The general problem ‘contrarians get a happiness/adrenaline spike when they see someone being sassy and biting and iconoclastic, so they find sassy/biting/iconoclastic memes more interesting and remember/deploy them more independent of their persuasiveness or informativeness’ is a very hard one to solve, though, and I’m not sure what to do about it.
It’s our subculture’s version of the very common problem in-groups have, where angry and aggressive and cut-through-the-bullshit posts catch people’s attention more, which makes them more memorable and widely propagated, which causes the culture to increasingly shift in the direction of aggression and negativity. The Internet loves happy hate spirals, and LW’s variation on this theme (the reason our kind can’t cooperate) might be called a ‘happy cynicism spiral’ or ‘hypercritical supercriticality’.
I’m not sure what the best method is for making kindness/friendship/love seem badass and novel and cool. I guess the MLP fan demographics are some small cause for hope..
The general problem ‘contrarians get a happiness/adrenaline spike when they see someone being sassy and biting and iconoclastic, so they find sassy/biting/iconoclastic memes more interesting and remember/deploy them more independent of their persuasiveness or informativeness’ is a very hard one to solve, though, and I’m not sure what to do about it.
It’s our subculture’s version of the very common problem in-groups have, where angry and aggressive and cut-through-the-bullshit posts catch people’s attention more, which makes them more memorable and widely propagated, which causes the culture to increasingly shift in the direction of aggression and negativity. The Internet loves happy hate spirals, and LW’s variation on this theme (the reason our kind can’t cooperate) might be called a ‘happy cynicism spiral’ or ‘hypercritical supercriticality’.
I’m not sure what the best method is for making kindness/friendship/love seem badass and novel and cool. I guess the MLP fan demographics are some small cause for hope..