rottenboysclub:

gravitycomplex:

gravitycomplex:

rottenboysclub:

freedom-of-fanfic:

Thanks for telling me! But I can’t take credit for that one. What I said was a lot of anti-shippers seem to have grown up after American culture became hyper-paranoid, so you don’t even remember what it was like to not be hyper-paranoid. And it’s pretty natural for paranoid people to try to control what other people do so they feel safer, instead of trusting them to look after themselves.

The shift to a paranoid culture happened after the 9/11 attacks, because the attacks were used as an excuse by Republicans to overreact and scare people into giving them lots and lots of governmental control. That’s why I mentioned 9/11 as the turning point.

But I’ve seen the copypasta version of my post that makes out that I said 9/11 made antis, and it’s a truly artful meme. A masterful shitpost that deserves recognition. 👌

This is something that sociologists and economists talk about a lot – the 9/11 attacks had a huge impact on not just the geopolitical sphere, but one of the most influential events of this generation’s society and culture in general. A lot of sociologists consider it to be a dividing line of what separates someone from being an “old millennial” versus “young millennial”, and some consider it to be the cut-off point for millennials in general. Some people have even dubbed Gen Z the “9/11 generation”, because they don’t know a time before it.

I grew up in the 80s and 90s, so I DO remember a time before this. I remember when you could meet someone or see them off the aeroplane at the gate, when they didn’t have invasive full-body scanners and a ton of other things. I remember the shift happening, because I was a teenager at the time. It was almost instantaneous. People were ruled by paranoia and blind patriotism.

The way 9/11 was dealt with did create a culture of fear. Younger millenials and and Gen Z grew up in it. Of course that’s going to affect how they take in and process information.

I don’t see why that’s controversial.

I think it’s worth mentioning that this is part of why anti culture is mostly US based. This brand of paranoia post 9/11 is particular of the “Western World” (as in Huntington’s definition of it) of which the US and part of Western Europe is part of.

Where I live and was born and raised, a Latin American country, while there was a bit of paranoia the year or so after 9/11 — and people thinking that there were anthrax attacks, even tho here those were hoaxes — afterwards… No one really cared.

Maybe it’s the cultural differences, the lack of military power, the fact that we had an on going economic crisis during that year that exploded in some of the biggest shit I’ve ever seen (people died during protests), or maybe it’s a combination of it all.

But in a lot of places outside the “West” well… No one gave that much of a shit after a year or two of it. It wasn’t close enough to us to give us the social trauma that other countries, specially the US, still hold today.

From an outsider’s perspective, in the “West” sense, it just seems like people translating the cultural and political climate they were raised in into something unrelated, in an effort to fulfill some desire for control they don’t have in their lives or in aspects of their lives, while failing to recognize the damage they might be doing to themselves and others.

Maybe they think that if they had “governmental control” over fandom content they’d be safe, because in their paranoia they think they’re right, but at the end of the day copying Big Brother with good intentions will never make anything good.

It just makes another kind of Big Brother.

After typing this I got to thinking about some stuff and I’m just gonna add it v quick because it hit me like a sack of bricks ngl.

And what hit me is that, when I said that antis translate cultural and social climate I didn’t realize how fucking much they do it.

Because what they’ve done, regularly, since anti culture sort of exploded, was single out individuals (sometimes people who had nothing to do with the fandom the antis in question consumed, sometimes not even fandom people) and get their information — stalking their blogs, doxxing them, etc. — and then attack them with whatever they could get, accusing them of crimes (the whole pedophile thing they have going on, for example), suicide baiting them more often than not and even ruining their offline lives.

And then I realize. They’re enacting their own version of the fucking Patriot Act.

If the person seems dangerous you have a right to stop them, detain them and have their lives destroyed. Doesn’t matter if you’re biased and paranoid, doesn’t matter if they’re innocent. What matters is stopping potential threats.

And to most antis, specially young antis, everyone is a threat.

They spent most of their lives in a semi to full authoritarian cultural and political climate, where there was always at least one authority figure and where they are told, constantly, that their lives/innocence/virginity/whatever conservatives say these days is in danger and strangers are not safe — specially adult strangers, who might attack them or abuse them or groom them.

Then they move to a space without authority and where rules are not really that strict, where they have freedom and they might find themselves engaging with adults strangers.

And their paranoia goes haywire, because they’re so used to the structure of their regular life — and are extremely uneducated, a combination of both their ages and a shitty education system in the US case — that the only way they think they’ll be safe is by restructuring fandom into the same sort of authoritarian society they come from.

So they do what their society did, they allow themselves and give themselves power to single out people who they deem dangerous and try to destroy them, because making them join is not even an option.

Once you’re seen as a threat you will always be a threat.

Holy shit, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there. I always attributed it to them watching too much “To Catch a Predator” and seeing themselves as internet vigilantes, but I was completely missing the social climate the led to the creation of those sorts of tv shows in the first place.  Do they even know about the Patriot Act? Or is the Partriot Act (or similar things) just the usual end result of this sort of paranoia and authoritarianism?