Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: 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.)
I think the common ground is a fear of loss of authority to which they feel entitled. They learned the “old” ways of SysV RC, X11, etc. etc. and that is their domain of expertise, in which they fear being surpassed or obsoleted. From there, it’s easy to combine that fear with the fears stoked by adjacent white/male supremacist identity politics and queerphobia, plus the resentment already present from stupid baby slapfights like vi vs emacs or systemd vs everything else, and generate a new asshole identity in which they feel temporarily secure. Fear of loss of status drives all of this.
Except my feeling is it’s mostly people who have grown up with Linux as a settled fact of computing life, not Unix greybeards.
Absolutely. Take the reverence for “SysV” init* to the point where the init system has all but eclipsed the AT&T Unix release as the primary meaning of “System V”. The BSDs (at least the Net/Open branch, not sure about FreeBSD) adopted a simplified BSD init/rc model ages ago and Solaris switched to systemd-esque SMF with little uproar. Personally I even prefer SMF over its Linux equivalents, despite the cumbersome XML configuration.
I somewhat understand the terminalchud mindset, a longing for a supposed simpler time where a nerd could keep a holistic grasp of one’s computing system in their head. Combine that with the tech industry’s pervasive male chauvinism and dogmatic adherence to a law of “simplify and reduce weight” (usually a useful rule of thumb) and you end up with terrible social circles making bad software believing they’re great on both fronts.
* Rather, the Linux implementation of the concept