentally separates our cultures. I think this is why it's so hard to explain to our families and coworkers things like racism and casual homophobia.

I think that We, those who have been sick for a month, who have had our jobs jeopardized for want of a car that cost $100 more than the only one we could get, are simply less capable of seeing life as Clean Until Proven Dirty

We simply do not assume that each others week, month, year, has gone well. There is enormous room in even our casual conversations for really frank descriptions of really intense and heartbreaking struggles.

It is not awkward to have a stranger at a party tell me that they have to get plasma injected every other week or they'll literally die, or that they almost didn't come because they were chain-vomiting.

You know that awful racist saw "we need a good plague"? I feel that way, but I don't want anyone to die. I just want 85% of the population to be Laid Up for a month. 28 days at death's door and everyone emerges and Understands

suddenly it's okay to discuss with work acquaintances exactly how much of your skin fell off because *everyone* has been through this. it would put this enormous dent in peoples ability to believe their own narrative of their life being a beautiful, perfect party

but i wonder, having said it, how much truth there is to this. is it that all these people have relatively beautiful lives, or are they much more similar to me and it's just that marketing got to them first?

i had no kind of normal childhood even before I got chronically ill. I was never susceptible to the bulk of the advertising telling me to see myself as a Beautiful Person. Even when I started partying I never saw myself that way.

Had I gone to high school and been convinced by others to care about clothes and who looks the most beautiful in a contrived photo, would my illnesses have the same effect on my psyche? Or would I just lie and conceal them?

I think that mass marketing presents some surprising new challenges for humanity. One of them is that FB/IG can prey on people in this way, and it doesn't look harmful, and we have *zero* tools for doing anything about it.

Our culture is dying a death of a thousand cuts as advertising companies attack us from all angles at once. Are "year in review" slideshows worth outlawing, or protesting? Of course not. Even some of you take genuine pleasure from them, and obviously that's fine.

The problem is when you stack that *on top* of everything else, the relentless onslaught of false positivity and tools and pressures to self-style as a perfect happy person

The problem is essentially that Facebook is a shitty person who is a bad influence on our friends and families. They're the Ted that hangs out and constantly talks shit about poor people, and he doesn't *quite* go far enough to get punched

So you say "Sis, look, that Ted guy - he's making you *miserable.* The stuff he says is horrible." and she literally doesn't see it. to her it's just "he has some ideas about how food stamps should be regulated" and *that's not enough to throw someone out of your life*

maybe for a leftist, but for someone who isn't radicalized, who doesn't see people as With Us Or Against Us in the way that we realize is a sad fact of our lives, that's absurd. it's absurd on its face.

"you want me to cut my old friend out of my life... because he thinks food stamps shouldn't buy candy bars? what the fuck is wrong with you"

yeah, seriously, what is?

it's asinine to suggest that. but if you stack up *everything else* Ted says, you assemble this picture of a person who has a reason to hate everyone. that's a laundry list of "little" problems though, and it sounds shitty when you say it out loud.

FB/IG etc. are saturated in Feel Good in a way that's hard to see, but boith in their design and in their culture and *especially* in their automation, they make it clear you aren't supposed to be Real on them.

The trouble is that to a lot of people it just sounds like I'm advocating complaining all the time as a way of life. I mean, I pretty much. Am. If you have complaints I think you should say them, generally. But our culture is so heavily biased against that.

culture says "you should be mostly happy and your dissatisfactions should be things you can treat dispassionately" which conflicts with my worldview which is that life is largely a series of hurdles and our personalities are built out of how we take them and what they do to us

It's not at all original to say "we shouldn't just pretend to be happy all the time!! sheeple!!!!" but I do think we need to do something about the new brand of continuous, uninterrupted reinforcement that FB/IG provide.