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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
So the fucking Cracker Barrel rebranding thing happened. Iām going to pretend this is relevant here because the new logo looked like it was from the usual āimitating Apple minimalism without understanding it in the leastā school of design. Theyāve confirmed that theyāre not moving forward with it, restoring both the barrel and the cracker to the logo, so thatās all good. Thatās not what I want to talk about.
No, whatās grinding my gears is the way that the rollback is being pitched purely as a response to conservative āantiwokeā backlash, and not as a response to literally nobody liking it. This wasnāt a case of a successful crusade against woke overreach, this was a case of corporate incompetence running into the reactions of actual human beings. I canāt think of a more 2025 media dynamic than giving fucking Nazis a free win rather than giving corporate executives an L.
I think I mentioned Doughboys in this sack somewhere, so talking about CB is fair game
Note I dont know what a cracker barrel is irl, as we dont have them here. But my view of the bsky socials was ārebrand sucks, dont really care, wow why are the right so obsessed over thisā culminating in people talking about how these kinds of stores are a simulacrum of a cozy mom n pop store and people are unknowningly mad about losing even the simulacrum, and how this is all due to capitalism. (More commercialization than capitalism imho, but capitalism did speed up the process). Just as rainbow capitalism will betray you in the search for more profit so will cozy capitalism.
E: update on the story āCracker Barrelās Pride page now redirects to its āCulture and Belongingā page, removing its LGBTQ+ Alliance and DEIB Team.ā And while I didnāt know CB, this ensures I will never eat there if I ever have a chance.
@Soyweiser @techtakes The correct term for the type of capitalism that enshittifies its product should be ācrapitalismā.
Yeah, it is also sad the culture warriors are not aware they are mad about this sort of crapitalism. They think the hominization of the builds is due to the woke, and not because the mother company owns the building/land of the franchise and this no slanted roofs bit (see https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:66rbia7w4vcwiszfppfv3r2e/bafkreiacsurup26wigvedpedf44rodrwzzebfcytzdglb2bh6wjh6brbsa@jpeg), increases resale value. Just companies looking for more and more minimal minimal viable product.
image description
Post from some social media by user Mancowmuller On the left four images of the outsides older style fast food places, all with more rustic looking buildings, notably buildings with more slanted roofs, evoking very slightly a more European home style (sorry if this is the wrong way to describe it im not an architect).
On the right four images of the outsides of four new style fast food places where the buildings look more like office buildings or simple modern stores, very blocky, lot of glass big panels/windows and flat roofs.
A big text is overlayed on these 8 shrines of American style capitalism saying āCommunism.ā
Also important to note on the image, looks like the new style ones are not all real. Some of the details look off which makes me suspect it is AI generated. Esp the pizza hut one.
I mean, itās a restaurant and an aesthetic that is certainly more common and popular in the South, and they have had some controversies over racism. Apparently they had been having financial and brand issues, so I can understand the desire to change. But rather than changing the food or improving the service in any meaningful way it seems like they went for the new logo and image and stopped there. Given that their existing audience was basically there for the wholesome old-timey please-donāt-ask-about-the-racism vibes Iām not shocked that conservatives in particular were upset about the change. But like, the change was never about wokeness or whatever it was about aesthetic modernization and a flailing attempt to fix things from business idiots who donāt know how to address the actual problems of mediocre food and fading relevance. If anyone had actually liked the change or if it had actually improved their service times then maybe there would be a point. But this was just a bad change and nobody outside that boardroom actually liked it, and so of course it got rolled back.
āSimulacrumā is the perfect word for it. None of these posers making a fuss about a corporate logo have simmered a pot of of soup beans in their life.
I must admit I stole that partially from somebody else who mentioned the idea. Which also had me go āindeed, that is a good wordā
Was it the āHyperreal Simulacrumā from the joe rogan takedown videos you linked in last weeks stubsack?
No somebody else. Hyperreal simulacrum is a bit of a different concept I think. Because that supersedes reality, this is just a weird sort of nostalgia.