Rage Bait

 “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.” - Desmond Tutu

“The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict…[an individual] who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it” – Martin Luther King Jr.

“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented” – Elie Wiesel

Quote source - https://organizingchange.org/here-is-how-moral-leaders-approach-neutrality/

I watched a pile-on on a friend’s page & chose to remain silent but I wish I had had the courage while people were piling on the one person who stood up to the other comments & said simply. “I do.” Cause I do care about peoples politics. Another one of my favorite quotes is, “man is by nature is a political animal.” - Aristotle

Also “all art is propaganda, sometimes unconsciously but often deliberately propaganda.”- Upton Sinclair. Aka telling people to silence themselves via social media is a form of artistic political act. Especially now. 

"In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia." - George Orwell, the context being that it is impossible to remain neutral as politics affects every aspect of life, even for those who think they can avoid it.

Not only do I want to hear your opinions. I Love hearing your opinions. 

*fb creepily auto input what I wanted to say just now & derailed the natural course I was taking. I don’t like that one bit. Not my iphone. Not autocorrect. It just typed an entirely different word it thought I wanted to use & there it was. I won’t succumb. I’ve been a natural writer since the age of 10. I walked Myself to the Silverton Pharmacy & bought myself a very fancy 5 Star Hunter Green college ruled notebook. I still have it, it’s not that full. It’s bad enough more of my thoughts & experiences are public than private these days & that the paper daily pages I write purely for me & my creator Julie Cameron & all the artists in my artists circle, even the ones who think they’ve cut their tie to me forever, are not the focal point of my life anymore. 

I will not follow rules made by completely unjust unelected leaders.

These are not our laws these are not our rules.- Ani Difranco 

I never should have given up the Jackie Lane Love brand. It was my strongest attempt of so many I think. 

I have silenced myself very much since I left social media & returned. Once by force but the second, more important time, by choice. Things are not as safe as they once were. Thought crimes are real. I mean, as I type this into “google keep” live, in real time, ultra corporations can turn my thoughts into chum for the AI processors to suck down. Before I even post it publicly. Sucking down our thoughts & accomplishments as humans so much faster than we lived those lives in the first place. What will be left of the humanity when everything that is read is written by what computers assume we want to say? I never thought I would be saying I lost some of my closest friends to AI. I never thought people who used to trust me would cast me aside because I disagreed with them. I used to be the person people came to for help. Or disagreement. Constructive criticism we used to call it. I Love constructive criticism. And I love to dish it out & take it. My mom inspires me. Her competitive nature keeps many around us going. It changes the lives of many. In the world of trigger warnings there is no room for tough love. You can be stern with someone. You can teach them discipline. It is utterly strange that I am so against ultra authoritarianism & at the same time I love discipline & made sure it was something I instilled in my son. Who at times may seem very undisciplined & rebellious with his appearance & attitude but is a dedicated musician & student which cannot happen without self discipline. He studied martial arts from age 2-5 & I studied martial arts when I was 30-32. It gave me a sense of calmness I had never had. I actually went through it 5 years After my son. It is not a part of our lives now but the teachings stay with you. It made me a smarter & less fearful person in many ways. But it also taught me the reality of my own strength & I believe that keeps me safer in life but without making me paranoid. I was at one time stupidly fearless. Online. But otherwise too. When we were young. Most of that time is not recorded online. We scanned Some developed photos or uploaded them from our floppy disks from the Walmart 1 hour photo. Photos were so cheap & so fast. I just developed wedding cameras that used real film. It cost 3 times as much money as it would have in 1999 & doubles would be double that. We didn’t even get anywhere near most of the shots because people don’t know the realities even, of Standard 35mm color film. The flash was not great but in most cases not used. Most of the best shots are by me in the bright sunlight, to finish out the rolls, of cool looking stuff I saw outside. It made us laugh though & was the most enjoyable thing I’ve seen in such a long time. Holding them in your hands had such a strange effect. Much different than, as Jorden Jensen pointed out & I can’t stop thinking about now, the endless photo scroll. It’s weird someone I relate to so much can’t smoke weed at all. Make it make sense. But the endless photo scroll. The unorganized life. I am so critical of the art I present on social media now. I’ll look back on the past & see Tons of photos that I took, from the future, that I am like, “this is So beautiful, why didn’t I post this when it happened?” Cause I felt it was so inadequate in the moment but so perfect with hindsight. Hindsight is why I started the JackieLane2020 brand, it is supposed to be my life with the clarity of hindsight. I was just lamenting my Jackie Lane Love brand. I am not just One thing as far as the history of the internet is concerned. I have had many personas & many brands. I have worn many hats. Shared too many bottoms. But I had a good time & now that I am 40 & still alive I can say I am Finally glad about everything I’ve done. Seeing how silenced & stoic even kids are on the internet. Tons of coded double speak just to vent our most difficult feelings & experiences as if the words we create to describe those experiences are what’s bad as opposed to the experiences themselves being bad & also worth human beings creating a specific grunt to express to one another that thing. We have so many words. So many specific thoughts & feelings piled into a relatively small set of letters. But really there are approximately 7160-7164 living languages in the world right now. It’s not just species & corral that is dying. The diversity in how we communicate is also. I see comedians I love traveling all over the world & having their jokes be understood. That is fucking wild man. Do you even know how hard it was for me to type that sentence knowing I intend for this to be my first blog post in a very long time & that I figure nobody will probably even read it, I still considered, “should I say it That way? the way the I would.” But I felt like a voice was needed. I am that voice. For me at least. I’ve been working on my throat chakra for quite a few years now & I still can’t seem to fully unstitch my lips. I used to have a vertical labret piercing in my lower lip that I got at a very strange time in my life to remind myself to “keep my mouth shut” about something I never wanted to share with anyone but eventually shared with the world thanks to the strong 💪 women of the #metoo movement. The me too movement was intentionally squelched. When you typed that hashtag into Twitter, well before the X debacle had even happened, it was auto inputing a little icon of multiple skin-colored raised little fists. But I always felt it was mockingly. No other hashtag has auto generated little cartoon symbols in it. Plenty of hashtags contain chosen emojis but not Forced ones. Eventually hashtags altogether didn’t affect engagement anymore. But women all over the world were at the time & are still now what we call “shadow banned” for misbehaving & speaking out against the patriarchy oligarchy. 

Now the best thing for engagement is called rage bait. Social media platforms seem to be particularly interested lately in trying to force feed us things that are grating. Things that make us wanna push back, I guess & eventually buy something. But I see people being sucked into it all around me. I try not to be gullible but I take after Douglas Adams. I always believe the thing or the possibility that the thing is true before the thing. But no matter how “convincing” it is, I seem to routinely be able to sniff out AI. It instinctively doesn’t feel right to me. In some ways I hope this blog post, for the handful of people who read it, feels like the most human thing they’ve read in a long time. I do not think as well or as fast since my concussion a couple years ago but I do find myself more patient & thoughtful. I may not be able to sling facts like I once could but I have a savantish level math ability left (thanks for the confirmation NYT PIPs & language app math) [I couldn’t right now even fucking remember the name of the app which to me is wild since I can remember all these quotes I’ve read & song lyrics of songs I listened to when I was young] {Duo Lingo, fuck} this post is already much too long. Longer than I ever intended it to be. It started as a FB status. But FB tried to alter what I have to say. Lately I keep what I post shorter & more concise than any of my blogposts ever were. I feel inspired by a few things. I saw a friend make an incredible accomplishment & cried because I was so happy she was alive, it’s a long story. We’ll get there another time. I have kept my side of things private until now to protect her because she is the type of person who deserves all the protection in the world. Anyway. That made me cry about another friend or 2 that I would give anything to have here. Even if they were mad at me sometimes. I still wish they were here. If this post was an album it would be System of a Down’s Toxicity & Incubus’s Morning View, I love a good sunrise, both of which came out within a month of 911. Toxicity was released September 4th, 2001 & Morning View was released on October 23rd, 2001. Which reminds me of Ani Difranco calling 911 “an almost too perfect day” in “Self Evident” a sneaky 20th track out of 24 tracks on an entirely live recorded double album. My favorite sort of album. It makes sense I still blog because when I was young my favorite sort of book was a Diary (some fiction) or an Autobiography aka a glorified diary. It’s not about your daily life but about your daily thoughts about what events made you into who you are as a person. I probably should have written a memoir by now. But if it doesn’t come out in the moment for me it doesn’t come out at all. There’s posts to make for social media for my 2 businesses & myself as an artist. There’s too many football games to go to, to see my son play saxophone. They play All the greatest hits of the 80s 90s & today cause that’s their parent’s music. It’s why we were singing & playing rock & roll & classic rock. For our parents & grandparents. Sometimes these kids are playing heavy metal for marching band like it’s Black Sabbath. & Someday they’ll be playing WAP. Like we played Wake Up Little Susie. Times change. The olds not understanding the youth is eternal but I try. I really struggle with how hard it would be when raised with the possibility from birth to always filter photos of yourself, we used to call it photoshop but that took so much more time & effort. Now you can just slap that shit into any “free” AI app & distort your body & face to your hearts content. We all learned the hard way that google & FB & Youtube were never really free & how valuable our attention always was, probably because of the temporary limitedness of a human life. It’s unfortunately all too quantifiable. I don’t like seeing weird blurred cartoon versions of faces I deeply love but they are cropping up everywhere. As a comedian I was listening to referenced, there is going to be no limit on what is done with AI, whatever is possible will be done, whether we like it or not. The intellectual property rights that have already been violated. And honestly that isn’t even what I care about. Who gives a shit if giant corporate art oligarchies are losing their revenue to AI? But it’s also cutting into the bottom line of every small business & artist you know. It’s fracturing people even more than “politics” already had. If you wanna call what the prez is doing “politics”, I guess you could if you had never heard of the word crimes. Watching my same friends who supported Occupy Wall Street & other protests against the global oligarchs throughout the years succumb to this relentless authoritarian thought control has kept me so depressed I could barely function. Which for me means, going to work, birding with my partner, helping my parents, seeing my son play music, posting on social media to let people know I am still here for them. So I’m active but my artist is whose silenced. The fearless girl who spent all those years typing whatever the hell she wanted into DeadJournal & then Both Live & Deadjournal for over 5 years. I stopped writing at all & especially publicly from the time Zack was born until he was around 5 & I read The Artist’s Way for the first time. I realized instead of being ashamed or afraid of what I’d said when he was a baby, I really felt I’d missed out on recording a significant & important part of my life. I had regrets when I started writing again but I have none now because I spent my son’s early childhood very present. I spent that time before he went to school totally devoted to making sure he had an awesome childhood & that he learned as much as he could & he certainly did & is much smarter than I ever was or will be. Now when I write I think to myself. “What would my son think, what would my mom think, what would my grandma’s Jackie & Jean think?” I still write for rebellion but because I want my nieces & nephews & son’s friend’s to look up to what I say & appreciate that some grown up out there is trying to understand what life is like for them. I made a pact with my best friend when I was 16YO getting bullied on the bus that we would Never forget how hard it was to go through our teenage years & I never will. We had no lock down drills though. No one taught us we May someday be shot in school & that was just a reality we all live with and accept. We didn’t grow up under a constant threat that “AI” would be stealing all the jobs. Except ya know anything of any importance. Teachers, janitors, priests, deacons, rabbis, imams, cosmetologists, masseuse, painter, poet, dancer, singer, chef, gymnast, swimmer, football player, baseball player, basketball player, tennis player, pianist, music teacher, EMTs!, firefighters, doctors, that is just off the top of my head the most important things I can think of & even computer programmers & security professionals can’t be replaced by AI because machines don’t have morals. We do. When you let the algorithm decide who will live or die it will never decide the same way as a human. AI has no remorse. Humans may live with many regrets but our capacity & ability to be compassionate is I believe our greatest strength. Humans together have built many wonders & befriended much of the animal kingdom. I think we can do better than 8 people ruling the world who we certainly didn’t choose & who only came to power because at an opportunistic moment they were willing to sacrifice people poorer than themselves for their own personal gain & the “investors”. As if investors in corporations are not people, just the corporations are. Investors who make/made their money off of the slave labor of Apple or the weapons sales of the “government contractors” that fuel global war. These aren’t passive acts. Investing in the stock market. The market on human capital is not neutral. Neither is trying to silence people when things like snatch & grabs of human beings are happening by an unjust militia established by our unjust leader. 

I have more to say now that the dam broke but I’ll just leave it there & let you start to process before I release my reactions to some other weather related & corporatist issues I am finding issue with lately & I think we need to consider. You may not want to participate in the consumption economy but there are still ways to keep the economy moving forward by spending money locally on what my partner & I call consumables, (ie food or stuff you’re gonna use, like art or your friends album, haircuts, etc). Go buy tickets to shows of the musicians & comedians & poets you know. It’s how they make money. 

We can’t be neutral on a moving train…

Until Next Time…

Love, 

Jackie Lane 

PS. Hardly any breaks or paragraphs. You’re lucky I used punctuation & capitalization at this point but I want to be well understood while still being defiant within my writing style.