If I hear "unalive" as a verb one more time 
Something dystopian about being trapped in a system that runs on mass death but expects you to talk about death like you're a character in a children's cartoon
busy crying about their 14 words tweet getting taken down in 2019
"I'm going to to do myself like Tarzan did to Clayton from Disney's Tarzan"
You mean watch while they hang themselves with their own
VinesTikToks?
You're not allowed to be aware of the spectacle. It's a crime. Dropping your mask of passive acceptance to fall to your knees and scream "The spectacle! The spectacle!~ it's all the spectacle!" in the middle of hte streets is illegal because it's bad for quarterly profits
Listen, only Joe Biden can promote violence. Anyone else? Instantly sent to
the gulaggitmo.
Tiktok isn't an app for kids, i don't want to be ageist - it's for all ages and everyone can have fun on there. But the way tiktoker's talk on tiktok and other platforms with their cutesy little euphemisms for violence and sex does make me think every time "Ah, they're used to the kiddie app", because it's making grown adults be afraid to talk about adult topics.
This is just the fault of censorship and not the app or the users, but it is literally sanitized kiddie language and feels very out of place and hard to take seriously on websites that don't have that censorship.
I'm unfamiliar. Does something with the term 'suicide', for example, get flagged on tik tok?
The filters and algos and censorship rules are not public. All this shit "unalived" 'grippy socks vacation", is people trying to intuit what is an isn't allowed in an environment where htey have no meaningful feedback at all. "It's against our community guidelines". No one knows what the guidelines are. No one knows what does or does not violate them. No one knows if hte decision is made by a human or a machine.
The thought process isn't dissimilar to magic - People are doing ritualized actions to stave off the attention of their evil, hateful gods. if they make the sign of hte evil eye, if they say their prayers before bed, if they don't say "suicide" then the evil dopamine god won't de-list, de-monetize, or ban them.
When they started doing behaviorialism research on animals, there was this one thing that stuck in my mind, they found ut that, if they just gave pigeons food at random times, like pigeons in cages, the pigeons would seemingly start to think that whatever it was they were doing when the food appeared caused the food to appear. So very quickly they'd end up with pigeons doing these little dance routines, because the pigeon had built up an association between what it was doing and the appearance of food. The pigeon didn't know what hte fuck was happening, but it was trying to make sense of and control it's situations.
All these tortured neologisms, they're the same thing. people are trying to talk, just talk, about important shit in theirlives and all these vast, opaque, inhuman regimes of censorship and punishment are pressing down on them. But they don't know what hte rules are, the companies that have seized control of all mediums of public communication won't tell them, will lie to them, so they're trying to figure it out as individuals who either don't understand science or don't have the resources needed to interogate the system usinmg scienetific methods.
It's all fucked. There's a metaphorical existentialist shaking you by the collar and screaming "DO YOU SEE? DO YOU SEE THE ABSURDITY OF A UNIVERSE THAT IS BOTH INDIFFERENT AND CRUEL?!?!?!?!
It's funny how it resembles a heightened version of what people accuse the USSR, PRC, and DPRK of. In gommunist chyna, citizens don't know what they aren't allowed to discuss or what words they aren't allowed to use, so they speak in a contorted code to get past censors [who might not even care] when there is a rumor of a topic or word being forbidden. It's like a panopticon where you don't only not know when you are being watched, but you also don't know what is being watched for.
Good point. iirc and it's been years and I never actually read the book and just fibbed my way through class, but the whole The panopticon could be watching anyone at any time, so it doesn't need to watch everyone all the time" was one of the key features of the panopticon regime. Like the whole thing in discipline and punish was that the system teaches people to disicipline and punish themselves, because that's more efficient than a top down system. The system will always be more efficient if you teach people to censor and punish each other instead of haviung to hire a hundred billion police to do it directly.
And yeah, the every accusation is projection thing. Lenin has some line about who the burgers own the papers, so the papers are censored in the interest of the burgers, so the "free press" and "freedom of speech' are bullshit bc you can only say what the burger's editor's allow to be said.
Also, I am always, always struck by the idea that the STASI would probably be horrified by the level of invasive surveillance everyone is subjected to every moment of every day, but people are totally blase about it, but I was told my whole life for decades after the cold war ended how horrifying it was that the Stasi was watching you pee or your neighbors were informing on you, but now everyone is informing on their neighbors all the time with nextdoor and shit, and anyway apparently when they dug in to the STASI's archives after the Reich conquered the GDR they didn't even find evidence that the STASI was murdering dissidents nad thought criminal sanyway?
You definitely have the main idea with the panopticon. I think someone more well-read than I could probably make really interesting points about how, in the original form one has an imagined cop in their head constantly enforcing externally-established rules, and this new version has an imagined cop constantly enforcing imagined rules of imagined scope. The notice for what is banned is replaced by a rumor-mill and the occasional high-profile case where "what tripped the censor?" still remains unclear and manual flagging sullies even this very messy sampling method.
I don't really know that much about the STASI, but it's not like West Berlin wasn't also heavily surveilling its denizens, and deaths in East Berlin get wildly overstated to the point of being a farce. That's probably something gone over in "STASI State or Socialist Paradise?" but I haven't gotten to it yet.
Strong reccomend on Statsi state etc. It was a really eye opening book.
This comment too, I hope it makes or helps me read Discipline and Punish. The only exposure I had to Foucault confused me and made me hurt myself in confusion so I decided to stay away...
What you wrote made it sound really interesting, here's hopin' I can read it sooner rather than later!
It was so fucking confusing I got much more out of media and video games and shit htat used the concept, and people talking about how panopticon actually works in real life, than I did from teh book itself. Like I stg Kojima has done more to help me understand philosophy than actual philsophers. So ma
TikTok, etc. take tone-policing oneself to new extremes. Especially because of the ambiguity of what will be censored. It makes me worry.
Second comment of yours I saved in this thread, keep up the good postin' cde!
Suicide, weed, death, a whole bunch of shit honestly but mostly that.
Apparently kids have been saying “unalive” in way more normal contexts too, not just places where you’re trying to avoid bot censors. Like, using it in essays because they think it’s a more formal way of saying it kill, like “dead” vs “deceased”
(There’s certainly a chance this is made up and I’m sounding like the weird chuds who think there are litterboxes in classrooms and if that’s the case whoops)
I genuinely wish there was a way to pressure advertisers to knock that shit off. God I hate that word so much. Please just let people say kill I don’t want to hear unalive anymore it sounds so stupid.
I just find it incredibly depressing there's a generation growing up whose vocabulary is being directly influenced by Google's bots
It's just so fucking grim. In 10 years everyone is going to talk like they're trying to trick ChatGPT into saying something naughty
Kill the god of machine logic inside your minds
Butlerian Jihad now
Hey don't be too sad, it's being influenced by China’s bots too.
You gave me the worst dumbnet evil AI scenario. It's going to live rent-free in my head. I can't believe you've done this. /s
Language do be rapidly evolving in fascinating and unpredictable ways.
That one is just longstanding AAVE, "do be" is a present progressive meaning something like "has been frequently known to be". "He do be working" therefore is like "He has been working a lot lately".
I say it all the time, it's fun and less of a mouthful.
I like using been, I listened to a podcast where a linguist explained how versatile it was. If you shorten it that means it like happened in the past and it's continuing to happen and you say it with more like emphasis, maybe like more plosive like a 'P':
"He been playing Mario Kart 8. Mans can't put the joycon down!"
Like you are doing something now or started recently if you say it kinda neutral:
"Yeah, I been tryna find some piece to play, I just keep on playin' Chopin, boy's been havin' it since 1818 or something. Old man and it's been a while since he dead, but he wasn't ok with dyin' cuz he's been killin' it.
Maybe like sarcastically or when you lengthen it:
A: "You do your part of the assignment? I haven't started I went to see Speed since it was playing."
B: "You were watching a re-run of some old movie no one's heard? Well, I've been doing my homework, y'know, what was assigned and we agreed to do."
Wait why would there be litter boxes in classrooms? Why would they be allowed cats? Do people think that's how kids are getting
potential trigger i think
'feminized'?
That wouldn't even be a good way to do it.
the classroom litter box thing was something a school experimented with in case students needed to pee during a school shooter drill. Chud media circulated a story claiming that it was to accommodate "furry" students who identified as a cat and didn't want to use the toilet.
Dang the stuff reactionaries think up that we fight for consistently prove to be way way better than how things actually are.
It's like they're describing a slice of paradise. Y'know those Ben Garrison drawings, that's what I had in mind.
Bringing back "he got sent to another dimension" from the Dragon Ball Z Ocean Dub.
In the original Japanese, there are some real instances of "sent to the shadow realm", but many more of death, so the 4kidz dub changed it wherever possible to something sending you to the shadow realm instead of killing you, and left it ambiguous in most of the remaining cases.
You trying to tell me all the hot singles in my area aren't actually interested in making a corn video with me?
Every genuine Gen Z linguistic invention is a word filter workaround. Nothing but mundane words that computer scientists can't filter for fear of filtering far larger numbers of mundane and innocent posts and significantly harming revenue for internet platforms, only to watch the kids select a new mundane word to describe a dick
It's either filter workarounds or it's been widely popularizing existing terms that used to be more regional or strictly associated with black or hip-hop culture. Like cap, fam, simp, etc
Which is pretty normal, isn't it? A lot of slang from the 80s was just reappropriated southern California surfer lingo.
Yes definitely, that's the other main type of gen-z slang... Black gen-x slang. And it seems like even those borrowed terms lean towards the repurposed unfiltered ones. White programmers won't think of Black slang but eventually they'll get wise to it, unless it's too unique and risks overfiltering white boomers talking about their day.
Also I can wager that a lot of that 80's California surfer lingo was ripped off from Hawai'i. California is the engine of Hawai'i's cultural influence on the wider United States
You forgot Gen X 4chan slang. Idk how but incel terms are unironically mainstream now. I regularly hear "soy", "normie", "mewing", "mog", etc. IRL from pretty seemingly normal, well adjusted people. Both men and women like wtf
I regularly say weeaboo if that counts. I think I sometimes say "my jimmies are rustled." Those are such ancient terms though I think the 4chan stink has faded.
Which is pretty normal, isn't it? A lot of slang from the 80s was just reappropriated southern California surfer lingo.
Yeah but when they did it it was a totally radical idea dude
only to watch the kids select a new mundane word to describe a dick.
🍆💦🍑
I'm just a fan of watering vegetables 😎
Like the good old "an hero" from before zoomers did their first fortnite dance.
This is definitely one of those phrases, like "jannies" or "lolcow," that raises the hairs on my back and gets me to reach for the report button.
I don't think that was motivated by automated content moderation though
No that one was motivated by cruelty. 4chan got it from a typo in someone's memorial Myspace page after they killed themselves. It's not a euphemism, it's a direct mockery of suffering and death.
I always saw it as jest over viewing someone who, when forced into something as terrible as suicide, is then reveled and called a hero once they're gone, despite no one caring prior.
Like making "an hero" into a meme was making fun of the way people need to make it about themselves by creating a spectacle and lesson around someone else's hardship.
Viewed through the 4chan lens, the people on 4chan were all suicidal and depressed, and had contempt for others who disregarded them until they were no longer around.
Maybe I gave them too much credit but I also saw that shit happening real-time in high school after a couple deaths. One guy who committed suicide after a particularly bad benzo withdrawal was a step away from getting a purple heart, while another guy who died a week prior from cancer got a 5 second blurb in the announcements and was quickly forgotten about. I somewhat contradicted my point, but the real thing I'm trying to get at was the performance of grief over genuine grief, and I always read the og "an hero" post as a performance.
It shows just how influential social media is in shaping culture outside of the ordinary internet niches.
I mean, I have been saying "lol" out loud in real life for the majority of my life
If I hear "unalive" as a verb one more time
So glad I am not the only one that finds that stuff unseemingly.
The WWE used their euphemism when John Cena said "we have caught and compromised, to a parmenent end, Osama Bin Laden."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMlFYl6u1H4
So it aint just the zoomers! WWE wanted to get everyone hyped about an assassination, but even they were like "ooo, that is kinda gruesome."
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
