Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 9 June 2024 - eviltoast

Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

  • deborah@awful.systemsEnglish
    7·
    6 months ago

    to be fair, a lot of the early Internet, including the early research Internet, was driven by libertarian tendencies (which always ignored the dilemma in combining libertarian tendencies with the fact that the entire early Internet was enabled by massive government funding). John Perry Barlow, the EFF, etc. It’s just that a lot of those people were libertarian utopians – and I will fully admit that in my youth it seemed very convincing. It felt like there were no space for bad actors because when the Internet was smaller, it was less obvious to idealists and the naïve that a larger internet would be incredibly useful for bad actors.

    As recently as gamergate the EFF was loudly insisting that all moderation by private companies was wrong, and in the intervening few years they have only grudgingly and rarely admitted that overly libertarian moderation policies can suppress speech massively. And yet I fully believe all the EFF people mean well.