💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2023 › 10-10.gmi captured on 2023-11-14 at 07:57:27. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-11-04)
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Since Hamas' sudden attack on Israel (which by all accounts has been a combination of legitimate military targets, as well as civilians), I haven't been able to avoid the subject on social media. To the Israeli diaspora and many Jews worldwide, this is the latest salvo in an ongoing campaign against their very existence. To supporters of the Palestinian people and those who envision the return of the state of Palestine, well, same.
And it's been inescapable and while I care about what's going on, I refuse to say or boost anything on the usual platforms: yes, it's important, yes, people are dying, and Christ yes, the whole region feels like it's on the brink. But social media doesn't care about nuance: you're either for Israel, or the Palestinian people. You're not allowed to say that the situation is necessarily complicated, and that actions by both combatant sides make black-and-white judgements impossible.
My online life didn't used to be this way. Can you imagine how 9/11 would play out online today? Back then, you'd get news from news sites. cnn.com was quickly added to muscle memory. I checked other sites as well, and directly. Google News didn't exist. There was no social media to boost strangers' takes into your life, you weren't expected to have a stance on every major world event, and you certainly weren't condemned for your silence on your tiny blog read by a handful of friends and strangers.
I wanted to see what what going on then, so I went back to my archives of my HTML journal from that era. I don't have anything for September, 2001. I have a couple entries that October, and my focus seems to be on my coursework, as well as the upcoming first installment of Lord of the Rings. Was I self-centered? Yeah probably, but I was also young. But what's important is that even though I know I was thinking about what's going on (I vividly remember getting a call from my dad, who worked very early hours, on 9/11, telling me to get up and turn on the TV), it wasn't something I felt like I needed to write about in my journal. No, opinions on everything would come later, with chronological and algorithmic feeds.
Social media has been incredible in the way that it's made it easy, effortless even, to meet people tangentially clustered around your interests. But it's come at a cost. With the understanding that it is, in many cases, people's sole window into the online world, there is an expectation that you state your allegiances, so people can know whether you're part of their tribe or not.
I'm tired of that. I'm exhausted. Look, I've existed in the social media version of the online as long as anyone else - I trace it back to LJ, so, let's say late 2001 for me. And I remember before, how we still lived in the world where all these terrible tragedies happened - the world of 9/11, but also Kosovo, Chechnya, Bosnia, et al. - but where we weren't expected to make our identity out of fragments of every major event in parts of the world that, if we're being honest, many of us will never, ever see.
There will never be a year in history without war, or armed conflict, however you want to describe it. I don't want to live my life perpetually angry about the suffering of others. Their lives are important. But I don't want to spend every minute of my life on edge. I'm not in politics, I don't study international relations; is there a person alive who really cares what I, specifically, think about these things? When I log into Bluesky, or Mastodon, or God forbid go against my best interests and open my dormant Twitter account, I see all kinds of posts about what's going on in Israel in the Gaza Strip. And what's going on is awful. It will break your heart. But I don't need to see people's thoughts on it to know that, and I miss the times when I wasn't expected to process everything everywhere at once. And to have a public opinion on it, as if anyone wanted to read the ramblings of inconsequential me.