Nothing tops @dril’s “face god and walk backwards into hell” in terms of iconic phrases with absurd sources, but @clickholeofficial recently gave us “don’t squander this opportunity! God may have closed a door, but what that stupid motherfucker hasn’t realized is that he left a window open for you to wriggle right through!” And damn if that isn’t the most motivational thing I’ve read all week.
Some people threw white paint on it a few years back.
They want to be a victim so bad.
Fun Fact: That’s a statue of the fist which Joe Louis used to knock out Max Schmeling, Hitler’s favored heavyweight boxer in 1938. Schmeling won the 1st bout by knockout in round twelve, but Joe Louis came back in the follow-up match and laid him the fuck out in the 1st round.
Fun Fact: Schmeling was hated by the Nazis for losing to a black man and for having a Jewish manager, and he hated them right back, stating in 1975 that he was glad he’d lost the fight because the thought of the Nazis using him for propaganda purposes sickened him. He also personally saved the lives of two Jewish children and later became lifelong friends with Joe Louis.
So maybe don’t refer to him as “Hitler’s favored heavyweight boxer”…
We are living in a post-discourse world. Almost everybody on Tumblr knows The Discourse, everybody on Facebook knows a slacktivist friend who changed their profile picture for one cause or another and an older relative who posts weird political stuff nobody else cares about. Twitter users and Newspaper readers know who Justine Sacco was. Github and Hacker News have seen Opalgate, Django pull request #2692, Donglegate, …
Shirtgate and Tim Hunt have even reached TV news.
People make inconsequential jokes, or take part in something unpolitical that is subsequently scrutinised and deemed not politically correct enough (by whatever side). The person at the center of this whole thing gets dragged back into it every time somebody on side A attacks somebody on side B and it all ends with both sides unfollowing/unfriending each other.
Tumblr had seen peak discourse in 2013. Tumblr has not been trendy with teenagers in five years. Even Snapchat and Instagram are no longer the cool new thing. Twitter has not been the cool new thing for seven years now.
Social media is no longer full of early adopters, or wide-eyed, curious MOPs making their first steps on the net, or concerned Soccer Moms trying to figure out what heir young (too young for this!) child has signed up for. People can deal with social media. It’s no longer a novelty. Society has even adapted to deal with the ways people deal with social media, somewhat.
We have all lost friends (not real friends, of course, but what counts for a friend on social media, like mutuals) in the flame wars. We know what to expect. We no longer cheer when somebody gets caught in the fangs of the anonymous Internet mob – we reach out in private and ask if they are okay, carefully avoiding any public support for fear of backlash.
After years of Usenet, web 1.0, pre-discourse, forum culture, LiveJournal, the Blogosphere, the Internet went mainstream, and the mainstream acknowledged that. The Internet was no longer a place for nerds and weirdos like John Carmack or Cory Doctorow, respectively. We have seen the Internet, and it is us!
We went from anonymity and caution to pseudonymous communities, to real-name oversharing, and finally to carefully constructed social media personae.
At some point during the oversharing phase, discourse and mob rule reached their peak, toxic activists unleashed shitstorms, and we gladly joined in. We thought the victim deserved it, because he had a problem with the Internet, which meant he had a problem with us. It started out as outrage against corporations, but it quickly learned to pick on random people.
Now we, as stated above, have learned to keep our heads down. We have learned that the hate mob is us. Some of us only stopped joining in because of outrage fatigue.
At some point you just run out of the neurotransmitters you need to feel
angry about things. We have learned to only tweet our lunch, not our opinion. We have learned to use a pseudonym. Remember your PR training, stay on message, don’t make jokes outside of the member-approved internal chatgroup!
People had to lock down their posts and profile. The Internet is not a nice place any more. When you mess up, we will privately support you, but come on, what were you thinking saying that in public?
The Post-Discourse Situation:
Most twitterati have stopped dogpiling.
There is a mall, dedicated core of people coordinating the shaming campaigns.
We know you are not a bad person just because you got into an Internet Shitstorm.
We might privately commiserate or publicly vagueblog in your support.
We will say we told you so when you get edgy and it blows up.
The epistemic level of The Discourse is still bad.
Big Internet Shitstorms have gotten rarer. They are no longer perpetrated by viral, spontaneously forming crowds, but by strongly connected groups of bloggers. Outrage has been eaten up by the division of labour.
From the inside, however, once a shitstorm does happen, it looks just the same. It looks like there is a broad, popular opposition to your viral Facebook post. Your friends will privately scold you for getting into a preventable situation.
As the chilling effect increases and the censorship becomes internalised as self-censorship, the few remaining culture warriors can concentrate on the few remaining non-self-censoring netizens.
IN A WORLD WHERE BIG INTERNET SHITSTORMS RUN WILD
ONE MAN THINKS POLITICAL CORRECTNESS HAS GONE TOO FAR
YES!!! IM HERE FOR IT!!!! I LOVE IT!!!!!!!!!! (under a cut bc it got way longer than i intended???? im so sorry??? oh my god???)
he finds out that he’s on the ace spectrum like. right when he gets to samwell because shitty basically welcomes his republican ass with a gender/sexuality lesson that’s more threatening than educational, but a few months later when he’s kept himself up at night and swallows his pride and googles “ace spectrum”, and what do you know, things make more sense.
dex thinking he’s completely sex repulsed at first, because he’s had girlfriends, and he liked them, but every time things would go past light making out, he felt super uncomfy and uninterested and just generally kinda Not Good, because he felt like he had to keep going, because what was his excuse not to?
(this poor boy has never had anyone tell him that “i don’t want to” is a good enough excuse before samwell. listen. dex grew up in a not great environment that he left with a WHOLE LOTTA ISSUES and a MESS OF INTERNALIZED HOMOPHOBIA)
him sorting his shit out a bit and being like “FUCK ok so im definitely queer, im ace, and i have a BIG FUCKING CRUSH ON DEREK NURSE” by their sophmore year, because at that point him and nursey are fighting a lot less and spending a lot more time watching movies and accidentally falling asleep on each other and distracting each other from homework by texting each other links to stupid vines and youtube videos even though they’re RIGHT NEXT TO EACH OTHER and honestly they’re just big dumb idiots who are so clearly falling for each other, and dex has a mild freak out when he realizes, but mostly he’s just annoyed.
just moving along like everyone else 