Cat Valente – Tracy Durnell's Mind Garden

Bookmarked What We Talk About When We Talk About “The Village” by Catherynne M. Valente (Welcome to Garbagetown)

“[T]he village” was literally always women’s unpaid labor.

[…]

Whether we’re talking about grandparents and aunties and older siblings … helping out with the next generation or an actual village in which unrelated people band together to share the load for everyone, it still ends up, most of the time, being a gilded metaphor for a vast network of women providing physical, mental, and emotional labor without acknowledgement or payment.

There is no cultural framework where help flows toward working parents but not from them. Where we are beholden to no one but entitled to support. Where we only have to associate with people we choose to at our leisure. Where there’s always someone to pick up slack for us and manage whatever we find unmanageable.

That’s not a village, it’s a wife. Which is why conservatives, faced with the same difficulties, don’t call out for a village, they start changing laws so women can be controlled again.

If Threads were a place it’d be the mall

Liked Why Zuckerberg’s Threads app will never be the new Twitter by Paris Marx (Insider)

This push to oversanitize and limit conversations to benign, lowest-common-denominator discussion turned the internet from a common, public market where everyone could hang out on equal footing into a commodified, poorly lit mall designed to cater to people who had the most to spend.

Ultimately, how Threads does will be determined by whether users actually want a Twitter-like platform that puts vapid consumption above substantive, useful, and occasionally heated discussion.

Reminds me of Cat Valente’s fiery article last winter (which I apparently wrote 2000 words in response to but never finished and published 🤪), called “Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media,” in which she writes:

Stop benefitting from the internet, it’s not for you to enjoy, it’s for us to use to extract money from you. Stop finding beauty and connection in the world, loneliness is more profitable and easier to control.

Stop being human. A mindless bot who makes regular purchases is all that’s really needed.

— Cat Valente