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Re: Sock Puppet Advocacy
> Often, the loudest and angriest voices are given center stage, thus pushing aside the softer and quieter and more marginalized voices.
Sorry, I'm still thinking about this.
In concrete terms, I know plenty of disability advocates whose work runs parallel to the gaming industry. They're smart and kind people who work hard, create good writing and art, and do the mandatory social media hustle. Unfortunately, they have relatively few followers and make almost no money from their advocacy. So I guess what I'd like to see are non-imaginary brown queer disability advocates that I know in real life (through Sidequest, for instance) getting recognition and getting paid.
But, in a broader sense, it's the general tone of the conversation that I worry about.
To give a silly example, let's posit that you post this on Tumblr: "At the end of The Wind Waker, Ganondorf says that there are no fish in the Great Sea. Based on the evidence presented by the game, I think he's probably correct. It's interesting to imagine a postapocalyptic sea filled with monsters. I wonder what that would look like?"
I actually made this post, and it did some numbers. Instead of running with the idea and creating art and stories, however, the way a significant number of people responded was to tell me that I'm wrong and also a bad person. What that meant is that anyone who maybe wanted to explore the world of the game from a marine biology angle was put off by the conversation, which is that the very idea makes someone a bad person.
On top of not getting to see cool Legend of Zelda crypto-ichthyology, it hurt me to be told I was a bad person for indulging in idle speculation about an old video game. Because of course it did! Any normal person would be hurt by that, and it's not even a sensitive topic.
So part of the problem, I think, is that it's the people who aren't hurt by this, and who in fact get energy from conflict, who end up thriving on social media. Conflict is good and necessary, of course, but social media algorithms often serve to transform conflict into cruelty. And I guess I just think that people who have a low tolerance for cruelty should be able to participate in the conversation too.
Sorry, I'm still thinking about this.
In concrete terms, I know plenty of disability advocates whose work runs parallel to the gaming industry. They're smart and kind people who work hard, create good writing and art, and do the mandatory social media hustle. Unfortunately, they have relatively few followers and make almost no money from their advocacy. So I guess what I'd like to see are non-imaginary brown queer disability advocates that I know in real life (through Sidequest, for instance) getting recognition and getting paid.
But, in a broader sense, it's the general tone of the conversation that I worry about.
To give a silly example, let's posit that you post this on Tumblr: "At the end of The Wind Waker, Ganondorf says that there are no fish in the Great Sea. Based on the evidence presented by the game, I think he's probably correct. It's interesting to imagine a postapocalyptic sea filled with monsters. I wonder what that would look like?"
I actually made this post, and it did some numbers. Instead of running with the idea and creating art and stories, however, the way a significant number of people responded was to tell me that I'm wrong and also a bad person. What that meant is that anyone who maybe wanted to explore the world of the game from a marine biology angle was put off by the conversation, which is that the very idea makes someone a bad person.
On top of not getting to see cool Legend of Zelda crypto-ichthyology, it hurt me to be told I was a bad person for indulging in idle speculation about an old video game. Because of course it did! Any normal person would be hurt by that, and it's not even a sensitive topic.
So part of the problem, I think, is that it's the people who aren't hurt by this, and who in fact get energy from conflict, who end up thriving on social media. Conflict is good and necessary, of course, but social media algorithms often serve to transform conflict into cruelty. And I guess I just think that people who have a low tolerance for cruelty should be able to participate in the conversation too.
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My own experience is that, 99% of the time, most people are just going to be ignored. Unless you're devoted to "participating" in social media (by which I mean following a certain number of new people each week and commenting on random posts for at least an hour or two every day), there's really nothing to be done about this. There's also nothing to stop other random people from finding your posts and using them as a platform to behave badly.
The older I get, the stranger it seems that everyone takes this for granted. "It's okay to feel hurt if someone says something deliberately hateful to you" seems like something that shouldn't need to be said, but here we are I guess. Sometimes I feel like a coward for only posting nice and pleasant things on social media, but Twitter and Tumblr and Bluesky just don't feel like the right place to have serious discussions.
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