UPDATE 3/7/21: The proverbial picture worth a thousand words:
Parents encouraging kids to burn masks on Idaho Capitol steps pic.twitter.com/VOYfOYqwwt
— Sergio Olmos (@MrOlmos) March 6, 2021
UPDATE: Dr. Fauci just said everything you’re about to read here in a vastly different number of words and more diplomatically, FSM bless his soul. He did that on CNN in an interview, 8/5/2020, but it’s a reiteration of what he says in this article. He remarks that anti-science sentiments are just “for reasons that sometimes are inconceivable and not understandable.”
Likewise, his family continues to get death threats merely to pressure this brave man into shutting up. That’s a point where I can express some solidarity with his situation, having confronted the exact same phenomenon for the exact same reasons when I started blogging.
Now on with the original post…
None of you reading today will have much reason to believe this. Indeed, most of the evidence is washed away from the Internet now. But I was once one of the most hated figures on the web. That was because, in the early 2000s, I was one of the few people advocating for science literacy via computing literacy.
Nobody wanted to listen then. Don’t Make Me Think was a bestseller. Command lines and hacker tools were held up as something holding people back, something to be avoided, in books like The Design of Everyday Things. Nick Bostrum proposed that we might be living in a computer simulation, and the entire Internet instantly agreed that this was ironclad fact, brooking no argument. Ray Kurzweil wrote book after book about how Artificial Intelligence would make computers “wake up” any day now, and the Singularity would be nigh. Matrixism was treated like a real religion by people who could not tell Wachowski brothers’ movies from reality.
Yes, all of that happened in the 2000s!
I was the only – THE ONLY – person calling “bullshit” on all of the above looniness, and the day did not pass without my opening my inbox to death threats from Internet tough-guys, some of whom worked to DOX me and make threats to my family too.
Today, we have our flat earthers, vaccine denialists, and people who refuse to wear a mask now. They’re all lumped in the with “Boomers” now, as if anybody under the age of 45 were incapable of harboring falsehoods. But last decade, the YOUNGEST voting generation was where all the anti-science flack was coming from. I’m free to climb on a soapbox now and denounce anti-science views, now that hundreds of thousands of Americans have died from science denial. But before? If I dared utter a word of skepticism about the crazy nonsense going around, I’d get a flock of these guys on my lawn threatening me by morning:
The 2000s were the Dark Ages of social media
The unique insults of the first decade of the 20th century were as follows:
- “Elitist” – Anybody who held up any kind of intellectual standard
- “Arrogant” – Criticizing anybody else’s ideas as being unscientific or not based in fact
- “Egghead” – Speaking in complete sentences instead of text-speak
- “Gatekeeper” – A person who held others up to a standard of any kind, such as “knowing what a word means before using it”
- “Patronizing” – Trying to teach anyone anything, no matter how patiently
- “Condescending” – Believing that intelligence is better than stupidity
- “Smug” – Rejoicing because you have learned something
- “Ableist” – The newest and hottest abuse term. It is supposed to mean “discriminating against the handicapped.” It actually means “you told me to do something I don’t want to do so I will claim that I can’t do it and then scream ‘ableist’ at you until mobs come to lynch you.”
The “ableist” one is very much alive today and used to harass anybody over any standard anywhere at any time. A whole generation of self-diagnosed disease fakers can now claim that anything from felony laws to doorknobs to learning is “ableist.”
Once, merely the act of telling a newbie “RTFM” was attacked as elitism. It STILL IS, for that matter. But all “RTFM” is doing is telling people to look for the answers in the book written for that purpose. The Linux community was infiltrated from the inside by these anti-intellectuals who complained that we “elitists” were gatekeeping Linux – “you must be this knowledgeable to ride.” No, people have to know things so hundreds of thousands of us don’t die from a stupid virus that the rest of the planet recovered from!
What are we supposed to do? Shit, I don’t know! We tell people to read books because that’s where the facts are and we need to get them into people’s brains! If anybody has a better method, I’m all ears. But if somebody’s feelings are hurt because somebody else told them to cure their ignorance, that’s just tough titty. There is a direct, solid line between complaining that knowledge is for “elitists” and every Karen who insists on barging into a store without a mask now.
How do I reason that? Because computer and technology literacy equals media literacy in the social media age. There is no hope today for the person who will not Google, will not fact-check, will not stay fully informed. It is too late to teach them in 2020, they’re lost now. It was too late to teach them how to stop the collapse of civilization in the 2000s. The best we could do is point them to that huge mountain of information over there and hope for the best. But every time we pointed, we were each surrounded by a bellowing mob of anti-thinkers screaming “Don’t listen to him, he’s an ELITIIIIIST!”
Also because, before you can split the pseudoscience from the science, it helps to have some STEM experience so you understand a little of how the natural laws of the universe work. Computing your way to social media is a handy two birds to one stone. I was in a hurry in the 2000s, because I saw Trump coming. I wanted a vanguard of STEM-techie, savvy, media-wise intellectuals ready to meet him. Sadly, there were too few of us.
Telling people “learning is good” – oh, how controversial! So yes, “you must be this knowledgeable to ride.” That’s not my law, that’s a natural law of the universe. Anti-intellectuals, do you wish to speak with the manager of the universe? What good will it do when you call them an elitist condescending arrogant gatekeeper too?
It’s better now, but we dare not forget how bad it was
The general culture of the Internet and media has taken a 180 swing in most ways within the last decade. Thank the gods for that, but there’s still a lot of ignorance about the true Dark Age of the web, only some 15 years ago, when social media was new and the public didn’t have quite the handle on fake news, troll brigades, and astroturfing that it does now.
But now we have people asking in 2020, “how did things get so bad”? The Dark Ages of the 2000s are how things got so bad now. We let an entire generation get by with this standard:
We understand toxic culture now, but this picture is what social media was actually like in the 2000s. If you didn’t piss yourself, you were on a “high horse” who thought you were “better than everybody else.” Elitist, elitist, too good to swim in piss!
That same “elitist” label got stuck to then-president Obama. This partly the “liberal elite” label that Republicans try to stamp on all Democrats, and partly charges coming from within the Democrat’s ranks too. It came from his advocating for STEM education, and education advocacy in general. Obama saw Trump coming too.
To take our country back, stop ridiculing people for being smart
What the “elitist” family of insults were, it was all hate speech against people who believed in science. We’re familiar with bigotry and discrimination against people of color / gender / orientation / etc., but do not think for a minute that there’s no such thing as bigotry against intellect too. We are, after all, comfortable owning names like “geek” and “nerd,” but there’s so much more where that came from. We get used to this idea that we can mock and ridicule people just for their intellect. We are too cozy with that idea.
There are countries that have embraced anti-intellectualism before. Such as Pol Pot’s Cambodia. During Khmer Rouge’s mass killings, intellectuals were targeted as the enemy of the people. “Anyone thought to be an intellectual of any sort was killed. Often people were condemned for wearing glasses or knowing a foreign language.” Teachers, doctors, engineers, all of them were first up against the wall when the firing squad came to town.
Fascism throughout history tends to chase away the brainy (gosh, wonder why?), which is how we got Einstein and many other German scientists during WWII. In between daily events of the current Donald Trump situation, I hope everybody is noticing that Trump and Republicans in general have a beef mainly with the intellectuals? Do we all have this hammered in now?
Never forget, folks. The tragedies of the year 2020 could have been avoided if, in 2005, we had all just stopped everybody complaining and told them to Read Those Fucking Manuals.
