4chan raiders decided to fracture the tumblr queer community by making up an imaginary gender for child molesters, “clovergender.”
Because people on this website are godforsaken, they bought into that, and believed quite genuinely that there was a secret, massive conspiracy of child molesters on this website seeking to rape various underage users.
In the context of this conspiracy nonsense, antisexual radical feminists stepped in to advance their own goals, by suggesting that anyone who engages in certain forms of kink or reads certain types of fiction is one of these child-rapists-in-waiting.
Simultaneous to this development, the popularization of “stimboards” as an evolution of moodboards/aesthetic boards and “so satisfying” gifs occurred.
Stimboards were highly popular with two major groups (often overlapping): fandoms, and tumblr’s LGBTQIAPN+ population.
Because those were the two groups that were also targetted by the antisexual radical feminists and by 4chan’s nonsense, stimboard makers were convinced that their art would be used to groom and rape children unless they “made sure” that it “couldn’t be” by putting up those banners.
However, because radical feminists had convinced these artists that the “real” child molesters were adults engaging in consensual relationships and/or “shippers,” the “preventative banners” mostly targetted those groups.
The irony that these people genuinely believe that the only thing between a rapist and their victim is a 15x500px banner is hilarious and deeply, deeply depressing.
oh, is THAT what that was? i was so confused by the whole “x don’t interact” thing
To be totally, 100% fair there are some people who do the “kinksters don’t interact” thing because DD/LG folks might reblog moodboards and tag them with things like “daddy’s little slut” or “how cummies feel” or whatever and I do get people who want to keep tags like “pink” “princess” and “kitten” free of kink gifs.
So, while I understand and abide by people not wanting kink put on their posts, that can be resolved by saying things like, “ask to tag,” or “this post is sfw.”
It’s also worth remembering that the majority of kink blogs aren’t going to be tits deep in stimboards, they’ll be posting their own content and sharing between themselves.
It’s a very rare problem, and the reaction has not been to block perpetrators or request boundaries be respected.
Instead it has been feeding into this notion that all fandoms and queer spaces are positively crawling with child molesters, which is shitty for a number of reasons, as well as claiming that autistic people (the nominal target audience of stim boards) can never be involved in kink or shipping, or rather, that being involved in either is proof that you’re lying about being autistic.
In effect, autistic people have been declared acceptable casualties in a fight against an enemy that does not exist.
Which wouldn’t be okay even if the phantom horror were real, but since it’s entirely fictional, it’s basically just an enormous fuck you to any autistic who isn’t “innocent” or “pure” enough.
As for keeping tags clear: safe mode.
Blogs that include explicit sexuality are Nate nsfw. If you don’t want to see NSFW content, out on safe mode. If you’re underage, you can’t even turn safe mode off without lying.
On a semi-unrelated note, as much as 4chan is often found at the head of such disasters, I can’t find myself feeling resentment toward it: instead the mass of people who blindly believe anything they read and jump from one troll to the other seemingly unaware of being used as volleyball…oh, those I can get behind being pissed off at.
Like. Everyone knows 4chan is terrible, and suddenly there’s this ridiculous “gender for child molesters” bullshit (and if that convinced you for even a hot second wow you really fucking hate trans people) and it LITERALLY USED 4CHAN GRAPHICS, and y’all still drank the kool-aid.
I’d say I’m disappointed, but this is exactly what I’ve come to expect from this hellsite.
Hot take: kink is often literally just emotional and sexual stimming, special interest hyperfocus, and/or the result of sensory processing differences in how people experience sexuality.
Autistic self-hate/internalized ableism therefore likely plays a huge role in the social popularity of extreme, performative anti-kink sentiment in this community and overlapping communities.
Some autistic folks internalize the messages telling us we’re creeps for existing socially with other people (pervasively, but especially around sexuality), and wind up in a pit of puritanical scrupulosity trying desperately to pretend that the things that make us tick aren’t important in our sexual lives.
We would fall for this shit less often if we weren’t pervasively culturally gaslighted about our worth as people.
Agree.
I also feel, as a physically disabled person, that anti-kink is ableist against people with unusual bodies as well. I’ve known a lot of people who have been interested in impact play/painplay because, say, nervous system issues mean they can’t feel or can only partially feel “standard” sexual stimulation.
Telling those people they are disrespecting themselves by, like, getting their backs whipped instead just makes me go ??? WHAT WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS YOU ARE NOSY MEAN AND DUMB
As someone both autistic and with physical nerve damage in a few places due to both injuries and genetic structural issues… yeah, don’t assume everyone experiences the same stimulus the same way.
Nerve damage comes in different flavors. There’s the “everything hurts” kind, the “can’t feel much in general” kind, the “randomly itchy or tingly” kind and also the “certain kinds of touches tickle or itch or sting when they ‘shouldn’t’ but other kinds are extra nice” (and that’s just for sensory-nerve damage; motor-nerve damage gives its own weirdnesses, like “sudden cramping for no reason” or “one very specific muscle out of this whole area doesn’t work right” – and on that last one, you don’t realize how much some of the weird tiny muscles that you might not even know you have are essential for normal functioning until that weird tiny muscle stops working). It depends on which specific nerves are damaged and in what way. There may be more kinds than I’ve described but I’ve personally experienced ALL those things as a direct result of physically damaged nerves.
And then there are differences in sensory processing. I have synesthesia and other sensory-processing differences. I perceive sounds as having colors and textures and as producing physical sensations in my body, among other overlaps of sensory input -> perceptions not generally associated with that specific input. This doesn’t impair my ability to determine reality, it’s not hallucinatory. You won’t make me believe I’m physically seeing a red square that’s suddenly appeared in front of me if you play a sound that translates as a red square on my visual overlap, I’ll be aware that the red square is the sound and not something that physically exists in my visual field. But it does mean that some sensory inputs are more or less pleasant to me because of how they translate across other senses than the one originally stimulated. The smell of sulfur is a rather lovely dark purple shade, so I’m less averse to smelling sulfur (it still stinks but the color’s pretty nice so it’s overall kinda ok). Fluorescent red is the color of the pain of a headache, so I’m not a big fan of looking at actual fluorescent red thanks to associative aversion, even though it doesn’t actually cause me pain to look at (the sensory translation is one-way).
It’s fair to not want sexual stuff added on to your stimboard posts. But the fact that some people find some “stim” stuff sexually stimulating doesn’t automatically make them bad people.
These are good additions and really well-explained, thank you.
I have a very deep-seated kink that basically functions as a form of synesthesia/cross-wiring.
It’s more inherent to my sexuality than gendered attractions have been, showed up earlier in my life, and during the years when I was trying to repress shit (being young and embarrassed and on the Try Real Hard To Act Neurotypical life plan) it resurfaced harder and faster than gender-based orientation. Hell, it resurfaced harder and faster than my gender.
I’m sure that there are people for whom kink is an expendable part of their sexual preference and not essential neurological wiring. Probably many people!
But I’m not one of them, and so when someone labels a post “no kink” or “kinksters don’t interact” – not “don’t reblog to NSFW blogs” but a comment that is ambiguously or unambiguously about the type of person who’s allowed to engage – I get approximately the same emotional reaction as if they’d named any other thing I can’t change about myself.
Like, since the specific thing they hate about me is invisible unless I make it visible, it doesn’t even particularly make it impossible for me to reblog a post.
But reblogging that post would send a message to everyone like me that they’re unwanted and wrong. Messages we already get constantly. Some of us die of the cumulative burden of those messages (not only about sexuality but about everything from how we dress to how we eat.)
Neurotypical society needs to stop doing this to neurodivergent people – and neurodivergent people need to stop buying in out of fear and doing it to each other.
conservatives are intolerant of who you are; progressives are intolerant of what you do. a good cartoon.
Why is that bakery selling “Bible”
Just one Bible? Offered at a totally unrelated business? I’m so confused
I feel bad for OP because they probably just wanted to post their little post and get their handful of notes for it, but this is such a perfect piece of rhetoric to dissect that I’m going to forcibly make it into a teaching tool, and they’re just going to have to deal with that. In this case, OP and the cartoonist are confusing judgment with prejudice. It’s likely to be simple ignorance on OP’s part, but it’s a deliberate rhetorical choice that the cartoonist made to create this piece of propaganda.
OP and the cartoonist are both conflating judgment/prejudice and equating them, stating that they are both equally bad forms of “intolerance”.
Society usually suggests it isfair and reasonable to “judge” people differently based on their behavior choices. This is the underpinning of many institutions, such as education, justice, barter, and (generally) employment. If people behave badly, this rule says, then they are supposed to receive fewer rewards and opportunities, until they correct their bad behavior or are forcibly deprived of their rights.
This judgment is also how many people behave at a personal level, as it allows personal relationships to function, and behavioral choices can be made based on previously agreed rules about what good behavior looks like. This is generally considered to be an acceptable way to run a society; if someone lies, steals, cheats, or attacks others, then they have behaved badly, and the society judges and treats them accordingly. In this manner, society is kept in a relatively stable form. It would be very hard to demolish this system, and I’m not sure what a sustainable alternative would be.
This is why “Judgment” is considered to be logical and reasonable, while “prejudice” (quite literally pre-judgment) is considered to be illogical and unreasonable. That’s why having “good judgement” means being able to make good decisions, while there is no such thing as “good prejudice”. Judgement makes the laws; prejudice, when used to discriminate against people, is often illegal. They are not the same thing.
The idea that bad behavior should
not be tolerated is as old as the Code of Hammurabi. It’s the
foundation of multiple religious texts. It’s what little children are taught from the cradle all around the world, and is the foundation of most Heavens and Hells. It is usually called
something like “judgment”, “justice,” “consequences” or “discipline” …
not “intolerance.” But if it is called intolerance, then it is certainly correct that bad behavior is not supposed to be tolerated.
According to the OP and cartoonist, the animal kingdom is surprisingly left-wing, with social animals being particularly intolerant of “what people do” when those actions unfairly deprive others of resources. Chimpanzees and ravens can be taught to play cooperative games by scientists – and, famously, social animals don’t want to play with animals that reveal themselves as cheaters or thieves. Animals that behave unfairly during cooperative games quickly lose the trust of other animals, and their fellows will refuse to play cooperative games with them. To me, as an evolutionary biologist, it’s amazing to think that concepts like “accountability” are meaningful to animals.
If you genuinely believe that this is a bad thing – that intolerance of “what [people] do” is just as bad as intolerance of “what [people] are,” then my goodness! Equating those would be a complete overhaul of the most basic tenets of human society, spirituality and morality. I really would be interested in knowing what the alternative would be, and how a society could be run if it genuinely considered these things to be equal. I would genuinely like to know how far this belief goes when questioned, and how people manage to reconcile it with their position in society.
So what’s the idea behind the rhetoric in the OP? Well, apart from confusing and misinforming people, it hopes to convince them that judgment and prejudice are equally bad. This will be useful because if people believe this, it can be used to convince them that they must not punish social-rule-breakers (“You are obligated to serve customers who behave badly”) as well as diminishing the role of civil rights. The idea that “both sides are equally bad” is a commonly sown one in this decade, as it hopes to create a majority of disillusioned, docile people who won’t vote and don’t believe in change, leaving the playing field to be controlled by energetic extremists.
But in an insidious way, it also attacks that idea of “accountability,” that nebulous nation-building concept that even crows hold dear. Personally, that’s not what I like to see in my opinion leaders – it’s most commonly promoted by people who behave badly.
OP is right about cartoon quintessentially full of shit. Thank you @elodieunderglass for that excellent demonstration of exactly why and how.
ETA edited because I completely misread initially – the OP is the initial comment, not the cartoon!!!!!!
hey yall dumb fucks reblogging this and yapping about how, ur life is actually super hard as a younger sibling…
the ‘eldest sisters are oppressed’ thing is based on the fact that the oldest girls in many families are, a lot of the time, drafted into watching her younger siblings to the point that shes more of a young third parent than a kid anymore. shes expected to be incredibly responsible while her younger siblings get to make mistakes. she get to do more housework than her father because apparently men shouldn’t have to watch laundry.
op is obviously referring to the ways in which older sisters ( nope not brothers) are forced into maternal roles by both society and their parents for a number of reasons, not limited to society’s insistence that they must learn to become mothers early. theres also the fact that many families both need and cant afford childcare. this idea that an oldest sister is free childcare is bullshit.
There’s a book called “The Eldest Daughter Effect” that goes into detail about this. And it applies to the oldest daughter so even if the oldest child is a boy and the second child is a daughter, she is the one who ends up getting all that extra pressure and responsibilities for younger siblings.
You may have heard about the efforts in Europe to reform copyright law. The debate has been ongoing in the European Parliament for months. If approved next week, these new regulations would require us to automatically filter and block content that you upload without meaningful consideration of your right to free expression.
We respect the copyrights and trademarks of others, and we take all reports seriously to ensure that your creative expression is protected. We make this clear in our Community Guidelines. There’s already a legal framework that works and is fair: Todaywe take down posts and media that contain allegedly infringing content when we receive a valid DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown request. We also provide clear-cut ways for people to fight back if they believe their removed content was not a true violation. These instances are monitored and reported and live in our biannual transparency report.
The suggestion to use automated filters for issues of copyright is short-sighted at best and harmful at worst. Automated filters are unable to determine whether a use should be considered “fair use” under the law and are unable to determine whether a use is authorized by a license agreement. They are unable to distinguish legitimate parody, satire, or even your own personal pictures that could be matched with similar photographs that have been protected by someone else. We don’t believe that technology should replace human judgment.
Tumblr is and always has been a place for creative expression, and these new regulations would only make it harder for you to express yourself with the freedom and clarity you do so now.
If you access Tumblr from Europe and want to act, you can find more information on saveyourinternet.eu.
James Rhodes, a pianist, performed a Bach composition for his Youtube channel, but it didn’t stay up – Youtube’s Content ID system pulled it down and accused him of copyright infringement
because Sony Music Global had claimed that they owned 47 seconds’ worth
of his personal performance of a song whose composer has been dead for
300 years.
Just last week, German music professor Ulrich Kaiser posted his research
on automated censorship of classical music, in which he found that it
was nearly impossible to post anything by composers like Bartok,
Schubert, Puccini and Wagner, because companies large and small have
fraudulently laid claim to their whole catalogs.
Europeans have one week to contact their MEPs to head off this catastrophe.
Stop what you’re doing and contact two friends in the EU right now and send them to Save Your Internet – before it’s too late.
This isn’t something that gets talked about a lot, and I have no idea how far the problem extends geographically, but if you care about poor people, if you care about sex workers, if you care about activists, if you care about privacy,
you should consider resisting the transition from cash to card-only payments that is happening in shops in some bigger cities. Including shops where only one register in a long row still accepts cash payments so anyone paying with cash needs to wait in line and sticks out.
Cash is how poor people help keep each other alive without immediately worrying about their benefit cuts, cash is what people get when they do a bit of work or sell some old stuff to feed their kids that week. Cash is how most sex workers get paid. A lot of people need to be able to make cash payments to feed their kids, pay their rent and basically to live.
Cash is also what activists use whenever they need protest supplies and don’t want their full name and address attached to the protest. Cash is how we buy any item we want to keep out of our digital footprint. But whether you’re buying a megaphone or a dildo, you can’t do so privately if you can’t spend cash.
Banks are eager to work towards a post-cash economy because it makes our spending habits so much easier to track. States want the same because it makes people so much easier to track and control. We should not want a
post-cash economy
and we should resist attempts to create it.
I adopted a cash-as-much-as-possible policy a few years ago. I only use a card when I’m buying something online or for unexpectedly large Costco purchases. I started doing it out of spite because I hate credit card companies and I could afford to. It’s also nice for any local businesses you patronize–they don’t lose part of the profit from the sale to the card company.
I´m pretty much cash only, and i can think of a whole lot more situations where cards are not only impractical but stupidly impossible. like flea markets: my clothes as a kid came mostly from there, same with my kids bc my mom doesn´t see a reason to buy new stuff for more money for a couple months of wearing. how to pay 3 bucks for 3 shirts over a table w/o electricity?
and that seams to be pretty german, lots of people here don´t want cashless society.
Based on my own experience, cash use isn’t just pushed back by the widespread availability of payment by card or phone. The number of ATM’s is also being reduced in a lot of larger cities.
And when the nearest ATM is 1.5 kilometers away and people at the market run out of cash, they just stop buying things. So market-stall owners quickly get themselves one of those small attach-to-your-smartphone card readers.
I’ve already seen a LOT of farmers markets where you can pay for your vegetables with a card. The same is happening to big-city flea markets, the same will happen to smaller city flea markets.
And the number of ATM’s will just get pushed back more, while the number of pay-by-card opportunities increases. And then it becomes hard for people without transport and with mobility limits to do ‘cash only’ out of principle, so ‘cash only’ becomes one more thing only privileged idealists can do.
So, ‘cash only’ as an individual choice is nice but it’s not enough. As with just about every other problem in the world, you can not create change by ‘voting with our wallet’. Individual behavior choices do not offer an effective pushback to a systematic policy being pushed upon a population. They never do. A more solid resistance to a post-cash economy is needed if we want to avoid it.
Of course this is IMO, but use of technological progression should not be hampered, instead we need to look to the root of the problem – which is the root of society as a whole. The corruption and of course the avarice of the current rulers – if such a thing didn’t exist, if we lived in a freer society where we didn’t fear the current minefield that is politics or worry that protests equated to hostility instead of understanding, would any of you really be afraid to use cards instead of cash?
Only if we lived in a worldwide society with no states and no authorities at all and no chance of the resurfacing of states and authorities. I find it highly unlikely that the existence of money would continue without authority. So realistically… nope
Technological ‘progress’ is just change, it can be good or bad or neither, but it’s important to question what it achieves and who it serves.
Regular cash works. It doesn’t need to be pushed back. The people that are pushing it back are doing it primarily because of the control and surveillance opportunities of cards, not because it’s actually better.
Like the transition from paper tickets to digital cards for public transport, this technology is not about user comfort but primarily about information and control.
from an accessibility standpoint, using cards is much easier. I’m autistic, so planning out an interaction before it takes place greatly reduced the amount of spoons it will take. With a card, I know exactly how it will go: 1.) I say what I want, 2.) they tell me the number of dollars it will take to acquire it, 3.) I pull up to the window, 4.) I hand them my card, 5.) they hand me a drink if I get one, 6.) they hand my card back, 7.) I put it in my wallet and put the wallet up just in time to grab my food and 8.) drive off. As many steps as that is, it’s a linear flow. However, paying with cash has approximately 700 branches after step 2 (what I’m getting could be anywhere from $3-10 and because taxes I can’t absolutely know how much it will be until they tell me, and sometimes I memoize exactly how much my order for a specific place is and they change it). Also, if I can’t give them exact change, I have to fumble with that which is much more difficult than putting a card in a slot.
I know this all may sound like just complaining about things that are specifically engineered to encourage my exact actions, and I don’t disagree, but at this point in my life, sometimes the fact that I can go to the taco bell dive through and get a steak quesadilla for $4.24 and pay with my card is the difference between eating and not eating.
(And I can’t speak for them but I imagine people with mobility or motor disabilities find using cards easier too.)
That’s certainly a thing to consider.
However, accessibility is rarely one thing. For some people, cards make it very difficult to comprehend how many money you have and remember how much you’ve spend today. Even with digital tools to keep track of a bank account, cash provides a much easier physical control of what you spend. For people who need that control to not run out of money, cash can mean the
difference between eating and not eating at the end of the month.
Luckily, it’s not a matter of choosing one. We can have cash AND cards, and if we must imagine a future with states and money in it, we can envision futures in which anonymous cards that are easily acquired and discarded in exchange for cash so that those that need a card for accessibility reasons don’t have to submit to state surveillance to use one.
BIG DISCLAIMER: i was 9 when 9/11 happened, so this might be more about my own crystalizing tastes than anything else. i think it’s a pretty darn good theory tho and other people have validated it.
BIGGER DISCLAIMER: i am not saying that country music prior to 9/11 was free from nationalist, racist, misogynist undertones – i just think that these themes became more the norm!
MY HOT TAKE:
with very few exceptions, including goodbye earl, before he cheats, and daddy Iessons (side note – all women!) 9/11 ruined country music. around 2014 onward we’ve got margo price, sturgill simpson, jason isbell etc., who are making country music great again (wink), but those folks are mostly considered “alternative” country. the mainstream country music for well over a decade now is a glut of trash performative patriotic / working-class-but-not-really lab-crafted budweiser-sponsored nonsense that has managed to sound rebellious (or has convinced its fans that it sounds rebellious) without ever actually questioning any power structure. so much so that artists who ACTUALLY criticized the government were literally blacklisted for nearly a decade (the dixie chicks)
pre-9/11 country music, though not perfect or ideologically pure by any stretch, did not have the raging american flag painted truck boner that comes to mind for a lot of people who say “i like everything except rap and country”
SPECIFICALLY, toby keith’s “courtesy of the red, white, and blue (the angry american)” (2002) literally destroyed country music. it was a direct answer to the 9/11 attacks and war song in support of the invasion of afghanistan. the lyrics read like a disjointed feverish email chain letter forwarded from your great uncle sprinkled with glittering american flag gifs and heavily saturated pictures of bald eagles. the entire song is lifted from an estimated 248 peeling bumper stickers collected from rusted trucks on cinder blocks in overgrown yards, cut up and arranged to fit a catchy, formulaic tune that is almost certainly the background music playing in george w. bush’s head at all times.
“we’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the american way
and uncle sam put your name at the top of his list
and the statue of liberty started shakin’ her fist
and the eagle will fly, and it’s gonna be hell, when you hear mother freedom start a’ringin’ her bell”
country music and the new country musicians that toby keith paved the way for became so pro establishment and so unquestioningly nationalistic that, again, the dixie chicks who went against this grain were blacklisted by the industry and received death threats from country music fans. hell, there are folks who STILL froth at the mouth at the mere mention of the dixie chicks.
9/11 killed outlaw country – how can you sing the praises of law breakers when your main circuit consists of singing to troops? there are some great classic country songs critiquing the police state – especially from johnny cash and merle haggard – now country music artists hold fundraisers for FOPs. new country music is basically in-law country music.
you don’t have to write a pro-bush patriotic anthem to be part of this post-9/11 ruination. playing meaningless songs about living in the heart of (read: white) america, eschewing the city (read: not white), and cracking open a cold one with the boys for “authentic” country music is also important to the war effort.
there’s a progression of themes here:
post 9/11 top tier: war anthem, vocally patriotic, directly used as pro war propaganda;
which paved the way for: “things used to be so much better” thinly veiled racist laments, good for campaign ads;
which paved the way for meaningless party anthems – attempts to make things “like they used to be” and craft a reality that neither the artist nor listener likely ever experience.
that brings us to what most people think of today when they say they hate country music: the country party anthem – “tiny hot gal in tight jean shorts who can drink beer like the guys, she doesn’t like beyoncé Like Other Girls, oh she’s so into me and my truck, i’m gonna take her fishing after i finish sowing my corn – sung by a guy who’s never touched a tractor” – has overtaken the tragic, done me wrong, despairing country ballads of tammy wynette, george jones, and even up into pre-9/11 contemporaries like reba mcentire and george strait. you didn’t necessarily have to be country to relate to their pain. now you have to perform suburban redneckness to enjoy luke bryan.
when was the last time you heard a sad country song?
after 9/11, cowboys (whether or not they had ever been near a cow) weren’t allowed to be sad anymore (no more done me wrong country), and they certainly weren’t allowed to question authority (no more outlaw country). partying hardy became the most important American Thing and if you don’t sing about that, our Enemies Will Win.
so – understanding that country music has always had bad stuff, and that like any genre it suffers from commercialization, 9/11 DESTROYED COUNTRY MUSIC. and toby keith gleefully helped destroy it.
for some further evidence of the decline of country music, please listen to the dixie chicks’ “long time gone” which is an indictment of the industry (i believe it was written before 9/11 but my point still stands – the genre was on the decline and 9/11 was the major cultural event that hastened the decline).
maybe i am a curmudgeon – almost every generation of country music has had its own “country music is not what it used to be” anthem, but i really think something distinct happened with 9/11.
Can confirm. Alan Jackson and Toby Keith, the blacklisting of Dixie Chicks, literally the only singer I can think of that ever spoke out against anything from 2001-2010 was Johnny Cash. I’d also say that the uber-patriotic stance lead to the shiny, vapid County Boy® nonsense that lead to so many of the solo artists all sounding and looking the same.
James Rhodes, a pianist, performed a Bach composition for his Youtube channel, but it didn’t stay up – Youtube’s Content ID system pulled it down and accused him of copyright infringement
because Sony Music Global had claimed that they owned 47 seconds’ worth
of his personal performance of a song whose composer has been dead for
300 years.
Just last week, German music professor Ulrich Kaiser posted his research
on automated censorship of classical music, in which he found that it
was nearly impossible to post anything by composers like Bartok,
Schubert, Puccini and Wagner, because companies large and small have
fraudulently laid claim to their whole catalogs.
Europeans have one week to contact their MEPs to head off this catastrophe.
Stop what you’re doing and contact two friends in the EU right now and send them to Save Your Internet – before it’s too late.
Dumb bitch in the notes arguing planned obsolescence is necessary to keep costs down,
I thought planned obsolescence was to prevent your phone from just suddenly turning off and never working again? Like it’s meant to be an “oh, my thing isn’t working, I should invest in a new one soon.” Kind of thing?? Like shits gonna break either way, I just thought this let us know like a month earlier than it would otherwise.
I mean… that’s kind of what they want you to think?
Sure, throttling your phone’s cpu so that the battery doesn’t wear down faster is certainly… a thing that’ll extend battery life… but, uh………… Hey, why don’t we just allow customers to replace their old batteries, you know, just like batteries were originally designed to do?
This extends far beyond phones/computers/etc as well. I recall, there’s light bulbs that exist from around the time of their invention that can still burn to this day. But companies only manufacture light bulbs that degrade and burn out over a few years, so that they can keep selling more light bulbs and turn a profit.
There’s a lot of examples of this, really. But, no, the main purpose of this is simply to make people continually have to replace their old “““broken”““ products for new ones, when the only reason they break to begin with is because they purposefully build in deficiencies that cause the product to degrade over time. It’s capitalism, baby
My mom had one vacuum cleaner all through our childhood. That first generation of vacuum cleaners was made to a very high standard because the companies were trying to convince people who had never seen one to buy them. Now, unless you buy the very high end models, they break in five years.
Can confirm, once helped my dad paint a client’s house interior and needed to vacuume after due to all the sanding we did. Dad’s shop vac would have taken us hours to clean since it was made for small messes and not whole carpets. Dad dug out the client’s home vacuum (with permission) which was this ancient heavy metal kirby from the 70s and holy shit not only did it still work but it had the strongest suction I have ever seen in a vac and it was that day that really hammered into me that planned obsolescence was A Thing.
I can literally go to a junk mall, but a 1920s sewing machine, oil the moving parts, replace the rusted needle and sew on that damn thing for the rest of my life.
And if one part or piece breaks, literally takes the mechanical knowledge of a 3yr old with plastic tools to fix it. I can access every part of that machine and fix it with a screwdriver and needle nose pliers. No special screws so only a “””professional””” can fix it. No parts that can be “so hard to fix you might as well buy a new one”
Corporations CAN make functioning lasting products. They just choose not to.
The Apple ][+ I wrote my first stories on in 1980 still works. The 2004 iPod I bought off eBay to store audiofiles that iTunes refuses to recognize as mine because (GASP) they came off physical CDs I bought works fine. Fridges, TVs, gaming consoles, appliances, things I remember in my parents’ house in the 70s (ok, the console was a Pong clone, BUT STILL) worked for 30-40 years (some of my grandparents’ appliances were 50+ years old), and then their successors started lasting 10-20, and that window is growing shorter and shorter.
There is absolutely no reason that modern technology has become more and more and more fragile in my lifetime. I don’t care that a lot of it is more advanced tech than it used to be. It also doesn’t have as many mechanical parts to wear down and overheat and fail in mechanical ways as it used to.
I have SO MANY THINGS that still work fine, but the internet says I ought to update them, and since I don’t, I have the choice between losing the programs I bought that I use all the time (like Photoshop before it went to a subscription-only service where you LOSE ACCESS to your files if you stop paying a monthly fee) or losing things like Skype that automatically disabled the old version of itself, announced I had to use a new version, and then wouldn’t let me install the new version because my OS was too old. When it was STILL WORKING FINE.
There is overwhelming evidence that planned obsolescence is a thing, and I commend the EU for daring to confront companies profiting from it.
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