This thread really spoke to me, but in its most simplistic terms I disagree about an inability to escape its grip. For most (?) of us anyway. Each individual is responsible for their own consumption habits, so if one finds themselves in a pool of content they don't want to be swimming in then it's on them to adapt. Either go to a different pool or drown - choice is theirs.
I guess it's different when you're trying to construct a fantasy football sort of feed from the ground up and you keep getting overt and coded political messages along with it. But that's just par for the course, and something I've noticed that's going on in a lot of our internet lives. But let's drop that aspect of it and concentrate not just on consumption habits, which is why I merely included sports and entertainment, but about political intrusion into work and family, too, two things essential for just being. The modern-day politicization of those endeavors was unthinkable a while back. This isn't a desire to go back to Pleasantville or Wandavision pre-color, it's a desire to maybe not have so much agitation personally, which I think is a product of the late sixties -- and especially the early seventies -- where the more radical among us, especially communists and Marxists, decided to attack the American personal sphere in order to mess up the system from the ground up, as it were, something they seem ultra successful in doing, actually.
The relentless politicization (and federalization, given our political climate) of every personal occurrence is a disaster for our personal lives, IMO. We're not (as a whole, not as particular people) necessarily equipped to deal with the abstract reasoning that's required to solve a whole lot of complex issues that involve a totality of things, like racism, say.
Take that, for instance. The majority of people just don't have the capability to think about all the nuances and things set in place by the racial demarcation of yore. Housing, schooling, all of that gets upended and implicated when race is brought up. It's a very far-reaching and personal thing, the "solutions" for racism, that is. We can't reconstruct an entire system predicated upon the separation of whites and blacks for a long part of our history. And our attendant wishes to do so result in grievances only alleviated by the most fundamental overhauls of systems possible. You think
@timschochetis going, for all his haranguing about race lately, to give up his rental properties or want low-income housing moving in next door? ####, no. Imagine if he were a residential landlord. These are damn nigh intractable problems. You'd have to call for massive, massive redistributions, redistricting, rehousing, re-everything. There'd be close to a real war (think of the busing riots in the seventies) with real blood should that come to pass any time within the next hundred years. That's impossible. I mean, we're beginning to get to civil war and sustained riot levels we haven't seen since '68. Call that melodramatic, but I do know this: We can't handle a shooting in Minnesota as a collective nation with all its attendant national effects these days. It just isn't working. We're cancelling everything because one person got shot in a local act of misfeasance because of the nebulous belief that this local misfeasance is indicative of a broader and pernicious problem that is not quantifiable. That can't be the case for a functioning government or a functioning society. The not quantifiable can't be redressed. It spins and rotates its way into other spheres of life. The only way to solve it is by totalitarianism, properly understood as addressing the root causes and totality of the problem. It's impossible.
So where does that leave us? I don't know, but my point is, it's not just consumption or entertainment. This is coming to a micro level. How deep it goes is the question we're going to have to answer. I'd prefer that we address less nebulous issues, like police unions or police militarization or civilian oversight. That at least gives us tangible goals, tangible things other than uprooting an entire system. That's when the damn communists among us win.
