Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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 so 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 agree that many people launched careers in journalism or science communication by being on Twitter in the 2010s, and that many people tweet, skeet, or blog because they hope the same thing will happen to them even though Old Media has no more money to sponsor them with.
I put Kelsey Piper in a different place than Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, or Scott Alexander because AFAIK she never built a huge and engaged online audience. Piper is paid by Effective Altruist organizations to write Effective Altruist messages on third-party sites. That is why I call her a hack: she is in the economic position of a PR worker but pretends to be a journalist. She has not showed that anyone else is willing to pay her to write.
edit/ Her only media appearance that I can find that is not with an EA, Rationalist, or Libertarian outfit is on something called the Frames of Space podcast this spring. Compare Bret Devereaux collecting bylines and podcast appearances and with a very engaged comment section and paying Patreon fandom. Devereaux is a working writer and speaker who works to develop new sources of income, Piper is a propagandist whose entire career has been funded by Effective Altruists, mostly friends of her old schoolmate Caroline Ellison.