This happens to me when I rarely open up Facebook. I’d see someone I was obsessing over in the 10s, and now I just wonder what I was ever feeling with them. It’s not like something happened and they’re massively different, they’re more or less the same. Really the world changed a lot and I’m not the 
I used to be.
I’m not dating anyone new now. But if I had to judge someone as hot, they would have many of the following characteristics:
- left of some soft (Marxist, Anarchist, hell I’ll date a decent socdem)
- mask wearing
- vegan
- high empathy, worry about the suffering of others
- reader
- actively organising something in their community
To be honest, I had a pretty basic taste in dates back in the day. If anything, this should be a self-crit.
this reminds me of how a friend of mine took this girl to prom. I would describe her as quiet and seemingly normal.
anyway, by her mid 30s, she was posting on Facebook non stop about how Obama was in the Muslim Brotherhood and actively helping ISIS into the US. big Operation Jade Helm brain. like posting memes of Obama with like evil red eyes and stuff, unironically.
I can’t even imagine what level of Q / JFK manifestation energy she is on now.
Facebook is going to be remembered like that racist newspaper that Henry Ford stuck in cars. Or maybe like cigarettes or heroin. It’s the most effective brainworm tool ever created and it’s caused multiple generations to have severe cognitive problems.
Once a month I’ll log into FB. Even with my lefty friends and what I’m following, the content is just super bad. It’s gotta be the worse social media out there now.
Some of the most generic white people from 20 years ago are the most aggressively reactionary now.
i used to be the douche with shitty politics in high school. they were all relatively disengaged and civility types. in defiance of the historical american trope, i grew up in a large urbanized metro “blue” area of a “blue” state and moved away to live/work in a series of smaller towns, mostly underserved regions, generally in starkly “red” areas of “red” states. and, much to others’ shock, my political development has gone in a completely different direction than that of my stayed-in-civilization high school cohort, who now find themselves in a battleground/contested area with suburban pockets of extreme reaction.
i don’t feel like my life’s arc has particularly been smart. my internalization of the information and ideas around me has been slow. all the pieces have been there for decades, but i was not putting them together mostly due to stubbornness and laziness. it all seems obvious to me how wrong i was back then and i am embarrassed at who i was.
i swear to god, every time i looked up somebody from high school back when i still had fb, they became massive chuds. they used to be chill and disengaged when i knew them, but somewhere along the way they plugged into the dumbest info streams and just plain gobbled it like hungry piglets. like just 70% “build the wall” type immigrant-hating chuds. and then like 25% anti-bernie, homeless fearing LIBS with the difference being weirdos who went off the rails, moved away, and vanished into the mists.
watching it has given me a lot of antipathy towards the passive assumption that in relation to rural life, urban life in america is an engine of tolerance or progressive politics. rather, that particular view is driven by the uncritical positionality of researchers and thinkpiece authors.
The Gentrification Of The Mind is about the systematic destruction of urban engines of tolerance or progressive politics, and their replacement with the amusement park version. The author, Sarah Schulman, said the scale of what was lost during the AIDS crisis cannot be explained to those two young to remember the times prior.