I really enjoyed some darker content in terms of establishing that humans aren’t always the good, wise, enlightened people of the galaxy, consistently The Good Guys in nearly every encounter.
But shifting to that “oh there’s a dark side to all the optimism” as the consistent ongoing tone for the show rings wrong as much as the always good guys tone did with older trek.
Shocking news: people are people everywhere, not just on ‘rival’ platforms.
UPS is being UPS here.
They’re abandoning packages, then sending her a bill for COD as if she accepted the package but didn’t pay.
The fact that if she digs in and fights it she can eventually dispute each charge is somewhat separate from UPS and their collections contractors harassing her about the ‘debt’, or the new packages that keep showing up.
This would make excellent satire, but it’s pretty dismal journalism.
Ever since that day, I’ve consistently correlated success with the fluctuating number in my follower count. In fact, I would argue that every millennial who works on the internet has internalized the belief that resonance on Twitter is the only way to unlock progressively more illustrious opportunities—it somehow seems more relevant than your degree, your scoops, and even your endorsements.
Speak for yourself, please.
Many millennials who ‘work on the internet’ have understood in the past that Twitter follower counts did constitute a sort of abstracted measure of relevance, like pop culture equivalent of how often an academic article is cited by other academics. There was quite a while where that was, unfortunately, true: for example, your measure as a PR professional was tied to your ability to use your professional skills to boost your personal accounts. It was far from the only thing that counted, but it was certainly an excellent networking tool and having impressive high scores would result in more opportunities, better opportunities, and less hunting for them. There absolutely was an expectation that communications or marketing people would leverage their skills for their accounts, that they would show off what they could do for potential employers within the confines of their own internet footprint.
You could still get work without that, I still got work without that - but work would come to you if you had an impressive social portfolio, not just on raw follower counts but on things like content and engagement as well. The total sum of your social media and online presence was the portfolio of communications or media field, same way designers are asked to provide examples of past work.
And that’s still true - it’s just less and less likely to include someone’s twitter in that assessment.
I think that’s why Elon’s reign of terror has been so bitterly ironic: Everything we’ve been taught about Twitter—and, frankly, social media in general—has proven to be an enormous lie. It was always volatile, and regrettably, we made it the locus of our careers.
Things can be true in the past and false in the present. What this particular person was taught in the past was true at the time of teaching. And then this crazy thing called “change” occurred and it’s no longer true. Except, what he was taught - that conventional wisdom holds that journalists need their own personal brands - remains true. The secondary coaching, that a Twitter presence is part of that branding, is not necessarily true but also not abstractly false either.
That the author struggles with the very concept of change, feels they were promised that Twitter would be permanent, and seems to believe that people who are successful now because of twitter activity then are somehow going to wind up on the streets is hilarious, if perhaps in a not particularly kind way.
Everyone he talked to has a secure career or market position. Sure, they got there via twitter, or they feel twitter helped them achieve that - but they will be fine. Some of them might take earnings hits or need to make some uncomfortable pivots to off-twitter platforms, but none of those folks are teetering on the edge of a cardboard mansion lifestyle after sinking clearly-fruitless hours into twitter boosterism.
Lorenz predicts something of a “Great Clout Reset” on the horizon—everyone emerging from the rubble, starting over at square one—and frankly, she can’t wait to see what happens. […] Maybe that’s the silver lining. Twitter might be dying, but maybe afterwards, we can try to become superstars all over again.
Oh look, we can see how the author wound up thinking that Twitter was all-important and utterly permanent. They’re doing it all over again; and in ten years we’ll get the exact same article about whatever platform they think is actually the Real Deal right now, complaining about how it inevitably failed and Lorenz steered them wrong with bad career tips.
Tumblr remains impressively Not Dead given its ownership and finance history.
Very much so.
If this coin’s math and mechanics actually work in transferring wealth from rich to poor … it’ll be swamped in poor people wanting their cut, and rich people will want nothing to do with a shitcoin that’s explicitly going to take their money and give it to other people.
I think maybe some of that is on me; I’ve been using “in power” somewhat colloquially and to me there’s a gap between ‘gaining power’ in a soft sense referring to achieving a station that possesses power - and complete seizure of power. The latter is always the goal of the former, but the former is generally a necessary intermediary step.
It seems to me that the current crop of neo-fascist (or fascist-adjacent as you call them) leaders have remained in power for a very long time, even with more or less fair elections. Erdogan in Turkey, Netenyahu in Israel, and Orban in Hungary come to mine.
Those three for sure have held power quite a while - just that they’ve held power long enough I don’t really consider them representative of modern neo-fascism so much as inspirations for it. In the sense I was thinking of when I wrote the above, I was thinking more of the factions and leaders that exist within states that are not clearly semi- or pseudo-fascist in their structure. The ways that Erdogan, Netenyahu, and Orban maintain their power are not yet in place in those other states, but implementing some forms of them are goals within those movements.
The neo-fascists’ I was talking about have to win elections and hold legitimate power within the current structure of the state before they can alter that structure enough to fix elections or bypass them. And in getting that initial foot in door, creating the opportunity to hijack the state, benefits strongly from using populist rhetoric - as genuinely pro-fascist voters are relatively rare, those factions and leaders need to use other causes to win over voters who wouldn’t support their “real” goals directly.
Absolutely, I’m gobsmacked nobody seems to read history.
Although, a lot of these nowadays fascist leaders are being supported by very large swathes of their own populations, as much as 48%, which is the truly shocking thing.
Reading history … that tends to be how it works. Fascism is good at getting popular support for it’s ideas, without overtly being fascism to the people who support it. Fascism’s gateway drug is populism, and populism works best when the ‘common’ population is under strain too complex to address as a single issue.
The worlds ongoing climate crises, economic issues, and political instability within developing economies are all placing unusual and complicated strains on the common populations of developed nations - which in turn opens the door for populist rhetoric and leaders to thrive and gain a foothold on the political discourses in their nations. The biggest single pro/con of populist rhetoric is that it is at its strongest as challenger or as opposition - much like armchair quarterbacking, it’s very easy to criticize what has been done, and even easier to sound like you could do it better, but very hard to deliver on promises from the drivers’ seat. As a result, populism is good for getting elected, but is not good for staying there - or getting re-elected later.
So given that many populist talking points in current economies are fascist-adjacent, pivoting towards fascism makes for an easy and natural segue in the event that they gain power or hold sufficient security of position and supporter base that populism alone cannot serve to maintain.
I’m no GPT booster, but I think that the real problem with detectability here
It will almost always be detectable if you just read what is written. Especially for academic work.
is that it requires you to know the subject and content already, and to be giving the paper a relatively detailed reading. For a rube reading the paper, trying to learn from it - a lot of GPT content is easily mistaken as legitimate. And it’s getting better. We’re not safe simply assuming that AI today is as good as it will ever get and the clear errors we can detect cannot ever be addressed.
Penetrating academic writing, for academics, is probably one of the highest barriers of any writing task, AI or not.
But being dismissive of the threat of AI content because it’s not able to convincingly fake some of the hardest writing that real people do is maybe sidestepping a lot of much more casual writing - that still carries significance and consequence.
When ye olde Eternal September hit, many new users did not realize B1FF was satire, and thus chose to emulate the coolest dude on the internet.
I always loved the convergence of the various Rustled Jimmies memes popping off, just before Harambe happened.
The other one was manufacturing and engineering teams ‘back home’ would scrawl the Kilroy on parts, like while ships or tanks were being assembled, that would otherwise be inaccessible - which meant that when that thing was hit, or taken apart for maintenance closer to the front, Kilroy was like, inside the sealed-up wall or at the bottom of the engine compartment.
In both your example and this one - both growing the myth that no matter where you went, Kilroy had been there first.
According to my grandpa, it was a myth that they used to feed the new guys and green squads, like a Santa myth, and putting on “genuine belief” in the Kilroy myth was as much of a running joke as the myth itself was. He claimed servicemen were also constantly trying to get commanding officers to unwittingly participate, by doing stuff like submitting paperwork signed Kilroy or that referenced him already being somewhere when troops liberated it - in the hopes that report or news tidbit would be one that COs shared as announcements.
So I’m assuming the duplicate communities are communities of the same exact name in different instances/server. Is anyone else finding this somewhat confusing?
Generally speaking, yes - but also, this is something that will likely fade over time as specific ones stand out. Currently, the plurality is a result of no developed community for that niche existing; as communities settle and grow, less of that sharding will take place unless there’s a crisis in the ‘main’ one.
I have a hard time believing that all of even just most of the men that initially joined her group had “concerning views” if that’s meant to refer to the misogyny we see in those most associated with the term today, but I do know that plenty of the posters I saw on the subreddit years ago when I visited were not of that ilk.
That’s fine, but remember you’re doubting the one person unique qualified to talk about the developmental history of the movement that they launched from the site that they ran.
I don’t think that it necessarily was “all” or “most” but simply that the male presence within the movement was sufficiently represented by individuals with those views that it’s one of the first thing she mentions in the context of discussing the growth of the movement itself.
Part of her point seems to be pointing out that they invited those views in, very early in the movement, out of a desire to be inclusive - only to be driven out by those views later on down the road.
I bring that up in this context because I don’t think that the movement or the term can be divorced fully from the male misogyny that it’s associated with today. Those people are not latecomers to the label, they’ve been there effectively from the start - from the point where it went from the comments section of Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project blog, to becoming “a community” centered around a shared label.
but I think if the term was originally coined to represent people who were genuinely suffering from external circumstances that put them in the position they’re in, it should remain for them and not those who sabotage themselves via their own toxic behavior.
I’ve used bold to highlight it in the quote above - that is a big “if” that the person who coined the term says is not true. If it were true, we’d be having a different conversation. But it’s not true.
The simple fact is that it’s a self-identifier. It’s a label that people put on themselves based on their perception of their own life circumstances. The original vision for the term says that neither you nor I get to tell anyone else they’re “not a true incel” or to go over their life and tell them the barriers are self-inflicted if they don’t see it that way. I guarantee you that the people you want to exclude from the term do very genuinely believe that they are “suffering from external circumstances that put them in the position they’re in.” No matter how much your or I might see them and think they’re clearly suffering from self-inflicted wounds, they are entirely sincere in their belief that their dating life is out of their control and has been a victim of cruel society.
One group deserves empathy and compassion; the other deserves scorn and derision. I don’t think it’s productive or fair to the former group to use the same term for both.
To me? They’re the same group. Some members of the group are hateful and shitty. Some members of the group aren’t. I’d say that the overwhelming majority of members, from both sides of that divider, are experiencing obstacles to dating or sex that are self-inflicted, even if they also have other barriers that are not. The vast majority of both groups would tell you that their personal circumstances are wholly out of their own control.
The “logic” that group uses around attractiveness and dating marketability and how this or that facet of looks or wealth or social status or whatever is ultimately spurious. If Ricky Berwick get rich, famous, and married - the absolute hard impassible barriers that incels talk about affecting themselves simply do not exist.
Internet history pedantry, but by the time the subreddit rolled around, the term and the movement had already been coopted.
Incel started as a term for men who felt depressed about being unable to find a female partner, and the subreddit they created was originally a supportive space for them.
The term was coined somewhere between 1994 and 1997 by “Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project” as a term for people of all genders who were unable to find partnership despite trying. Alana is a woman, and is effectively universally credited with coining the term and founding the movement. The movement wasn’t ‘for men’, the term wasn’t about men specifically, and it didn’t start on Reddit. It started off as more of a personal blog, where Alana documented her own experiences and struggles - the site gained followers from other people with similar experiences, eventually growing into a combined forum / support group / community.
Then it got taken over by angry misogynists and the term became associated with them, while the original group just kind of got forgotten about. That original group deserves attention and empathy as well as the term they coined; the latter group isn’t even “involuntarily celibate,” as they play a very big role in their own celibacy.
Those folks have kind of always been there, and have always been a heavily represented demographic - Alana has said in interviews that the men who joined in the early days did have some concerning views and some concerning themes were on frequent repeitition in the discussions the community had. I don’t think retconning the movement to exclude those people from the “true definition” is doing either camp any favours. The “involuntary” part of the label isn’t trying to engage with whether or not the barrier may stem from factors within their control, but solely confined to the fact that they want something and are not getting it. They are simply “celibate, but not voluntarily celibate”.
One quip that Alana made in several interviews while defining her modelling of the community she founded was that she didn’t care why someone was an incel, ie “it’s OK if you’re celibate because you’re into horses, but that’s illegal” that that person should still be welcomed and included in the community.
I just think more people should give some thought to who that term originally belonged to.
I think that in light of this, it’s even more important to be accurate and honest who those people are: Not male-exclusive, not limited to this or that cause of celibacy, not specifically gatekeeping out the misogynists or the beastialists any more than any other group. Just any people who want to get laid but are not getting laid.
lmao that is such a good descriptor of what’s going on there. Elon figured he could make money from racists wanting to be racist around normal people.
The thing there is that like … it’s not about consistency or values. The fact that he lied is meaningless to him, throwing it in his face is wasted effort. Communication is a tool to get what he wants, not a goal unto itself.
And no one is surprised.
Elon made it clear shortly after taking over that “free speech” was speech he happened to agree with, and he had no intentions of ethical consistency on ‘free speech’ when it came to speech that was critical of him or his platform. Twitter already went nuclear on links to Mastadon and similar alternative platforms earlier this year while their dumpster fire was raging.
I always thought the “ice floes” was just figurative, but apparently there actually used to be ice there! TIL~!
There’s the necessary info, thank you! - I’ve heard horror stories about hosting exit nodes, and was immediately spooked this would result in the same issues.