No talking on the quiet carriage. No boom box on the subway. No conversation in the queue.
Is this capitalist isolation or is this western “decorum” or what? Why do I have to shake off the instinct to cringe when I hear someone playing music through their phone speakers? Why do I worry if anyone can hear my music through my headphones? What the fuck is this pathetic silence masquerading as a “culture”
If you unilaterally take for yourself the right to pollute the space with your noise everyone in the unwilling audience you've thus taken hostage also has the unilateral right to punch you in the face and throw away your boombox. Fair is fair. Is this the kind of hostile environment you want to live in?
I love that from my original post saying “why do I live in terror thinking someone might hear music playing through my earbuds, maybe the oppressive need we feel to have an eternal personal bubble around ourselves says something about our society” people have assumed I meant “WhY cAn’T i MaKe ThE lOuD BoOm BoOm??”
But where's the terror though (besides inside your head)? I've never encountered anyone being even slightly reprimanded for some sound leaking out of their headphones, much less ganging up on the "offender". Where is this magical totally silent place you live in, maybe I should relocate?
Dude, look at the downvotes and comments I’m getting for even raising a discussion about “is it fucked up we all want to isolate from each other as much as possible, and turn our public life (which being out on the bus or what have you inarguably is, whether we like it or not) into a further extension of our private life?”.
The subject of this post isn’t “I should be allowed to blast music on the train, or pester someone in the privacy of their own home”, but I’m being treated as some sort of delinquent for even suggesting it might be okay if, sometimes, maybe, we heard something we didn’t specifically choose to hear :/
Nobody's saying that it's not ok. For example in the town I live we often have a piano set up in the street or subway or what have you for random people just to sit down and play on as they pass by. It's quite lovely and no one ever complains, people even stop to have a listen occasionally. We also get street musicians or performers in the city centre on the regular. Again, onlookers are always delighted. So unless our experience of living in the West is radically different I just have no clue about the supposed totalitarian enforcement of silence that you're getting at. Like yeah, I guess people in the global south are more publicly talkative but I just don't see how any of this is an issue. And neither does the bulk of the participants in this thread it seems. Like what's preventing you from starting a conversation with random strangers on the street? Or from asking the folks in a train carriage if you can play some music and if no one has a problem busting out a tuba you've been carrying around or something? This is why I'd guess the peeps responding here assumed you're advocating for an unalienable right to sonically pollute closed spaces.
If you unilaterally take for yourself the right to play piano on the sidewalk, everyone taken hostage by the ebony and ivory bars has the right to drop an acme safe on your head
That acme safe really sold your cartoonish misrepresentation.
Ty ty
"I'm not saying X, I'm saying X but phrasing it with pompous moralizing"
You're getting downvoted because you're a selfish asshole trying to make your indifference towards other people fit into a framing where they're actually the problem.