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A. Sebree's avatar

Thank you for the work (heh) of cataloguing the sub's early history. I had a distinct memory of seeing it pop up occasionally years ago when it was still in its "antiwork means no work" phase, but was met with several instances of people violently proclaiming that is not in fact what the sub was or ever was.

I would also like to thank you for writing these articles in the first place. Frankly, and with no disrespect, a gay Mormon would be low on my list of people I expect to share so many thoughts and opinions with, but life is full of surprises and it is nice to find a niche of (as it appears to me, at least) sanity on the internet.

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Jordan Braunstein's avatar

This episode illustrates something else foundational to social media but rarely mentioned: online socializing and communal associations exist in their current forms *because* participants are mostly opaque to each other.

This is the other side of the anonymity coin - that which lets disembodied ideas and perspectives exist by their own merits also obscures so much else that would typically inform who and what we want to associate with.

How many people would join a group founded by someone who looked and sounded like Doreen, if Doreen tried to recruit them personally? How often do thousands of people become outraged by the misanthropic venom of a random 16-year-old troll? Would they, if they had a video feed into the kid's bedroom while they clacked away on their keyboard?

Interestingly, the more online life merges with meatspace, and the celebrities gestated in those spaces enter the mainstream, the more the mainstream resembles a carnival of grotesques - the people insane, weird, and obsessed enough to rise to the top of virtual status hierarchies, loosed upon the world.

But as you note, the membrane hasn't been wholly dissolved. Normie sensibilities still exist and will exert their transformative effect of turning what's new and cool into played-out and lame. But every time the cycle repeats, the membrane gets thinner.

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