OliveTapenade
No bio...
User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
8hr ago
Oh, I can see that. But all insults are objectionable in and of themselves - that's the point of them. This particular one is not an insult I would use myself. In this particular case I think that the punishment for the insult was grossly disproportionate, and even if you disagree with me, I came to that conclusion on the basis of looking at the insult itself and the context in which it was used, which are things that the news story strategically concealed. It's that concealment that I'm objecting to.
OliveTapenade
20hr ago
I'll go on a slight tangent and say that I've had a similar experience in religious contexts. I was raised in a liberal mainline Protestant church, and as I grew older came to understand more of theology, more of the meaning of the Christian tradition I came to hold close, and this required developing practices of skepticism and resistance. The church I was raised in, on the institutional level, frequently erred, so I had to strengthen my ability to resist.
At times I have been tempted to become Catholic; if nothing else, there is more, proportionally, that the Catholics are right about than that my original church is right about. Proportionally, they do a better job of holding to the gospel.
But - they demand a kind of total submission of the intellect, a "free choice to trust in the Church's religious authority". A probabilistic judgement that on balance the Catholic Church gets more things right than such-and-such Protestant church is explicitly not enough.
I feel a bit of the same tension here. Let's grant that my resistance against the institutional authority I was raised with was justified. Boy, isn't it convenient that this other one is the perfect, correct institutional authority, against which resistance is never required? How wonderful for Catholics to be part of the one tradition wholly devoid of error, confusion, or misrepresentation. How amazing that the erring heart of man is present everywhere but among the doctrinal pronouncements of the magisterium!
All right, so, the Catholics have an answer to that one - the Holy Spirit infallibly preserves the church from error. I am Protestant enough in my bones that I don't think it works like that, or at least, not nearly so expansively as they think it does.
But to return to the secular - His Majesty's Government is not infallibly defended by the Holy Spirit. It's even less plausible that they are the one authority that must never be questioned or resisted. They don't even claim some sort of divine thumb on the scales. So why is it heroic to follow the demands of conscience and in every case but this one? What makes them the exception? Is it some naive faith in historical progress? Modernity or secular rationality functioning like a kind of revelation? That sounds more like the liberal optimism of a century ago. It is something more deconstructive or postmodernist? But then why should any one authority be immune to deconstruction? Whence comes the certainty lurking beneath the surface here?
OliveTapenade
20hr ago
It definitely reminds me of one of my journalistic pet peeves, which is the one you describe in that Substack post. A news story will tell me that someone said something offensive, or made comments interpreted as offensive, without ever telling me what they actually said. This irritated me at first because I want to know what the person said so that I can decide for myself whether I agree that it's offensive. Later on I concluded that it's just because the outlet does not want me to decide for myself, but would rather I passively accept this judgement.
Sometimes this is relatively inconsequential. I'll use a local example. Last year a football player was suspended after using a 'homophobic slur' on the field. Notice how nothing in that article tells you what Rankine actually said. You can go and click all the links down the bottom to related stories, and none of them tell you what he actually said. Fortunately I chased that one up and what happened is that, during a game, he called another player a "faggot". That's it. That one word. I'd argue that what Rankine said was rude but not much more than that. It's on about the level of calling someone an "asshole" or a "retard". Given that AFL players are young men (Rankine was 25) in a highly-masculine competitive environment, I expect a bit of salty language from them, so I think this particular incident wasn't a big deal, and doesn't warrant much more than maybe the team captain saying, "hey, keep it under wraps on the field, okay?" But the news story does not report what actually happened, and it looks like the AFL wanted to signal how much it hates homophobia, so Rankine was punished disproportionately.
Once you start noticing this sort of circumlocution, it appears everywhere. I think the policy that I've adopted is that if you want me to be outraged about something someone said, the first requirement I have is that you tell me what they said. You can censor it if you like - you can bleep it, or say "the N word" or "the F word", or whatever makes you feel more comfortable - but I don't get outraged on faith.
I'm sure everyone here has noticed similar. In this case, "hateful opinions on immigration" is a category that can cover everything from a person just saying "I think we need less migration and more border protection" to a person saying "I hate all Pakis, they're cockroaches and we ought to drive them all into the sea". What we know is that Amelia has wrongthink, but if we've come to learn that wrongthink is a category that covers everything from advocating mass murder to politely stating facts that someone else finds inconvenient, the category itself loses its force.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
It does, yes. The person is entirely able to obtain citizenship for the child by identifying as the 'father' of the child. It is, of course, a true biological fact that this person is the 'father' of the child, if by 'father' we mean 'the source of the sperm that contributed 50% of the child's genetic make-up'.
This is a purely semantic dispute. The person is the biological parent of the child, but wants to be referred to legally as 'mother' of the child rather than 'father'. No actual facts are in contention here.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
...the character of Amelia is, as far as you can tell from the game itself, a faithful friend, genuinely interested in Charlie's welfare and sympathetic to him, and never depicted doing anything bad outside of the symbolic realm.
I re-read my post due to the QC and it occurs to me to add, by way of completionism, that Pathways itself presents Amelia's friendship as valuable. Questions it asks you around whether to share her memes or go to the protest when she asks are framed as if continuing to be friends with Amelia is desirable. You can decline to share the post and risk your friendship, or share something you may not agree with and continue the friendship. The game's writing assumes that Amelia is likeable and that Charlie wants to hang out with her.
If you make the various friendship-risking choices, Amelia does end the friendship, saying that obviously Charlie doesn't share her values, and in context that seems like it should sting. If you make the 'right' choices in the game, you lose a long-term friend and she appears to feel betrayed. Setting all politics aside, that will feel bad to almost any reader. Yes, Amelia is being pushy and aggressive with her politics, which is somewhat obnoxious, but every child learns, while they're growing up, that it's important to stick by your friends, and to not betray people.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
I did say above that I think the protesters are behaving foolishly. That was my point 2, and my advice for the left was to find a better way to do this, because I think that throwing people into situations where shootings are statistically more likely is something they should avoid. I don't hold that it is categorically wrong to deploy people into situations with elevated risk of violence, but when you do so, that risk ought to be proportional to the good you hope to achieve, and in this case I don't think it is.
My overall position is that ICE (and other law enforcement agencies) should do all that is reasonably possible on their end to minimise the risk of bad shoots, that protesters and activists should behave prudently and avoid raising the probability of bad shoots, and that when bad shoots do occur, the agents responsible should be disciplined or punished.
One difficulty here is that it's possible to enforce professional standards for ICE, and it's possible to punish ICE officers who shoot, but it is not really possible to pass a law requiring that protesters always act in sensible, prudent ways. That part of my position can only be achieved voluntarily, through cultural change.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
I think that adopting a policy that effectively says that it's okay to kill people if you think they're bad is, well, abandoning the concept of civilisation.
What is your position here? That you (or people, or the Trump administration, or some other group?) ought to kill leftists (however that is defined, for you?)? Can you imagine that going anywhere good?
OliveTapenade
5d ago
Sure - I'm not claiming that Pretti was a good person, or pro-social, or anything like that. You are free to conclude that he was a person of poor moral character. I just don't think that matters to anything.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
The second point may well be true, and I think I just made the case that 'the left', broadly construed, is encouraging people to do things consistent with that point.
It just seems to me that if the first point is true, the second point is immaterial to the case itself
I've been trying to avoid the day by day of this argument, since overanalysing single incidents can't provide useful insights into a larger political context, but if we have to...
This is largely what I think. I think the OP is hypocritical - he's discovered a video that makes Pretti look like a horrible person, so he concludes that Pretti 'deserved it'. This is an instance of the behaviour he condemns, where 'feelings about ICE and Pretti and Good are mandatory'.
My opinion, held with low confidence, is basically: 1) Goode was probably a valid case of self-defense; Pretti was probably not, 2) Goode, Pretti, and others were behaving recklessly and foolishly, and 3) ICE is being deployed clumsily and without effective strategy, more as political theatre than as a plausibly effective method of slowing migration.
If I put on my very cynical hat, my reading of the broader situation is that there's a political battle going on, and the left are winning. The Trump administration has deployed ICE as a kind of show of force, hoping to encourage their supporters and demoralise opponents. This has not been very effective. The left-wing strategy is basically to follow ICE around and publicise ICE doing unsympathetic things, so as to undermine ICE's perceived legitimacy, and thus also the Trump administration's legitimacy. As such the left are putting sympathetic innocent people into situations where there is an elevated risk of chaos, perceived threat, and thus shootings. I do not think people on the left want ICE to shoot citizens, but they are contributing to situations with elevated risks of that, and from a purely cynical political perspective, every time ICE shoot an observer/protester/activist, the left wins.
My advice for the left would be to find a better way to do this, because chaos on the streets and people dying are bad things in themselves, and my advice for the right would be to become more effective. Deploying ICE to Minneapolis is thuggish theatre. There can be a place for theatre in border policy, insofar as it's a message to prospective illegal entries, but what they are currently doing is clearly not a well-considered, effective strategy to decrease migrant intakes and remove existing illegal aliens.
At any rate. You just can't draw conclusions from whether Pretti himself was a good or bad or anything else person - not about whether the shooting was justifiable, and not about larger political strategy either. It is just a red herring.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
I think I'm more generous with 'Bad' than I would otherwise be because the 'Deserves a Warning' and 'Deserves a Ban' options are there. I use 'Bad' for any post that I think is technically within the rules, but is, in a vague, hard-to-rigorously-define sort of way, the sort of thing that I would like to see less of around here.
I believe the instructions for the queue are to not overthink it and give your immediate response, so I try not to feel too bad about giving a vibes-based response.
OliveTapenade
10d ago
Where do you put a character like Dame Edna Everage on the chart of purple-haired women?
OliveTapenade
10d ago
This is all coming down to a simple question: does the state have a legitimate right to a monopoly on violence?
Shouldn't that be nuanced somewhat? I'd suggest narrowing it down to a legitimate right to a monopoly on the initiation of violence.
Most people would, I would guess, say that there is a legitimate right to individual self-defense. If someone is trying to do violence to me or my property, I have a right to respond with violence myself. This isn't a communist position, and in general the right or conservatives have been more supportive of an individual's right to use defensive violence.
If we limit the state's monopoly to the initiation of violence, we allow for defensive violence by individuals, and I think that better captures most people's intuitions.
In the context of the United States it's a little more complex than this again, because the American political tradition in particular grants that there is a right for the people to organise themselves and overthrow a tyrannical government, by violent means if necessary. Sic semper tyrannis is not merely a slogan. Here there is, I think, more overlap with communists, since both liberals and communists accept that in principle it can be legitimate to engage in revolutionary violence. In that case the dispute is more about in what circumstances that kind of violence is justified, and I think American conservatives, borrowing from the just war tradition, would have a lot to say about that. Revolutionary or rebellious violence must be proportional to the level of tyranny, must have a reasonable chance of success, must conform to some sort of jus in bello in terms of legitimate targets, must happen under the aegis of some sort of revolutionary organisation or authority, and so on. 'Revolution' is not a blank cheque to just go and shoot anyone you associate with the oppressor, but rather, legitimate revolutionary violence must be organised, strategic, and proportional to the threat posed by a genuine tyranny.
(Disclaimer: this is all on the abstract, theoretical level. I'm talking about political philosophy, not current events.)
OliveTapenade
10d ago
...that might just be because I'm a sucker for Shakespeare.
I do think that the median Amelia meme is garbage, and many of them are being pushed by obvious political junkies or grifters. Something like this is utterly worthless, and obviously made by an American anyway. And that account is trying to sell a memecoin!
My realistic prediction is that in a week or two nobody will remember Amelia. I'm just silly and easily manipulable enough to enjoy a day or two of patriotic British memes.
My favourite Amelia meme so far, actually, is Amelia sharing fun British Empire facts. I wasn't familiar with James Prinsep before I read that post, but it is true, and Prinsep is a genuinely interesting and impressive person. I would prefer more content like that to, well, MAGA-brained Americans LARPing as Brits.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
Hell, I remember when blue hair was associated mostly with anime, and it was completely apolitical to say that blue-haired girls are hot. It wasn't that long ago. Associations can change very quickly.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
Well, yes, obviously it's a fantasy. But fantasies do have a place, and men have been fighting for fictional ladies for thousands of years. A symbol doesn't have to be a real person to be effective.
And as you say, the place of women in political discourse itself changes and evolves. Women went around and gave white feathers to able-bodied young men. Today you would expect young women to be disproportionately progressive, but that's not an eternal truth, and surely any movement towards encouraging young women to be more conservative would contain images as examples.
I don't think Amelia's going to change anything substantial by herself. She's just one more bit of internet froth. But there are worse things in the world that somebody enjoying or feeling encouraged by froth floating on top of the online sea.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
I thought it was for vegetarians? 'Protein' meaning basically 'meat or tofu'?
OliveTapenade
11d ago
I was a bit obsessive in the weekly thread but I am genuinely enjoying the meme. There are a lot of low-quality versions of it, but where it works, the 'joke' is the simple idea of being proud of one's own country. I criticised the Huff AI slop ones, but there is a part of my soul that is moved by this one, and it's AI-gen slop too. Maybe it's just that Shakespeare's words are doing all the heavy lifting.
Still, regardless of origin, I enjoy the whole thing as a reminder of one important trait of patriotism.
It's fun.
It is genuinely fun and uplifting to feel part of and believe in something larger than yourself, and to identify with a place and a heritage, and it's a type of pleasure that people from middle-class liberal cosmopolitan backgrounds like myself are trained not to feel. So allowing myself the space to read the This England speech and enjoy the feeling of loving something in my own heritage, without a trace of irony, feels somewhat transgressive.
The worse Amelia memes, at least for me, are the ones that are just focused on this or that bad thing. Bad things are bad, and should be opposed, but if hatred is the only emotional tenor of a movement, it won't land with me. There's plenty of media that just serves up outrage or panic or whatever else, and none of that finds fertile soil in my heart. But for something to say, with plain sincerity, "This thing that you and I belong to is good and beautiful", is unavoidably moving.
OliveTapenade
14d ago
The scenarios are surprisingly diverse. You would expect the wokescolds in HR who mandate these trainings to make the straight white male the villain every time, but in reality that's not the case.
Now that you mention it, one thing I do notice:
In scenario two, the woman who does better than Charlie on the test has medium-brown skin, hair buns, and a yellow jumper with an orange collar. Amelia points at this woman and says that immigrants are taking our jobs.
In scenario four, if you decline to share Amelia's video, the next day at school Amelia gives you the brush-off and walks off with her friends, who are... a white boy with brown hair, and the same medium-brown woman with hair buns and a yellow jumper with an orange collar. The two friends appear to join in with Amelia and shun Charlie. So either Amelia the racist is friends with black or South Asian people, and those people appear to agree with her on her big issues, or the people making the game are lazily reusing the same diverse cast everywhere.
The former is definitely the funnier interpretation, but it's probably the latter.
OliveTapenade
14d ago
They do sometimes use 'they/them' pronouns even for unambiguously gendered characters - for instance, if you share Amelia's video in scenario four, it says, "Charlie's mum was not so pleased, and grew suspicious of all this new activity their child seemed to be involved with". Since the mother is referred to as a mother and as 'she' elsewhere, this might just be laziness?
OliveTapenade
14d ago
That's fair. This kind of earnest education aimed at teens is very hard to do well - it's a naturally anti-authoritarian, rebellious demographic, after all.
This one just seems like a particular failure, or one that sends perverse messages. As Eetan noted, the correct answers in the game are usually apathetic. The only one that seems productive is the one where Charlie asks the teacher for help improving his work and applying to more job. For all the others, the correct answer is either to stick your head in the sand and do nothing, or ask an authority figure for guidance.
I do wonder if part of the problem is concern that research or facts by themselves don't do enough work? They don't make the case by themselves. You could argue that "do your own research and use critical thinking" doesn't suffice as an antidote to extremism in a time when misinformation is everywhere online; less charitably, I'd note that "do your own research" codes right-wing now. But whatever the cause, the scenarios in Pathways are those where an earnest person researching them online could come to the conclusion that the radicals are right. In the hiring example, Charlie might come to the conclusion that being a white man, rather than a woman of colour, is making it harder for him to get a job - and that's plausibly true. In the migration examples, Charlie might find that the rate of immigration is high and the ancestrally British proportion of the UK's population is only projected to decrease. That's also, well, true. And you can't really combat people being concerned about that in the space of a Flash game with only two or three sentences of narration.
Is this another problem due to their reticence to clearly identify the positions that are out-of-bounds? I can see the argument that she needs to seem nice at first, and then cross the line. You can see this with the protest scenario, where Charlie can go to observe and then be surprised that, instead of mostly being about British values, patriotism, and veterans, it's mostly about xenophobia. But where exactly is that line?
I think you can see this with some of the meme responses. The anime opening, for instance, does make Amelia look very sympathetic. The anime makes her look like a sweet girl, maybe a little shy, who is genuinely passionate about loving her country. But there's also the AI-slop Grok version, which just makes Amelia a person who hates Muslims.
(And I think generally misses the mark; it is too obviously written by an American, and the style is too American overall. It doesn't ring true as English. You can tell that it's one-issue Muslim-hate because, for instance, in the original Grok-Amelia says that British institutions are taken over by "queers and nonces", and then in a follow-up she criticises Muslims for being anti-LGBTQ+!)
But, all right, what's the line? Is Amelia just a Tory? Is she a UKIP or Reform voter? Is she a full-on BNP or EDL supporter? It's not clear.
Cynically that's the point. The line between far-right and right is deliberately blurry, so as to create a chilling effect around plain old conservatism. But the issue we have here is the reverse of that. A character who is presumably intended as far-right is ambiguous enough to just read as regular-right.
Let's go through the scenarios presented one by one. Maybe this is too much depth, but I'm genuinely fascinated by this.
1: Charlie is gaming with his regular circle of friends. Someone forwards a video to him, and tells him that if he cares about the country, he will watch and share it. The correct response is to ignore the message entirely.
This one is striking because there isn't even any evidence that the video is far-right. The scenario as written is perfectly consistent with Charlie's friend being a Green or a socialist or a Corbyn supporter or a Remainer. All it implies is that the video-sharer is a very politically-engaged person canvassing for their cause.
The correct response is also obviously impractical and self-defeating. It notes that the video's content may be illegal, but it is impossible to tell that sight-unseen, and a policy of refusing to watch or share any video because it might be illegal is, plainly, a policy of refusing to engage with any online video at all. If Charlie followed that rule, Charlie couldn't even read Pathways itself! You might precisify it to something like "only watch online videos from trusted sources", but in almost all circumstances that amounts to the same thing.
2: Charlie does badly on an assignment at university. A brown-skinned woman does better than him on the same assignment, and receives a job offer. Charlie has been applying for jobs and has received no offers. Amelia leans in to tell Charlie that this is because immigrants are coming to the UK and taking our jobs. The correct response is to ignore Amelia and ask the teacher how to improve.
This is probably the most straightforward example of Amelia being wrong. It is possible, counterfactually, that if the high-scoring woman hadn't been there, Charlie might have gotten the job offer instead, but the link is pretty tenuous. Maybe Charlie's just not talented in this field. If I had been Amelia in that situation I might have instead nudged Charlie and said "DEI hire, am I right?" or something like that.
3: Charlie sees a video on social media saying that Muslim men are taking emergency accommodation instead of British veterans, and saying that the government is betraying white British. He can ignore the video, research the topic, or post in agreement with it. The correct response is to ignore it.
What stands out here is that all of the responses are completely indifferent to the facts of the situation. If you ignore the video, you coincidentally come across another video suggesting that the government is taking care of veterans, but it's far from clear how you'd tell which video, if either, is telling an accurate story; and the option to try to research the topic leads down a rabbit hole of migration statistics that apparently radicalises him.
4: Charlies sees that Amelia has made a video encouraging people to join "a political group that seeks to defend English rights", and Amelia invites Charlie to join a secret social media group. Options are to ignore it all and risk upsetting Amelia, like the video but not join the group, and share the video and join the group. The correct answer is obviously to ignore it.
It's quite vague what Amelia is actually standing for here. The graphic shows Amelia at a rally waving a sign saying NO ENTRY, so it sounds like 'defending English rights' means opposing immigration at least to some extent. Wanting to decrease the current level of immigration is a pretty mainstream view on the UK right (it's a central pillar of Reform and the Conservatives talk about stopping illegal immigration, though not reducing legal intake), so there's a lot of latitude in terms of what she's advocating. Amelia's memes on the next slide show her saying no to video gaming, waving the UK flag and the NO ENTRY sign, and encouraging people to join a group whose symbol is a skull on a shield called 'Action for Britain!'. What looks like a Facebook group called 'True British People' also appears in the background, so we can assume she's advocating some sort of populist nativism.
5: Charlie is visiting his dad in another town, where Amelia knows that a protest is happening. The protest is again "the changes that Britain has been through in the last few years, and the erosion of British values". She asks Charlie to go in her place. The correct response is to decline.
As above, it's quite vague what the protest is about. When Amelia describes it, speech bubbles show a cancellation sign over the British flag, a handful of red poppies, and background pictures show a protest and a plane dropping bombs on a city.
If you enthusiastically go, Charlie makes a sign with two crossed swords on it, but no more details are visible. If you go just to watch, speech bubbles show a thumbs-down, a gun, and a frowny face, and the narration says that "the protest seemed to be more about racism and anti-immigration than British values and honouring fallen veterans". So, again, all we can tell from this is some kind of nativism.
I am struck by the invocations of 'British values' - largely a post-2000 invention and which spikes around 2020. I associate it with the Blair government and early 2000s concerns about Islam; I'm looking from afar, but it strikes me as remarkably similar to the 'Australian values' debate in the early 2000s here, for largely the same reasons. The continuing growth into the 2010s is probably about Brexit, and attempts to draw a distinction between British and European values? 'British values' is not a phrase that goes deep into the English folkways, at least. It's a 21st century phrase, though I suppose you might argue that that which is taken for granted is not articulated. A phrase only became necessary once the traditions represented by 'British values' were felt to be under threat.
6: Just the ending scenario, with no further choices, and no Amelia.
Anyway, having looked at it more closely, what do I take from this?
I'm not sure how much I buy a 'Hansel and Gretel' interpretation, where Amelia seems nice but is secretly sucking Charlie into far-right extremism. Amelia seems to be pretty up-front about her values. Someone who nudges a classmate and says, "Hey, that's proof that immigrants are taking our jobs" isn't exactly concealing her nativism! The actions she requests are then totally consistent with her openly-stated views. She doesn't try to recruit Charlie into making bombs or anything. She appears to want to just spread the views that she openly tells you she has. I can't see any dissimulation on her part.
The witch or the drug-dealer, in their stories, are lying. The witch pretends to be benevolent but actually wants to eat the children. The drug-dealer tells you that the drugs are fine, and feel great, and that stories about addiction and dangerous side effects are just hype. Amelia at no point attempts to mislead Charlie that I can see.
So if the intent was to tell a story where a seemingly-sympathetic character lures someone into extremism, and to emphasise the importance of spotting the early warning signs, I don't think this was successful. There's no discontinuity between the way Amelia presents itself and the actions she recommends.
OliveTapenade
14d ago
Obligatory 'Everything is Worse in China'.
(I believe Greer later, on Twitter, retracted the point about China at least not having the American gender nonsense. That is in fact spreading among Chinese youth.)
My experience, having known and talked to a fair number of people from mainland China, is that if you want to be politically successful you do have to participate in an awful lot of lies, or at least, insincerities. If you don't want to be part of that, you can mostly check out, but the way that goes for most Chinese people is that you resign yourself to living under a government and a social system that constantly barrages you with a combination of lies, misrepresentations, and technical truths, and you have no way of telling them apart. Most Chinese people know that their government is deceptive and incompetent, and generally try to route around it, or live with its demands, since they have no practical ways to change it.
Now I know what the obvious response is - that Western countries also have governments that barrage people with lies and misrepresentations, and that political or social advancement is also contingent on repeating lies and sincerities. I agree that this is mostly true.
But it is worse in China.
One of the things I'm very grateful to have heard and learned from Chinese friends is that intuitive sense of "same crap, different day". They deal with pretty much the same kind of garbage as Westerners. Only more of it. And worse.
OliveTapenade
15d ago
Oh, certainly. I don't think the strategy actually works, and the extent to which modern Western economies function as GDP-maximisers in isolation from any sense of the lives that the country's people actually want to live is a damning indictment of the whole field of political economy.
Add me to the chorus of people who don't like the name. I think the aesthetic the article is describing is real, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with either diners or goths.
I agree that what it's describing isn't a subculture, though possibly I'm using the word a bit restrictively and thinking of a subculture as something that implies a community or a scene. It's not necessarily 'the mainstream' because I think that implies a kind of universality, but I think it is a mainstreaming of a certain kind of low-effort, passive engagement with online culture.
More options
Context Copy link