Out: Let’s form a club!
In: Let’s create a website!
I’m beginning to wonder if, as a society, we’ve never really made it off the playground. I remember as a kid how we would form clubs for the sole purpose of annoying someone else. We didn’t like so-n-so? Well, we’d form a really cool club and make them jealous! They’d see how awesome our club was and beg to join. And then we would have the distinct pleasure of telling them, “NO!” Or at least that was supposed to be how it worked, but I don’t recall it ever working. Far too often the person excluded wouldn’t even notice.
We’re more sophisticated now. We make websites, and we don’t exclude the people we don’t like. We just bombard them with posts reminding them just how stupid they are.
That’s how I’ve come to feel about the website io9.com. It’s a site dedicated to science, science fiction and fantasy, and pop culture. I have learned–and continue to learn–a great deal. Those writers who maintain a higher editorial standard can be quite interesting and enlightening. They cast a bigger net across the web than I can and have located some pretty interesting stuff. I can keep up on all the latest shows–without the investment of time and brain-cells to actually watch them.
But only if I’m willing to be regularly reminded that I’m not really welcome there. There are certain people they don’t care much for there, and regularly make their prejudices known:
- People of religion, even if they don’t actually hold the anti-science views the posters claim they do. Religion is just wrong-wrong-wrong, and the cause of every known problem.
- Purists. If you really think the latest incarnation of a favorite work is straying too far from its source material, TOO BAD! You’re just stupid.
- Anyone who has ever made a mistake, mis-learned something, or inadvertently absorbed mainline thought that is incorrect.
On the other hand, it’s very clear the “cool kids” are anyone who:
- Thinks you can never have too much sex in your entertainment or science
- Finds pithy ways of disparaging religion
- Admires their own cleverness for believing all the “in” things
- Thinks swearing in prose is an intrinsic good
- Believe change for the sake of change is an intrinsic good
- Questions authority, unless it’s their own
Like I said, I used to enjoy this website, but it’s becoming increasingly clear I don’t really belong there. It’s a “Cool Kids Only” club, and I’ve never been cool. I’d go read Popular Mechanics instead, except their scope is much more limited. I like exposure to pop culture and tapping into the cool-hunters’ finds. I could just do without the attitude. But I forget that I live in an era where “attitude” is considered not only a positive, but an essential.
Oh, how I would like to strangle the person who invented “attitude”.
I’ve said it and said it, if you want to understand adult behavior, just go watch any elementary school playground. Adults use more complicated reasoning and employ more sophistry, but it is essentially the same. I want, I got my feelings hurt so i want to hurt you back, punctuated by episodes of conscience.