Dyson's Fear 3.0

Another rant about geeks

So, I'm going over posts at the place I go to but really shouldn't, and one thing comes to mind: there's a lot of talk on subjects where people haven't a clue what they're talking about it. Granted, I'm guilty of this too, but it's an epidemic over there.

In this post on his blog, Denis McGrath says the following:

Don't get me wrong -- there's a whole lot of problems catering to the built in audience, as well. For one thing, in my experience working for Canada's sci-fi channel, I've found that generally the hardest core fans tend to eschew complexity. They're conservative -- they don't like change. They don't like sex or complex human relationships between men and women. They like to think of themselves as more sophisticated, and smarter than the "average" tv viewer -- when in reality, they're not

This is pretty much the demographic of folks at that place, the one that annoys me but I masochistically always return to. At one time, and I kid you not, a poster there claimed to have superior taste because of his advanced degrees... in engineering. There's a pseudo-intellectual arrogance at play that I just don't understand, as it really defies logic. There's a term for it, "fan entitlement". It's the mindset that because they spend so much time and emotion with something, that somehow they're owed something for it.

It's pretty psychotic, if you ask me. It's like coming up with an in-depth fantasy about the girl that sat in front of the class who you never talked to and doesn't know you from Adam, and then getting angry when reality catches up with your little delusion.

It's this mindset that I constantly get run over by. You can't say anything about it, because these are people in deep denial. They all tend to fall into Denis McGrath's demographic, and because of that, they all think they're right. They throw around incorrectly used terminology, like straw man and asperger's, while they basically just masturbate in public.

Right now, over at that place, there's a number of threads discussing the business model of a particular publisher. The problem with this is that none of them are actually privvy to said publisher's business model, only assumptions based on their limited exposure to it through a press release. If you dare to point this out, the fact that they don't have any proper info to go on, they attack you for it.

Like I said, public masturbation.

Why, oh why, do I even bother?

Labels: cultural theory, rant

posted by Jason @ 10:18 AM