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.)
So the fucking Cracker Barrel rebranding thing happened. I'm going to pretend this is relevant here because the new logo looked like it was from the usual "imitating Apple minimalism without understanding it in the least" school of design. They've confirmed that they're not moving forward with it, restoring both the barrel and the cracker to the logo, so that's all good. That's not what I want to talk about.
No, what's grinding my gears is the way that the rollback is being pitched purely as a response to conservative "antiwoke" backlash, and not as a response to literally nobody liking it. This wasn't a case of a successful crusade against woke overreach, this was a case of corporate incompetence running into the reactions of actual human beings. I can't think of a more 2025 media dynamic than giving fucking Nazis a free win rather than giving corporate executives an L.
Note I dont know what a cracker barrel is irl, as we dont have them here. But my view of the bsky socials was 'rebrand sucks, dont really care, wow why are the right so obsessed over this' culminating in people talking about how these kinds of stores are a simulacrum of a cozy mom n pop store and people are unknowningly mad about losing even the simulacrum, and how this is all due to capitalism. (More commercialization than capitalism imho, but capitalism did speed up the process). Just as rainbow capitalism will betray you in the search for more profit so will cozy capitalism.
@Soyweiser @techtakes The correct term for the type of capitalism that enshittifies its product should be "crapitalism".
I think I mentioned Doughboys in this sack somewhere, so talking about CB is fair game