You are the Dead Internet
Sometimes social media brainrot comes from within.
Just a light disclaimer for the uninitiated: I use the f-word in this post sporadically. If you need to know what I mean by it, please watch the Louis CK standup comedy bits where he contrasts it with the word gay. I’m gay married anyway so sue me if you still have a problem with it. It’s a really important word that even the tech mob word-bans on their shithole platforms because it describes them so well.
Yesterday I left a Discord guild. The reason? I realised it’s an extension of the owners’ social media profiles and the pretension of community around whatever they were working on is fake.
Here’s what happened: I had a conversation on the guild about social media corruption with someone who, judging from their profile picture being a plush doll of a popular media franchise, was probably around 15 years old. The interaction was amicable all the way through with them, but the owners were apparently uncomfortable with the discussion! They never said why (these types never do), they just disrupted the conversation by telling us to move channels.
I don’t know how to explain to people that topics are not discrete things on instant messaging platforms like they are on forums. You can’t actually ‘move a discussion’ – in reality you’re just telling people to temporarily shut up. And as is so often the case on Discord guilds, channel topics are broad to begin with and there is no practical hope for consistency of enforcement of this supposed rule. It’s really just an alibi for mods to shut down discussions they don’t like to hear about. There are other topics that go on in the same time span you can find that didn’t specifically relate to the channel topic that they allow, so y’know, it’s just a bullshit pretense.
This was sad because this conversation I had—with some random anonymous teenager—was the first substantial discussion that occurred on the guild in over six months. Aside from some sporadic posting of project updates that garnered tepid response and no discussion, the guild was dead until we spoke. Noticing this made me realise an important connection between antisocial online behaviour and the oft-discussed Dead Internet Theory: the former causes the latter.
I wasn’t born yesterday so I kind of just fast-forwarded all the usual ways this tends to go down and skipped to the end by leaving. Looking back I just have to shake my head; who does this guy think he’s shitting? You wanna have a community but reserve the right to shuffle people around while still being at liberty to discuss whatever you please? Who the hell do you think you are?
This delusional arrogance is very common in online communities and it’s also disproportionately present in tech-oriented ones. It’s not hard to imagine why talking about the corruption of social media would make them uncomfortable – they have been trying to cynically use social media to blow themselves up this whole time! And this is why the Internet is mostly dead: shit up by self-important faggots like this guy who think they’re the next George Shitz and everyone should come along for the dickride.
It’s easy enough to rationalise this crap at 25 when you’re full of yourself or perhaps hot off some fake tech job where you were paid to jack off for 30 hours a week. But recall what I wrote about Tunney, who is pushing 40: if you keep going down the road of Internet faggotry, you’re going to find yourself penning phoney emails to community admins that ban you and all your friends while you keep dishing out that very same self-serving hypocrisy by banning people that you don’t care for or who make you personally uncomfortable. You’re not that special! When you get banned because all you do is self-promote, you’re getting exactly what you’ve been putting out this whole time: self-serving hypocrisy. Grow the fuck up and get the fuck over yourselves. I would feel bad if they did that to someone earnest, but they didn’t, so I don’t.
Nobody’s buying this shit anymore. Why? Increasingly, there’s nothing to see beyond your burgeoning patheticism. Your projects become evermore extraneous and useless to anyone and everyone, and yet your ego continues to balloon. Why the fuck should anyone care? Do you think they share in your delusion that you’re the next Wozniak and/or Carmack? That’s hilarious. Maybe if you gave a shit enough to treat other people with basic dignity you’d have a community instead of an overglorified RSS feed no one cares about.
Until then, I’m logging off your ‘nick of the woods! Go get help and until then your accounts are being deleted from everyone else’s feed. They’re a scourge on the Worldwide Web.