Social Media Cycles and the Bean Dad.

I Hate It Here, See You Tomorrow - Brain Worms

It’s sad to see a ‘celebrity’ I like become the example of why Twitter sucks. Especially when I agree with the core of the argument that the hot takes culture of pick our target of the cycle and forget them once we’ve run them off the hell site.

Roderick is not an active racist, but sure, like any well off white man deep into middle age, he’s got work to do to unlearn the ambient racism of whiteness that we’ve all steeped in most of our lives.

The racism/sexism captured in screenshots is him making fun of those attitudes. Is it still problematic and off the mark? Yes. Is it proof he’s a Nazi? No.

There are layers of stupid in the Bean Dad cycle:

• lack of context/empathy. Why do people assume these tweets are truth, that the worst interpretation is the correct one. Partially by the anti-empathy training of Twitter, and partially by not having any context of the original authors style.
• confirmation bias. Once Bean Dad is assumed evil, pulling old tweets out of context is fish in a barrel for those looking to destroy a person. Even out of context it’s clear that while wrong, they were attempts at making fun of the type of people who would say that shit, within an in-crowd who knew the bit. But people purposely misread it to make their target all the more deserving of their attacks.
• assumption of guilt/just world theory. Even in this article decrying the internet outrage machine, there is still a firm belief that the target of the system is deserving of the cancelation/firestorm, just not that we the stormers should be doing it.

Part of my dusting off a blog is from this urge to just not with social media hype/hate cycles.

Which is, of course, why the first thing I had to do is rant about social media. Ugh. I promise most content here will not be ranting about content somewhere else.

maybe.

sometimes.