The following originally appeared on Reappropriate<\/a>\u00a0(a great site you should check out!)<\/p>\n

Guest-post by Cayden Mak (@Cayden<\/a>),\u00a018MillionRising<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

I recently remarked to a longtime Twitter friend that I feel we live in a magical time, and I always wonder if young movement folks in the past felt that way, too. My friend suggested that not every generation gets to feel that way but there are definitely moments that people live through when they\u00a0know<\/i>\u00a0they are in a magical time. I feel confident saying we live in one such time, but there\u2019s still a question of what we\u2019re going to do with that magic.<\/p>\n

The internet has played no small part in the moment we\u2019re in. More than ever, young people are connected to each other, having conversations about the things that matter to us, from pop music to police violence. We\u2019re realizing there are more of us than there are of them, and that\u2019s an incredibly hopeful thing. We live in a time of rapid reinvention, and at a moment when the conversations we are having online\u2014for better or\u00a0worse<\/a>\u2014are catching the attention of the mainstream.<\/p>\n

For me, the internet always filled the gap between the community where I live and the one I long for. Growing up, finding my peers in the suburban Michigan town where my mom bought a house after she and my dad divorced was a challenge. I didn\u2019t lack for friends, but there were conversations I wanted that I just couldn\u2019t have with them. I was itching to define my politics, which is something I ultimately found online.<\/p>\n

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When I tell this story, I get a lot of knowing nods. Other people\u2014especially queer, especially of color\u2014in their mid-20s to early 30s relate to the struggle of growing up feeling different, and finding friends online. This story complicates the conventional wisdom about young Asian Americans and tech: it\u2019s not just that we\u2019re geeky (I am), but increasingly we\u2019re growing up away from ethnic enclaves and feel the sense that we are perpetual foreigners, even if we don\u2019t articulate it that way.<\/p>\n

So I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a coincidence that\u00a0#NotYourAsianSidekick<\/a>trended<\/a>\u00a0the way it did:\u00a0it hit a nerve with young Asian\/Americans<\/a>\u00a0trying to carve out a place and a sense of self in a complex and globalized world. The hashtag itself, at once a negation and an affirmation, reflects a bit of the discomfort I\u2019ve always felt with my racial identity. In the ecstatic whirlwind moment of the global trend, tens of thousands of people channeled isolation, pride, joy, and pain and said, \u201cyes, I am\u00a0not<\/i>\u00a0that!\u201d Which begs the question, \u201cif we\u2019re not that, then what\u00a0are<\/i>\u00a0we?\u201d<\/p>\n

These days, the community I want to see is way more complicated than the community I once found online. I carried my early politics with me to college, where I learned about the hard work of coalition building, and graduate school, where I learned about the complex relationship of young creatives to the cities they inhabit. Over the past decade I\u2019ve worked as an ice cream scooper, bartender, freelance web developer, delivery driver, game designer, adjunct instructor, and labor organizer, all of which have challenged me in surprising, sometimes difficult, ways. My ideas have changed, and I\u2019ve had to come back to the internet with a new sense of what it means to be me, and to be with others.<\/p>\n

Because I\u2019ve worn so many hats, both as a worker and as a person, I know it takes more than the right politics to build a better world. It takes a community that is willing to hold its complexity, ask difficult questions of itself, and be accountable to itself. I\u2019m curious what that is going to look like online, because so many of our tools are not designed for complexity and community, but rather for transactional individualism and the maintenance of firm boundaries. I find that when we talk about socialization and inequality online, we often forget that the internet\u00a0itself<\/i>\u00a0socializes us into particular behavior. The internet is itself an assumption, and is informed by an ideology.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, some of the same websites that make it possible to capture the internet\u2019s imagination with a hashtag are also major contributors to the\u00a0gentrification and displacement<\/a>\u00a0of\u00a0members of the Asian American community where I now live<\/a>. In order to fully understand the state of Asian America on the internet, we also have to understand the material effects of the tech boom in cities like San Francisco, and on workers in a global supply chain, the international migration of families, and the political and economic interests that put incredible pressure on people to make difficult choices with steadily decreasing promise of success.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following originally appeared on Reappropriate\u00a0(a great site you should check out!) Guest-post by Cayden Mak (@Cayden),\u00a018MillionRising. I recently remarked to a longtime Twitter friend that I feel we live in a magical time, and I always wonder if young movement folks in the past felt that way, too. My friend suggested that not every […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,829],"tags":[1056,1033,1185],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-8138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-guest-bloggers","tag-notyourasiansidekick","tag-18-million-rising","tag-online-organizing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8138"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8138\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8140,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8138\/revisions\/8140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8138"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=8138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}