this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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Well, there's not just one Them.
The Them who wrote your American history textbook and glossed over the centrality of slavery to the Confederate cause, aren't the same Them who write TV sitcoms that propagate stereotypes of bumbling clueless men entitled to dump all the emotional labor on their hyper-competent women partners.
The Them who fund intrusive social media, aren't the same Them who dial down the yellow-light time on your traffic lights to catch more people with red-light cameras.
And the closer you look, the less it looks like a Them at all.
The individual TV writers were really trying to be good TV writers, in the social & economic context of TV studios.
The history textbook people were mostly actual professors. They want you to have a good history textbook. But the Texas Board of Education is giving them a hard time.
Heck, the social-media programmers mostly just wanna launch cool stuff.
The yellow-light people, though? They have no goddamn excuse.
Yeah, but in the end all those people get their orders from higher up, and in the end they execute the vision of the people in charge. All of this only to get their pay to be able to afford to live with a roof over their head and food on the table.
I feel the "order" is more in line with "make me a sitcome that targets young man and will make me a lot of money" rather than "propagate misogyny and stereotypes". Both lead to Big Bang Theory though.
It’s so hard to see from your perspective sometimes. Feels like everything’s a conspiracy haha. But you are 100% correct.
The “them” we feel is the sum of all human outcomes, personified as a discrete organism. Maybe all of humanity is one big mega-organism and thats the “them”.