Are we really doing "It's the fault of kids these days!" thing?
I, for one, am not blaming any real, serious, comprehensive problem on "the kids these days." Personally, I'm not even all that attached to the idea that the occasional 'faux-progressive' irritants I encounter
are all young (in context, under 25 or so I guess).
But I will say that people are allowed an occasional grumble about things that merely annoy them, even if those things aren't the biggest evil in the world or the ultimate cause of life's problems.
I blame growing up in a panopticon
The obvious reason would be "the universal sensation of being watched and exposed at all times, and of seeing what everyone else is doing at all times, causes people to get defensive, to get self-righteous as a way of rationalizing that they don't need to be ashamed after all, and encourages people to make performative displays of whatever they imagine 'goodness' to be, even if they have a very limited understanding of
why those things are good."
Of course, what we have is
worse than a panopticon. The panopticon, the original prison idea imagined by, I think, Jeremy Bentham, was laid out so that the guards in the central spire could observe all the prisoners, but importantly,
the prisoners couldn't see each other. Basically trying to do with imaginative layout what we'd do with security cameras, because hey, it was 1800.
With social media, not only are we perfectly visible to an invisible central authority that can direct its gaze at any of us at any time, but we don't have privacy
from each other, or from whatever random bozo decides to take an intrusive interest in our lives or scream curses at us. Which makes it so much worse. Like I said, some kind of super-panopticon.
all this shit about "the puriteens" is pretty funny considering that most of the actual impetus behind the actual censorship of fiction and the internet is, like, usamerican legislation and usamerica-based financial middlemen, neither of which are run by teenagers.
It's okay for a guy to be annoyed about random bozos who scream at him on social media and webforums because they have a hyperactive sense of self-righteous moral purity,
while also being aware that most damaging censorship is directly controlled by an entirely different group of bozos in suits who have their fingers on the triggers of "delete entire category of works" cannons.
Again, it's okay to complain about things that are merely annoying, even if they are not the cause of all life's problems. Indeed, that is part of the problem being complained about here- the inability to even temporarily
change the subject, the strain and irritation of dealing with constant scrutiny, often by people who don't really think it's that important for them to understand the things they are scrutinizing.
(and let's be honest, both sides of the ~fandom censorship debate~ consist primarily of people in their 20s-30s. actual teenagers are too busy being horrible to each other in person to get into that shit)
For the record, that's my gut feeling too. It changes nothing.
that's fair.
but, like, i get the impression that the main reason that the quote-unquote "puriteens" are so fixated on consumption-as-activism is that it's the only avenue of expression presented to them; they're growing up in a nightmarish sousveillance panopticon where they are Creators and Consumers of Content first and people second, so of course they're like this. blaming them for that is like blaming a battery hen for not being able to walk.
Entirely valid!
They are nonetheless annoying.
And as private individuals, we really have no tools for helping such a person in the moment except to say "okay, y'all need to touch grass, plus also here is, as Bread says, how to analyze y'all's discomfort and figure out where it's coming from."
A thing it is nearly impossible to do without recognizing the nature of the problem, which is that we have people who are reflexively condemning stuff at the drop of a hat for various reasons including the ones you describe.
I think people might be extrapolating too much from Twitter culture. The character limit and structure are rather antithetical to productive discussion and encourage brigades based on sound bites.
Yeah well, Twitter is a prominent part of our culture, and other social media platforms are too. These aren't isolated little islands where people mess with each other and everyone else just gets on with their lives; they form connections to other spaces, and people who have lives outside them go into those spaces on the regular.
