DrMux

Sounds like a half-self-aware version of “Great Man” thinking, just with the caveat that there aren’t actually any among humanity.

But actually, I think you’re right. It’s easier and more palatable to our narrative-hungry minds to believe that we’ll get some sort of cinematic climax before the credits roll, history ends, and we walk out of the theater, than to realize that the world can both be unimaginably shitty and also incredibly boring. If the world doesn’t end, or if this isn’t the end of history (I think a deus ex machina utopia granted by the aliens falls in this category) we might have to confront the grim reality of slow, complicated, and mostly nameless problems. And that’s a lot like waking up one day and realizing your parents are real people who don’t know everything, and one day they won’t be around to deal with things for you.

I’ve had similar thoughts about other conspiracy-type thinking like the illuminati but yeah, makes sense that it would apply to aliens as well.

“Hmm… we really only wanted to rule over you to harvest your species’ brain power through an interface with our computational networks. This… just won’t do. Later losers!”

We’re tired, and we’re scared, I think.

Worse, we’re used to being tired and scared. We’re apathetic to our own anxieties and exhaustion. The only thing to fear is not fear itself. It’s complacency toward fear.

There’s a huge difference between “lol le dum fat burger chez merica” and commentary about the history of the country and the patterns, systems, and dark truths that made it what it is today. Is there any one element in this meme that you’d argue is false?

Neither is very useful until you can correlate it with something else. Like, it takes a lot more effort to find someone in meatspace than in a database. Though, the number of databases with your face in them is a number that goes up faster every year.

Ceci n’est pas une meme.

the average person considers a “redditor” a pretty negative thing to be.

Redditors consider a redditor a negative thing to be. It works because no redditor believes they are one. It’s everyone else who’s a part of the gross hivemind, not me. Reddit thinks this and reddit does that, but not me. I’m different and special. Not one of them.