Check out this piece from xkcd, the beloved and influential web comic. I think it’s a good example of how important how you position your argument is relative to the arguments you’re fighting against, how desperately people want to be the underdog. (I share this comic via a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License. The creator of xkcd is Randall Munroe.)
This comic is indicative of my general take on xkcd, in that I simply don’t recognize the world the author conveys. First, in general: who, exactly, is the underdog in the “digital divide,” the endless series of arguments about how our lives have become mediated through an array of communicative technologies? I’m someone who uses, values, and appreciates these technologies, but who is a committed skeptic towards the triumphalist conformity with which they are discussed. I cannot tell you how many times I have been berated by remarkably aggressive people for the crime of expressing less than sufficient enthusiasm about our coming digital utopia. If you are a critic of digital technologies of online practices, or if you merely express a lack of personal interest in those technologies or practices, people lose their shit. My question is always why people who are unquestionably on the more popular side feel so threatened.
Tale the particular discussion shown in this comic: what’s the fear here, exactly? That people are going to suddenly abandon cellphone photography? Really? People take 55 million Instagram photos a day. Camera-equipped cellphones and apps, services, and products involving them are an enormous business, generating billions and billions of dollars in investment and revenue. But some people worry about the impact of all of that photography, in an utterly powerless way, so… what, exactly? What is threatened, beyond the juvenile desire to live in a world where your every behavior is validated and approved by literally everyone? What is the ratio of people who take digital photos with their phones to people who feel even mildly squeamish about the practice? 1,000 to 1? 10,000 to 1? So who cares? It’s bizarre.
And it’s that discrepancy between the powerlessness of the digital critique, and the capacity for that critique to make people feel threatened, that compels Munroe to dramatize the situation the way he does. There’s a dude, wearing the fedora, the now-universal online symbol of “person I can safely feel socially superior to,” lecturing people who are innocently taking photos of a sunset. Munroe creates a situation, in other words, where his position is defending the victim, fighting for the underdog. That’s the only way to make sense of the character saying, “Why the fuck do you care how someone else enjoys a sunset,” when the question can so easily be turned back onto Munroe: why do you care about what other people think about how you enjoy the sunset, especially considering that so many more people take photos of sunsets than complain about people taking photos of sunsets? I can’t crawl out of my own subjective experience to be sure that I’m accurately expressing who, exactly, is judging whom. But I feel confident in saying that the overwhelming cultural force is on the side of the technoutopians and not on the side of the skeptics. And it cuts across ideologies, with neoliberal technocrats in Silicon Valley and left-wing writers at places like The New Inquiry and Jacobin parroting each other’s talking points.
My subjective experience of how we talk about technology is that those who advocate a substantially digitized life think of themselves as besieged Davids, when in fact by every rational measure, enthusiastic technologists are Goliaths.
A perfect example of what I’m talking about is Jonathan Franzen, and the phenomenon of “The Internet Reacts to Something Jonathan Franzen Said.” It’s a cyclical pattern where Franzen, being something of a tiresome pedant, complains about a particular technology-mediated practice, and the entire online world obligingly goes insane. As Maria Bustillos pointed out, there’s something profoundly pro forma and obligatory about all this. Franzen wants to be a martyr, his editors want pageviews, the Twitterati want to rage about something, and everyone gets what they want. But there’s an essential lie to this dance, and that is this notion that Jonathan Franzen is somehow a powerful cultural force against which only the collective might of the internet can stand. In reality, the very fact that the collective is so reliably aroused, and aroused to such absurd vitriol, demonstrates that Franzen is a fringe figure in that conversation, speaking for a tiny constituency that has almost no power to define the online social space. The publications and writers that attack him are the ones who actually create shared cultural values, not Franzen himself. And even a piece as ecumenical as Bustillos’s ends with the drive towards conformity: join us, she says, when Franzen’s whole point has been to enumerate the reasons why he is deeply opposed to joining. All of the cultural force cuts against Franzen, yet his critics insist on treating him as the heavy, because the will to be the underdog is so strong.
Or take this massively self-important piece about the future of writing in TechCrunch by Jon Evans. Evans invokes David Foster Wallace in his argument that conventional tastes in writing are constrained by a stuffy style that is out of touch with mainstream use. He also invokes Orwell, which proves once again that people will invoke Orwell to support literally any argument, no matter what their position. (Orwell was many things, but he was no populist, and particularly not when it comes to writing.) Like essentially everything written on the subject of language change, it posits this powerful edifice of traditionalists who snootily look down their noses at the masses and use their power to maintain the status quo. This is true essentially anytime people complain about “the grammar police” or those who want to maintain a traditional definition for a word. Speaking as someone in the world of composition and language: this elite does not exist. There is essentially no constituency for maintaining the stuffy old ways. Within the academic studies of composition and linguistics, essentially everyone is eager to be seen as cool, which is why you get endless papers regarding the legitimacy of texting-as-writing. People are terrified of being perceived as judgmental elites, so they sprint in the opposite direction. The dominant fad is not to advocate preserving old styles but to browbeat an imagined constituency that does. You’ll notice that Evans does not name a single individual who he is critiquing, instead referring to an amorphous group. That is not a coincidence. In the online culture Evans writes within, traditionalists are so thin on the ground, that to bother to name them would inevitably look ridiculous. But Evans, like seemingly everyone on my Facebook news feed, feels compelled to posit himself as part of a beleaguered minority.
I could go on. As I’ve written before, the perfect example of this lies in the ostensibly hated, secretly beloved divide between low and high culture. Despite their absolute economic and cultural dominance, video game and comic book and sci-fi fans continue to rage against an imagined coterie of elites who sneer down at their tastes. But the reality is that almost every aspect of traditional high culture is mortally threatened, with beautiful art forms like ballet and opera fighting for their very existence while video games and superhero movies rake in billions. Yet those who love pop culture feel an existential need to maintain their posture as underdogs, for reasons that simply elude me.
With xkcd, the fundamental question is who is genuinely advocating for pluralistic values and for the right of everyone to define their own version of the right life. I feel like this should be clear to anyone who’s read xkcd: Randall Munroe is the guy in the hat, in the average xkcd comic, though he thinks of himself as the other guy. In terms of how it argues and discusses the world, xkcd is much more the guy lecturing people for taking photos, not the guy defending them. I don’t say this casually: I think xkcd is the single most preachy publication on the internet. It’s steadfast belief, and most constant subject matter, is the superior moral and intellectual virtues of Randall Munroe. Its capacity to remain so beloved and influential while being so preachy simply goes to show the size of his choir. I implore you, people sharing and praising xkcd: you are the man, online. Which is fine. It’s not an argument to change what you believe or to stop enjoying the comic. But for aesthetic and analytical reasons, I would like for us to be honest about the fundamental character of power online.
The sad thing is that Munroe has brought up, in this comic, a topic that is very important to me: the sad tendency of people to be so threatened by the possibility of judgment, they seek to deny even the implied judgment of alternate behaviors. The internet is a set of communicative technologies that have the capacity to reveal the full flower of human diversity to us, but which are very often used in the service of conformity. That’s why “You’re Doing It Wrong” is an internet trope, because the very thought of different people behaving in different ways came to be seen as threatening. In a cultural age dominated by insecurity, to see other people living lives that are different than our own is to invite the possibility that ours could be perceived as less worthy. So preemption becomes essential; the behavior of others becomes not different but wrong, even ridiculous. That’s how you end up with an online world filled with essays about how, say, your choice of coffee grinder reveals your character.
All I would ask of Munroe and his readership is to consider what it might be like to be on the other side, to be someone who maintains a commitment to an offline life and to remaining skeptical of the claims made about our new technologies. If they could climb out of their own self-definition as underdogs, I think they might understand how relentlessly bullying the online space can be for such a person. There are millions of you. There are tiny handfuls of us. If we have to be pushed to the other side of a binary, I would enjoy it if we are allowed to reflect the simple reality of who, exactly, has the power to bully whom.
So two thoughts here. The first is that this particular comic is citing quite an old trope that very much predates digital technology, and rehearsing an old debate that in some measure goes back to Socrates complaining about writing but that at the least has been a commonplace exchange within the history of photography: that a technology of visualization interferes with the experience of visuality. Within that debate, you’ve had more than two major positions: you’ve had the ideology of street or documentary photography, which (usually) asserted its right (even obligation) to produce images anywhere and of everything; you’ve had various practices of art photography, which argued for a parsimonious and sometimes even privileged right-to-photograph (that only some people should make photos, and only in some places and circumstances); you’ve had souvenir photography, which is less about representation and is more a technique of memory and memorialization; and you’ve had dedicated anti-photography arguments that argue against one or more or all of these photographic practices. You’ve also had people who have (as we now sometimes do with digital media) said, “Let a thousand flowers bloom”, who’ve been puzzled that anyone cares what anyone else does. But for the person who believes in the evanescent value of direct sensory experience, it’s entirely possible that other people’s cameras can crush what’s precious to them; for the picture-taker, the disdain of the anti-photographer can be an irritant. Which is what this xkcd is referencing.
So you are taking up a side (of sorts) and he is taking up a side: you have many progenitors. Perhaps one of the problems with digital media is that the digerati and their critics both tend to jump into their antagonism with an overly strong sense of the novelty of the stakes. But also: it is a comic that takes a side. In part you seem to be objecting that he did. I think it’s a bit of an odd expectation that the cartoon somehow be scrupulously even-handed.
But this leads to the second thing, which I think is more germane to this post. Why are the digerati bothered by the remnant disdain of the Franzens? Digital media rule the world economically, sociologically, you name it. I think those who are bothered are those for whom the critical ideology that shaped selective or elite analog media: a) still has some force in their memory and experience and social worlds and b) for whom digital media were less exciting for their technological capacity and specificity and more exciting for the way in which they permitted the overthrow of that ideology and of the editors, critics, taste-makers, cultural brokers, and gatekeepers who maintained elite literary, visual and performance culture in postwar, pre-digital America. But that older structure of expressive practice still has actual influence and more important remains a part of “thinking about culture”, so folks like Munroe keep being annoyed by it–it’s the bit of food that gets stuck in their teeth. I have some sympathy for this feeling–Franzen, Lee Siegel, etc. annoy me too, for most of the same reasons, even though I’m not particularly a digital utopian, not particularly enamored of technocapitalism, or uniformly hostile to the systems and practices that maintained elite high culture in the 20th Century.
For me, the important point is this: digital media didn’t overthrow the power of taste-makers and gatekeepers. It rearranged the chairs some, sure, and it changed the language with which people perform their gatekeeping functions. It’s alter the landscape. But it has also instantiated new hierarchies as well. The danger is that those hierarchies are less obvious and less explicit, which can make them more corrupt, not less. What we don’t talk about as hierarchy, we can’t oppose. So you have the phenomenon, for example, of people claiming that Twitter is non-hierarchical, while they obsessed over their follower count. That’s the sort of thing that worries me, that people have actually bought into the notion of a some egalitarian creative revolution and so fail to see the ways in which power manifests itself now.
I personally don’t think it’s egalitarian at all (the new cultural hierarchy). I do think it’s two things:
1) Not the old hierarchy: there has been a real sociological, material, institutional and economic shift in who shapes taste, who keeps the gates, who produces culture. At least some of this is an intramural struggle between two social groups. I’m of an age, a cultural orientation and in an institutional world where it’s more common to sympathize with the old world of publishers, editors, columnists, critics, and so on. But I don’t particularly. I may not be wild about our new algorithmic overlords slouching towards their Bethlehems but if I had to choose between them and the NYT opinion columnists, Lee Siegel, Jonathan Franzen, etc., the folks where the ressentiment is so thick that it sticks to the floor like popcorn butter in an old movie theater? I’ll go with the digerati.
2) It’s not quite just rearranging the desk chairs. Empirically, I think the digital restructuring of cultural production has really ripped apart one of the sustaining ideologies of the old cultural elite: that there was only a very small amount of room in the culture for high-quality work. They were supported in that vision by real materialities of scarcity: printing was expensive, the technologies required for making visual culture were both expensive and often difficult to operate and disseminate without large-scale collaborations, etc. When at least some of those materialities were strongly affected by digital technologies (both of production and circulation) here’s what we discovered–and I think this is really a social fact, not just an ideology–that there is more good stuff out there than the old elite believed. Both in traditional genres of expressive culture and in wholly new ones. Now we didn’t discover that “quality” is a total social fiction, nor did we achieve an expressive culture without hierarchy, gates, or enclosure of profit. In fact, we may be in a worse situation when it comes to the extraction of surplus value from cultural work. But the space of production and consumption is a bigger, wilder, more porous space than it was in 1975, and that’s generally been a very good thing. Not the least because it’s often shown just how small-minded, mean-spirited and unimaginative the old brokers were in their taste-making.
Very nice essay, and as someone who is frequently called a Luddite (an intended insult that can be taken as a complement, if you know your history), I sympathize with feeling trampled by the digital herd. It’s interesting how closely the victimization trope you identify resembles that consistently employed by right-wing zealots like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.
One quibble: Not sure why you say that Jonathan Franzen “wants to be a martyr.” Even if he comes off as a blowhard, isn’t it possible he’s just sounding off about something he cares about deeply?
(BTW, forgive the plug, but I think you’d appreciate much that’s in my book, “Not So Fast: Thinking Twice About Technology.”)
Doug Hill
I think this debate plugs into the tremendous guilt that we (a)often do not have time for one another and (b)would rather not spend the free time we do have on one another. The sunset is just a stand-in for the mother, the father, the friend, the daughter, the dog.
You appear to believe that there are three parties here. There are only two; the folks taking the picture and the folks critiquing the practice. That is all.
You seem to be complaining that a criticism (that you like, and you feel is a minority position) is being criticized. When you offer a critic, you open yourself to criticism.
You can either be the folks taking the picture. Or you can be the folks endlessly arguing over whether or not they should. Whining about whining is still whining.
This is deeply strange: the entire process of writing the comic opens up the third space that you say doesn’t exist. That third space has to exist; you and I are occupying it right now.
Nope.
For real? I have a screenplay you’d love.
As Prof. Burke points out, people have been telling me that taking photos detracts from my experience since way before Instagram was a thing (I have always strongly disagreed).
And the way that Evans talked about CSWE never once mentioned elites or a shadowy cabal intent on destroying expression; he put it in terms of a systemic issue that was difficult to avoid, a tic, a holdover … the NYT simply “can’t” publish colloquial-sounding articles.
This argument is a good one for the high school rhetoric class I teach. This is sad, I know, but high school students seem every year less motivated by or even aware of the simple contrarian route to writing topics. So I like to present as many as I can, just to prime them. Not to argue that your perspective is simple contrarianism, but from a teaching perspective…I think you get it. Anyway, I would like to use this piece with them, but I anticipate the need to simplify it with syllogisms or other tools, as we discuss. I favor your position, for a variety of reasons, but if I offer this topic to my students I’ll have to referee their explication first. Also, it occurs to me that the College Board is due to stick a comic in the Comp exam, and XKCD is a likely choice.
First, what about the relationships among the figures. You (I think you did, I can’t find it now) implied that the hat guy and the guy he talks to are strangers, that hat guy just accosted somebody on the street. I don’t see evidence for this interpretation. I assumed they were friends, walking together, who see something and then talk about it. That is a comic staple, quickly and easily represented, reliant on an archetypal situation. So if it’s a discussion among friends, is the underdog thesis undermined?
Also, you say that the hat guy “lectures” the photo-takers on the bridge. I know that you mean that generically; the people on the bridge are a group. But the word ‘lecture’ implies that he’s actually challenging those people, strangers on the street. I don’t see evidence for that at all, unless you imagine that the interlocutor in the later frames has somehow been brought in from the bridge people for the purpose. Staying within the evidence of the comic, I don’t see it. Can you explain how you might get to underdogism if, in the literal events in the literature (which my students will be most able to control) the hat guy is actually making polite conversation with a friend instead of hectoring strangers?
Consider also the diction hat guy uses. In your view, what happens if hat guy isn’t wearing the hipster hat, and doesn’t say ‘hate’ or ‘ugh’ in frame 1? What if he simply makes a case that it’s better to do one thing than the other? (overlook for now the fact that the entire comic, and indeed the entire line of thinking, relies on that tone.) Does that remove the underdogism? Is the underdogism solely contained in hat guy’s tone?
Dave
I hate to be the guy that says “this isn’t as deep as you think it is”, but all this is is an updated complaint about the people in the 90’s who said stuff like “I don’t even own a television.” I doubt anyone believes that television is an institution mortally threatened by these people, but regardless, they’re annoying. (As is fedora-guy, who can’t let a single moment pass without reminding everyone that he and his opinions are the different and good ones.)
This xkcd is “annoying people are annoying”. Nothing more.
An updated complaint because the original issue persists, unattended.
“Yet those who love pop culture feel an existential need to maintain their posture as underdogs, for reasons that simply elude me.”
Maybe it has something to do with the inevitable emptiness that branded consumption (of which so much/most pop culture is) leaves people with, such that they turn on the perceived cultural elites for validation because surely the reason Iron Man 3 didn’t ultimately stir my soul was because some scribe at the New Yorker refuses to watch it and prove to me that such sustenance therein exists.
Also, re: people have been complaining about photo-taking forever, there is something specific about the intersection of social media and cheap cameras that makes things like Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook albums significantly different. It’s as if capturing the sunset, or a great looking meal, or last night’s drunken debauchery, is a mediated (but futile) attempt to extract some peace of mind from a sensual experience we knew, secretly perhaps, we were otherwise incapable of obtaining through simply “being there.”
Stuff I don’t get here:
XKCD is at core just opinion writing, not unlike this blog here. It’s in a cartoon format, tricking those of us who aren’t great readers into thinking we’re reading Garfield when in fact we’re learning about political/social debate. Yeah his character always wins the debates. So does Socrates. The dialectical approach to presenting an argument may have returned.
People who don’t embrace technology are some persecuted minority? This one just baffles me. There is lots of journalism these days about the perils of new tech and privacy. It’s very well scrutinised. Folks like Krugman point out we’re in our third industrial (I think that’s the word he uses) revolution. What exactly did you expect to happen when such a big social change as this swept over us all?
Feel free to point out everything I’ve missed here.
“There is lots of journalism these days about the perils of new tech and privacy.”
Examples?
Nothing you surely haven’t seen already. Perhaps you had something else in mind.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/opinion/sunday/when-gps-tracking-violates-privacy-rights.html?_r=0
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/15/opinion/nocera-a-world-without-privacy.html
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/data_mine_1/2013/09/facebook_privacy_and_kids_don_t_post_photos_of_your_kids_online.html
There must be at least 50 more.
There are still very intelligent people with a prejudice against newer digital forms of artistic expression, like video games. (I have encountered older academics who express this prejudice in offhand ways; and it was only last year, I think, that the New York Times started reviewing video games). At the same time there is no organized constituency of people who want to return to a smartphone-less age. This makes for a strange mix of technophilia in the national culture and stubborn belief in some quarters that art cannot be made with some kinds of technology — generally the kind made by Nintendo and (now) Valve.
So the attitude that I am clashing with is not so much “digital triumphalism” as “technology is a necessary evil but the kids these days are abusing it.”
I can’t speak for fedora-man, but whenever I’ve had fedorish thoughts about people photographing life rather than living it, It’s not because of someone taking a picture of the landscape. It’s usually when I’ve been posing for like the fifteenth group picture of the afternoon. It’s kind of annoying, but you can’t really say no to your mom, aunts and the cousins you don’t see that much anymore.
Or less churlishly, when I’ve shown up in a picture published on someone else’s social media site when I’d rather keep my life moderately unpublished.
So maybe there are reasons to prefer modern life not turn into a perpetual photostorm other than telling people how to live their lives?
It may be worth pointing out (since it underlines how the creation of a populist/underdog position is the entire substance of the strip in question) how badly constructed the argument is. After Munroe translates the Fedora’s complaint about Instagramming the sunset into the cliche of “documenting your life distracts you from living it” his Reasonable Interlocutor responds that trying to take a picture of something requires more attention to be paid, and that some of his best adventures are built around trying to photograph a thing. This first of all ignores that an adventure built around photography is not simply documentation of life already in progress, it’s taking concerted action in order to enrich life for the sake of documentation, and to document for the sake of enriching life. And the interlocutor/Munroe thereby completely elides all the differences between a photography-adventure and Instagramming a sunset, which center around the fact that most space phone-shots of sunsets are completely worthless.
The lack of engagement signified by the Sunset Instagram doesn’t derive from the moment being mediated or documented: it’s that in a majority of cases, the person taking the shot isn’t engaged enough with either the technology they are using or their environment to understand that, basically, a sunset (or, further, the feeling of a sunset) is a hard thing to photograph. Their experience of the sunset won’t be successfully translated to the resulting image, and neither will it have much aesthetic or communicative value as an object separated from the experience itself, for others or for their future selves. Thus they delegate some of the responsibility of remembering what was special about a moment to an utterly forgettable image. The person ‘building an adventure’ around photography presumably is engaging more deeply both with environments in which to adventure, in order to discover places particularly memorable and photogenic, and with the technology they are using, and how to capture images that both translate those experiences more successfully and are independently worthwhile. They may not be successful in doing so, but in purposely building an adventure around doing so, they indicate at least a somewhat deeper level of engagement with technology and the world around them. (One could go on to ask whether, in pursuing this deeper engagement they are actually even successfully engaging or simply projecting an image of themselves as engaged, but I’ll assume here that they are, in some way, more ‘connected’ to the action of the capturing an image and the moment which they are attempting to capture or translate.)
This is not to say that taking photos with a phone cannot be artful, purposive and meaningful, that the resulting images are never memorable or always without value, that one cannot take a worthwhile photo of a sunset, or even that nobody has ever taken a good shot of a sunset with a phone! But in immediately discounting any differences between ways that one might document life (and ignoring the differences he himself brings up), Munroe collapses the argument to “spoilsport technophobes!” and erases the chance that “a condescending stranger tell[ing] you they hate the way you’re experiencing your life at just the moment you’ve found something you want to remember” might actually be concerned that in many cases this documentation is likely to be an unreflexive parroting of others’ behavior (people have phones with internet connections and cameras, taking pictures of things like sunsets is what people do now) and, if not done attentively, disconnects them from what makes the sunset special (all of the aspects of the sensation that are difficult to capture or translate into an image, and which the act of photographing can suggest are being ignored) and results in an unmemorable digital object, visually unremarkable enough to be of little interest to anyone else and of no use in later invoking strong memories or feelings, to sit around until it is deleted or lost.
All of which is, I guess, to get behind Morozov in saying that the problem, here as elsewhere, isn’t that people are on one side or the other of the ‘technology’ question, but that the discourse of technology/technophobia/techno-utopianism obscures all the actually-important details of any topic which falls under that umbrella.
You start with some strange idea of being an “underdog,” and then try to make an xkcd comic fit your premise. There’s no “underdog” in this comic. There’s no “digital divide.” There’s no “martyr.” You have graduated to the next plane of hipster existence. You have no declared yourself too cool for people who think they’re too cool for things that are popular. You understand the world better than people who claim to understand the world better than the average person.
You’ve somehow managed to come to the conclusion that Munroe is Fedora, when anyone who’s read more than a few xkcd comics know that he is in fact Cueball. Then you start spouting nonsense about Munroe expressing some “fear.” This entire essay is a strawman. You’ve chosen to read things that aren’t there, clearly misunderstanding what you’ve read, or else purposely making things up for the sole purpose of tearing them down to show how much more advanced you are.
Now go ahead; respond to me, telling me I just don’t “get it” and how you can see things for how they really are.
I’m not going to tell you that you don’t get it. I am going to tell you to calm down. I am one guy, with one set of opinions. xkcd has an enormous and rabid fanbase, as you yourself demonstrate. And this ties into what I’m talking about: I don’t get why you’d be so defensive. There’s tons and tons of people praising this very comic. Why does a single dissenting voice make you so angry?
You’re reading way too deep into the comic. The comic is not about people “losing their shit” over not liking technology, it’s merely about not being a douche based on what people’s hobbies — in this case, taking pictures. There is no underdog. There is no fear “That people are going to suddenly abandon cellphone photography”. In fact, there is absolutely no reference to cellphones, or the use of social media at all.
But let’s say that your argument has some merit, and that Munroe is trying to paint himself as the underdog. You criticize him for trying to do so, yet you openly say “All I would ask of Munroe and his readership is to consider what it might be like to be on the other side, to be someone who maintains a commitment to an offline life and to remaining skeptical of the claims made about our new technologies. If they could climb out of their own self-definition as underdogs, I think they might understand how relentlessly bullying the online space can be for such a person. There are millions of you. There are tiny handfuls of us. ”
Are you not painting yourself as the underdog here? Or am I missing something.
No doubt.
Make all the snarky replies you want. If you have an actual point, I’d be glad to hear it.
Who is being snarky? I’m making the admission: I am positioning myself as an underdog here as well. All that’s left is for people to decide on their own if this claim is legitimate.
You invoke this underdog-ization a lot, but I think you’re wrong in the entirety.
I think the real reason people are afraid of being criticized by it is that deep down, they know they should be, i.e. their parents and their parents’ generation would criticize them for it, and they feel that there is some ‘true’ sort of judgment that exists, even if no one is making it. (And to be fair, people are often judged in a silent manner). When someone even hints at making this true judgment, they feel that shame and simply seek to repel it. Even though they intellectually sort of want to argue that there’s nothing shameful about it, they have been taught so deeply it is as to not be able to shake it aside.
I’m like this with Pokemon. For those who don’t know, it’s possible to play competitive pokemon, such that it doesn’t resemble the cartridges extraordinarily (I like to analogize them as checkers and chess). Even though I’m playing a very complex game which has a lot of math, reading your opponent’s intent, gameplan, moves, items, and even predicting his moves in any given turn for advantage, I’m still ashamed, because it’s Pokemon. Even though the last few people I told didn’t shame me at all, I still feel ashamed, because it’s Pokemon.
It’s not that people don’t want to be underdogs, I guess, but I feel like you’re reading too much into it.
As for the XKCD comic, he has a fair point; why look down on someone else for how they choose to enjoy something? There isn’t really a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way. But, I do think there’s a counterpoint there – people may take those pictures because it’s what is expected or X when they’d really enjoy just looking more ? depends I guess, the picture is also meant to recall memories
Ah, the Pretentious Hipster; along with the Stodgy Elite, the other boundary limit within which Triumphant Mainstream Nerd Culture defines its Perfectly Reasonable Commonsense. Those stodgy elites deride our simple pleasures to maintain their privileged role as ‘gatekeepers’, born of the inertia of hidebound tradition. But you! You pretentious hipsters might be worse: you are merely insincere pseudo-intellectuals, pursuing over-complicated analyses simply for the sake of distinguishing yourselves. What you fail to understand is that there is no need for complexity, since the tastes, predilections and conclusions of Mainstream Nerd Culture are the natural result of both the majority’s intuitive feeling (and yours as well, if you were being honest and not ‘pretentious’!) and simple logic, properly applied. So stop being such a hipster, hipster!
Forgive the smarm, Freddie, but this was the perfect antidote for my online day. After fighting with LGMers and Ordinary Gentlemen who don’t comprehend basic concepts this hit the spot.
It’s because that sense of victimhood and inferiority was in the soul of geek culture before it got big, and something like that doesn’t go away easily even when the weak become powerful or the situation changes. Just look at the lingering effects of racial supremacy ideology in the US. Truth is, we need geek culture to get big and start dying in favor of something else before I think it will ever truly lose that defensiveness.
Upon further reflection, I think this comic is actually a brilliant inversion of its apparent meaning. The hat is not a fedora, it just has a brim. Who, or what, wears hats with brims? Scarecrows.
In other words, hat person is actually a scarecrow; he is literally a straw man. Munro actually agrees with Freddie. Except about the not liking Munro’s attitude part.
Oh boy, Freddie! You’ve gone and insulted nerd royalty! Brave man.
Here’s the alt text:
“I hate when people take photos of their meal instead of eating it, because there’s nothing I love more than the sound of other people chewing.”
I think this implies the debate is about criticizing people who take pictures, not about some sort of techno-triumphalism.
Also, I think this is much more about the narcissism of small differences than about technology in any way. Fedora feels the need to openly belittle how some other person chooses to enjoy a moment, to set himself off as different and better than them.
People lose their sh_t over a lot of surprising things. Like there is an entire subsubgenre of antimetabacklash in what I’d called YCombinator culture (mixed with reddit culture) where underunderdogs bite back against people who critique the stylesheets or Javascript of a website someone linked them to.
> “He also invokes Orwell, which proves once again that people will invoke Orwell to support literally any argument, no matter what their position. ”
Interestingly, the scholar John Rodden has actually written an entire book about this very phenomenon :
http://books.google.com/books/about/George_Orwell.html?id=s-7ihMZgiRgC