what’s wrong — fuck advocacy

Posts Tagged ‘what’s wrong’

What’s Wrong: Men

5/19/11 by Cyle Gage

So… this photo has been reblogged over 2,000 times on castle nail fuck:

Click on the image to see the post itself. Or click here, whatevs.

If you go through some of the responses, they’re extremely polarized. And they’re mostly from dumb 15-year-old kids (who don’t know who Sean Connery is). Some of the more intelligent comments articulate the need for, or rather the necessary destruction of, gender norms, and how they’ve changed over the last 50 years. It’s a good thing that we’ve come down from the false, rigid, and patriarchal figure of Sean Connery to the more sensitive, effeminate, and gentle notion of many boy-bands. There are yet other reblogs viciously commenting on Sean Connery’s checkered past when it comes to beating women:

Oh look at that sassy Barbara Walters glance. Where has that gone? Anyway… I find it very interesting, this whole assertion of “where has masculinity gone?” Largely, I think the image macro is wrong. Nothing has really happened at all on a purely superficial level. Instead of Sean Connery, today we have Don Draper, any one of George Clooney’s characters, Vin Diesel, et cetera. We still have a plethora of “classic Men” embodying a rather patriarchal chivalry. The difference is that the more contemporary male figures are not so much anti-woman, as Connery once was; they are now more and more pro-man in response to feminism. And what’s wrong with that? We have feminist movements, why can’t we have masculine movements? (I have touched upon this before.)

Tags: manly man, men, what's wrong

What’s Wrong: Social Information

4/13/11 by Cyle Gage

Besides the obvious commodification of social information, the bigger problem is social information itself.

Coming from a web development background, when I see Facebook, I don’t see people: I see rows in a database. I see people being reduced to fields in a form; status updates, Likes, and other such mechanizations of personality, all of them simply a mass of data. The debate 3-5 years ago (and it goes back much further) was about how we (our individual selves) choose to be represented on the internet. This debate was founded on the idea that the self chooses to represent itself when staring at a computer. This was a reasonable assumption back then, when the majority of computer users were adults who had (somewhat) a capacity to distinguish online from offline. And it was largely true; when you logged in to a chatroom, you were vaguely aware that you could create any identity you wanted to. There was a separation.

For several decades psychologists have known that in many ways, we as people do not really consciously choose how we represent ourselves in real life, even though we’re made to feel that we choose who we are. We really don’t. We’re amalgamations of the people around us, our family, our genetics, and how culture affects us. This is all sub/unconscious, very little control is conscious (though it can be made into a more conscious process with meditation/self-understanding). Who we “are” is highly contextual, abstract, and relative. Who we are shifts constantly over time. Conversely, the more you realize and accept this, the more in control you become (though you can never truly be in control).

The internet is the first medium to truly defy this in its most fundamental form, because computerization of the self requires normalization and, therefore, definition. There are no abstract concepts in a database, facebook’s rows of information are broken down into data types: integers, strings, text blobs, relational foreign IDs leading to other databases, et cetera. There is no room for the amorphous ideas of friendship: there is only a row which links the unique identifier for me to the unique identifier for you. That is friendship to facebook, and it is becoming friendship for all young people.

Tags: doomed, lulz, what's wrong

What’s Wrong: Making Things for The Internet

3/19/11 by Cyle Gage

Introduction

This is an article about the difference between these “jobs”, or “positions”, or “mindsets” in regards to making things on The Internet. I think they exist within separate spheres but encompassing the same general principle of the importance/balance of creativity vs knowledge. The jobs exist in different realms, with each side weighted differently; it’s the age-old left brain vs right brain, and how different responsibilities require different mixes of the two. The juggling/emphasis of each is what makes the job unique. It’s tough to go from being one to being another; people tend to be born predisposed to one of them. Kind of like being introverted or extroverted. These are constructs, yes, and they can be changed, but they’re often deeply ingrained in our ways of thinking. I’ll cover Designers, Developers, Engineers, and Architects. (And one more at the end.)

Tags: design, internet, interweb drama, what's wrong

What’s Wrong: the internet 15 years later

3/2/10 by Cyle Gage

So this guy in 1995 wrote about why the internet will suck. This article was reprinted and reblogged and is going around the web right now and a lot of assholes are feeling pretty smug about “how wrong this guy was” and how the internet is actually quite awesome now. Hold the fuck on for a second, and read the article, and think about it. This guy definitely was not wrong on most of his ideas, and no one should feel good about that. The internet does still suck in pretty much all the ways he describes.

The author immediately refers to the internet (the 1995 internet, mind you) as “trendy and oversold”. It still fucking is. Trendy? See: Twitter. Oversold? See: Google. A lot of what he says the futurists predicted have not happened presently, and what small steps we made (like internet video conferencing and Second Life) are relegated only to either academics (whose careers rely on them) or the most cutting-edge corporations (who don’t mind dumping money on trendy things to appeal to their employees).

Tags: bullshit, internet drama, random, what's wrong

What’s Wrong: Empire State of Fuck

2/11/10 by Cyle Gage

I don’t really know what’s wrong with the world today, but here’s a place to start:

Ugh. I’ve listened to this song a couple times since it came out and I’ve largely avoided it because it makes me very depressed. I didn’t really know why, I just felt a pain in my gut when I heard those lyrics and that pseudo-R&B beat and poor old Alicia Keys’ voice. Unfortunately, I’ll analyze this a bit.

Tags: bullshit, dancemoves, music, what's wrong

What’s Wrong #921: A Capella Metal

2/1/10 by Cyle Gage

I don’t think I need to say anything more. I think the “breakdown” at 2:50 especially exemplifies what’s wrong here.

Special thanks to Zach Maxell for bringing this to my attention. I was going to write a long-winded rant about this, akin to the crabcore article, but I don’t want to waste any more words on this right now.

Tags: humanity is doomed, random, what's wrong

REVIEW, LOL: The Dumbest Generation

1/13/10 by Cyle Gage

If you are under 30, stop skimming this and go read it. The book is called The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30, by Mark Bauerlein. I like the title just because of how annoyingly long it is; you know everyone stops reading it once they’ve read the first three words. Also, the title of this blog post is funny.

If you’re still reading this, then I guess I’ll explain why you should stop right now and go buy that book. Firstly, I’m going to say that it was an extremely validating book, because it eloquently examines, with scientific backing, the same material that I myself focus on in my nonfiction writing (see: this blog). Basically, this blog is a lot like the book, but with almost nothing listed to back it up besides my own ego, and is much less hateful than my rants. However, about halfway through (starting with a chapter called “Online Learning and Non-Learning”) Mark suddenly gets a lot more biting with his remarks, much more flippant with his tone. I like that a lot. It excited me. Before this, you spend over a hundred pages going over statistics on literacy and intelligence aptitude testing scores and how they have changed over the last half-century. While this is interesting, and it certainly lays a foundation of scientific and statistical inquiry, it gets kind of dry. But dear reader, persevere through it, because once you get to the asshole side of Mark, there’s no end to the roller-coaster of awesome.

The latter half of the book is full of amazing quotes and themes, of which I’m not going to cover all here, but I’ll go over my favorites. (Oh god there’s so much text below this, I’m sure all of you people under 30 are going to have heart problems, but please try and wade through it. This information is vital.)

Tags: books are awesome, dooooomed, required reading, review, what's wrong

What’s Wrong, And How To Do It Right: Party & Bullshit (In the USA)

1/5/10 by Cyle Gage

Listen to the motherfucking awesome song. Party & Bullshit (In the USA) (Notorious B.I.G. vs Miley Cyrus) For those fools who are unfamiliar, this is from Best of Bootie 2009, an annual album comprised entirely of amazing bootleg mashups. Why is it especially awesome? Because through their music, they transform culture. Really, they take normally earsplitting mainstream shit, smash it together like they do in the goddamn LHC, and transmute it into danceable, art-worthy brilliance.

But I’m singling out “Party & Bullshit (In the USA)” for a reason. The reason is simple and fairly obvious, but I want to explain it for those who don’t pick up on it immediately. This song is taking something that’s doing it wrong and making it right. I like to complain about what’s wrong, but some things deserve a break to be commended. Especially if it’s transformative. So what’s wrong? Miley Fucking Cyrus, that’s what. Honestly, I had never listened (or known that I was listening) to a Miley Cyrus song before this one, mostly because I figured she’d sound just like those other girls. I was wrong. She’s worse.

Tags: music, what's wrong

What’s Wrong, #2029: Crabcore

12/29/09 by Cyle Gage

[What's Wrong is gonna be my goddamn every-once-in-awhile examination of the obvious.]

Yeah so this is old, but it’s still funny and it’s still wrong. Crabcore. If you don’t have an IV pumping internet into your veins at all times like I do, you might not have heard of this. You are fortunate. Let me bring you down to my level, briefly.

“Crabcore” is a subsubsubgenre of hardcore (is that even a genre? Ugh, another post for another day) which involves adolescent males with very black hair and a complete lack of style pumping on easy chords and strumming like a crab. Exhibit A:

Tags: crabcore, dancemoves, dooooomed, what's wrong