fuck advocacy

social media makes me feel inadequate as a human. that i can only “like” something, and i’d rather just “like” something than say something. that i’d rather let a mechanization, a normalization, a boiling-down of my feelings codify and signify who i am as a person. or that i have only 140 characters to make a point. some of the best jokes can’t be told in 140 characters. some of the best advice can’t. some of the best memories certainly can’t. what exactly are we gaining with all this shit? we’re gaining laziness. we’re making things easy. many would contend, and rightly so, that the internet is levelling and “democratizing” society, making us all equal contributors in a world which was once one-to-many. I wish it were so; it certainly has the capacity to. but too often, as the internet has proven, the cost of that democracy is a favoring of the lowest common denominator. we lower all standards to make everything accessible. me writing this out doesn’t fit into 140 characters, it doesn’t fit into a “like” or “dislike” button, but it now cannot be read by someone who doesn’t speak english. it won’t be read by a lot of people because it doesn’t exist on a popular platform. it can’t be parsed and optimized and normalized and mechanized as easily, to find out what ads should be displayed alongside it. (if it had ads.)

and if you think this isn’t a serious fucking point that holds some ground, you need to wake the fuck up. you’re being drugged. you’re being subverted, one click at a time. the internet used to be our place, run by our rules, spun to tell our own stories. now it’s corporate-controlled, brought to you by our feverent participation. we got ourselves into this mess, we can get ourselves out before it’s too late, can’t we? imagine if there were actual monetary figures associated with internet use! imagine this bullshit! $9.95 a month gets you facebook, youtube, and twitter. now we’re not talking about limits brought on merely by social convention anymore, but limits brought on by economic forces (see: what adults like to call the market), enabled by our collective inaction! it costs an additional $5.00 a month to get you some livejournal, some wordpress, some nytimes. it costs an additional $10.00 to get international sites like al jazeera and the bbc. right now the favoring of one over the other is largely social, i.e. our friends don’t read Slate, never link to it on facebook, it never pops up on gawker, so why would we read it? why would we even know what Slate is? but when it becomes economic, the lines are drawn even sharper. not only do we not know what it is, we are told we can’t view it without paying a fee. (which is why all paywalls are the stupidest fucking ideas on the internet if you want to maintain any kind of relevance over the next ten years.)

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