#social dysfunction

[willofdpeople]

Me: Why don't I have friends in the new school? I wish someone talked to me :(

Me when someone talks to me:

[jrmilazzo]

The Last Days Of Social Media | NOEMA

Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion.

This convergence of bots, scammers, brand-funnels and soft‑core marketing underpins what might be called the bot-girl economy, a parasocial marketplace fueled in a large part by economic precarity. At its core is a transactional logic: Attention is scarce, intimacy is monetizable and platforms generally won’t intervene so long as engagement stays high. As more women now turn to online sex work, lots of men are eager to pay them for their services. And as these workers try to cope with the precarity imposed by platform metrics and competition, some can spiral, forever downward, into a transactional attention-to-intimacy logic that eventually turns them into more bot than human. To hold attention, some creators increasingly opt to behave like algorithms themselves, automating replies, optimizing content for engagement, or mimicking affection at scale. The distinction between performance and intention must surely erode as real people perform as synthetic avatars and synthetic avatars mimic real women.

There is loneliness, desperation and predation everywhere.

[knogue]

Whiteness is hypersensitive to its own value...

Whiteness is hypersensitive to its own value, which means that whiteness is hypersensitive to the presence of anything which threatens the value of its particularity. Whiteness is sensitive and vigilant because it must constantly survey the landscape for anything that threatens the myth that organizes its being and its activity. Whiteness is a project of devaluation—the devaluation of everything that threatens its specifically ‘white’ sense of value. To create its own particular value and sense of worth, whiteness must devalue the very thing that gives it shape and meaning. The activity of maintaining a specifically ‘white’ identity is the activity of devaluing everything that is not ‘white,’ as the presence of the not-‘white’ threatens ‘white’ value. This is why people scream and get out of the pool, why they grouse and frown and move to a ‘better’ neighborhood, why they wanted ‘whites’ and ‘coloreds’ to use separate water fountains. To use the same water fountain, the same swimming pool, or to send their kids to the same public school to be educated alongside alleged inferiors threatens the value of so-called ‘white’ identity.

Whiteness is a social convention, and ‘white’ is the name of a conventional relation between human beings that adheres to a standard that transcends them. Because it is above them, it cannot be found within them or among them.

Whiteness is a system of signification, measurement, and evaluation that seeks to affirm human being as a material substance in accord with a myth rendering that substance as something other than human, i.e., either as god or as animal. In this mythic structure of binary value, the species is divided into god-humans or human-animals—the rightful citizens of a heavenly earth, or the criminal intruders to be kept at bay and confined to hell.

[knogue]

Whiteness is basically just money...

So-called ‘white’ identity is rooted in the same imaginary value as money, and to admit that each of these are groundless would be an initial step in restoring the species and its relationship to the earth, and grounding this relationship in something other than antagonism and exploitation. But when one’s imaginary identity is rooted in a monetary value derived from antagonism and exploitation, these are not so easy to give up. Whiteness believes that conflict and antagonism are essential to human being, and though it is not necessary to believe this, the belief is so widespread that it will probably have to be seen to its end. It is probably only when the belief becomes concrete (i.e., when conflict, antagonism, exploitation, and unnecessary precarity realize death at a much greater scale) that whiteness as a popular ideology will reach its end. This is why I say that whiteness is the posture that precedes extinction. For its program to be widely disseminated, intensified, and seen to its logical end, great numbers of people will have to die. This is what happens when life is perceived in a broken mirror reflecting an impossible object. To prove the object’s possibility, that which stands in the way of its realization must be eliminated. Of course, the true obstacle to the realization of whiteness is not the presence of those who do not belong to it, or those who do not embody its idea, but the simple fact that it is nothing but an idea—an act of thought that cannot be materialized as anything other than a thought.

[knogue]

Whiteness conditions perception...

Whiteness conditions perception around a myth of human being that cannot be realized in human experience, and specifically ‘white’ activity exists in resolving the gap between the myth of whiteness and the idea of a ‘white’ human being on one hand, and a concrete experience of human embodiment that lacks a final, knowable, internal ‘racial’ designator.

No one is ‘white’ because no one is ‘raced,’ but whiteness strives to achieve an imaginary status that it is not possible for a human being to have in any tangible, concrete way. Whiteness must compensate for the fact that the supposedly ‘white’ individual can provide no evidence of their own difference, but must still believe in it in order to have their particular value in a ‘white’-centered world. Whiteness must prove that ‘race’ exists, while already living as though ‘race’ has been proven.

The breach or division that whiteness claims is natural, inherent, or given is only a breach in its own self-apprehension. Because whiteness strives to see that others are not both merely and fully human, it cannot perceive itself as merely or fully human. It tries to launch itself into a beyond that it cannot reach because it is imaginary, a fantasy, and so it must subject others to the imaginary rules to justify this breach that cannot be located. The infinite quest for what does not exist leaves the ‘white’ (who is always bereft of their whiteness) in a state of anxiety, hostility, and resentment, as the promise of a specifically ‘white’ being goes eternally unfulfilled—and the ‘other’ becomes the cause of discomfort.

But the ‘other’ is only a reminder of the failure and false promise of the ‘white’ imagination, the ‘other’ is the reflection in the broken mirror that reveals whiteness as unfulfilled, and therefore lacking. Believing in whiteness is to believe in one’s own incompleteness—it is a symbolic excess that compensates for what is not there, an excess that must repeat itself as it shouts into a void that has no echo. Whiteness believes that there is more to be gained from a world which supplies an impossible need, and fails to find what it seeks because nothing is missing. But the covert, never-admitted belief in its own lack is what gives whiteness its particular value and allows it to enter guiltlessly into a state of exception.

[knogue]

What is "Whiteness"?

Whiteness is like a language insofar as the limits of one’s language are the limits of one’s world (Wittgenstein).

Whiteness is like money, and operates as the subterranean, barely concealed language of finance, of a speculation and abstract wealth that realize themselves as material impoverishment.

Whiteness is a concept, a paradigm according to which the world is ordered. Whiteness is a gestalt that alters and organizes perception around a superstition branded as ‘racial’ fact.

Whiteness is not biological, but must present itself as such in order to reliably function. It is a pretense that strives to order a reality that is retroactively named “racial.”

Whiteness cannot be experienced, but only perceived, and only insofar as that perception does not reveal its foundation as a choice. Whiteness is a virtuality that strives to become actuality, an abstraction that strives to become concrete—and it is precisely in its failure to become what it already claims to be that the activity of whiteness manifests itself. Whiteness is an activity that consists of the failure of its own realization as an actually experienced human quality—it exists in giving oneself over to a fiction, and then claiming that fiction as ‘reality.’

[adhdmoi]

Do you have a good way on how to describe social dysfunction in regards to ADHD? Like I'm so bad in social situations and I don't know how to explain it to people without it sounding like bullshit

I don’t, but I remember reading somewhere awhile ago that from a very early age, a high percentage of kids with ADHD are isolated from their peers. speaking for myself, I think it has something to do with how I’m always lost in thought and I’m not really engaged in what’s going on; that’s kind of why I do/say weird things sometimes

[highlights-of-the-lowlife]

If you’re neurotypical and you ignore social conventions you’re a rebel and a free thinker but if you’re neurodivergent you’re a little lost child who must be pitied and fixed.