Social Media Thread of Social Media Drama

[Alpacx]

Whole-ass (eat it) thread text:

One MUST resist the urge to lolcow. I'd call it one of the most important urges to resist on the contemporary internet, actually

Lolcowing is an apparatus that turns a person into a renewable source of entertainment. It refers to an ongoing *relationship* rather than an individual, I think. The relationship is extractive and one-directional; the "cow" doesn't consent, doesn't benefit, and isn't a participant in the exchange.

A couple things distinguish it from ordinary mockery. One is context collapse as a production requirement: you have to strip out like, any audience they wrote for, any body of work, their tone because all of that is what made the thing sayable, and so all of it gets in the way of making it laughable

As a practice it systematically selects for vulnerability. The traits that make someone "funny" like earnestness, oversharing, inability to read the room or modulate, visible distress, not getting the joke are very often the markers of neurodivergence, mental illness, isolation, or just being young.

This is tricky because it sometimes looks almost identical to criticizing public ideas, satire of the powerful etc, which is legitimate. And the people lolcowing are overwhelmingly, sincerely sure that's what they're doing. Sincerity of belief can't be the thing that distinguishes one from the other

Also, "has the person we're mining for content and laughs done shitty stuff" can't be the thing either. Someone can genuinely suck, the charges can be 100% true And Yet that doesn't justify an extractive relationship which is necessarily abusive and corrosive to victim and perpetrator.

For one, ordinary criticism aims at a correction and can be satisfied. Lolcowing aims at a supply, and a supply is satisfied only by continued production. It doesn't want the "cow" to change; it wants them to keep producing. There's no stopping condition.

Overall I'd locate the difference between criticism and lolcowing in four axes: direction, object (a person, or a position/action?), stopping condition (is the ongoing supply the point? it often is) and charity (engaging the strongest version of what someone said, or the most mockable?).

This is a sad thing to buy into as a human being, even when it's tempting. Contempt is habit-forming and it flattens your perception; practice seeing people as types-to-be-milked and you get worse at seeing people as people, full stop, including the ones you love.

It's also epistemically ruinous; because the caricature is the product, the practice requires bad-faith reading. It trains you to read for maximum dunkability instead of for understanding.

I think it's really critical to take a hardline no on lolcowing even when it's someone you actively dislike; the only stance that holds has to be target-independent since sincerity of belief and just deserts aren't good benchmarks on their own. There's no justified use of the Torment Nexus, y'know?

Also I think the world is a beautiful place full of interesting people and not a freakshow, and increasingly thinking of it as a freakshow is limiting to your own ability to thrive as a human being.