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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
Quick update - Brian Merchantās list of āluddite horrorā films ended up getting picked up by Fast Company:
To repeat a previous point of mine, it seems pretty safe to assume āluddite horrorā is gonna become a bit of a trend. To make a specific (if unrelated) prediction, I imagine weāre gonna see AI systems and/or their supporters become pretty popular villains in the future - the AI bubbleās produces plenty of resentment towards AI specifically and tech more generally, and the publicās gonna find plenty of catharsis in watching them go down.
Personally, Iād love to see the Luddites be rehabilitated as a result of the Great Bullshit Collapse. They were just regular folks fighting for dignity in work, and itās tragic how successful the bastards have been at erasing them from history.
Judging by some stray articles from WIRED and The Atlantic, Merchantās likely done plenty to rehabilitate the Ludditesā image.
I suspect Silicon Valleyās godawful reputation and widespread hatred of AI have likely helped as well - āmachinery harmful to commonalityā may be an unfamiliar concept to Joe Public, but āAI is ruining the Internet/taking your job/scamming your parentsā is very fucking tangible to them.
Pulling out a previous post of mine, the NFT craze likely helped indirectly, by killing technological determinismās hold on the public and badly wounding Silicon Valleyās public image.
Of those two, technological determinismās death was probably the more important one - that ideaās demise meant the public was willing to entertain that new tech developments from Silicon Valley could be killed in their crib, that they wouldnāt inevitably become a part of public life, for worse or (potentially) for better.
nfts damaged public image of crypto beyond recovery, fine. tech in general, iām not so sure
Iād say they did do some damage to techās wider image by becoming a pop-culture punchline and a mark of shame rolled into one.
Incidents like Seth Greenās Ape getting kidnapped, the public exploitation of George Floydās death and the legendary dumpster fire that was The Red Ape Family, plus the onslaught of dogshit NFT art and the nonstop scams and deception within the NFT/crypto sphere all led NFTs to become widely and rightfully panned, with NFTs getting unflatteringly compared to beanie babies and NFT profile pics getting either right-click saved to mock their supposed āownershipā or blocked on sight, depending on how people generally felt.
It is refreshing to see the general trend of people laughing when promptbros try to paint themselves as the Wright Brothers Reborn, isnāt it?
my point is that these incidents were mostly mentally filed to ācryptoā and were not generalized to wider tech industry