Canned Dragons

I look at Easter not just as a day, but as a kickoff, if you will, for Eastertide. I see it as somewhat analogous to New Year's Day. Resolutions start then, and don't end when the day is over. Eastertide is a time to look at renewal in your life. If that renewal is simply a present fact, as is my continuing recovery from ME/CFS — thanks be to God — then it is a time for celebration. Sometimes, though, you may have to gently invite that renewal.

Easter is the most important holiday in the Christian calendar and it means a lot to me and other believers. This year, I wanted to write something to convey the beauty of Easter, but I didn’t come across any articles that really sparked my imagination and spurred my writing. Then I realized, while sitting in church, that I had actually already read a post that spoke to me about Easter in way that was relevant to my recent experiences – that I wanted to share.

Peggy Noonan writes for The Wall Street Journal about “America’s Most Tumultuous Holy Week,” which she believes was the week in April 1865. To make her case, she subtitles her piece: “On Palm Sunday, Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant. Lincoln was dead by Easter.” It’s a pretty strong argument for a superlative level of tumult. What impressed me about her account of the surrender of General Lee to General Grant was the amount of grace that the North gave to the South after such a bloody war. The reason for grace wasn’t that the figures in the North thought that the cause of the South was anything but criminally unjust.

Grant would write in his memoirs “What General Lee’s feelings were I do not know.” His own feelings, which had earlier been jubilant, were now “sad and depressed.” He couldn’t rejoice at the downfall of a foe that had “suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”

I’m pretty sure I’ve heard those lines before in the Ken Burns Civil War documentary because when I read it, I hear it said, in one of Burns’ reliable narrator’s voices. It shows the disdain that the Union soldiers must have had for the Confederate cause. Yet, when it came time to negotiate the terms of surrender, they were merciful terms. The Confederate soldiers were allowed to keep their personal arms, take a horse or a donkey, were fed and sent on their way back to farm their lands. Noonan relates, "Grant’s commissary chief later asked, 'Were such terms ever before given by a conqueror to a defeated foe?'" Perhaps they were, but that kind of treatment is not the standard following a war.

The United States perhaps would not have remained united following the war, were it not for those terms. As I remember why Christ died for us, I like think His sacrifice to earn forgiveness for our sins can be best celebrated by forgiving others. At a time when bickering in this country happens over seemingly everything, this Easter reminds me that we can be reconciled over even some of the most difficult things.

Other than writing, I have been trying to avoid too much screen time. This week, I turned to paper craft and made my favorite Transformer, Galvatron.

We are rapidly approaching the end of Holy Week for Christians. Happy Easter to everyone celebrating! To my Tamil friends, Puthaandu Nalvalthukkal!

For those who are into bullet journaling, the Creative Block Party has a bunch of freebies for the price of an email address. I like some of the ideas they have for habit trackers.

I have struggled to find a habit tracker interesting enough for me to stick to it and I’m hoping that I can use some of these to complete my circles. Most of my habits will revolve around reading, writing and prayer.

Anna Havron urges you to create a personal “Yes and No” list to have a framework with which to guide your life. Such a list helps you document what you are committed to doing and what you are committed to not doing. Here’s a good example from Anna’s own list that I’m trying to put into practice:

Respond, don’t react. Whenever possible, I iterate on my reaction to something important for 12-24 hours before talking about it. Applies to work emails too.

I’m currently in the middle of watching Ken Burns’ documentary on Ben Franklin. This reminds me of Franklin using his 13 virtues to guide his daily life and decision making. He had 12 virtues, but was bragging about how good he had gotten at implementing them that his friend suggested adding a 13th: humility. Franklin thought the best way to introduce a touch more humility was to imitate Jesus and Socrates.

I was going to order a bamboo back scratcher to get at those hard-to-reach itches this week, but Etsy sellers are asking their customers not to buy from the site between April 11 and April 18. Mia Sato profiles the sellers from the online marketplace Etsy who are going on strike to protest changes to the platform. She interviews a seller who is participating in the strike and for whom Etsy is not what it once was.

But for the last few years, changes at Etsy that she feels hurt sellers were piling up — rising fees, mandatory marketing programs, and an influx of drop shippers — and the marketplace no longer felt like somewhere where artisan products and hand-picked vintage items were prioritized.

I have also noticed a change in Etsy over the years. It sometimes feels more like eBay than the online crafts fair it used to be. I can't speak to the fees and other things that sellers are protesting, but I've definitely seen the impact of the drop shippers. It sometimes seems like you may be just as likely to come across a mass-produced item as you are something bespoke and handmade.

→ Etsy Sellers Will Go On Strike In April And Want Customers To Boycott | The Verge

Greg Morris realizes he doesn't need a blog, but ponders how much it benefits him, anyway.

The benefits of it run far deeper than the sum of its parts. No person should judge their blog based on the number of views the posts get because it always serves a different purpose. It allows you to publish whatever it is you want to publish, get it out of your brain and own it from start to end. I don’t need a blog, but everyone should have one.

I totally agree with Morris that everyone should have a blog. I’m trying to get a friend who is currently sending out thoughts about the situation in Ukraine, globalization, etc. to an email distribution list. His emails are insightful and informative, and I’d love to be able to point people to a blog post that lays out what he is sending through email.

→ I Don’t Need A Blog | Greg Morris

There has been recent talk of people going into "goblin mode," a pandemic-associated mode of isolation and hunkering down. Sam George from the University of Hertfordshire argues that this is a mischaracterization of the goblin.

Most goblins depicted in literature and folklore are active, playing pranks and generally causing trouble for the humans around them. They do not sit passively at home, surrounded by creature comforts, lazing the day away.

Instead, George says we should look to the vampire for a more direct comparison. Vampires have gone from being thought of as hideous, odious creatures to being sex symbols (think the Twilight series). We too can come out from our dark cocoons and into the light.

But over the last 200 years, Vampires in popular culture have evolved from plague-ridden creatures like Nosferatu to sparkling, aspirational sex symbols. Instead of holing up and resigning to a fate forever in goblin mode, we should follow the example set by vampires and aim to emerge from the pandemic as better versions of ourselves.

George has fun with the mythology behind these menacing creatures being brought into contemporary times as points of reference for our behaviors.

From the blog

The Slide from Epistemic Bubble to Echo Chamber

We are trees rooted alongside each other, and tearing up the roots of one tree threatens to encroach on the rootedness of another.

Frosted EchoesRobert Rackley

Derek Thompson wrote a newsletter edition for the Altantic about population growth collapsing in the US. The statistics he cites are alarming.

U.S. growth didn’t slowly fade away: It slipped, and slipped, and then fell off a cliff. The 2010s were already demographically stagnant; every year from 2011 to 2017, the U.S. grew by only 2 million people. In 2020, the U.S. grew by just 1.1 million. Last year, we added only 393,000 people.

I know that there are some people who won't see this as a bad thing. After all, population growth leads to competition for resources and overpopulation. The humans who exist now can't all get access to appropriate resources. People still freeze to death outside of homes that could keep them warm. Unfortunates starve while others eat until they are stuffed. Equality seems further and further away in many places.

So why do we need more people in the world and specifically in the countries in Europe and Japan and the US, where birth rates are declining and population growth through immigration is sometimes viewed with suspicion? Thompson is careful to state that he thinks that ultimately, family planning is a matter for individuals to decide, even as the macro-level consequences may be economically devastating. He doesn't shy away from elaborating on those consequences, though.

The implications of permanently slumped population growth are wide-ranging. Shrinking populations produce stagnant economies. Stagnant economies create wonky cultural knock-on effects, like a zero-sum mentality that ironically makes it harder to pursue pro-growth policies. (For example, people in slow-growth regions might be fearful of immigrants because they seem to represent a threat to scarce business opportunities, even though immigration represents these places’ best chance to grow their population and economy.) The sector-by-sector implications of declining population would also get very wonky very fast.

He calls this course we are on as leading us into a "demographic danger zone." In another piece that summarizes the problem, potential causes and predicted outcomes, Scott Lanman lays out the challenges that Japan is experiencing due to their extremely low population growth.

In Japan, employers often struggle to fill job vacancies. Spending on health care and pensions has swollen Japan’s public debt to more than twice the size of its economy. The International Monetary Fund has estimated that the country’s annual economic growth could be 1 percentage point lower for the next three decades because of Japan’s aging population. That means the country’s economy, forecast to expand 1 percent this year and next, may stagnate further.

To mix metaphors, Japan is the canary in the coal mine for other nations who are heading down this road. It's a scary prospect when the younger population cannot produce enough to support programs that take care of the elderly. Thompson mentions the situation pitting the younger generation against the older generation in his post and let us hope it doesn't come to that.

The religion connection

One surprising thing that both pieces have in common is that they both ignore the correlation between religiosity and fertility. Though not completely universal, in the majority of cases, fertility declines along with religiosity. Expectations of gender roles plays a part here, with more conservative religious expressions tending to have the greatest fertility. A study of the relationship between the two factors in 2002 takes the data that shows the correlation and examines causation.

Using data from the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), we show that women who report that religion is "very important" in their everyday life have both higher fertility and higher intended fertility than those saying religion is "somewhat important" or "not important." Factors such as unwanted fertility, age at childbearing, or degree of fertility postponement seem not to contribute to religiosity differentials in fertility. This answer prompts more fundamental questions: what is the nature of this greater "religiosity"? And why do the more religious want more children? We show that those saying religion is more important have more traditional gender and family attitudes and that these attitudinal differences account for a substantial part of the fertility differential. We speculate regarding other contributing causes.

With traditional attitudes about gender declining along with religiosity, we should probably be worried about the trend. Those who would either celebrate the rise of secularism or at the very least shrug their shoulders should be informed about the overall results of the shift. Demographic changes brought about by attitudinal and lifestyle changes are poised to have destructive consequences. While Thompson may very well be correct that the choices about reproduction should be up to individuals, the aggregate of those decisions will effect everyone.

In his book, The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt examines the group cohesion brought by religion, and the loosening of those ties and ends up in the same place as Thompson and Lanman. Haidt is another secular writer who sees the trend of lower birth rates, but brings different attributional causes to the table. He looks at increasingly irreligious Europe as a cautionary tale.

Societies that forgo the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully on what will happen to them over several generations. We don’t really know, because the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few).

Haidt doesn’t lay out the outcome of fewer offspring, but it would be surprising if he anticipated anything other than what is predicted by others and reported by Thompson and Lanman. Haidt does get into more specifics about what happens in general when group cohesion dissolves in the absence of religion.

But if you are an atheist living in a looser community with a less binding moral matrix, you might have to rely somewhat more on an internal moral compass, read by the rider. That might sound appealing to rationalists, but it is also a recipe for anomie—Durkheim’s word for what happens to a society that no longer has a shared moral order.(It means, literally, “normlessness.”) We evolved to live, trade and trust within shared moral matrices. When societies lose their grip on individuals, allowing all to do as they please, the result is often a decrease in happiness and an increase in suicide, as Durkheim showed more than a hundred years ago.

Haidt uses the metaphor of the elephant and the rider to describe our intuitive and rational selves, respectively. Does the situation he outlines sound familiar? You don’t have to look far to find statistics and analysis about a growing mental health crisis and rise in suicide in the United States. What you don’t typically see is what Emile Durkheim (considered the founder of sociology) observed around the turn of the 20th century, namely that dissolving group cohesion along with the ties of religious affiliations correlate directly to the negative mental health outcomes to which we are now bearing witness.

The mainstream media, being mostly secular, tends to avoid the potential causality of these problems being the weakening institutions of religion. However, there is plenty of evidence which which to make the case that there is a relatively linear relationship between this phenomenon and a number of troubling societal trends.

With no formal announcement (whoops), Wordpress.com changed their pricing significantly, removing the paid tiers for personal blogging and leaving nothing in between the free plan and the $180 Business plan. I've often thought that Wordpress doesn't want to be in the business of personal blogging. Before they recently made the switch to block-based themes, most of their newer themes on Wordpress.com were geared towards businesses. It was clear from the descriptions of the themes and the static homepages advertising businesses that they weren't built with blogging in mind.

As Manton Reece points out, this move makes Micro.blog an even better value proposition at $5 a month or $50 a year.

As Micro.blog hosting has improved, I’ve thought our $5/month plan compares favorably with WordPress.com’s similarly-priced plans. Surprised that WordPress.com has now gutted their pricing lineup, with nothing in between $0 and $180/year. $5 to me is still simple and obvious.

Another reason you may want to think about blogging on Micro.blog is the fact that Elon Musk is now the largest shareholder of Twitter.

Given that he has criticized the platform for free speech and is a heavy and popular user, it is unlikely that Musk is buying Twitter stock as a passive investment.

"We would expect this passive stake as just the start of broader conversations with the Twitter board/management that could ultimately lead to an active stake and a potential more aggressive ownership role of Twitter," Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities said in a client note early Monday.

As a soon-to-be-former Twitter shareholder, I can state that this news is not comforting.

Last week, Twitter banned the conservative satirical site The Babylon Bee for what it termed “hate speech.” Specifically, the “satire” involved misgendering U.S. Assistant Health Secretary Rachel Levine as a man. I’m not sure what’s satirical about that, but it seems cruel and certainly not at all funny. As a sign of the coming apocalypse, Elon Musk was interviewed by the Babylon Bee in December 2021. Is it possible that this ban was the act which spurred Musk into thinking of buying into Twitter to change its direction?

These changes to the biggest blogging and microblogging platforms, respectively, should give people pause. Now might be the right time to switch platforms to one like Micro.blog, where you can create long and short-form content. M.b. has a reasonable pricing structure, and you own your blog and possibly domain, with plenty of export options if you decide to move it elsewhere.

At Micro Camp 2021, Patrick Rhone did a talk on writing a book and he delved into the topic of blogging, which he framed as writing essays for an online audience. His point was that if you are a blogger, you are a writer. A writer for those who read your content online. It was an inspirational talk in how it shifted the way you can think about your writing and your readers. A little change in perspective can go a long way when you are trying to motivate yourself to put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, in this case.

One of the things I’ve noticed when writing online is that people read very differently and prefer to get their content across different mediums. Even within my family, my writing is more likely to be read by certain individuals if it is presented in a way that they prefer. For instance:

• My mom is most likely to read something if she sees a link on Twitter. Less so if the content is delivered via email, partially because her inbox is out-of-control.
• My sister is more likely to read what I’ve written if it comes through email. She is not on very many social media platforms, and won’t see anything I’ve posted to Twitter.
• My wife is more likely to read an email, as well. She is heavily on Twitter, and follows a lot of people, so sometimes my posts get lost in the stream.

It’s apparent that how I share something and on what platform is important, if I want it to be accessible. My preference is that content is made available via:

1. The open web (for general traffic and new readers)
2. RSS (for the more tech savvy - this is my preferred way of reading)
3. Social media (short posts to syndicate to services like Micro.blog and Twitter and a good way of getting public comments)
4. Email (for folks who like newsletters and for email replies, which are a good way to get private comments)

There are four solutions of which I am aware that do all the above well. Write.as, Ghost, HEY World and Micro.blog. I know a lot of people like Write.as, which has a social component, somewhat similar to, but not as complete as Micro.blog and also has email options for blog posts. I haven’t tried Write.as, because honestly I don’t love the aesthetics and the theme or app design. I have tried Ghost, both self-hosted and the Ghost Pro hosted solution, several times. Although, I ran into a lot of trouble with Mailgun (for newsletters) and upgrades with self-hosted Ghost, so I don’t recommend that solution. Ghost Pro was really nice: increasingly stable and reliable with a set of features that was powerful but didn’t overwhelm. Their support team was responsive and helpful. Ghost is built for bloggers who want to “monetize their content,” though, and I’m not in that group. I’m writing because I enjoy it. I don’t want to strategize about expanding my audience, something Ghost is always pushing. So, for now, I’m sticking with Micro.blog and HEY World, the former for its customizability and social component, the latter for its complete lack of those features and its simplicity.

I’m grateful that blogging services are starting to take into account all the ways people want to read writing from an independent publisher. This is especially helpful when, let’s face it, traditional blog commenting systems are not great. They invite half-baked responses (I was guilty of this, back in the day) instead of real conversation. Don’t even get me started on anonymous comments, which remind me most of someone yelling from a car window as they pass you by on the road. With email and some of the micro-blogging platforms, the discourse is improved, both privately and publicly, because of the robust ability of those systems to handle discussion and the level of accountability that comes with using a real identity (Twitter can sometimes be an exception here).

Even with the popularity of social media, it has never been a better time to consider blogging. There are all sorts of ways to reach those who may want to read your thoughts.

Rebecca Riddell has an opinion piece for the Washington Post (🔗 Via Lisa Sieverts) on the US trying to export privatized healthcare to nations that in some cases, at least, have pretty robust public healthcare systems in place. The example that she hones in on is Kenya, where the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is trying to push "market-based approaches" to incentivize private actors in the healthcare space. In many case "privatization" becomes a euphemism for exploitation, just as "consumer choice" in healthcare is code for the patient pays the cost. While many countries around the world have capitalism as their economic model, it seem only the US has a sort of hyper-capitalism.

Hyper-capitalism holds that nothing is too sacred, personal or integral to life to be off-limits to a profit motive. For instance, even in most capitalist countries (wealthy and not-so wealthy), healthcare is provided for citizens as a right. In the US, that cannot be the case, because private actors are making too much money to give up on their ability to extract capital from the most basic of human conditions.

The United States famously spends more per capita on health care than any other country, even though the system performs far worse than that of many peer countries. Access is highly unequal, and sky-high prices push millions into poverty and discourage others from seeking care altogether. This heavily privatized system is indisputably excellent at one thing: generating profits. And powerful vested interests have blocked serious reforms for nearly a century.

Experience over the past year has cemented what reason and intuition had already led me to believe: for-profit healthcare dehumanizes people. I understand that the NHS in the UK is not perfect, and, in some cases, has ridiculously long waiting periods for care. I'm also under no illusion that Kenya has the best healthcare in the world. The care in those places, though, is setup to benefit the patient. Positive outcomes are when people get well, not when insurance companies make more money.

Ministry mastermind Al Jourgenson, or "Uncle Al" as he is affectionately known (probably as much for his crazy, constantly revised stories about his past as for his status as elder statesman and progenitor of the industrial genre of music) tried to erase the synthpop era of the band. Their first album, 1983’s With Sympathy was recorded for Arista Records who, according to Uncle Al, was constantly forcing him to compromise his artistic vision. When Ministry moved to Sire Records for their second album, 1986's Twitch, Jourgenson disclaimed the first record and told fans to burn it.

During my teenage years, I was a pretty big Ministry fan. I once high-fived my friend Billy at the counter of a record store in my excitement about buying In Case You Didn't Feel Like Showing Up (live), causing him to light up with embarrassment. Jourgenson came up with sounds like no one else, despite other industrial music luminaries, like Trent Reznor, following in his wake. I never got into Nine Inch Nails, which a musician in my tenth grade creative writing class called "scary keyboard music." I could admit the undeniable strength of a single like "Head Like A Hole," but the rest of Pretty Hate Machine left me cold. Ministry on the other hand, sounded like someone hooked a distortion pedal up to a vacuum cleaner and ran it back and forth over bare floor and carpet (“Stigmata” and “Burning Inside”), creating some warped loop and stimulating my auditory nerves.

Jourgenson, who wouldn't really admit to playing any instruments, managed to create unmatched soundscapes from some dystopian future that might be fun to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there. Computers, which even back then, were used by visionaries like Ministry to supplant traditional instruments and come up with something entirely new, sometimes disturbing, but frequently dopamine stimulating. Later on, Ministry lost that creative spark, due mostly to Jourgenson's increasing dependence on heroin, which almost killed him several times over.

Back to the future

When I was regularly listening to Ministry, I knew of the existence of their earlier work and had heard from friends that it didn't really sound like the same band. I had limited funds for music discovery, so I stayed away from it, just as Uncle Al would have wanted. I didn't hear songs like "Work For Love" until I was well into my adult years, and was surprised by how good it was. Fortunately for listeners, With Sympathy is readily available on today's streaming services. Fans also recorded footage of Ministry playing live during this era. Despite all his objections, Jourgenson looks perfectly happy to be playing these tunes. You can see his excitement when he preps the crowd for the song, with his faux-British accent, seeming like a Johnny Depp character in a futuristic pirate band. Back then, Patty Jourgenson, Al's wife (before he was married to heroin) played keyboards in the group. The full band sounded cohesive and tight, putting on what must have been exhilarating shows for their audience.

→ Ministry - Work For Love, live in Boston, 1984

I wanted to include a video of the Burger King Super Bowl commercial from a few years ago that featured "Work For Love" but couldn't find it anywhere on the widest of worldwide webs.

Frank Yang, of the late Chromewaves.net, has a new blog called Space Echo, where he does what he couldn't really do on his previous music blog: feature older music. With Chromewaves, he was writing about new music coming out. He hustled to stay on top of the latest noises, but eventually burned out and shut the blog in 2013.

This gave Yang the freedom to check out what he had been missing in the decades before he started really taking in music and then writing about it.

I felt free to go back and explore and educate in private, and let me tell you - being able to listen to nothing but Bowie and Eno albums without having to write a single word about it was divine. I delved into the scenes and movements that laid the groundwork for the music I loved most and… I loved it even more. And now, seven years on, the bulk of my listening is of artists I rarely if ever blogged about; some I didn't even know existed.

Content as Yang is to go back even further than the shoegaze scene's beginnings, he loves the shoegaze genre. In his latest post, he writes briefly about the history of Curve, why they don't get as much attention as some of their peers and how their releases were so hard to find before they showed up on Bandcamp. He showcases the video for "Horror Head," which is, most probably, my favorite shoegaze track. I love Toni Halliday's ethereal vocals and the bass line that jumps all over the fretboard. I was smitten when I saw the video on 120 Minutes on MTV and went out and bought the Doppleganger CD. Its strange artwork of mutilated dolls reminded me of the doll terror in Barbarella. This was in the days before I could work and compact discs were something that I didn't often have the money to buy. The disc was the last album I bought before moving from Virginia to Albuquerque, NM, in the eleventh grade.

When I purchased it, Doppleganger was an almost total disappointment. I literally only liked the one song for which I had acquired it. I played the h*ck out of "Horror Head" and left the rest of the disc alone after a couple of initial listens. It made me sad because I knew what the band was capable of and yet they didn't seem to be living up to their promise. I was also bummed because the drive from Virginia to New Mexico is a long one and I didn't have new music to keep me company.

In Albuquerque, I bought a goth magazine at some record store near UNM in downtown, and it had a feature on Curve. When I read the article, I couldn't believe that singer Tony Halliday's parents were actual legit pirates of the Caribbean.

I used to pass by the locker of a girl who had a Curve poster taped to the door and she would say things like, "aww, he got his hair cut" and other remarks that would make me blush. I was too chicken to talk to her because I had no idea who she was. She kind of reminded me of Halliday, though, who was the prototypical early nineties alterna-girl.

Years later, watching this video still evokes a lot of memories.

In a piece entitled It's Not Your Fault You're a Jerk on Twitter, Katherine Cross writes for Wired Magazine about the psychological dynamics that drive antisocial behavior patterns on social networks. Her analysis on how the platforms accelerate what is already dissociative behavior from the human beings behind the keyboard draws parallels from unlikely places, such as urban planning.

Road design in countries like the Netherlands promotes what is known as "traffic calming," reducing pedestrian deaths and car accidents; by contrast, road design in North America promotes high-speed driving, passively nudging drivers to step on the gas, giving them less time to stop, even in crowded areas. Understood this way, you can get away from solely individualist narratives about accidents-about bad drivers or "pedestrians who weren't looking"-and focus on how design encourages broad outcomes not attributable to any one actor.

Similarly, social media is designed in a way that agitates, rather than calms, its traffic. It leans into, rather than curbs, the augmented reality aspects that arise from computer use-tricking you into believing you're somewhere other than reality.

Our level of abstraction from a conversation on the internet breaks down the inhibitions that would normally be provided by our sense of empathy for others. That's the failure of our human moral and psychological underpinnings. The fault of the machine is in that it exacerbates and aggregates the failures of single individuals into a juggernaut with a powerful capacity for damage. The dynamics that play out in Twitter pile-ons is why I had my profile private for years and am still not totally comfortable with the fact that it's now public. The effects of being beaten down by a Twitter mob can be severe. Many of those so afflicted have serious mental health implications and suicidal ideation.

The effect of being attacked and shunned

Cross uses specific examples of individuals who have been attacked on Twitter. In a piece for the Atlantic, Helen Lewis writes about the same effects that play themselves out in the narratives shared by Cross.

A true cancellation typically involves the subject being cast out of their professional network, denied the ability to make money, and rejected by their social circle. One reason it is so alarming an experience is the sense of contagion-without obvious coordination, a person becomes a nonentity. Many of the canceled people I have known, or reported on, have experienced depression or even contemplated suicide.

Lewis illustrates how Russian sanctions can show us the effects of ostracism.

When a Russian spymaster complains about his country's cancellation, our response should not be to laugh at an idiot confusing a culture war and a real one. Instead, we should recognize that economic and social isolation is a powerful weapon, and resolve to use it with the same restraint as any other weapon.

It seems the devastation that cancellation can bring applies at a macro or micro level.

A different way

You don't see the same dynamics on a social network like Micro.blog. The technology limits the snowball effect by the deliberate exclusion of features like the like and the retweet. Micro.blog also has a human being who manages the community and that gives people a level of accountability for their words. When you are interacting with a faceless apparatus like Twitter, that same sense of accountability is not there. Cross has an accurate description of this phenomenon: "There is a seductive quality to posting into the void, a Möbius strip sense that you're the voyeur who no one can see, and the exhibitionist who everyone must see."

How well can these measures work? The proof is in the pudding, as they say. On Micro.blog, people are rarely even impolite, never mind hostile. If someone does get a little too strident in their opinions, they usually back up and apologize. Micro.blog has different issues, and obviously community policing wouldn't scale to a very large network. It serves as a good example of ways to curb the excesses of the large social media networks, though.

It's also worth remembering that the angry people on Twitter are usually a vocal minority. According to this short post on Axios, 75% of people in the U.S. never tweet.

After my Lenten fast, I'll probably return to Twitter, but I'll be even more mindful of how the platform distorts our thinking.

When I was a kid, I spent a good amount of time with a cousin of the same age. Throughout our elementary school years, he and I shared a deep and abiding love for all things G.I. Joe. We hunted down the elusive Snake Eyes figure together. We turned our grandparent's spare room into a miniature theater of play warfare. I remember meeting him one time and he had setup a whole battle scene in my grandfather's caddy while on the way to pick me up. He and I discussed comic book intrigue and far-fetched military plots. There was one difference in our collecting, though. His parents bought him every G.I. Joe toy that he wanted. He had almost every action figure, vehicle and play set that rolled off the production line.

Despite the largesse of my cousin's collection (or perhaps because of it), he was fastidious about the condition of his toys. I distinctly remember getting to his house and wanting to use his new Major Bludd figure in our play, but he refused to take the plastic mercenary from his box. The 3.5" G.I. Joe figures were mostly well designed, but they didn't hold up well with excessive play. Their joints succumbed to wear and their arms and legs became floppy, like they had a connective tissue/screw disorder. Sometimes, the hook that connected to the rubber band, which held their upper and lower torso together, busted through their crotch. The missing plastic codpiece gave them a look that was most pitiable among Hasbro manufactured men. My cousin understood well the ravages of time and use on an action figure and would rather look at his pristine toy soldier than risk the soldier's health and manhood in the play wars that raged.

Rationing your music

I've been thinking about all of this recently as I decide how to listen to music. I've been squirreling away some of my favorite tunes, including the new Ronnie Martin album, From The Womb Of The Morning The Dew Of Youth Will Be Yours. I don't want to "wear out" my favorite songs from too many listens. It's more than just the degradation of the polyvinyl chloride that the record is made from. It's also the diminishing level of pleasure that comes with repeated spins. I want to retain the feeling of intentionality and the enjoyment of discerning that comes with savoring the music. This feeling seems to be mostly confined to music that I have on vinyl, as there is a layer of friction in taking the record off the shelf, extracting it from its many layers of protection and putting the needle down on the spinning platter. Digital music is just too easy to play, skip past and move on. Its retention seems more ephemeral, no matter how good the music is.

Of course, I still listen to albums like Dinosaur Jr.'s You're Living All Over Me quite frequently, despite the fact that I own copies on CD, cassette, 2 different colors of vinyl and digital and have been listening to it since 1992. As I grow older, though, the music that holds my fascination for years like the tunes from my youth is harder to find (even though I love a lot of it for short periods of time - 2022 has been great so far).  

I will play my Now Sounds playlist over and over again without worrying about diminishing returns. I constantly refresh it with new music and that keeps the dopamine hits coming. It's a different model than what I employ with the work I truly treasure. In fact, I find myself avoiding putting new songs from albums that I really adore as a whole on playlists, so I won't get tired of individual tracks and ruin the enjoyment of the album in total.

Doling it out

Does anyone else ration things that they enjoy? Do you ever find yourself saving "the good stuff" for the right occasions, just to avoid making it commonplace? It can be a movie, a soundtrack, a meal, a desert or even a special book. What do you only dole out to yourself every so often to retain its specialness?