A bit of an editorializing title, I know. And I’m a little drunk, I might read this tomorrow and see it form another angle and question myself into oblivion.

But I was reflecting, Is the categorization of sexuality, ideological beliefs, hobbies (I’m a cinephile, I’m a gamer, I’m ‘x’ thing that defines my whole identity), a result of the dominance of the liberal world we live in?
We are taught to think about the world from a young age in terms of good and evil, wrong and right, marvel villains vs marvel heroes… Binary, simple, childish thought, but as the contradictions of our world get more extreme, we’re forced to expand our understanding the world and form a wider perspective of what makes up our reality (or simply bury our heads into a sandpit), be it by simply creating more categories to fit onto our narrow worldview or by accepting the immortal science of dialectical materialism (based).
Thoughts?

  • Cochise@lemmy.eco.br
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    2 days ago

    This is a very complex discussion that I like a lot. And a very philosophical one.

    For starters, we cannot separate the process of making groups (cinephile, gamer, etc.) from the concrete conditions where these groups are made. I would say that categorization is not a liberal agenda per se, but inside social media dynamics it’s a compliance dispositive.

    I like this article a lot and will put some quotes,

    The categorization today, under social media is mostly a performative act, where you declare your conformity to the group, not some sort of self discovery process.

    Subjectivation is not a flowering of autonomy and freedom; it’s the end product of procedures that train an individual in compliance and docility. One accepts structuring codes in exchange for an internal psychic coherence. Becoming yourself is not a growth process but a surrender of possibilities that we learn to regard as egregious, unbecoming. “Being yourself” is inherently limiting. It is liberatory only in the sense of freeing one temporarily from existential doubts. (Not a small thing!) So the social order is protected not by preventing “self-expression” and identity formation but encouraging it as a way of forcing people to limit and discipline themselves — to take responsibility for building and cleaning their own cage. Thus, the dissemination of social-media platforms becomes a flexible tool for social control.

    This is a product of how these platforms works, as they are neoliberal tools to promote neoliberal subjectivation.

    Social media’s quantifying metrics aggravate the problem, making expression into a series of discrete items to be counted, ranked. It serves as the infrastructure for a feedback loop that orients expression toward the anxiety of what the numbers will be and accelerates it, as we try to better those numbers, and thereby demonstrate that the self-monitoring is teaching us something about how to become more “relevant.”

    What is odd is that the connectivity of the internet exacerbates that sort of neoliberal ideology rather than mitigating it. Connectivity atomizes rather than collectivizes. But that is because most people’s experience of the internet is mediated by capitalist entities, or rather, for the sake of simplicity, by capitalism itself.

    They do this by transforming ourselves in commodities. The categorization in neoliberal material conditions is the process to adapt the multiplicity of the human being to a market niche in a optimization process that take away all pieces that don’t fit that market niche, don’t generate value,

    Social media offer a single profile for our singular identity, but our consciousness comprises multiple forms of identity simultaneously: We are at once a unique bundle of sense impressions and memories, and a social individual imbued with a collectively constructed sense of value and possibility. Things like Facebook give the impression that these different, contestable and often contradictory identities (and their different contexts) can be conveniently flattened out, with users suddenly having more control and autonomy in their piloting through everyday life. That is not only what for-profit companies like Facebook want, but it is also what will feel natural to subjects already accustomed to capitalist values of convenience, capitalist imperatives for efficiency, and so on.

    • @Cochise @DiaMatEnjoyer O gutocarvalho uma vez postou que o Mastodon deve ser usado como um diário online.

      Eu acho que deve haver sim preocupação com o Network State, e com a realidade sair de um ambiente real para um virtual, mas minha vida enriqueceu muito desde que comecei a usar o Mastodon.

      As postagens reforçam, em ambiente social, a minha capacidade de pensar.

      Na minha “vida real” (entre aspas já que a rede é também parte de um núcleo real) eu nunca conseguiria organizar meus pensamentos de forma a construir meus próprios projetos ou até mesmo manter um diário coerente que expresse realmente como eu me sinto e o que eu penso do mundo.

      Externar um certo “diário” neste ambiente social faz com que a minha presença/existência seja testada em um ambiente diferente do que eu vivo. Assim construindo conhecimento com a ajuda de outras pessoas que aqui estão também.

      A cultura faz diferença. O Mastodon tem cultura própria e estar aqui no âmbito de trocar com pessoas reforça a minha capacidade intelectual e física na vida real, logo também na minha liberdade e qualidade de vida.