Looking back on it, I think the thing that most made me despair of the adjacency with wordcel/shape-rotator bullshit last year was that it didn’t seem to move the needle on anyone’s opinion of anyone. You had all these people being like “well I don’t think it’s true that people with degrees in the humanities or social sciences have a lower class of brain and implicitly don’t merit a place in real Smart People Spaces because a Jungian quack who has arbitrarily declared himself the voice of science and logic said so, but this seems like a reasonable position that could be a real gem with a bit of amendment, and I certainly would never dream of respecting a person’s belief system less because that was a part of it.” Fuck off.
One of the things that drew me to the adjacency in the first place was that while it was mostly made up of STEM people, they had a genuine curiosity about a lot of topics outside of that collection of fields and didn’t usually fall victim to the sort of petty departmental turf wars that seem to be the bread and butter of every nerdy undergrad. It’s a shame that this seems to have waned over the years.
‘wordcell and shape rotator discourse’ seemed so obviously stupid on its face it took me like a week to realize it wasn’t some new elaborate bit everyone was doing.
u mean it wasn’t
Felt like more of a TPOT thing? But there’s an infinite appetite everywhere for pseudo objective schemes that let you split people into “cool smart people like me” and other
this?
TPOT is the designation for what was once called “post-rationalist Twitter” but has expanded in scope such that it probably needed a new name. The boundaries are (deliberately) quite fuzzy, but if you imagine a collection of people who are kinda rat-adj but also very into “vibes” and indistinct spiritualism, and also quite chummy with both blueglobe Twitter and rightoid trad Twitter, you’ve basically got the gist of it.
(it stands for “That Part Of Twitter”)