One of the most annoying things about being an English-language content creator are the Americans who insist that everything must be about them.
I can make a video that never mentions the US once, and I will get hundreds of responses about the US.
I will get people claiming that I'm wrong because of some issue unique to the US.
I will get Americans telling me that I have a moral responsibility to help them fix their cities, despite the fact that I'm not American and I don't live there.
I'm releasing a video this week about Berlagebrug in Amsterdam and I've had Americans tell me that this is inappropriate, because of Baltimore.
These people are literally implying that the entire world should stop talking about THE TOPIC OF BRIDGES because a bridge collapsed in the United States.
I honestly cannot comprehend the level of delusional arrogance that is required to make that statement.
@notjustbikes There are half a dozen "what happened to the Baltimore bridge?" videos on my youtube feed doing deep structural analysis. I haven't seen any outcry about them.
@notjustbikes
I understand your frustration, but the average American just doesn't know any better. The rest of the world does not exist in their news, their culture, their movies...
We all know about the bridge in Baltimore, they'd never know about a bridge in Rotterdam, unless an American ship was involved or Americans killed.
@notjustbikes This reminds me that time while I was on Twitter and Americans would be angry about people talking tech while the Trump insurrection was in progress. "How dare you talk about tech if THIS happens now?!"
What's most frustrating to me is that there are now dozens of urbanist content creators out there, about 95% of them are American, and they make content that is almost exclusively American-focused.
But I am still constantly inundated with Americans demanding that I make more content about the US and issues that only apply to the US.
I met up with another non-American YouTuber recently and he summed it up perfectly: "I wish I didn't have to think about the United States anymore."
@toolsontech haha yes absolutely. Thankfully I have learned how to fill out that stupid US withholding tax form that every American service makes you complete, so that I get the 0% withholding rate as a non-US corporation with no activities in the US.
It's still obnoxious that I need to fill it out at all, but I guess it's a small price to pay in order to extract money from American companies and bring it into the EU, where I'm happy to pay taxes on it to get the good life we enjoy here. 😂
@notjustbikes I agree, though from an opposite perspective! :) I'm a European, moved to the US over a decade ago. And I want to talk with Americans about urbanism and city-related quality of life in Europe.
But it's very hard for me to have conversations with Americans on anything urban-related or propose any solutions/alternatives because of how unique and f-d up the problems, traditions, regulations, or even people's expectations are. :(
Same here: European transplant to the US.
Even American bike advocates are suffused with the idea that the car is the most important thing. Some in my town talk about "appeasing" drivers.
Once I told them they had to get over that first before they can be effective advocates. They looked at me like I had sprouted a second set of ears.
I am called radical because they don't have what I possess: a deep-seated conviction that I have the right to bike safely.
@CelloMomOnCars@notjustbikes I try to look at it with empathy: a) they were raised in this culture and have it internalized extremely deeply. It's impossible to change it in a single conversation or a couple. b) some of them are fatalistic (or, in their view, pragmatic) - they might even personally agree, but don't see any way to change it on society level and expect extreme pushback, so compromise.
@CelloMomOnCars@notjustbikes And btw NYC bike lanes show exactly the problem you describe. Great they are there, great the city builds more, but the way they are organized is clearly to not disrupt the cars and you get exactly what you'd expect - cars parked on them and people accidentally opening doors on you. :/
Exactly: internalisation!
Even the US engineers who are totally on bike safety's side still have vision clouded by car brain.
We have a councilperson here who once said, "I can't support bollards; Studies show that bollards hurt drivers who run into them."
THAT, my friends, is #CarBrain talking.
I blame no-one, it's 100 years of car culture.
And cultures change.
The way [some] kids playing with cars don't go "vroom" anymore, they go "Eeeeeee" 😎
The amount of grovelling they do to drivers and suburbanites is so off-putting to me.
I take a very direct and blunt approach on my channel specifically because I was fed up with the passive, spineless, and ineffective methods of these people.
I have no patience for people who say that my "tone" is inappropriate.
Meanwhile, this is how Amsterdam fought back against cars:
Very offputting.
But even in NL and even today, every single proposal to remove car parking spots brings out the fights.
I think it would be instructive to learn more about the decades-long process in NL to put walkers and bikers at the highest priority - and more than "polderen": what was the process, how were mayors and business owners convinced to, say, clear the market squares of car parking?
@BartWronski well this why I don't want to talk about "fixing" American cities: because the US has unique problems that simply don't exist at anywhere near the same level in other parts of the world.
So this content would need to be very American-specific, and completely irrelevant to the rest of my audience, the majority of whom are not American.
An ultimately I still don't understand why a Canadian living in the Netherlands should be the one to make that kind of content in the first place.
@notjustbikes a funny example - I tell people that commie blocks have their problems (thin walls, not well maintained), but they were also great to live and purposefully planned. Everything nearby with all the amenities, free centers of culture, a lot of green between them, well connected with public transport, walkable, safe. And they see the grey aerial pictures and "omg, so depressing, and people forced to live without their own space like chickens in cages".
I've also realized that one of the reasons I now post almost exclusively to Mastodon (despite my issues with it) is because it has a primarily European audience, so we can discuss issues here without every conversation having to revolve (or devolve) around America.
That is impossible to do on Bluesky or Threads.
It also helps SO much that I can block American Mastodon instances at the server level, which I have done several times. A nice benefit of running my own Mastodon server. 😉
@notjustbikes Wikipedia says that there are about 400 million native English speakers (many more for whom it is a second language), and about 300 million of those are American. That means that about 3/4 of the idiots and assholes watching your videos are American, like me.
@ThunderDohm Americans make up less than 30% of my audience (and dropping).
There are over a billion English speakers in the world and the majority of my audience speaks English as a foreign language.
I'm fine with Americans going and watching other channels instead of mine. There are dozens of other urbanist channels out there and the majority of them are run by Americans. Their content will probably be more relevant to them anyway, which frees me to talk about other things.
@notjustbikes Out of curiousity - if the RS1 (Radschnellweg 1)(Bike Speedway 1) in NRW (Northrhine Westphalia) ever got finished, would you try it out and review it?
@notjustbikes Don't know if this is exactly the same, or if it's a newer feature, but I think even I as a lowly user can block servers. They call it the domain:
I think the difference is that that option keeps you from seeing posts from that server, while blocking it at the server level prevents them from ever seeing my content in the first place.
So the Americans on the servers that I've blocked will never see the thread about me complaining about them.
That is, until some asshole screenshots it and posts it to Twitter. 🤣
@notjustbikes funny because one of the most annoying things about being an European consuming English-speaking content on the internet is having to cope with content that is around 95% about the US specifically. About issues that simply do not exist in Europe, products that we can't get here, etc. Finding content that is relevant to any of the 7.6 billion people living anywhere that is not the US feels so refreshing, and it should not.
@notjustbikes I am from Asia, used to study in the UK and the difference in urban design between the two regions is significant.
I wonder if you are interested in urban design in Asia, like cycling in Japan for example? Although rail transport in Japan is often praised, as far as I know, the status of cycling there is not as ideal as trains. A recent proposal to change the traffic law there is especially very concerning.
@nyancatflies I am very familiar with several Asian countries and I used to live in Taiwan.
I will eventually make some videos about Asian cities, starting with Japan, but I do not run a "Wikipedia and stock footage channel." When I make a video about something I go there in person and film it, and I don't want to change that, because it makes for a much better quality video.
That does mean however that I am limited to the places that I can talk about because I have to physically travel there
@notjustbikes for Japan, if you need help to pre-check places, list atrocious stroads, the few painting gutter that disappear when a car turning is needed, train tracks rebuilt underground or overground (rebuild for cars), destruction for neighborhoods to connect 2 stroads (my house will be demolished for that, the city made measurements this year) and many more, I really would like to help you.
LB: @Troggie and I were talking about this last week, how the internet we experience has become US-centred because almost all of the social media we use is run by American companies.
The result of this is that - in the English-speaking sphere at least - American attitudes have become commonplace, as has their news. I don't hear anything about governmental elections in - for example - Austria, but I can't escape USA politics. @notjustbikes
It's not as bad here on Mastodon because of it's huge European user-base, but obviously there are still Americans on here, so I still see stuff about US politics.
However, the Americans who are on here are a) pretty good at using CWs to obfuscate their posts, and b) seem to be as tired of their politics as the rest of us. So in the end, it's possible to avoid most of the firehose of bullshit from the Former Colonies.
@DJDarren@Troggie@notjustbikes It's not just social media. For one I worked for an American company once... Never again.
But also in my wife's work area of behavioural science it's focused too much on WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich and Democratic) which is highly skewed to America because most of the research comes from there.
So it's a doubled sided problem - they are a fucking needy bunch and they also have an outsized say in civilisation.
Looking for example into forums about speaker systems, it seems all the engineering there revolves around all sizes in inches and feets and conversion factors like one cubic foot are 1728 cubic inches, copper wires measured in the number of drawing holes rather than mm² cross section and so on
I wonder why they have not yet invented their "proud to be american" units to replace millihenries and microfarads
@DJDarren@Laberpferd@Troggie@notjustbikes And if it's the Daily Mail they'd be writing how many bloody immigrants could hide in it and get across the border to steal all the jobs.
@notjustbikes I remember, at 9-11, the instantaneous shockwave that went around the world. That was a very different scale of incident, of course, and entirely appropriate, but I found myself pining for pre-telegraph days, when you would only be able to hear about such incidents once a boat had crossed the Atlantic, bearing the letter from the newspaper's special correspondent. I suspect hearing about world tragedies a couple of weeks after they occur is a more healthy model.
@notjustbikes Sounds familiar. People complained to me when phone calls (or worse, the entire Linux Phone) would not work with their American MVNO (and I then had to look up which one of the actual carriers I am vaguely familiar with that used).
The upside of this: It's easy to spot the Americans!
@xyhhx omfg I had never heard the term "Seppo" before, but a quick search of seppo and sepposplaining lead to some quality Aussie content. Thanks for that.
I love that it's short for "Septic Tank Yank". I'm dying! 🤣
@notjustbikes Do you feel that your experience living in Canada helped prepare you? I sometimes feel as though living in "not!USA" had been training me to think about differences from a young age, so I'm curious whether that's generic or just me.
@chutten I think so, yes. Canadian media is a lot more internationally focused, but growing up I also could get access to US TV and see the drastic difference.
@notjustbikes One of the problems, that all social networks have, is that you reach people in "their world". They are all caught up in their stuff. So they associate your post to their situation. Then their fast thinking kicks in and social media makes it easy to reply quickly. They write stuff, that they wouldn't write, if they just thought about it for a minute.
So someone will alway write something. 🙄
BTW: You should do more about streets in Germany. THEY are the real problem. 😄
Or simply using the British word (or an extremely regional NE/Scottish word) whenever there is one in order to confuse them.
I've been insisting on this since I was a teenager and I can't even count the times American tourists have attempted to give me an English lesson because they thought that "postman", "petrol" and "lad" were incorrect.
@notjustbikes Please keep doing what you’re doing! As a Dutchman in America I like to read what is happening in Holland/Europe. The news on TV here is only local or only US anyway. And there is so much out there. After all, aren’t we here to learn from each other and other cultures? Keep going… 👍😀
@notjustbikes I often think about this article from The Atlantic, specifically its brilliant opening sentence: "Sharing the internet with America is like sharing your living room with a rhinoceros. It’s huge, it’s right there, and whatever it’s doing now, you sure as hell know about it."
@notjustbikes do you want us to say you are wrong as well? We do like telling people they’re wrong here in the Netherlands, so I’m sure we can all make that happen for you. We’ll find something. ;)
@TheDJ nah, the Dutch people are usually happy with my videos but just respond with, "but we have a housing crisis here!" as if Canada isn't experiencing exactly the same thing. 😂
This is only possible with access to YouTube Studio Content Manager and YouTube only makes these tools available to large content providers.
Trust me, if I could geofence my videos I would. Not for all of them, but there are several videos that I would make off-limits to Americans if I could.
@notjustbikes
When I (a German) was in the US, somebody asked where in the US Germany was. It seems to be beyond their imagination that there is a civilized world beyond the US. I guess the only other peoples that exists are either communists or terrorists.
Germany has something similar with people from Berlin. They will write on Mastodon saying that something is going on in "Mitte" (center) and you have to know that it's about Berlin.
@martin_ueding have you ever watched cable news in the United States?
Almost every story is about the US and, the rare times they talk about international issues, it's in the context of what the US did to create it, or what the US needs to do to stop it.
There are literally no news items presented that do not involve the US in some way.
@n0toose@martin_ueding there's also the opposite effect where everybody outside of it will irrationally hate their country's most populous province and/or city
@notjustbikes@martin_ueding oh god, yes! "Ah the capital, I have to say, it's not representative of the real country!" is something I've heard about Berlin, Brussels, Athens... from friends or even strangers that don't live near those areas to myself or others.
@notjustbikes@martin_ueding My uneducated guess on that is that it's partly because other people have a picture that people from the capital are self-centered (possibly huge cognitive dissonance on my end here), as they hear about it in the news all the time, hear politicians make statements about that capital only, and then see themselves as being "left out"
I'll call that... inverse capital city syndrome! doesn't make sense but I might as well come up with names for that too, it's only fair!
@n0toose@martin_ueding I think it's just that the most populous areas are talked about the most, and have the most political influence, simply because they have the most people there.
So people outside of those areas feel like they're being ignored, but it's just because they are in the minority.
Some of it is somewhat related to why we're dunking on Americans in this thread though: that the people in those areas talk about their own issues, often to the exclusion of other people's issues.
@crankyclown@notjustbikes I feel much safer around latinos in the US than around whites, you rarely hear of a latino mass shooting. They worked their asses off to get here
@notjustbikes Ha! I can relate, albeit slightly differently. I’m a Brit writing about EU railways, and there’s always a Brit making it about their rail system. So solidarity 💪
@jon@notjustbikes
Ha! And the Germans ignored the cautionary tale of British Rail privatization and deregulation and made a total cockup of what used to be a fully functional Deutsche Bahn. Sigh…
@khoji@notjustbikes Also facile crap. Sorry. Broadly - whether public or private - you get what you pay for in rail. Strip back investment, crap outcome.
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