simsa04 (simsa04@gnusocial.net)'s status on Saturday, 10-Dec-2022 08:55:45 JST
simsa04To me #UFoI (https://ufoi.org) sounds a bit like the old "Underground Press Syndicate" (later: "Alternative Press Syndicate") of the 1960s to 1980s. In the UPS, many alternative magazines joined to redistribute content from each other (without charge, only an annual membership fee and voucher copies to the media they reprinted from required). The effect was that even tiny magazines could reprint articles by "more famous" authors or sources, which overall lead to an explosion of alternative magazines primarily in the U.S. but also in Europe and the UK.
The advantage of #UFoI may primarily be that very small instances can better "see" (and are easier "seen" by) the #fediverse. That seems to me a far more interesting angle than the trite virtue blocking discussions.
The flipside is that #UFol obviously could become another silo (in addition to the already existing one of the Mastodon run network). But I don't think that the split of the #Fediverse into mutually excluding sub-diverses can be halted anyway. Virtue blocking of instances is already too advanced and widespread, and with that the attitudes regarding what instances are and what they should do.
Not really. But perhaps keep in mind that the "promise" of technology automating everything was at its height *before* "mass media consumption culture", i.e., the consumer attitude vis-à-vis all things involving a screen.
The "screen age" (a more adequate term than "Anthropocene") doesn't keep people just hooked and bombarded with content; not just convinces people in tech that in order for them to be able to spend even more time with the screen they only need to come up with more problems the solution of which demands more screen connected technology; but that due to their screen interaction the world beomes something recreated on the screen. "Nature" or "world", becoming man-made via screen-ification, turns reduced, stale, boring, and ugly. And how can you care for something that is such? You can't. So as the "world" / "nature" turns out that way, people (naturally) turn away from the (purported) ugliness the "world" has become... and retreat into their own paranoia. No place for relaxation there, quite the opposite.
In all, if "screen age" is a plausible suggestion to you to answer your question, I can share a few book titles. If you think that's the wrong approach, then I would need more info from you to see where your hunches are pointing to.
simsa04 (simsa04@gnusocial.net)'s status on Friday, 09-Dec-2022 08:56:11 JST
simsa04My two jobs (dishwasher in a restaurant and garbage collector in a nursing home) are pretty demanding right now. The main problem is less the physical strain but the lack of time: I can no longer read books. For two weeks I want to read Bálint Magyar's "Post-Communist Mafia State" (2016) and I either find no time or am to exhausted to read. Things won't get better till, perhaps, early January as I have double shifts during the Christmas season and New Year's Eve. If you want to keep people stupid, force them to wage-slave...
« In a moment of apparent tension, the family of US Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who suffered strokes and died of natural causes one day after responding to the January 6 insurrection, refused to shake hands with either House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy or Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell when they accepted the medal.
Gladys Sicknick, mother of fallen officer Brian Sicknick, was asked by CNN why she didn’t shake McCarthy and McConnell’s hands at the gold medal ceremony.
“They’re just two-faced,” she said to CNN. “I’m just tired of them standing there and saying how wonderful the Capitol police is and then they turn around and … go down to Mar-a-Lago and kiss his ring and come back and stand here and sit with – it just, it just hurts.” »
McConnell and McCarthy deserve that, and obviously can't care less. Disgusting pricks.
When people stop wage-slaving and start "fulfillment labour", things won't change much, as the fulfillment-labour (the self-realization via activities one always wanted to pursue) has still been defined in terms of work and jobs. That is: As soon as people stop wage-slaving, the "real work" they thought they've been "meant" to do, disappears as well. Which is why many people in unemployment suffer so much.
IMO, at the base lies a pretty simply question: As people learnt to "define" themselves via their wage-slaving/job/fulfillment-labour, their personality crumbles when they are no longer capable of doing that. Thus the important question becomes:
"Who am I when I can no longer define myself via my job/fulfillment-labour?"
In order for people to get rid of their addiction to work (*not*: workaholism, but their dependence on defining themselves via their activities and achievements), the 4-day working week will be a necessary step towards making people incrementally get used to a state of being in which they don't "define" themselves via their activity any more.
The next step is the dissolution of "defining through one's own activity" towards "defining through activity at all", regardless whether it's "here" or "there". Then definitions like those through ones's relationships, what one has in common with others, etc., may arise
Only then are people allowed to take up a pen or a chisel again. :-) When their activity is beyond addiction.
Still standing, tenacious vis-à-vis change, full of appeals to practical constraints and force. The world, I mean, not the smiles, at times, esp. when things reappear in a different light, deeping understanding and appreciation – for that very same old world.
To me, writing in English comes naturally (irrespective of the grammatical and lexical quality of my sentences). Although it often borders on Denglish, writing in my native tongue always felt awkward and like I'm suffering from autoglossophobia – the fear of one's own langauge. In English I feel far more at ease.
I can understand that people like to switch languages, even in one sentence, in particular when it comes to precision in describing things or evoking feelings. But I rarely do that now. I had this inclination more often when I was more fluent in Spanish than I am today, so that I could switch between three languages. Still, German has been the least favorable one of all three.
Sorry for the awful typos... "Superiority" may have been the wrong term, "exceptionality" seems a better fit. And from here, the path towards a national agenda was open, at least in Germany. Language preservation is a different matter, done for different reasons other than brute nationalism. (Especially with the constant threat of assimilation by eastern neighbours.). On the other hand, which culture does not define itself in terms of its language? The loss of one's native language seems to me to be always a culture- and identity threatening factor.
Yes, I this aspect of language promotion due to a numerically small group of native speakers in mind was on my mind when I suggested the bivalnece of such endeavours: Reviving (or preserving) a language and the risk of such projects being drawn into nationalist agendas. But perhaps I am too wary about this possibility because of the history of German "Sprachgesellschaften" ("language societies") in the baroque period which not only tried to pin down a genalogy of High German to one of the four original languages ("Urspachen") but by doing so tried to foster a sense of German superiority over other European nations.
> For me, this commitment to geographical, language-based spaces is in contradiction to what attracts me to the internet in the first place.
Seconded. And, with regard to the Estonian Mastodon instance, "communities" created in that way seem to be created to enhance feelings of national pride and identity. Even if it is done to promote the use of Estonian language, it's exploitability for (and by) nationalist causes speasks against pursuing this path.
I'm really guessing here. Keep in mind that I use a VPN which at times is rejected by major media websites because it is deemed to perform too many requests.