Recent events have updated me towards thinking that a decent fraction of Americans (10-40%?) will rationalize and go along with ~anything the current admin does
I feel like unfortunately I am maybe one of these people, but it sort of depends on the definition of “going along with”. I can’t imagine myself ever feeling generally good about any of the recent administrations, but I also can’t imagine myself trying to do much of anything about any of the things the administrations do, except for direct impacts on people I’m really close to. I’d guess that for that definition, the proportion may be significantly above 40%, like 80%-90%, but I’ve got no particular reason for those numbers.
Oh wait dang it’s me, I’m ~the park friend!
I was born in 2006. The first phone I acquired was a flip phone; I bought in late 2023 because a friend wanted my number and I was running out of plausible excuses. I know what the blogosphere is but don’t care too much about it. I feel like I could convince the raspberry pi in the kitchen to become a server, but I feel like that would take more googling than I’d like and why would I want a webcomic anyways? I can make a real comic and give it to people. I saw some open flames around Christmas-time and so did my friends. Before that, November; I backpacked along the highway for a while and had to cook my food over a burner thing I got from amazon.com. My family used to go camping and backpacking a lot, but it is now weak and dissolved and we can scarcely coordinate family movie night. I don’t really use Spotify, Instagram, Snapchat, Linkedin, Twitter, Tumblr, &c. I don’t drive, I mostly walk, but my friends who drive all drive old cars without touch screens. My brother and I play Minecraft 1.21.2 on a CRT screen from the 90′s enclosed in an arcade meant to look like the farm from Stardew valley. I spend too much time on my laptop; I get outside and see my friends significantly less than I’d like to. This all feels pretty normal to me??? Well, not normal, but not so far from normal that it’s the most significant thing about me. Maybe the 4th most significant thing about me for people who don’t know me well? Possibly 5th if there is a significant thing about me that I can’t notice but no one mentions because it would be rude.
The flip phone is a phone, an mp3 player, a camera, a GPS, etc. It’s ugly and cheap and doesn’t work as well as I’d like it to. I can’t imagine evangelizing about it to anyone; its main virtue is that it’s cheap and I can lose it on a bus without getting too upset. Some people assign flip-phones magical this-will-fix-my-media-consumption-issues properties, and maybe if they believe this it becomes true, but also like maybe you own a laptop. ???
Everyone says they should get a flip phone and thus fix their consumption habits; not that many people really do, and Cool people definitely don’t because their consumption habits weren’t an issue in the first place.
You’re doing an okay job at pointing to the Problem, in my view, but I feel like the reaction movement you’re describing only exists as an aesthetic pastime for wealthy people (I don’t know if that’s actually true tho). I understand the sacred ideal of each Object having a Purpose, but it would be really expensive and impractical. I try to make Beautiful Objects for my friends, musical instruments and embroidered towels and family-heirloom-books-of-poetry and physical incarnations of text-message-inside-jokes, but the flip phone doesn’t need to be a Beautiful Object. It’s a very practical thing, like a toilet cleaning brush. It’s useful for coordinating things with my friends, and sometimes calling them, but my friendships overwhelmingly take place in the world.
(as a person who is new here, I’m a bit confused! The helpful grey box tells me to “Aim to explain, not persuade”, but then I come across these vague beautiful mushy rhetorical-sounding things like your post :p)