The RW Profile Pic Shows You Who You Aspire To Be, the LW Profile Pic Shows You Who You Think You Are

and some notes on hobbies vs. fandoms, thought digest, 3.18.2022

Credit: TheFamilyGamers

Is anyone else just not… feeling it lately?

I just want to relax. Do a good job at work. Adopt a kitten.

Nothing is really bothering me this week. Usually I can at least find it in me to complain about the skin walkers in my immediate environment but fuck it. People are out of touch and soulless and it’s none of my business.

I’ve been thinking a lot about (but not eating) birria tacos. And dipping Alaskan King crab in cheese. Instead, I’ve been drinking bone broth and consuming a lot of turmeric. Not sure if it’s in my head, but I think I feel better.

I bought tickets to FaerieCon, and appear to be getting back in touch with the part of me that’s a true geek, that does things like plays tabletop role playing games about vampires and writes short stories about televangelists. I went to a board game store yesterday in Lincoln Park and bought a puzzle of a dragon drinking tea.

The sun is out. I went on my roof and read The Book of Mormon for the first time in several months.

St. Paddy’s Day was unremarkable but not bad. Lots of nostalgia for my Texas days. Missing the University of Texas even knowing that the UT I hung out at isn’t the UT of the present day. There used to be a time when nobody online knew who I was. I was just that weird girl you worked with who tried to get you to read Nick Land. You wouldn’t know who Nick Land was until years later when he was a footnote in a New York Magazine article.

I used to hang out in Walmart parking lots and drink bad wine with Party City cashiers who had second lives as vampires, strippers, witches, singers, camgirls, whatever, before I got too allergic to wine. I used to take dance classes every day. I used to go to the movies a lot. I used to go to Half-Price Books so often the people who worked there knew my name, and always told me when they had new New Age stuff in stock. I used to take long drives to nowhere and listen to Coast to Coast AM and Ground Zero. I used to go to SXSW every year. I used to be friends with a lot of people in their 60s who believed they’d seen the other side, beyond the veil, or extraterrestrials. Now, I spend a lot of time online.

I haven’t really posted that much this week, either. I don’t know. Just feels like there’s a flatness to everything but it’s not a bad thing. A period of transition. It’s spring. I think I like it.

Anyway, here’s what you came for… what’s been on my mind this week:

The role of the avatar. Last week, I had an interesting conversation with my friend Clinton Ignatov—who by the way, is one of the smartest people I know and well worth a follow, if you aren’t already—about one of the key differences between left wing and right wing digital communities.

For right wing digital communities, the avatar, be it a frog or statue or anime babe, is (usually, not always) a proxy. It’s not a representation of the self. It flags group alignment. On the left, the avatar is (usually, not always) a projection of the ideal self.

The furry tankie understands they are not literally a pink anthropomorphic wolf dressed as Stalin, but the image is an important extension of their identity. The anime av to the trans anarcho-communist poster says something about how they wish to be, what their inner world looks like. The right wing retvrner with the statue avi doesn’t wish to be the statue: the statue symbolizes the world they seek to create. Even the body builder av isn’t the poster: it says something about what they think the world should aspire towards.

On its face, this distinction feels trivial (or silly to point out). I think it says something important about the difference between how the two groups interact with technology, though. The Internet is the extension of the Self for the Left, at least in large swaths. (One possibility I entertain is that even if they’re not transhumanists, they’re in a sense, transhumanists.)

Whereas on the Right, the Internet is a tool.

Words are violence to leftists because for leftists, there is no space between the real world and the virtual. It’s one fluid movement.

Of course, this isn’t a hard or fast rule. It may not even be true. But it feels like there’s something there…

The different shapes of language learning communities. I took part in a user feedback group yesterday for a language learning app, and it got me thinking: how many Americans learn a new language out of necessity, and how many learn a new language as a hobby?

And for the Americans who are learning a new language as a hobby, how does their relationship with that language?

Once upon a time, I used to be “proficient” in Vietnamese, and I remember my in-person classes were mostly composed of people who were there because they liked the culture, with one or two people who signed up because of their spouse or to connect with extended family. Kind of unusual when you think about the fact these were Vietnamese classes in Texas, which has a nontrivial Vietnamese population.

I think we, and by we, I mean upper middle class people in the States, take how weird this is for granted. It’s not immoral but it is weird. I’m not making any argument about colonialism or cultural appropriation or Orientalism, either. But I think there’s a distinction between “hobbyfication” and say, being the type of person who knows everything there is to know about Russian literature. Hobbyfication has both consumer and community elements in a way that just appreciation doesn’t.

The hobbyfication of necessary skills is all over American life, though.

My most salient interactions with this were in the late 2000s: the fruitarian diet (a niche expression of wellness-as-a-hobby that briefly enjoyed a moment in the sun around 2007 with the popularity of Freelee the Banana Girl) and language learning/polyglots (AJATT comes to mind).

Some trademarks are: a certain suite of influencers, forums/apps everyone joins, podcasts/YouTube channels everyone knows, lingo, a certain etiquette known to everyone in the community. I’m not sure if this is different than fandom. It’s participatory, like fandom, that’s for sure. I don’t think it’s “merely” a community, either.

With respect to fandom, my sense is it’s adjacent but not the same because I perceive fandom as not just having a consumer influence, but a corporate one, as well. Maybe the pipeline is hobby → fandom.

Information hoarding. I enjoyed this article in WIRED by Drew Austin about how unlimited data storage has turned us all into information hoarders, with little appreciation for what we’ve saved or how to preserve what’s important to us:

OUR INDECISION ABOUT this digital inventory radiates outward from our private spheres; our failure to consider what we should keep and what we should discard, or to organize any of it, inscribes itself on the internet at large. This trade-off—between personal storage capacity and the imperative to carefully manage and organize the information we produce—appears even more consequential when we consider the internet’s present shortcomings as a public archive of knowledge, a condition that has likely been exacerbated by individuals’ ability to store huge amounts of data in private cloud repositories rather than in publicly accessible places.

I’ve written about this topic a bit, specifically with respect to image hoarding. The more I go from “some rando with a blog” to “quasi-academic,” the more skeptical I become of tech…

The modesty movement among black women. Ever since I wrote ‘The Coming Wave of Sex Negativity,’ I’ve been tracking certain keywords on social listening tools to… well, just get a sanity check on whether I was reporting on my own Twitter bubble and what the TikTok algorithm thought I myself was interested in, or if I was noticing a real trend. Luckily, it was the latter and I am not totally insane.

One thing that has stood out to me, however, is that a big chunk of content comes from black women and communities of black women. I don’t know a ton about black-specific digital communities, so I can’t tell if this is new. I did stumble upon a great TikTok though that seems to suggest it might be a trend?

TikTok-native food trends. So, everyone knows that TikTok has influenced consumption across several verticals (food, toys, music, fashion)… But one thing I’ve wondered is… are all TikTok food trends things that people can do from home or are we ever going to see the kale/avocado/quinoa of TikTok? That is, menu items and perhaps whole cafe concepts around TikTok trends?

I wonder if chamoy/fruit roll-up pickles might be among the first? I know chamoy itself got a little bit of a boost due to TikTok, but I’ve seen at least one dedicated pickle cafe pop up in Texas. 🧐

What I’m reading this week:

• The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder

• U UP? by Cate Disabato

• The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Leguin

Where I’ve been published:

• Post-porn in The American Mind

• A review of Margaret Atwood’s new book, Burning Questions in The Washington Examiner

• How the Ukrainian War Took Over TikTok in UnHerd
  

Reminders, housekeeping, opportunities:

• A while back I got an Emergent Ventures grant. I was going to use part of that to publish a small magazine called misc.news. But with the launch of New Founding’s RETURN, it feels redundant, and instead of competing with them, I’d much rather write for them and direct traffic their way. I really like what they’re doing, so be sure to check them out.
  
  I think, instead, I’ll try to do some in-person events, with the ultimate goal of some kind of more regular meet-up group/brick-and-mortar institution. I’m probably going to start with IRL book/film conversations. If you’re in the Chicago area, let me know if you’d be interested in joining?
  

• REMINDER: We’ll be discussing “Love and Power,” episode one of All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, over Zoom on Tuesday, March 22nd at 6pm CST. The Zoom sign-up link will be going out on Sunday to paid subscribers. If you want to become a subscriber, here’s a little coupon:
  

• If you missed the Scott Pilgrim/Juno convo, you can still contribute to the discussion about it here. I encourage you to check this out! Really want to start fostering more conversations on here.
  

• Remember to submit your advice questions here. One of you has been using it to… I think just talk to me? I encourage that person to just send me an email, even if we’re on bad terms or something. Partially because it seems like you want more regular communication, partially because I don’t want to air your business all over Tellonym, partially because you send so many messages it makes it difficult for me to get to the real advice seekers.
  

• The Computer Room is changing format soon. And it’s going to be so much better. Talk about “building in public”!