Nothing happened. It was always like this. Geeks got unduly put on a pedestal. They got a reputation that was never earned. They're not any different than your typical psychopath executive.

I grew up in a town where a lot of these types of guys have become multimillionaires since 2010s tech boom. One person manages some hundreds of millions of dollars AI investment portfolio. That was before the GPT explosion. I have no idea how big they are now but I wouldn't be surprised if it's billions.

Growing up they were almost all psychopathic. Lying, cheating, backstabbing type of people. Nothing like the timid altruistic geek that pop culture proliferates. The more normal people did not go into tech. The actual timid types have had modest middle class careers in tech.

They don't hide it on their own boards. The right wing spaces. It's a real thing they do.

The two things we're talking about are not mutually exclusive. There are people who spent too much time in those "performative space". They get incited by agitators too. It's a clusterfuck.

It is. A big tell is their vernacular. It's not leftists. It's someone else pretending to be.

Another one is their interests or hobbies. They do not talk about these topics the same way the people they pretend to be because they are not the people they pretend to be.

I've been chronically online enough to be able to get a sense of it. They often slip. Some times it's so obvious it's a kid who is trying to copy the more adept ones.

A lot of minority subreddits on reddit are so fake too. It's 21st century blackface minstrel shows. Easy to dupe casual users. If you're chronically online long enough you can tell.

ETA: This is conspiratorial as the people who get caught all the time forgetting to switch their alt accounts. Can't reply to the mod for some reason so I guess I'm done here.

I think a quirk of reddit is that conventional finance doesn't account for its value. Reddit in and of itself just operates a barebones site as the article says. While the site itself is ostensibly worthless. It has had incredible amount of value to those using it for commercial and political purpose. Nation state actors too even (cougheglincough). These days what organization isn't using or trying to use reddit. Such things don't appear in financial statements. I think they've been propped up with funding for so long because its a nexus of zeitgeist. There are enough organizations who it is useful to such that it's better to keep reddit alive rather than risk having to establish their dark presence on new competitor platforms. I suspect spez knows he has everyone by the balls too.

The config file in ~/.config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc.

Search for the widget name. I will use org.kde.plasma.analogclock.

On my system this widget has a config section.

[Containments][53][Applets][186]
immutability=1
plugin=org.kde.plasma.analogclock

It is applet 186. Search the string Applet-186 for a section that has entries containing ItemGeometries.

[Containments][53]
ItemGeometries-0x0=Applet-112:1712,48,144,256,0;
ItemGeometries-1280x720=
ItemGeometries-1920x1080=Applet-186:1504,96,304,304,231;
ItemGeometries-1920x1200=
ItemGeometries-3840x2160=
ItemGeometriesHorizontal=Applet-186:1504,96,304,304,231;

The ItemGeometries are the layout of the widget on the desktop. I believe the last five semicolon separated numbers are:

• x position
• y position
• width
• height
• rotation in degrees

The American sphere of influence is palpable here. Trudeau, Poilievre, and Singh are all gen-x. The average age of politicians here is not as geriatric as American congress.

The millennials in my area are doing traditional extended family things with the kids friends from school.

There's another type of citogenesis going on with articles and internet comments. Writers look to social media to see what people are talking about / what will get engagement. Internet commenters talk about the article taking the points that strike a chord. Writers see what the users are talking about and write about that. Internet comments react. Writers see the comments and publish accordingly. Rinse. Repeat.

Some iterations later people have piles of articles to point to as proof. The articles have been repeating back their own words written by someone else with ostensible credibility because it's been published.

A major problem aside from that itself is internet comments need to boil everything down to simple one liner takes. The world isn't simple like that. People could do long form investigative journalism. And then the internet comments would boil it down to a single easily digestible take that washes away all analysis.

The perpetual foreigner mindset. They will never see certain people as Canadian. When they can't come to grips with that. They will never even see them as individuals. It goes no further than a monolith of which there are some who happen to be living in Canada but never Canadian. Gotta walk around making public displays of appeasement so peanut over there won't be shaking his is boot because they're all CCP agents until proven otherwise.