Season’s Greetings, Programs!

 

https://www.oldnerd.net/2022/12/seasons-greetings-programs.html

The Next Big Thing

Wait, youi're telling me the same group that brought us fedoras, the pick-up artist movement, "men's rights", Web 3.0, cryptocurrency, the Snyder Cut, and Elon Musk worship think I should be using an AI chat bot instead of a search engine? Well, let me get rigth the fuck on THAT.

The Eternal Question

 Is Trump’s audience so dumb they bought $100 Trump Superhero NFT’s thinking they’d appreciate in value?

Or is Trum’s audience so dumb they bought $100 digital pictures of Trump as Homelander not realizing they were also technically a crypto investment?

Or did someone just launder half a million dollars through Trump?

The world may never know…

And… I’m Out

 Going forward, I won’t even be posting links on Twitter.

The purge of Musk-covering journalists was the last straw. Musk is, of course, well within his rights to make up whatever new terms of service he sees fit and then arbitrarily claim to apply them to whoever he wants. It’s his system, and he gets to.

But the reasons he’s doing it are obvious and execrable. Don’t even remotely consider the arguments of choads who equate this to their worst fantasies of what Twitter was up to pre-Musk, and their much looser definition of “journalist”, in order to justify it. What’s different is who they’re targeting and why, and it’s more than just a difference of “right vs. left” opinion. But you know that.

If you don’t make a living that involves promoting yourself on Twitter, I recommend you disengage too. Stop posting. Stop liking and retweeting. Starve the beast of content. If you can, switch to a third-party client that lets you read stuff without seeing ads. If you do make a living that involves promoting yourself on Twitter, it’s obviously a lot more difficult, but eventually there won’t be much of an audience left to promote to.

Here’s where the content goes. youaredumb.net and oldnerd.net. Theyr’re bog-standard Google Blogger, do what you need to do to see or be alerted. I’ll keep using Mastodon and Post (and try to get that info in the links this weekend) and whatever else tries to capture Twitter’s disaffected audience, but for putting my thoughts out there, this is the place. Because that place is a fascist shitshow.

Dereliction

At this point in time, being willfully ignorant - shutting yourself off and unplugging from the moment-to-moment drama and hubbub of everything that’s going on, whether it be the Twitter drama or, say, sitting Congresscritters saying that if they’d done Jan 6 they’d have done it right and brought guns - feels like dereliction of duty.

Blissful, sweet, wonderful, luxuriously tempting dereliction of duty that could only lead to more happiness and joy.

Status Update Status Update

As Twitter somehow seems to find new ways to get worse, here’s how I see the current landscape.

Mastodon: Has reached a point of “mostly functional” for me, but most of the people who follow me on Twitter aren’t there and most of the people I follow are either not there or not posting.

Hive: Appears to have been killed dead by massive security flaws.

Post: Took me half an hour to even find how to get on the waiting list to be considered for an account, which’ll happen when you name your social media company after the verb for putting something on all social media. Currently indestinguishable from a data harvesting scheme from the early 2000’s but I’m told that once you get on it’s an actual thing?

Counter Social: Haven’t messed with this yet because it seemed like a Mastodon spinoff and the last thing I need are Mastodon’s sloppy seconds. Could be convinced otherwise as things get desperate.

Twitter: Twitter seems to be a test of how quickly you can heat a pot and still keep all the frogs in it. Everyone seems to be waiting for it to hit bottom so they can decide if the career and personal benefits outweigh the final ethical and societal cost and it keeps not hitting bottom. Even just posting links without searchable and engageable content leaves me with a sour taste in my mouth at this point but I have no idea how even that is working. with the audience. Seems like not well but maybe everyone’s still finding things here? I’m not sure how shouting into an empty void and shouting into a sparsely populated void is different in any meaningful way but it does feel different.

Reward Structure

For about ten years now, we’ve been living in a world, and in a society, that is structured to greatly reward people when millions and millions of people say “Jesus Fucking Christ, what an insufferable, evil, and wrong complete asshole you are.”

It’s not just that a substantial audience for insufferable, evil, wrong assholes, although that’s a significant part of it. And it’s not even that the systems in place to officially declare that someone is an insufferable, evil, wrong asshole have deteriorated to the point that they’re worthless, although that’s a significant part of it too.

But the biggest part of it is that a variety of socioeconomic factors have led to the decision, at an institutional level, that there really is no such thing as bad press.

“There’s no such thing as bad press” was a saying, not a fact. Hitler got a lot of bad press, at least until recently. To pick a more recent example, Jared from Subway got a ton of press and it didn’t work out well for him. 

But with the current crop of insufferable, evil, and wrong complete assholes, whether it’s a Sinema, a Rowling, a Chapelle, a Musk, or of course a Trump, the socioeconomic benefits of being awful now so far outweigh the personal cost that the only reasons NOT to do it are ethical and moral ones. Which creates a perfect environment for sociopaths to thrive.

Remember when “doubling down” was supposed to carry an element of risk? The blackjack term was brought over to the political side of the discourse BECAUSE it was a gamble. Not backing down from your awfulness used to be a risk because there was a chance that society and institutions would turn against you and reject you. 

But not anymore. Doubling down pays out 99.9A% of the time, and we’ll see how it works out for Kanye. Who wouldn’t take those odds? 

I don’t have an answer. If you ignore it, you let it grow and fester and turn into action. And if you pay attention to it, you reward it with importance and attention in an economy that’s almost exclusively attention-based. It all ends badly.

Declaration Of Independence

So glad to see that Kyrsten Sinema’s heartfelt request for everyone to pay attention to her during this difficult time is being honored so thoroughly.

This is why the argument “How can someone like Herschel Walker do the important work of being a senator with his obvious brain damage and werewolf fetish”? What, exactly, is a Senator’s work again? Vote with the party unless the personal rewards for not doing so outweigh any personal/career cost.

That’s it. That’s the whole fucking job and most of them don’t even worry about the second part.Sure, some of them go above and beyond this bare minimum in order to ruthlessly gather power and influence far beyond the job description, but one of those bobbing bird toys could be a Senator if it bobbed with enough force to push a button and Mitch was there to move it between Yes and No.

Neuralink

At least we know that Neuralink isn’t a secret plot for mind control, because anyone who’d hear Elon Musk say “I want to open up your brain and put my equipment in it” and signs on the dotted line is already a successful product of his current, public plot for mind control.

I didn’t even want that fucker’s stuff on my roof.