“Allow me to blogpost for a minute. I’ve come to learn that the most vocal part of any group is not necessarily the biggest — but they can absolutely become just that.
I grew up on the Internet in a pretty average manner: I wasn’t raised physically, and so I let strangers with questionable moral compasses and motives to do it instead. Most of what I knew was useless ‘Did You Know?’-Instagram,-fact-account stuff; I said ‘LOL’ out loud a few times before being physically reprimanded; Steve Jobs was one of my flavour-of-the-month, Silicon Valley messiahs. All of this was incredibly cringey and stupid, but it was expected, and I was allowed to figure out what was right for me and what was wrong for me. If there was a moral police, I found it rather than having it find me.
This is slightly tinged by nostalgia, but the 2000s to early 2010s were when the Internet was still ‘weird’. Not in a ‘Keep Portland Weird’ way where it comes off as artificial and corporate, but a constant barrage of social rejects. They all had their hubs to contain their honest strangeness, and these communities were rarely interrupted by genuine newcomers and the rare troll. As with everything on the Internet, GamerGate probably ruined this.
To slow this ticking time-bomb, I will tell you a fun fact: there is an unfortunately named species of ant named gamergate. You may cautiously nose-exhale now.
GamerGate wasn’t the straw on the camel’s back, as massive events like it tend to be. The Internet was rapidly becoming mainstream, and the ethos you could feel from 2003 DeviantArt accounts run by teenage girls in the Midwest whose parents hit them were being gentrified by AP students who ran these accounts with social capital on their minds. These people supplied the explicitly status quo Internet with snippets of the more impenetrable Internet; ‘man on 4chan says something stupid and inflammatory!’, ‘Woman on Tumblr changes her hair colour once a week!’ became news instead of axioms.
Normalfags had a circus to watch, but once they occupied the old streets, they started to feel distaste for these hobos running amok. Introducing the stock market! It was inevitable, and the Internet was already profitable, but now the market was just begging to be properly integrated. Genuine weirdness was driven out in exchange for thinly veiled trolls and copycats.
Look no further than how ‘weird’ Twitter just steals funny Tumblr posts from its golden age. Look no further than how normie anime fans flipped their shit when they learned about ecchi anime. Look no fucking further than the influx of Sneakerhead idiots becoming the primary demographic of GTA subreddits, where they were mainly compsci nerds years prior.
I miss weird. But weird is either a series of highly calculated stunts or too niche to be sustainable. ‘Cursed images’ sting like lemon in a fresh cut. Wojak being so pointed that it circles back to being dull is surreal. Being called a ‘freak’ with no sense of irony fucking sucks.
I just want to romp around with fellow fools.”
This is an essay I wrote for Ruqqus a few months back that I thought was decent-ish for here and my tiny base of listeners. I might even talk about Ruqqus soon. Who knows.
