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I struggle to figure out what they mean by this list. I would normally dismiss it as meaningless pablum, but experience tells me people do take it seriously, and when I try to I'm left frustrated. I can't find a more charitable assessment than very poor communication skills. For example: >The internet is where we could live, love, learn and communicate freely. To be ourselves, we need to be able to trust the systems that protect us. I disagree entirely. Not with the the ideal of course - it's about as positive sounding as possible - but with the word "could." We don't even have this offline, it requires a level of cultural conformity that doesn't exist outside a cult's commune. It's not going to be any easier on the internet, which nullifies the distance between mutually-incompatable cultures. At this part in the line of thinking, someone tells me to stop being unreasonable, that they represent all the reasonable people's interpretation of "loving and communicating freely," and I'm being too strict in my definition, and I should really scale it back a click. It doesn't mean a cult, it just means a large social group that gets along really well. OK been there, done that. In different groups I've been both an insider, a fringe member, and an outsider. I don't think "live, love, learn and communicating freely" describes a single one of them. It might be easier to get along than randos, but you're either at the core steering the group to keep everything from falling apart with lots of bite marks in your tongue, riding the wave by keeping up with the broadly-acceptable norms you don't mind adopting in the context, or rolling your eyes at how "welcoming" the culture is while obviously incompatible with your own personality. Then at this next point in the line of thinking, people usually just imply I'm socially defective and incompatible with all the good shit that's going on. But all I see is a bunch of fretting over the good shit not happening correctly. |