Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
The op-ed https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/opinion/ai-dangerous-openai-anthropic.html
Newport I mostly know for pretty mid lifehack / business books for the Tim Ferris crowd, pre-pandemic. "Doom trolling" does have a better ring to it than "critihype." Maybe he was holding his tongue until he got tenure or something.
idk i think it's new that someone in mainstream sort of calls them cultists, namedrops EY as cult leader and fanfic writer and everything that you could hear about in our circlejerk, but also shortly before EZ said that he's been called doomer and a crank but now he's vindicated to a degree not thought possible. this all happens after drop of that openai financial info, so EZ also held off, and EZ is PR guy so i guess he knows what he's doing, and maybe he thinks this might be it, or maybe he doesn't have anything better and plays his hand in best way he can. i wonder what comes next