oligopsony:

nostalgebraist:

Man I looked at that Wil Wheaton article about removing anonymity from gaming that @multiheaded1793 had been complaining about and it’s just … there’s nothing there

It’s not just that he’s ignoring the implications for trans people whose “real names” aren’t their names, or how it could help potential employers and the justice system comb through ill-advised should-be-irrelevant stuff people said a lifetime ago, or how it could be a godsend for stalkers.  It’s that he literally does not have a proposal.  He’s suggesting a sort of policy that tends to have huge glaring flaws, and any such suggestion that treated the reader like a grown-up would address how to patch those flaws with specific clever features, but nope, he’s just like “this bad idea?  worth a try, huh?”

Between this and Arthur Chu’s almost ingeniously terrible “solution” to the same problem, something weird is going on here.  I suspect that the people who write these things don’t really care about reducing internet harassment in a workable way, they just want to remind you that they are against internet harassment, just in case you were worried they might not be among the Good Guys.

I think this could be interpreted as naked posturing, but if we want to be charitable, its Stoner Philosophizing, where stoner philosophizing means throwing out an idea without really bothering to examine its truth or implications or much anything else about it. Dude, people are assholes online because they’re anonymous, so what if we got rid of anonymity?

Now, on its own, stoner philosophizing is utterly useless, except insofar as it’s intrinsically fun. But intellectual divisions of labor exist; if someone furrows a field we wouldn’t criticize them for not washing the lettuce, assuming someone does. Stoner philosophizing should probably exist, maybe in greater quantities than it’s already supplied!

Now it’s arguably bad stoner philosophizing to preface it with “We Must All…” rather than “Dude, What If…” But the former is probably just a tic of the linguistic community the articles you’re referring to are embedded in, like “dude” is a linguistic tic of the actual* stoner community. Sometimes it really does mean “We Must All” but sometimes not, and there are (at least I presume) rules governing this that are intuitive to native speakers.

*meaning, imagined by me rather than actual actual; much as any references to thinkpiece culture are as it’s imagined by me, since I’m not bothering to read the links

I agree that stoner philosophy has its place, but I guess this is a case where I’m used to so much more than that, even from relatively humble sources, that I can’t but end up feeling cheated, and curious as to why the cheating happened.

The lack of critical thought here would be about right for a one-line tumblr shitpost – maybe a just-shower-thought – and would be disappointing in a tumblr effortpost, much less a post on somebody’s Actual Blog (i.e Wordpress or the like), no matter who that somebody was.  (These sources certainly provide a healthy diet of cool-but-possibly-unworkable ideas, no?)  In this case, it’s not just an Actual Blog post, but one on a major newspaper’s curated “digital opinion venture,” which claims to aspire to high editorial standards – and one by a celebrity and nerd-culture darling, whose word, rightly or wrongly, is going to carry more weight than that of J. Random Nightblogger.

So while one can take the “We Must All…” confidence as just a genre convention, there are several imprimaturs in play that lend the piece a weird gravity it doesn’t have the substance to bear.  On my tumblr dash this would merely be a “not very good post,” probably arriving along with a train of critical commentary; as a piece in the Washington Post by a somewhat famous guy I do have to wonder how a “not very good post” ended up in such a place of prominence.  Surely there must be some cultural reason why this kind of Discourse in particular ends up there?

(via oligopsony-deactivated20160508)