Vote Dog He's A Good Boy
Mar. 5th, 2025 07:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingIn the past, I’ve gotten frustrated with Gen Z kids for being creepy little fascists on TikTok, but Bluesky is making me annoyed with Millennials for being super fucking lame.
People I know from my professional field, who used to be normal adults posting about interesting specialist topics, have all gone off the rails to post 24/7 political opinions. And they’re not even good opinions. Like, do you not like the current president. Do you think he’s a bad person. That’s fascinating, you must be very smart. And they’re picking up thousands of followers for this, because everyone wants to agree how bad the current administration is. It’s so tedious.
To be clear, yes the current administration is bad. Yes of course.
But nobody is deviating from the progressive status quo – ie, find an enemy and post about how bad they are without actually doing anything – by a single inch. Nobody is posting about, for example, how we could make a positive change by supporting such-and-such local politician. Nobody is posting about how someone named Mario could do something really funny right now. Nobody is posting about how we can help trans people by boosting their work, here’s a link.
And nobody is posting about smaller issues that it’s actually possible to address directly in a meaningful way. I’m especially frustrated with the academics who pretend to be all about social justice online as a smokescreen for being evil at their actual jobs, where they could actually make a tangible difference in the lives of actual people. Like sure, free Palestine, but heaven forbid that the diaspora Arabic language teachers at your university should make more than $10k a year.
I don’t post about that shit, because I have the good sense not to cause trouble in writing with my legal name. And in any case, I was not put on this earth to be a poster.
Still, when I think about how it would be possible to gain hundreds of followers by posting milk-white political opinions generated by an LLM, I’m tempted... but it makes me so tired.
People I know from my professional field, who used to be normal adults posting about interesting specialist topics, have all gone off the rails to post 24/7 political opinions. And they’re not even good opinions. Like, do you not like the current president. Do you think he’s a bad person. That’s fascinating, you must be very smart. And they’re picking up thousands of followers for this, because everyone wants to agree how bad the current administration is. It’s so tedious.
To be clear, yes the current administration is bad. Yes of course.
But nobody is deviating from the progressive status quo – ie, find an enemy and post about how bad they are without actually doing anything – by a single inch. Nobody is posting about, for example, how we could make a positive change by supporting such-and-such local politician. Nobody is posting about how someone named Mario could do something really funny right now. Nobody is posting about how we can help trans people by boosting their work, here’s a link.
And nobody is posting about smaller issues that it’s actually possible to address directly in a meaningful way. I’m especially frustrated with the academics who pretend to be all about social justice online as a smokescreen for being evil at their actual jobs, where they could actually make a tangible difference in the lives of actual people. Like sure, free Palestine, but heaven forbid that the diaspora Arabic language teachers at your university should make more than $10k a year.
I don’t post about that shit, because I have the good sense not to cause trouble in writing with my legal name. And in any case, I was not put on this earth to be a poster.
Still, when I think about how it would be possible to gain hundreds of followers by posting milk-white political opinions generated by an LLM, I’m tempted... but it makes me so tired.
