“Look at this Asshole”

There’s a class of post I’ve come to think of as “Look at this Asshole”. You know the form: a picture or a video of a Known Asshole doing Asshole Things, with a sentence or two with no semantic content other than to point. The emptiest of content calories, a brief source of low-quality dopamine, depending on the asshole. They’ve become like background radiation, part of the low-content noise the web is swimming in.

Don’t get me wrong, we live in an age absolutely drowning in assholes to look at. Our economy has been hollowed out into various grifts, scams, MLM schemes with extra steps, fascists walk the streets, people are losing their jobs so their bosses can replace them with sparkling autocomplete plagiarism machines, our entire civilization is in a permanent state of existential crisis.

But my response to these kinds of posts is always, “yeah, I know! They’re doing it for the attention, don’t give it to them!” Talking about the assholes might be of value, why did they get this way, what are they doing, what are the consequences and how can we stop them. Just Looking at the Assholes does nothing but encourage them. It’s like one of those cartoons where shooting lasers at the monster makes it get bigger.

But something I had not appreciated before I got into a regular groove here—or rather, what I had known but not truly understood—was how easy those posts are to write.

I know this because I keep catching myself; I’ll be thinking “lemme just toss that up real fast, it’ll be funny”, and no, I almost Looked at an Asshole. It takes some real discipline to force yourself to notice, and then start over.

Forget the whole economics around attracting eyeballs with “clickbait.” Are you behind? Need a post real fast? You could go Look at an Asshole! It’s one of the stupider results of this strange death-spiral the entire media apparatus has been in the last few decades, not enough people, economics encouraging short attention spans, not enough time or interest to write anything insightful, all ending in an endless feedback loop of Assholes and Looking At them, because it’s too much work to do anything else.

Man, just look at those assholes.