I am convinced that the worst thing about the internet is that it allowed people who historically would have been considered the worst person in town and totally ostracized for their perpetual bad vibes and opinions to find out that they have thousands of global allies and after that it was so over.
Sure, you can do that, but, that's not how to solve it realistically. That's paralysis, hypnogogia, and people being people making poor assumptions. Then jumping to conclusions from their assumptions and believing such to add up to reality.
Most of the ppl from my small hometown who have become vocally shitty online are ppl who I knew to get together and be shitty in person … just with each other in private. They absolutely weren’t, however, ostracized in the community.
About 15 years ago 4chan and Tumblr spilled out into the wider internet around the same time that more average folks started getting social media accounts.
Also they used to have to voice that shit IRL where they would get their asses kicked, instead of behind a safe screen with a Punisher skull instead of a bio pic.
Agreed but the extreme right was organizing online by the mid 1980s.
It is also the BEST thing about the internet is that it allowed marginalized people to organize
Pessimistically, i feel this.
Optimistically, they are outing themselves as awful so we can wall up their little gated community and bury it under the desert.
It expediated the process for a LOT of social phenomena. The good, the bad, and the ugly. It's kind of like an accelerationist's wet dream. Which says more about accelerationists than could really be written in any academic journal.
Also, instead of being interrupted, booed to silence or subjected to an automatic vibecheck and promptly discarded, they get to share their dogshit takes in full, in a way that's visually indistinct from non-dogshit takes
At my small college’s newspaper in the early 90s, we regularly got the stereotypical crackpot letters typed on onion-skin paper. These cranks weren’t students. They weren’t even local. You’re right: they were limited to that, along with shitty populist-conspiratorial local a.m. radio, pre-Limbaugh.
This guy wrote us a lot. He hectored other papers, too—here, the Baltimore Afro-American in 1988.
Sometimes, if we needed filler, we’d put his shit in the letters section. Even as a young GOP douche, I thought the dude was a crank.
Now, he’d be on YouTube, X, a schoolboard, a Senate Committee.
This a trillion times over.
I keep saying, before seedy chat groups bonding together over twisted ideas, everyone knew who the sicko was in the neighborhood…and everyone stayed away from them!
They were relegated to their basement, lived with their mom through adulthood and couldn’t buy a gun.
From 72 years of life, and 33 online, I am pretty sure you're overly optimistic about the pre-online age; I know one thing: the sickos who molested children were widely known by children but not discussed or outed by anyone. They didn't have international circles making & trading CSA materials.
The village dumbass has views on EVERYTHING. I have knowledge in certain areas but most of the time on the internet there is always a smarter person than I- so I bow to their expertise.
