Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 3rd November 2024
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 3rd November 2024
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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
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Quick update - Brian Merchant's list of "luddite horror" films ended up getting picked up by Fast Company:
To repeat a previous point of mine, it seems pretty safe to assume "luddite horror" is gonna become a bit of a trend. To make a specific (if unrelated) prediction, I imagine we're gonna see AI systems and/or their supporters become pretty popular villains in the future - the AI bubble's produces plenty of resentment towards AI specifically and tech more generally, and the public's gonna find plenty of catharsis in watching them go down.
Personally, I'd 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 it's tragic how successful the bastards have been at erasing them from history.
Judging by some stray articles from WIRED and The Atlantic, Merchant's likely done plenty to rehabilitate the Luddites' image.
I suspect Silicon Valley's godawful reputation and widespread hatred of AI have likely helped as well - "machinery harmful to commonality" may be an unfamiliar concept to Joe Public, but "AI is ruining the Internet/taking your job/scamming your parents" is very fucking tangible to them.
Pulling out a previous post of mine, the NFT craze likely helped indirectly, by killing technological determinism's hold on the public and badly wounding Silicon Valley's public image.
Of those two, technological determinism's death was probably the more important one - that idea's demise meant the public was willing to entertain that new tech developments from Silicon Valley could be killed in their crib, that they wouldn't 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, i'm not so sure
I'd say they did do some damage to tech's wider image by becoming a pop-culture punchline and a mark of shame rolled into one.
Incidents like Seth Green's Ape getting kidnapped, the public exploitation of George Floyd's 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 "ownership" 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, isn't it?
my point is that these incidents were mostly mentally filed to "crypto" and were not generalized to wider tech industry