shinelikethunder:

thefandompolice:

pyrebomb:

When I was a teenager on the internet looking at adult content, the fear was that some “concerned” parent would stumble across any of the relatively small fan communities and raise hell with the ISP until it was shut down.

Now I’m a grown-ass adult, and the fear is that the teenagers themselves will threaten, doxx, bully, and harass content creators off of large social media sites who have entire legal teams dedicated to covering their asses because their parents have done such a shit job teaching them internet saftey that they operate under the delusion that the entirety of the worldwide web was created as some “safe space” for minors rather than the godamned seedy back alley it has always been.

I don’t like overgeneralizing teenagers, I mean many anti-antis are teenagers, many of my followers are teenagers. But when talking about broad generational differences I believe Roach Patrol or one of their friends once said something kinda potent about how being born after the world trade center attack could shape the beliefs of some people into thinking it’s normal for any freedoms or potential dangers to be squashed in the name of public safety.

The rational here being that they were kinda born into a world where that is widely the response to danger.

But I think many people now are aware that a lot of the extra security we’ve put in place since 9/11 is mostly for show so that people feel safe, ie; security theater.

So sometimes what antis are asking for amounts to security theater for the Internet. Where they think that if we can squash these fan fictions, fan arts and pairings the world will have less rapists, domestic abusers and child molesters.

I may have been responsible for the ur-post of the 9/11 Generational Hypothesis. Or one iteration of it, anyway; I assume it’s been suggested independently multiple times. I’ve seen some of the critiques that have emerged since, many of them sensible, others not so much, but the one that’s stuck with me is: the people who are old enough to remember 9/11 are just as susceptible to the black-and-white fear mentality; hell, we’re the ones who inflicted it on the next generation. The difference is that we have an alternate mental model available. If a bunch of the kids who are just starting to graduate college have trouble conceptualizing it as anything but Bad People Danger World, well, they’re not the ones whose choices brought that about.

I’ve grown fond of that description of the problem because I like problems that suggest their own solutions.

In any case, “security theater for the internet” is a fucking brilliant summation of this particular instance of the problem.