Notices by Mx. Aria Stewart (aredridel@kolektiva.social), page 2

@Daojoan I'm asking about the other end of the data: not what they use as a search engine, but the major mode of _using tiktok_; it's presuming that search is the dominant mode of information access, rather than asking what modes people use. Given that, yeah, you don't get good information about tiktok because while it has search, its search is bad and it's not really how you use it.

Researching this is pretty hard to do well. What's the source of data you're citing, btw?

@pettter ooh yeah we have a marching band tradition separate from military bands, with different, often simpler music. Military band music really puts people through their paces!

@pettter yeah, American. Interesting having clarinets! They’re a rarity here in marching

@pettter marching band for one, where woods are absent save flute. Not always but it’s a weird case.

@pettter the saxophone gets called brass in a lot of contexts

You've got bugles, saxhorns, alphorns, saxophones, euphoniums, a zillion varieties of horn and maybe reeded horn, in allll kinds of sizes, reduced to a standard-ish selection for a particular era of western European music. What are the lines between these things? Fuckin' arbitrary. In context composers would pick what they thought people might have access to (or as a 'watch this, this is for THAT weird fuckin' instrument), or because there was a standard set for a particular military band

So why are the categories what they are? Barely consistent mutual agreement.

Okay you know what's an example of social construction?

Brass instruments.

Like, we know what a trumpet, a trombone and a tuba are right? Nice tidy categories, neatly separate functions?

WELL LET ME TELL YOU

Are all horns brasses? No.

Are all brasses horns? Also no.

Are all brasses made of brass? Also no.

Are they all bugled? Nope. Do you play with an embouchre? not always. Do they all have reeds? Not even predominantly.

@mekkaokereke Oh my word this. I keep realizing that no constructive engagement will work ... which means that intentional or not, the racists drove the conversation off, and likely find this an acceptable outcome.

What if we just replaced the interstate system with trains?

Subtootin' the obvious here but

Nazis aren't the big problem.

The problem is "nice" people who reinforce the status quo.

Oh my word, people! Having a feeling is not in and itself wrong! It's just information your brain is giving you about your life and situation!

You don't need to feel bad because you're having a feeling even if someone else’s situation is obviously more important. You get to have your feelings! It may or may not be appropriate to like, act on that feeling with the other person, there's a thousand selfish acts, sure. But having the feeling itself isn't one of them!

So someone cancelled plans because someone died, and you feel sad or disappointed? Fair! Cancelled plans suck! You get to be sad and disappointed! Maybe don't go asking them for comfort, maybe go deal with it with other people or make other plans or do what you need to take care of yourself, or push past and take care of them.

But you get to feel it. It's still your brain saying “Hey, this was important to you! It sucks!”

Too many people in my life need to understand this.

Your emotions get to be independent of other people's. Entirely. They are YOURS. The things that go on inside your head are _yours_. You don't owe them to anyone, you don't have to change them for anyone. Your ideas, your feelings, everything. It’s all yours.

And then, when you take care of that and realize that they are in fact yours, you can much more wisely choose when and how to share them instead of being in constant conflict.

@emilygorcenski Yeah and it's bad.

@emilygorcenski If you give corporate entities moderation powers, they use them broadly. That's what I'm saying.

It's not a slippery slope, it's an attractive feature.

@emilygorcenski Yeah. It takes careful law, rather than punting the decision onto corporate entities.

<small>If you let Tier 1 ISPs have content moderation decisions, the first thing they will eliminate is adult content, most vulnerable sex workers first.</small>

@aral Ping me any time! I love thinking about this stuff, and I'm willing to help be a foil to make things be more deeply considered!

@aral You're welcome! I know I'm disagreeing but I don't want to be antagonistic at all here. This is such important stuff and nobody's really solved it or even come up with truly solid ways to describe some of it. We're stabbing in the dark at some of the stuff capitalism has done the most damage to in our society, trying to bring it into the light.

@aral There's two test cases I'm thinking about right now:

in 1997, I ran a wiki for unschooled teenagers. It eventually bit-rotted, and the reins never got handed off properly. (the technical barriers were too high), but but it was collectively managed for the most part. That was super successful until it aged. It was such a solid sense of community, and people often posted pseudonymously, there were no accounts (very 1997 there...), spam was collectively erased. There was a lot of good there. Trying to replicate anything like that today would be really hard, both for external background toxicity reasons, but also technical shape of things is really different now.

And the other is our local "Salem Safe Walking Advisory Group" — right now, the infrastructure is owned by the person who started the group, and if anything ever happens to her, the group will cease to exist. But it's not something that would get sustaining power from being embedded in my and the other organizers social media space. It's something that demands an identity of its own, shared.

@aral Actually, going deeper here: in the case of like the Salem SWAG group, I delegate to the others of the group that they can speak for me, in the context of that group. I'm okay with us, collectively, saying things on behalf of us all. We are specifically trying to act in unity. We don't always agree, and we work together to figure out what to do and say, but we are putting up a unified front. And not just all of us saying the same things in our respective spaces, but actually together, as a group.