If I hear “unalive” as a verb one more time
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.
