Welcome to November, and 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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
A lot of them fail to grasp how rightwing they (rationalists) actually are. Others have ideas that are extremely simplistic, like there are lots of lesswrong post proposing one cool trick to get trump on their side or get normies to understand AI doomerism.
Yeah, they have all these big brain plans for research programs into aligning AI, not getting that if they actually get the public or any major political figures to really believe their doomer ideas “shut that shit down” with maybe a side of “throw some people in jail” is the common sense response.
When I first encountered people trying to expand upon the Mark Fisher interpretation of hauntology, a few years ago, I thought they were perhaps overreaching. But after a few more years of observation, now I no longer think so. The rationalist project isn’t really about predicting the future, and perhaps never really has been. Its conservative essence is to enshrine and protect a certain, mainly pop-cultural, framework about what the future should look like, and events are now passing that framework by. It only gets stranger from here.
This is such a great way of looking at it, thanks.
Of course, a lot of the creators of that future were themselves politically right-wing or libertarian. Think Heinlein.