Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 20 October 2024
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
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.
New piece from The Atlantic: The Age of AI Child Abuse is Here, which delves into a large-scale hack of Muah.AI and the large-scale problem of people using AI as a child porn generator.
And now, another personal sidenote, because I cannot stop writing these (this one's thankfully unrelated to the article's main point):
The idea that "[Insert New Tech] Is Inevitabletm" (which Unserious Academic interrogated in depth BTW) took a major blow when NFTs crashed and burned in full view of the public eye and got rapidly turned into a pop-culture punchline.
That, I suspect, is helping to fuel the large scale rejection of AI and resistance to its implementation - Silicon Valley's failure to make NFTs a thing has taught people that Silicon Valley can be beaten, that resistance is anything but futile.
Really appreciate that link to Unserious Academic! This piece underlines something very important about the forces (by forces I mean weirdos) we struggle against.