Day: December 9, 2014

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A prayer

This year, lots of things made me uncomfortable. Hypes, idiots, wannabe-experts. I happen to have the right quote for this case (because I’m a scientist and previous work has to be mentioned). Long, long ago (October 1, 2008, to be precise), a guy got so fed up with this world that he wrote a short prayer (in Russian):

Dear, dear God!

Please, enact a Fucking Big Economic Crisis, to return all these well-fed managers and analysts back to drinking cheap beer in parks, to make all the uppity sociocultural thinkers get to the villages they came from, since they won’t afford their flats. Turn back the Successful Startupers into socially inept black market delivery boys, and glamorous columnists into street prostitutes. Dear God, please, make this fucking world of arrogant insects collapse.

Dear God, I am even ready to be hungry for some months to see this.

Please.

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You are a monster

I have noticed a pattern in the media and I’d like to share it. Earlier, the simplest way to get an audience and sell your story was a sensation or a scandal. In the worst case, one could invent those. Now, it seems that we have arrived at a point where reader attention can be generated by a new kind of scandal: your own enragement about anything.

How does this work? First, you have to know that humans have no or little sense of scale. And negative things tend to influence humans more than positive. So, you find a cause that seems very important (say, THE CHILDREN) and find people who do (or can do) some atrocity that demeans THE CHILDREN. This obviously makes you rage (no, RAGE!!!111). But there is a problem: there are not that many people who terrorize children. So you’ll have to invent a story why this new car (and everyone who is driving it) is an enemy of THE CHILDREN. No problem with that: the car can be too noisy, too silent (the poor guy/gal won’t hear it coming), too big (POLLUTION!!11), too small (no kids can fit) etc. So, well, we should probably get rid of all drivers of this certain car model before they get rid of children.