Is Twitter dead? Is Facebook dead? Is Google+ (lol yes) dead? Is the internet dead?
Look. We’re all going to die. We briefly flirt with the idea that we’re not going to because the force that has enabled us to play Snood on our cellphone must surely mean we can beat death, and some of the more abjectly terrified among us get really aggressive about that idea, but we’re all going to die and we know that we’re going to die. And we also know that the world is going to mourn us very, very briefly, in part because we remember the time somebody else died and we said on Twitter or Facebook or (lol no) Google+ “that dude was still alive?” And in some dark recess of our lizard brain we remember those first spare moments when we were born and we emerged into the harsh light of the hospital delivery room, white and antiseptic, and though we were to that point undifferentiated, unaware that there was a “me” and a “not me,” still in some sense we knew “someday I will cease to exist,” and that was why we cried, and we came into the world shocked by that incalculable horror.
So as grownups we decide that the thing to do is to be Very Important, out of the very poor and objectively untrue logic that Very Important people never truly die, but unfortunately in the back of our minds we know that there are 7 billion of us, and that we can’t all be Very Important. But we’re good capitalists so we get transactional about it. We trade. It’s the easiest thing in the world: I’ll think you’re Very Important if you think I’m Very Important. And all it will cost you is writing some zingers or telling other white people how much more not racist you are than they are. Also, incidentally, we have to mutually agree that other people are not nearly as Very Important as we are, considering the whole 7 billion thing. And that’s what social media is for, that’s what our internet is for.
So don’t worry, investors. Verily, I say unto you, as long as people need to feel Very Important because they know that someday they will die and die alone, there will be Twitter or Facebook or whatever bullshit you access through the Oculus Rift which is strapped to your face for 12 hours a day. Ask not for whom the 22 year old jagoff tweets, he tweets for thee.
Update: “‘Twitter is the new comment section,’ our friend Margarita Noriega—you may know her as @Margafret—said. ‘It’s changed, and unfortunately, it’s gotten a lot worse. It’s too filled with spam and hate speech and unverified content..'”
Translation from media-person speak: Twitter is too filled with people who are not as Very Important as me.
Well, this post seems to be firing in all directions, but I want to talk about aiming at lefties (“…all it will cost you is writing some zingers or telling other white people how much more not racist you are than they are.”)
What is the deal with lefties hating each other more than we hate right-wingers? Not to pick on you in particular — I feel the same way — but I’m sick of just feeling that way and not knowing why. I want to know if anyone’s done any research on it. B/c leftist positions are not inherently more contemptible than rightwing ones but it’s a pretty well established phenomenon that nobody likes the people who espouse them, not even the other people who espouse them.
If lefties seriously want to capture public support don’t we have to identify what it is that makes us universally repulsive and gosh, I dunno, *do something about it*? Rather than just snipe to our respective in-groups about one another? B/c I for one am not wasting any more of my time in movements where I’ll get sniped at. I get 25 letters a week asking for my help with projects where I will not be called racist/sexist/mansplainer/clueless/bourgeois/insert your insult of choice/ for my pains, and right now the left cannot compete with any of them.
To be a lefty takes more than engaging in faux anti-racism efforts intended to elevate yourself in a social hierarchy.
While this statement is obviously true, I was hoping to be directed toward research…
I think that’s exactly the point…especially when being on top of the social hierarchy can have very real economic benefits. I think the dream of shaking off the “yoke of oppression” and to do do activist stuff full-time as a living is very appealing for a lot of people (myself included).
Years ago it was all about how you could beat up the Right the best. Now it’s all about how good you can do tearing down people on the same side.
But even years ago, infighting was a huge problem for the left. Feminists were trashing each other back when nobody outside the movement knew Gloria Steinem from Bella Abzug.
Word casserole.
Letter stew.
“If lefties seriously want to capture public support don’t we have to identify what it is that makes us universally repulsive and gosh, I dunno, *do something about it*?”
There already is considerable support for lefty ideas in the abstract. The catastrophic failure is in liberals and Democrats failing to translate that into mass electoral participation. Unfortunately what we have is an internet liberal/left that thinks it can ridicule its way to a more just society. It’s no wonder that tens of millions of potential voters feel alienated from the process.
I never did Twitter. If it dies before I do, then I can go triumphantly from decrepitude to retroactive prescience. Is that a zinger? Please don’t erase my zinger. I am bookmarking it. Bookmarking is still OK? I’m cold.
When I emerged into the white glare and the shrieking noise and bad smells, I emoted to myself in my preverbal way, Whatever am I doing HERE? Where did everybody go? … I yearned to go back to where I came from, and that is still my deepest instinct. Not to be important but to be again a fragment of something actual. Don’t want to do your silly stupid made-up stuff that I can’t ever get, want to do the real thing with this tiny-but-as-big-as-the-sky speck of eternity. You all forgot, everybody forgets.
There’s few funnier phenomenons in our society than the people who sneer at people for believing in Jesus because of the promise of eternal life, then turn around and earnestly tell you about Google’s commitment to lick mortality because they don’t want to die. But they don’t believe in science religiously because science is correctable and that totally follows. But it’s totally different, because they’re going to cure mortality scientifically. Twenty years tops. In the meantime, we have snood.
Asking questions are in fact pleasant thing if you are not understanding
anything totally, except this article provides good understanding yet.
each time i used to read smaller posts that as well clear their motive,
and that is also happening with this post which I am reading at this
time.
I approved this spam comment because I enjoy it so much.