Inspired by the post about the hieroglyphs the one dude hoped would last forever.
People always talk about future historians being confused at memes and old forums, but surely a lot of catastrophic events could just wipe out the internet wholesale, right? If something REALLY COOL like a giant meteor wiped out everybody, what if aliens came along and were deeply confused that our culture seems to end randomly in the mid 2010s, subsumed by an internet whose only remaining shreds are references in big scientific studies?
The history textbooks on our dumb asses would surely read "and the humans all talked into screens and used "hyper links" to share information and opinions. Very little is known about this obscure human ritual as no evidence can be found of its existence beyond scattered references in ancient texts contemporary to its existence."
Thinkin bout the impermanence of the internet rn
Eh, I guess I'll defend him a bit because I do read him pretty often.
He's definitely got a Marxist kernel in his writings. If you go back and look at his older stuff it's pretty on-brand ML internet blogging. That being said, he's by no means a "good communist" in any sense, but i don't think he's trying to be. I think a few years ago he made a shift towards a literary approach, where the arguments he explicitly makes in an essay may not necessarily be what the actual intention of the piece is, and he will often turn what you think is a cut-and-dry op-ed about some recent event into a totally hallucinatory retelling from some events from the middle ages. The point he's making is often entirely unclear, and honestly i kinda vibe with that sometimes.
Here, though, i think he's making some pretty clear arguments (though the whole "the internet is literally going to end" may not actually be one of them). A big part of what he's saying about the internet is that what you find on it just doesn't fucking mean anything. His bit about the Holocaust isn't about an actual existing increase of Holocaust denial, which may be occurring, but rather about bullshit articles that claim that there is without any actual basis in reality. It's just people making shit up for clicks. This isn't new, it's always been a part of the internet, but it's reaching a point where the signal-to-noise ratio is converging on zero, where everything is all meaningless slop which is making our lives worse.
Say he's wrong.
Quoting myself:
I'm not holding his feet to some NOT A GOOD COMMUNIST fire, and I don't even disagree with the "pretty clear arguments" he makes, his social politics are fuckin unbearable though. "Holocaust denial people? Eh, everything ends" is borderline verbatim what he says, whatever you might read into it. His goofy scaremongering about women posting kink stuff or people NOT HAVING SEX CUZ COMPUTER (classic bullshit comments have been removed from hexbear for) among other things, tells me what I know about this guy. All stuff I said in my direct reply to you.
I read the article.
This is an argument against nihilism that's emerged online. It's not "Holocaust denial people? eh, everything ends," it's "the internet trivializes genocide denial by treating it as a silly social trend instead of a real existing tendency, effectively reducing it to noise that nobody will pay attention to."
I don't see the bit about the lowercase nymphets as scaremongering. It's about this drive for increasingly provocative content that is trying harder and harder to capture our attention and, somehow, our money. Wild and crazy kinks? Cool. Wild and crazy kinks created entirely to capture attention online, backed by the capitalist profit incentive? Kinda cringe.
Why's this bullshit? Has there not been a loss of intimacy since phones and the internet? Cause I gotta say, I'm a pretty lonely mf'er right now and, being totally transparent out here, this would have been a much harder situation to get myself in without internet porn and reddit/YouTube bullshit. And even sample size of one and all, are you going to totally deny a causal relationship between the rise of the internet and the apparent loneliness everywhere?
That being said, he's British, and well uhh... oof.
Also lmao, as I said above what is it with people upholding Shinzo Abe thought?
How does Shinzo Abe relate?
Plz explain I'm not online enough 😭