Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
That's basically the entire problem in a nutshell. We've seen what people will fill that void with and it's "okay but I have power here now and I dare you to tell me I don't" and you know who happens to have lots of power? That's right, it's Balaji's billionaire bros! But this isn't a sinister plan to take over society - that would at least entail some amount of doing what states are for.
Ed:
I'm not going to bother looking up which essay or what terrible point it was in service to, but Scooter Skeeter of all people made a much better version of this argument by acknowledging that the other axis of power wasn't "can make someone feel bad through mean tweets" but was instead "can inflict grievous personal violence on the aged billionaires who pay them for protection". I can buy some of these guys actually shooting someone, but the majority of these wannabe digital lordlings are going to end up following one of the many Roman Emperors of the 3rd century and get killed and replaced by their Praetorians.
this is a possibility lots of the prepper ultra rich are concerned with, yet I don't recall that I've ever heard the tech scummies mention it. they don't realize that their fantasized outcome is essentially identical to the prepper societal breakdown, because they don't think of it primarily as a collapse.
more generally, they seem to consider every event in the most narcissistic terms: outcomes are either extensions of their power and luxury to ever more limitless forms or vicious and unjustified leash jerking. there's a comedy of the idle rich aspect to the complacency and laziness of their dream making. imagine a boot stamping on a face, forever, between rounds at the 9th hole
I think a lot of these people are cunning, aka good at somewhat sociopathic short term plans and thinking, and they confuse this ability (and they survivor biassed success) for being good at actual planning (or just thinking that planning is worthless, after all move fast and break things (and never think about what you just said)). You don't have to actually have good plans if people think you have charisma/a magical money making ability (which needs more and more rigging of the casino to get money on the lot of risky bets to hope one big win pays for it all machine).
Doesn't help that some of them seem to either be on a lot of drugs, or have undiagnosed adhd. Unrelated, Musk wants to go into Fort Knox all of a sudden, because he saw a post on twitter which has convinced him 'they' stole the gold (my point here is that there is no way he was thinking about Knox at all before he randomly came across the tweet, the plan is crayons).
you know, one of better models of schizophrenia we have looks like this: take a rat and put them on a schedule of heroic doses of PCP. after some time, a pattern of symptoms that looks a lot like schizophrenia develops even when off PCP. unlike with amphetamine, this is not only positive symptoms (like delusions and hallucinations) but also negative and cognitive symptoms (like flat affect, lack of motivation, asociality, problems with memory and attention). PCP touches a lot of things, but ketamine touches at least some of the same things that matter in this case (NMDA receptor). this residual effect is easy to notice even by, and among, recreational users of this class of compounds
richest man in the world grows schizo brain as a hobby, pillages government, threatens to destroy Lithuania
I'm sorry 'they' did what? Everyone knows you can't rob Fort Knox. You have to buy up a significant fraction of the rest of the gold and then detonate a dirty bomb in Fort Knox to reduce the supply and- oh my God bitcoiners learned economics from Goldfinger.
Welcome to the horrible realization of the truth. All things the right understands comes from entertainment media. That is also why satire doesn't work, you need to have a deeper understanding of the world to understand the themes, else starship troopers is just about some hot people shooting bugs.
see also: Yudowsky has never consumed fiction targeted above middle school
@Soyweiser @YourNetworkIsHaunted
@cstross But it's not only that: satire can't reach the fash because they internalise and accept the monstruous, and thus, what is satirised to expose in ridicule its and their monstruosity and aberrant values for average, still decent and sane people, for them it is "Yes, this is what we want." It's never "if you can't tell it's satire it's bad satire", you can be as "subtle" as a kick in the face and they won't get it because it <is> what they want.
Certainly, for a lot of them it is even worse. See how the neo-nazis love American History X. (How do we stop John Connor from becoming a nazi, seems oddly relevant).