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@emsenn@kolektiva.social @AndyDearden@mastodon.green This feels critically important, and really difficult to navigate at the same time.
On the one hand, everything you're saying is 100% and I have no critique, and it encapsulates a *feeling* that we lack the capacity for transmitting in such a way as to ground in the philosophical basis you have here, so yes, thank you!
On the other hand, there are layers of nuance, at least as we see this. First, there is a sense (for some of us) that there *is* some radicalism in denying the hegemony of income-through-platform on things like Instagram. We *could* probably do ok on Instagram, the farm aesthetic, etc etc, and probably X as well, and increase our capacity for financing this project through increased exposure. We choose not to because whilst the narrative of the "pure frontier" of the Fediverse *is* colonial, *is* mostly run by white people (and to be frank even some of the Indigenous narratives on this platform seem dominated by mostly white-passing Indigenous folk from vastly different sociocultural backgrounds than us), and while all of that frustratingly impacts how we can navigate this platform...
Our presence on Instagram or X also feels wrong, given not just the *politics* of the platforms (which seems to be the biggest critique by folks on this platform but to us that seems to miss the point a bit) but the *technologies*, their ownership, the necessity to commodify whatever it is we wish to share. Substack is, as I can tell, mildly different because of the reality of long form content vs. short form video or even "microblogging" content, though I'm sure (or rather, would be curious to know) if you ever feel that that platform does the same, in a way: requires the castration of message, the transmutation into "content" in order to be granted the privilege of platformization or exposure?
Because to us there is a degree of frustration in either case: the Fediverse AND the corporate socials all require that to transmit our knowledge and experience we must placate their end user: folks embedded in a colonial cultural hegemony who, despite their own claims, generally wish to be made to feel good rather than challenged. Though, at least on the Fedi there is, I suppose, the capacity to argue with things like moderation decisions publicly, to spin up a new account easily, and to perhaps maintain some degree further of deoupling from our legal identities (though we know privacy here is almost as much a farce as it is elsewhere).
And I know all of this is mostly a tangential reply to the OP, and not necessarily a direct one, so we hope that's welcome.
Replies (1)
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@rancholibertad@climatejustice.social A lot of what you've said here is very good, but I wasn't talking at all about earning off of Substack, just broadcasting. I view income from Substack more like I'm not refusing to accept money, not an actual income stream, the way if I go play guitar in the park, I'll prop my case open so folk in a culture that has economized reciprocity aren't forbidden from the forms of reciprocity they know.
To your question of castration: Yes, and I love that you picked that word because I view what I do on the Web very much as a drag performance, where I am performing certain genders of Indigeneity, anarchy, and so on.
The technical format of the platforms is part of what formats performance, but I've come to understnad it as a rather small part. What seems much more important are what's called the feeling rules of a space.
I think Sara Ahmed's thinking on emotionalism is really good here, because it situates it between bodies, and that is what is necessarily happening via distributed communication over media, even if it's text.
I think you're touching on something with distinguishing media formats, though. Text is better than audio, is better than image, is better than video, with regards to enabling reciprocal understanding without hijacking emotionalism, which is critical for cognitive understanding.
But even within text, HOW to say things matters more than the content itself, and habits of reading, technology, and hormones are only exaggerating this.
tl;dr: you touched on like a billion things my research is untangling so there is no tl;dr yet lol
@AndyDearden@mastodon.green
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