There’s a brigade of bots and people who, when you put something on the internet, weird or cute or sad or triumphant or a snapshot of rape culture, will say, It Never Happened. These are the people to whom I refer. Many are bots. Of the minority who are people, the majority are men. A minority of them are attested (blue check, as in that account is valid) ‘authority figures’, ‘journalists’ and ‘celebrities’ on twitter.
It’s gross. My response:
The revenge of unintended consequences is coming for the It Never Happened crowd. These gammon-adjacent persons invite closer scrutiny of what’s on their resumés, and the truth will set them free of having any decent future prospects, while schadenfreude sounds in the air. <ting>
People may get strapped in to this ‘subvert the narrative’ drive because they probably need to divert attention from their own truths, almost all of which might possibly involve not being believed by an authority figure. Note how I allowed doubt to permeate every phrase of the foregoing sentence? A hagfish couldn’t make that thing slipperier.
Anyway, I think they might be powerless people with crappy sex lives and frowny faces. You might think I say this to be rude, but I have never met a person that had a good sex life and a cheerful countenance who spent a second calling a total stranger, who was amiably relaying an anecdote about her six year old, a fuckin’ liar and attention whore, sometimes in as many words, always couched in a cold piss-bath of hate speech, completely out of sync with whatever was posted.
If we were all adults — I mean I’m in my 15th instar and I still haven’t pupated, Christ… anyway — were we all adults we’d feel pity and offer support, but eventually some angry young coder is going to doxx the living shit out of one of the It Never Happened types. There will be public shame for lies, because anyone who spends their cognitive pennies on calling truth-tellers liars and gets caught spinning porkies on the ol’ resumé — especially to do with titles and academic claims— will be fried like the gammon rasher they are.
Sadly, the bots will remain.
The bots and humans that are doing this have a horrific, parasitic relationship that reminds me of the mechanical grip and stab of a wasp positioning and deploying her ovipositor. The bots pump up the volume of comments and embolden the humans. The humans are inspired and emboldened by what they feel is an entire army of angry humans at their side, and make original content, some of it quite witty, all of it fucking hateful, and the botfarms steal their content and cross post, sometimes millions of times. The identifash and trolls who are their prey make content and amplify messaging for the parasite.
For all this hate bubbling and burping and foaming and frothing in the lava lake known as social media, it takes live human identifash activists to shoot up mosques, and while a certain craggy faced oligarch rains money down on bot farms, it’s nose-led white kids from red states who get hamburgers on the way to a life sentence. It’s parasitism from across the sea. It’s absolutely terrifying, and yet, oh so natural. The host pays the price,
but sometimes the parasites run out of biomass and the whole shebang collapses. Given that one is being born on the internet every second, or so it seems, I think there is still a lot of biomass for the botfarms.
Note. Gammon-adjacent is an enlargement of gammon, one of the British terms for neofash. A gammon is a large ham, and a large ham is Pink, Large, Slightly Sweaty, held in disfavour by Muslims and vegans, Salty and did I mention Pink, also very histrionic in the thespian take of the word ham, so there’s a lot in there. It has nothing to do with the foregoing but I thought I’d mention that another thing these folks get called on twitter is wâš“ï¸ (wanker). I haven’t heard anyone called a gammon wâš“ï¸ yet but I’m sure it’s coming.
People who draw a paycheque as journalists and columnists and think piecers participate in this behaviour. Alex Jones, for example. If you don’t know who he is, don’t bother.