Fanboi class is getting worse by the day. Fanbois are only different from recently purged bot/troll accounts in being unironically self-motivated volunteer stans rather than programmed/paid by Russia
Celebs who court, pander to, and weaponize them as troll stormtroopers wtf 🙄?!
Conversation
If you can *command* serious attention through your work or words, you need to *demand* better behavior from those who supply it. Every time you trade 1 thoughtful follower for 2, 5, or 10 desperately anomic idiots ready to go e-fedayeen for you, you dehumanize yourself and them
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Yes it feels powerful to have armies of 100,000 or more who will direct toxically stupid attention in any direction you suggest with a casual word or glance. But seriously, what hellscape apocalyptic war do you think you’re fighting by raising zombie standing armies?
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It’s a huge tragedy of the commons/lemon market. “That Guy has a 100k strong zombie army, so I must raise one of 150k” is what drives an exodus of all halfway reasonable people. You’re not entering a hellscape, you’re making it one.
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I’ve lost count of the number of otherwise interesting celebs I don’t follow because they succumbed to the temptation to raise zombie armies simply because they can. Because any interaction carries a risk of their getting petulant and telling their attack dogs, “go, kill!
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Congrats. Thanks to your desperate need to only hear validating things and be able to digitally beat up opponents with zombie troops, you’ve driven away 90% of the thoughtful, kind, interesting people who are also interested in you.
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Enjoy your damn sovereign nation that nobody dare say anything even slightly negative about: population you plus 100,000 zombies plus the 3 thoughtful but craven people who will put up with your shit who you then deify as the only worthy humans.
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Retreat to your Mordor full of Orcs you big baby. Enjoy your palantir-Skype calls with Saruman, your only friend who can do more than grunt and smash things.
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A good test of what kind of followership you’ve cultivated is what happens when you say something stupid: are they smart enough to spot it and flag it, and kind enough to do so gently? Or do they simply double down and compound your stupidity, turning it into a trainwreck?
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If you do this, one of two things will happen:
a) your own stupidity will grow by feedback until they drag you down to their zombie level
b) you will overcompensate by never saying anything that risks being stupid, becoming uninteresting
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People mistakenly think this strategy is antifragile because zombie armies grow bigger/stronger with every battle. But it actually represents fragility. By systematically filtering out a class of signals using hostile defenses, you allow thinking inside to grow weaker.
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As the cognitive potential energy inside your zombie firewall shrinks and ages and fails to attract fresh blood to stay alive, you end up in an equilibrium of derp. No new imaginative thought can penetrate so what’s in there feeds on itself. Positive feedback squeal of 1 idea.
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Straussians are particularly vulnerable to this shit because they believe some version of “everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten”. That a few esoteric sources that can cover all they need. That the rest of the world only needs exoteric broadcasts, not listening.
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Add to that their tendency to believe in the rightness of telling noble lies and the moral/ethical legitimacy of using idiots as tools at scale, and hey you’ve got digital Genghis Khans creating a Zombie Warring States era online. World War Z.0.
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And you know the most ironic thing here? Every one of you reading and agreeing with this thread knows exactly the top few people I’m talking about here but am deliberately not tagging or naming. Because they’d turn THIs thread into a war zone too.
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They tell themselves that we are cowardly, unimportant digital-middle-class chatterati doing bullshit jobs and intellectualizing without fighting in their big important crusades, and that they’re missing nothing. That we are to be either ignored or burned with righteous wrath.
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In a way it’s the age old conflict pattern: kings+restive peasants against middle classes.
But somehow I suspect we’ll last longer. The world is too complex for idiots to run, and too big for a few straussian crypto-monarchs (in all senses of ‘crypto’) to run by themselves.
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Note: zombies are mostly CREATED through such exploitative, radicalizing thought leadership. You don’t draw from a large pool of waiting natural-born zombies. You zombify potentially mentally healthy people, by betraying trust earned through original work twitter.com/neilscudder/st
This Tweet is unavailable.
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One more. I try but fail to see the world from the zombie stormtrooper perspective. All I can imagine is they’re lonely people who turn a slight emotional resonance with a distant celebrity, plus a small sign of royal favor like a like, into an entire desperately protected psyche
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