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 so 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. Also just came back from Spider-Man: Brand New Day, movie was awesome)
this isnāt really a sneer. and maybe itās in the wrong place tbh. idk.
i have a long-time internet friend / āmutualā who is the only person iām regularly in contact with that i think might be fully Seduced by the Chatbot. (i have a really good friend and long-time collaborator whoās all in on Agentic Coding, which is a real bummer, but heās a strictly āI use this for computer stuff and do not ever talk to it like a human beingā type of guy, plus the company he works for is all in and heās sick of writing shopify websites for bullshit brands blah blah blah ā anyway thatās a whole other genre of thing.)
anyway friend A is an incredibly kind person whoās been unbelievably supportive of me over the years. weāve disagreed a number of times, i think we are good at doing so reasonably. and even though his arguments sometimes resemble those of more nefarious figures, i think heās motivated by an earnest optimism about technologyās capacity to change the world for good ā one i find very naive, but believe is coming from the right place
anyway i posted a link on mastodon to a long piece i wrote, he, like, read it a bunch of times, paraphrased my argument back to me to make sure he had it right, and then kindly said he disagreed. well and good enough. except it feels a little more personal than disagreements weāve had before, because one of the implications of the piece would be that he himself is probably experiencing low-grade psychosis lol and is therefore not necessarily a reliable narrator of his own experience
idk. itāll come as no surprise to anyone on this particular website that i feel very strongly that iām right here ā if not about this guyās particular mental experience, i minimally feel that iām adequately representing the interests of the constituency my piece represents. (itās a newsletter i maintain as part of organizing iām doing.) itās also a genuine expression of my belief, which is that this bullshit article i was writing about was fucking bullshit
but not only does it go against all my Late Millennial Woke instincts to stake a claim that peopleās Lived Experiences are not valid lol ā itās just kind of a bummer to ultimately genuinely believe that my friend has been ELIZAād or whatever. heās said iām really helping him think through this moment but i also just kind of, idk. itās just not a good feeling
That sounds rough but at least you are there for your mutual. I find that the modern online environment full of propagandists and huckers and just plain idiots makes it hard to sit with other people and understand each otherās point of view. That does not work if the person on the other side of the keyboard is just going to reply with talking points, but treating everyone as just reciting talking points is not a great way to live life. That sort of thing is better in private but so many people have no contact information except public social media handles now.