Under the Digital Eye of Sauron - by Mary Harrington
Fascinating idea
The whole episode has left me reflecting on how this striving for purity and clarity has been baked into the internet since its inception: a phenomenon that itself has earlier roots in a specifically American - more particularly, Californian - culture. This is a culture that optimises for thin social encounters, assumed to take place almost always between strangers: the culture you might expect to form at the utter West, founded on the impulse to leave behind constraining tradition and dreary familiarity and begin again, among strangers, on a blank slate.
In this maximally-thin culture, the most basic courtesy you can extend someone is not to read someone else’s social signals, but to pointedly not read their signalling: to assume only that you cannot make assumptions. And the corollary of this courteous refusal to make assumptions is then that desires, preferences, and social codes may safely be ignored, unless they are explicitly spelled out.
https://reactionaryfeminist.substack.com/p/under-the-digital-eye-of-sauron
