Day: March 13, 2019

another ostensibly progressive breakthrough

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Max Blumenthal's magazine Grayzone opines on the latest box office junk:

Captain Marvel was marketed as a feminist blockbuster, a rare superhero movie featuring a female lead...
As is so often the case in Hollywood, however, ostensibly progressive breakthroughs in cultural representation were seamlessly blended with US militarist propaganda.

The essay describes how the Defense Dept. participated in making the film and how the script shills for Empire. As long as identity boxes are being checked none of this is supposed to matter. Sounds horrible.

speak for yoursel(ves)

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Netherlands-based net theorist Geert Lovink has a new book coming out called Sad By Design. The thesis outlined in the lead essay seems to be "smartphones and social media make us sad." Lovink's employment of the first person plural throughout the essay is a turnoff, e.g.,

By browsing through updates, we’re catching up with machine time – at least until we collapse under the weight of participation fatigue.

or

After yet another app session in which we failed to make a date, purchased a ticket and did a quick round of videos, the post-dopamine mood hits us hard.

As noted previously, this use of "us" and "we" irritates. If Lovink said "I" did these things or had these feelings he'd sound like a pitiful stooge.
The present blog is certainly guilty of using "we" or "you" instead of "I" but it's mostly a writerly habit of trying not to sound too pompous.
When I write I don't assume that you never joined Facebook or owned a smartphone. Or stopped tweeting in 2018.
I'm not sad about having a blog with with no like buttons or page view counters and I don't expect you are sad about whatever you do online or in life. Use Facebook and phones if it makes you happy, if it doesn't don't use them.