Halt, Delete

I deleted my reddit account.  You may be wondering why a radical feminist retained a reddit account for so long, or at all — as I have often wondered, as well.  But then, I prefer to take my misogyny neat, without any obfuscation. And that 40,000-character limit, with actual text formatting options, proved just too irresistible.

Never mind that fewer and fewer people approached that character limit over the years or, indeed, extended more energy in posting than is consumed by regurgitation of a meme.  Never mind that comment sections devolved into the one-line truisms favored by gen Zers and bots: groups whose proliferating presence online — no offense — is indistinguishable.  The dumber it all became, the more motivated I was to set it right, quite bafflingly missing the point that this was expression of my own increasing dumbness in proximity to social media, too.

Never mind knowing that these are military platforms — as surely, with enough effort, we can turn the mechanisms of the machine back against itself.  Here I must conclude that, per usual, Audre Lorde was correct.  The master’s tools will always be the master’s tools.  He doesn’t share.  He doesn’t have to. 

So I have conceded the obvious: that the only thing to ever happen inside the ant computer is becoming irritated with the other ants.

And surely within these closed circuits of our conditioning we all grow not only exponentially dumber, but more irritating and irritated in kind.

This said, I will forever be grateful for the more thoughtful contributions to r/lockdownskepticism (before it devolved into a right-wing chamber of echoes; see prior points) and r/dogfree: spaces that did occasionally renew my sense of a humanity worth committing to.  And for my own part, I have deemed some of my writing there worth preservation.  Hence this post, as it will be archived here.  

If you notice a slight tone change in the forthcoming entries, that is why. Imagine you’re on reddit.  Or don’t: because, really, we all deserve better than that. 

Image from Nonsense Botany, and Nonsense Alphabets by Edward Lear, 1889, via The British Library