I also live between two extremes of cycle touring, hitch-hiking, slow travelling, slow cooking, in search of authentic experiences with the demos and the opposite of going nocturnal, meticulously organizing all my music interests, reading etc.
I see a lot of promise in the future through open source projects and press freedom and see the perfect handling of information as that equalling out of access to opportunity on the horizon.
Head to Head - Will the internet set us free? [Founder of Wikipedia]
- https://youtu.be/trSaVLbfspg
Atemporality: Our Relationship To History Has Changed [Nerdwriter]
- https://youtu.be/ZAv5EKvRrco
So I didn’t want to create a whole topic on this as I’m much more interested talking about post-structuralism but as a side point; how do you effectively display personal information boundaries and practice them for other people in an information abundant age?
I’ve been fairly (and unfairly) critiqued on the forum for being too eager to bring to bear discussion I’ve found which interested me before thinking how the person being discussed might not want it bringing up. I was talking to my brother yesterday about how I felt bad that a lot of the times I contact him are when something’s gone wrong (I won’t say with what, but suffice to say), if I just blabbed all the time about this other persons problems, they might know to do more on their own, but I try really hard to keep my family and friends lives private, especially to other family and friends. So anyways I’m careful about private information in ‘real life,’ but need to get better at negotiating those boundaries online.
Anyway I’m sure everyone has encountered facebook drama and people too willing to share information, drawing it back to information age and privacy, anything you want to add to these stream of conscious thoughts you’re welcome too.
Oh yeah, then there’s non-fiction literature, I think that’s really important, and people like Milo Stewart going too far, but some people are also just too prudish. Or if you break with prudish culture at all, people worry, I had family members ask me if I'd been raped because I collected a list of all the resources for survivors of adult male sexual assault for my blog to be shared and promoted aha, that was a sad/funny mistake.
Intro to the zine: I am no hero, and neither are you; thoughts on how our histories of abuse inflect our anarchist practice:
https://toleratedindividuality.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/i-am-no-hero-and-neither-are-you-thoughts-on-how-our-histories-of-abuse-inflect-our-anarchist-practice.pdf
Old excerpts from my zine: Tolerated IndividualityMost anarchists share an understanding of security culture practices that discourages spreading information about peoples’ private political involvement. It is also important to avoid handing over emotional information without consideration of the potentially damaging ramifications. We need to build a practice of emotional security culture: mindfully protecting the emotionally charged parts of our friends’ lives.
In our scene, snitches and cops have been given easy access to personal information through the seemingly benign stories told about people’s private lives. This information is often used to create divisions between their targets. It is almost always an element of snitching, and sometimes is the driving force. This is one reason we should be keeping our friends safe when sharing parts of their emotional lives in the same way we protect parts of their political activity: they are really not separate at all.
That’s the big scary example. What happens more often is the casual spreading of other people’s emotional lives amongst friends, sometimes in the form of divisive gossip. Although the definition of gossip is debatable, what is clear is the harm that can come from people sharing emotionally sensitive information about other people’s lives without knowing if it is OK to do so. This isn’t to say we should never talk about other people’s stories; rather, we should do so with discretion, and get permission when possible. These boundaries are consistent with the principles of security culture in general.
On the other hand, we don’t feel an obligation to protect those who’ve harmed us. We must feel free to share our own stories of emotional vulnerabilities, and to pass on those of others when they consent. Doing so safely may take some extra consideration, but this additional effort is totally worth it.
When dealing with emotionally sensitive information, be sensitive with it.
https://activistjourneys.wordpress.com/my-first-per-zine/
Some of this stuff is pretty cringe inducing so apologies, still need to decide whether to take it offline or leave it up as authentic expression of my 20 year old self for younger audiences to relate too.
You couldn’t understand why I didn’t talk around any of your friends in Cambridge
When we ran hand in hand from the union building we’d transformed into a spectacle, with a policeman on our tail and growing tired running circles round town, I held onto you fiercely till all hope had disappeared.
I tried to hold you when you got out the police station and in the courthouse to comfort you but you had friends for that, when you were sick and hallucinating I held you from behind as you rang round your friends to comfort you, I was jealous then, I know now, I was never wanted on that level, to be compassionate. I was just a fantasy. I think we were both bemused by what place we played in each other’s lives.
When we stormed a lecture building in support of teachers striking and sat down to organize I didn’t live up to the projection you’d put in your friends minds, you were upset that I didn’t achieve my potential.
Your friends talked about each other behind their back like they were deformed beasts with no substance, vacuous, void of relevance, and you wondered why I kept a part of myself hidden. You called me up when I was in London, I said I could get the train over, your voice went dead, then you explained to me that your friends had been spreading round a joke that when I was being interviewed in the police station, I hadn’t gone no comment, I was just being me. You cried at me, why don’t you talk? Why don’t you talk to them about small things, I said I never thought about it, just felt uncomfortable, if I was to look at my life I’d never experienced such talk, such surety in their voices, such a small town with so many people moving so fast, such grand buildings, such… privilege came the word on the other end of the phone… yeah actually I'm sorry, she said.
But the anxiety of not being accepted by them, proved too potent. Their shadows followed her everywhere it seemed, we were never alone for their shadows spoke through her and I was forced to fight a fierce battle with her daemons. Whilst I continued to fight the battle, the war was already won, I was conquering fears that bore no fruit, I grew tired of asking if she remembered what that fight was all about because for her it was over the moment the words left her body, and I never worked out if they were ever much part of her being or just a perverted tool to tie up ends in me that sort only good ascetics.
Between sex-positive and sex-normative.
So how do we move past these 2 opposite experiences of our sexuality, I think we should learn to admire authenticity. After having internalized the kudos from being physically active sexually and politically in a sex-positive activist scene, I’m really done with struggling to enjoy sex for now. I just want easy, loving genuine connections, if that means saying no to sex when I really want to say yes to make someone happy, while I work out what I want, then that’s what I’ll have to do. But that’s obvious; the challenge is changing perspective, and learning that after one controlling drama filled relationship after another to accept that love is much more subtle than that, something that grows on you slowly.
The best way I could describe what I want would be say working in a library together with some rad punk somewhere, forever enjoying the same things, never assuming the other one’s sexual preference until one day after years of non-sexual lovely familiarity, I accidentally give the game away by crushing on something they were doing, before I even realized myself doing it, then and only then do we both realize our love for each other and the dance of risking intimacy begins, but with all the knowledge of that other person as a true friend, what makes them feel safe, happy, excited, overjoyed.
But I don’t see that happening in the spaces I inhabit because they are spaces dedicated to spreading information on better ways to do sex and the only good way to do that is talking from experience. The problem I have with storytelling is there can be a strong social competitive function, you are expected to gossip and compare your good relationship to the shitty relationships of friends or how you could never naively fall into the same mistakes of celebrity scandals you here in the news.
I miss the days when my sexual orientation, expression or assertiveness, was not the most important thing about me, and I don’t want to have to leave to more repressive normative circles just to get a breather from the running commentaries on your sex lives! Don't get me wrong I still go all gooey at being included in on the heartwarming intimate moments of personal growth, but expanding upon every tiny detail in the last 24 hours into some all encompassing theory that reduces your life into a soundbite, really ruins the real magic of living in the moment for me.
That is all.
“..It’s that thing when you’re with someone, and you love them, and they know it, and they love you and you know it. But it’s a party and your both talking to other people and you’re laughing and shining, and you look across the room, and catch each other’s eyes, but not because you’re possessive or it’s precisely sexual, but because that is your person in this life and it’s funny and sad, but only because this life will end and it’s this secret world, that exists right there, in public, unnoticed, that no one else knows about. It’s sort of like how they say other dimensions exist all around us but we don’t have the ability to perceive them, that’s what I want out of a relationship” – Frances Ha
The Spaniard
He shouted at me for a few minutes until he had enough and went down into the basement to sleep. In the days ahead he was inconsolable, telling everyone how bad an activist I was, what a stupid call I’d made. I didn’t know how to respond to his anger, so I carried on doing what needed doing. . .
After a week of tension, it took just 3 minutes of play acting, and we were good as gold after that. I learnt that when you make even the smallest gains in Calais, not to be flippant if the situation changes and said gains don’t seem so relevant anymore. Be delicate with other activists’ achievements.
It’s hard to hold our heads in these spaces. When a friend is looking for a target to vent their anger, it’s good to be able to throw ego to the wind. It’s good to be that inoffensive skinny boy who dismantles the image of me as being socially competitive by dancing around wildly and singing Delaney had a Donkey with pie on my face.