Doubt you're feelin so hot. Maybe this'll make you feel better. Or less confused... If that's possible. Bear with me.
Social media in its entirety is just the tarted up, modern incarnation of a forum tradition that began in the early days of the internet with the BBS (a technology every geek over 40 will describe to you like they had to carve it into stone tablets. Uphill both ways. Which doesn't even make sense.)
Anyway, all I'm saying is that today's online platforms interconnect so effortlessly, they function like one giant forum. So it's a shame that the public discourse has moved here. Had to, really.
Because that move turned "The Public Discourse" into "just another forum thread." A god damn gigantic thread, true, and one that encompasses dozens of websites, but a thread nonetheless. As such, it fell victim to Ned's Internet Rule No. 4: "On a long enough timeline, every thread is a pile of shit."
Ever see what happens when a mod forgets to lock an old thread? Scroll down and watch a sane discussion about puppies or some shit become gnarled and twisted until it's just CAPS LOCK and racism and weird porn and "fuck George Lucas!" for some reason.
You try to track it; try to figure out how the comments section of a pumpkin pie recipe swap turned into some facile tirade about white supremacy. The same way you might wonder, for example, how a conversation about the complexities of contemporary human governance turned into a bunch of uneducated dipshits hurling blunt objects at minorities.
Then you spot it. Usually about half way down the thread, out of NOWHERE somebody said something so insane and shitty that it could't be ignored. Troll or not, a response was demanded. Then it was too late. From there you can watch the conversation tumble so far down the mountain that the summit becomes obscured by the curvature of the earth. If only a mod had been there to stop the discussion while it was still on point.
But they weren't. And the top-voted commenter became president. And he never even MENTIONED pumpkin pie.
Our entire conversation as a people is now one huge, uninterrupted, UNMODERATED thread. And what's worse, when we try to look up from the screen or turn it off, the thread's leaked out of the fucking Matrix. Alive and with no hard power switch.
Anyway, that's how I'm explaining... all this. But god dammit, we need to accept one thing: Since public discourse is online, we MUST get a mod... Patrick Stewart? I'm thinkin Patrick Stewart. Clear choice.
