iron law of the internet: any movement or subculture will be judged by its most cringe members
nihilism disrespecterx.comiron law of the internet: any movement or subculture will be judged by its most cringe members
Cringe is more than just internet slag: It’s an entirely new, and dangerous, way of operating. Before cringe, people just….tried things, some of which landed, and come of which did not. Cringe suppresses the truth-tellers: The chaotic, creative idiots who gleefully prod us to reassess what we thing we know and believe. It raises the cost of taking
... See moreWithin online communities, this produces a strong pressure towards conformity with the values and mores of one’s peers. But even peer conformity is no safeguard, because anyone can see into it. The potential audience for anything posted on the internet is the entire internet. The only way to conform successfully on the internet is to be unutterably
... See moreRichard Seymour • The Twittering Machine
There’s power in signaling insider knowledge to outsiders, so naturally we see the memetic propagation of idiomatic lore artifacts beyond the bounds of where they actually convey meaning. But as time goes on, their density and alienation from more universal lexicons makes it hard for even the ‘in-group’ to keep track of this internal meaning. It’s... See more
Libby Marrs • How to Read the Internet
‘subcultures are status Ponzi schemes.
Google’s first employee became their Director of Technology and made $900 million. Jesus’s first follower became the Bishop of Rome; one in every thousand people alive is named after him. The first few people to make websites in 1995, blogs in 2005, or YouTube channels in 2015 got... See more
binjix.compeople were hotheaded dickheads on the public internet, and much more gracious, agreeable, and forgiving in more circumscribed settings—as a further sign that something was wrong with a prevailing assumption about the competitive marketplace of information. Maybe the winning ideas were not the best ideas but simply the most transmissible ones?