Notices by Siin (siin@pagan.plus)

@mapachin @adhdeanasl Thank you for adding this -- you're absolutely right. My response was inaccurate and ignored (as many of these conversations about humanity's "shift" to agriculture tend to -- my colonized brain talking) Indigenous agricultural practices that are ignored in most anthropological discussions because they didn't always "look" the same (among other reasons).

It's interesting to consider the crops being produced and how that impacts the outcome or evolution of social structures, I hadn't heard/read that idea anywhere but am really fascinated to learn more. It makes sense, definitely, that different necessary modes of growing different foods would have different outcomes as to how people interacted with one another within communities.

Thank you!

@adhdeanasl This feels resonant, it's so difficult to exit transactional modes of thinking and depending on cultural context I think many people simply just *don't* have another framework for considering "value" or mutuality in spaces intrinsically rather than economically or in a way that's skewed towards their interests.

Mutuality has to exist, right? In an interdependent functional space? But there *should* be recognition of intrinsic human value *first and foremost* -- I feel like this recognition is the best way to create the necessary give & take within any community/system where there's also understanding that sometimes what someone "brings to the table" won't exist (because they have health issues or need space, to give some examples) and that doesn't make them a less *valuable* person or member of the group.

Ultimately though I think that social dysfunction skews towards economic or productive/production value because that's how our society would like us to measure ourselves, first of all, and it's a hard trap to remove oneself from.

@adhdeanasl It is very strange. Something that never existed until agriculture, until the "standard model" of human sexuality really became a thing (when property ownership made paternal certainty desirable)
With its far reaching implications in our lives, yeah. Weird. Interesting thoughts, thank you for sharing

I've been on BlueSky for 10 minutes and... (An Essay)

I get it now. I used to be like "Why can't people just stop using Twitter/Instagram/WhateverTheFuck? If they need social media, why can't they just use Mastodon? Why doesn't Pixelfed get more users? It's literally the same UI".

But I get it. I've been on BlueSky for what? 10 minutes? And I can feel my brain chemistry changing. Mastodon is a coffee shop. It doles out caffeine. You still get the little dopamine hit when you get notifications, you get that kind of substitute for human interaction that feels nice. But Twitter and BlueSky and Instagram and these apps from companies with access to inordinate amounts of data to build algorithms designed by psychologists to literally be As Addicting as Possible? These apps are dealing meth. But they've pressed it like ecstasy and made it cute. They've made it socially acceptable. But let me tell you something.

Ever since I logged onto BlueSky, I've been thinking about it. I don't *think* about Mastodon all day. "Oh my god what should I post next? What will get me followers? Would this be funny? Is this on brand?" I don't think about it. I come here because I have interactions with people without the pretext that they're engaging with me to get engagement in return. Because sometimes in my life I feel isolated and because this substitute for human interaction feels nice.

I thought I'd get BlueSky (despite their horrifying privacy policy - more on that later) because there are some Things Going On that make me need to get a little more serious about making money. But fuck, if this is the only way? I'm taking a vow of poverty, or getting a day job.

Because then there's their privacy policy. Access to websites you visit before and after, identifying information about your device, purchases you make, and it goes on. But even that level of invasive access should give us pause, right? I have a lot of things set up on my computer that mitigate *some* of that access, but then let's think about how we give the app access to our photos and videos (all of them, not just what we post in the moment), our device's camera and microphone (not just while we're using it) and so on. And then think about how our society grooms us to believe (and maybe in some circumstances this belief is true) that we *need* these sites for access, for engagement, to make money.

The price of not working in a warehouse is every piece of information we can reasonably gather about you to use and sell however we please, for whatever purpose, indefinitely, and it never expires and we don't pay you for it.

This *is* exploitation and my ancestry makes me pause, horrified, at what this information *will* eventually come back and do to us when inevitably the wrong person/group gets ahold of it. And that's pretending like we even know who has our data and what they're doing with it, right? Because we don't know. We really don't. Call me paranoid, say that I shouldn't worry if I have nothing to hide, give me all of the excuses you've been programmed to give about why we *should not* worry about a surveillance state that *we* pay for. Then come online and rant about how dangerous governments are and fail to see the irony in it all.

And I'm a hypocrite. I bought in, too. For personal gain. After criticizing others for years for doing the same thing. It's true. But the interesting side effect is that I've gained so much insight into why we're so addicted to sensationalism, why we're so addicted to these sites, why we're so unwell in general. The kinds of things my feed is inundated with, especially since I haven't curated it yet and it's showing me what it wants to? My god. We cannot have a healthy society when this is what we're consuming all day every day. There is no way to be a healthy person, I believe, when consuming this all day every day.

So anyways. As always, perhaps a bit sanctimonious. But I'm a little dumbfounded at the experience of all of this after years off of corporate social.

#BlueSky #Meditations

White social justice spaces, and for some reason queer spaces in general, I've found, do this in a few ways:

1) Tokenism: people of color are welcome, if they're acceptable, and palatable. Points if they're "exotic" looking and extremely queer (but you have to be OUT -- if you try to distance yourself from queer labels for safety or any other reason you're unpalatable and threatening)
2) If you're mixed you often aren't given space. You aren't "colored" enough to make the group look inclusive, and you aren't really white, so there's this kind of odd communication divide that they can't get themselves to bridge because you aren't "colored" enough for them to two-dimensionalize you and force themselves to listen to you as an object that represents an ideology they attempt to espouse materialistically
3) If you're poor but you don't talk about it in a structural way, but you throw the word "poor" around in a fun, nonthreatening, non-structural way like "I'm so poor right now" then you're okay but if you start talking about growing up poor and poverty things people get really uncomfortable and shove you out (kids from upper middle class families would rather live with rats as a performance than listen to you talk about how living in a space that allows rats is traumatic because you actually had them growing up because you grew up in neighborhoods where trash was an issue)
4) Trauma porn gets points: sometimes you can edge your way into a space by validating white notions of marginalization but only if you provide graphic descriptions of the trauma you've faced in your life. This has multiple functions: it confirms to white people that they're better off and it also allows them to then later talk about you and how pobresita, poor thing, the system really *is* just so terrible, let's throw an event about it. It also confirms an ideology based around victimization and allows them to continue to avoid accountability because it's the world that's messed up and there's nothing they can really do about it

Meditation | 08-19

Small, functional communities are positive. That's it. Discussions of tribalism are often cast in a negative light: yet we ignore the reasons why people in our society are so desperate for a small, functional society that has space for them that they riot over sports teams or political leaders.

Small, functional communities are positive, when they're functional. Small, nonfunctional communities within an otherwise heterogeneous society that has no infrastructure to allow them to mediate conflict between other small, nonfunctional communities are often toxic. That's it. There are absolutely degrees of conflict and harm caused by this phenomena, but at least in my experience this always holds true.

Small, nonfunctional communities include the white, hyperqueer Los Angeles "underground art scene" and other white, hyperqueer spaces that are extremely liberal, extremely progressive, and extremely quick to speak for people of color but who will, using total manipulation that they think that they've earned by being a part of this community, that they think they've earned by finding a "seat" at the "table" of the marginalized, express extraordinarily toxic behavior towards non-white queer and non-queer people.

My relationship with LGBTQ+ communities has always been mired in a lack of a common cultural basis and awkward power dynamics that are really confusing when you consider that I'm effectively white if you don't know any better. My relationship with arts communities has also always been mired in a lack of a common cultural basis and awkward power dynamics that become really confusing when assumptions are made about who speaks for social justice and the place of an artist who learned how to paint by doing illegal street art and who learned to draw from garage tattooers. Because ultimately, that artist has no place in arts communities, no matter how much they enjoy going online or raving in person about classism, and racism, and anti-capitalist work.

So much of whiteness is narcissism. I know, because I straddle worlds. I know, because I am an alien, a chameleon who fits in just enough until you start to see the color of the skin shift and the history of the organism show through. So much of white social justice movements is narcissism, and there is a significant portion of white queerdom that is based on declaring marginalization as a maladaptive way to deal with the guilt of being exposed to education on power dynamics and critical theories without the underlying psychological basis to properly understand one's role in these systems. It's easy to repeat twitter taglines about decentering yourself and doing the work and listening to oppressed people so much that you never shut up and listen, so much that you never shut up and consider whether or not you have a good reason to be speaking about racism or power dynamics in the first place. How much of your social justice is based around attenuating your own discomfort, your own guilt, your own fear of alienation if you don't get on board the right bandwagon fast enough?

So I went to this gathering at the house in Los Angeles that acted like my home for years after I had to flee my neighborhood, and was stared at like an insect that absolutely did not belong there. A curiosity, a disgrace. The friends that live there, completely oblivious to this treatment because ultimately I've come to realize that they are the white queers desperate to distance themselves from the very idea that they could be privileged -- distance themselves from the very concept that they are not perfect social justice warriors, perfect allies, that their friends are homogeneous and cruel, maladaptive in their desperate longing for belonging that with one side of their mouth they talk about allyship and how everyone is valid and welcome and out the other side determine who stays and who goes along the lines of petty labels and elitism. A non-functional community performing poverty, adults rejecting adulthood, twenty-somethings with backup plans and trust funds leading poor white queer kids into an endless cycle of real poverty and pretending that they're all actually in the same boat. Raving about marginalization to distance themselves from the reality that they have options, that they chose this, to distance themselves from accountability.

How long are we really going to pretend that these are the people we trust to speak for us?

And white LGBTQ+ community members: before you crucify me, please take a long, hard look at your community, and make sure I'm wrong before you do so. Stop talking about "doing the work", and actually do it.

#Meditations