I want to get this out of the way right at the start: My plan to keep a low profile on the campus of SUNY Potsdam went to shit really fast.
(I also may or may not have alluded to the fact that the off-campus housing options for students in Potsdam, New York, is askin to the Warsaw Ghetto my relatives lived in during the Nazi occupation of Poland, but that’s another story …)
So, yes. I’m living on campus at SUNY Potsdam for the next eighteen weeks. I’m not going to tell you where because I don’t want you to stalk me. Or my roommate, but that’s where I’m going to be.
Yay?
I don’t know. I’ll let you know when it’s over.
The whole point to this is that I have a plan. I’m testing it out at Potsdam while simultaneously finishing my Master’s, just so I have a back-up if Social Media Is Bullshit fails miserably, and if the plan works, that’s going to be my life for the next few years.
If the plan works, key word there, the plan should provide plenty of laughs for everybody, which will be awesome because after next September, if I’m still talking about The Asshole Based Economy and Cyber Hipsters, you can shoot me in the face.
(Not really.)
But then again … shooting me in the face might be a lesser punishment than having to read any more Cyber Hipster bullshit. I’ve been researching these people since 2007 and it just kind of wears down on you. To the point where I think I now have shit stains on my soul.
You can only listen to rich, mostly white, overprivileged men say ridiculous shit for so long before you either start strangling them and hiding the bodies under your floor boards, or you just kind of hear that sound Walter White hears in the first season of Breaking Bad when he’s told he has lung cancer whenever they open their mouth.
These days I have the latter, but come next year, it may be the former. Let me show you why:
1. This was written a year ago and it’s pretty telling because it’s a warning from a guy at Adbusters (the group who created and organized Occupy Wall Street, besides the Cyber Hipsters claiming Occupy was a leaderless movement) about what would cause Occupy to fail, and he was totally right:
“If #OCCUPYWALLSTREET fails, it will be because we’ve blindly adopted “best practices” put forth by wealthy Californian techies turned reformist campaigners. Their methods now dominate the way many organizers believe activism should be done, privileging a data-obsessed, metrics-oriented, technocratic approach which is closer to advertising than resistance.” (Source)
That’s exactly what happened. When the people who think changing the color of their Twitter avatar is going to do something show up, you know your cause is fucked.
Where’s Occupy now? It’s a joke slowly fading into the footnotes of history. Why? Because the Cyber Hipsters adopted it.
2. I’m not kidding when I say the Cyber Hipsters are mostly white males either. They’re hostile to women.
3. They’re racist and don’t like non-white people. Also: The poor.
4. They weasally defend stuff like content theft. (Note: Anything from Matthew Ingram is a great example of how Cyber Hipsters view the world and justify their bullshit by claiming it to be the future.)
5. Anything they disagree with is immediately met with hysteria (Here’s Paul Carr’s wonderful take on some of their bullshit)
(And for fun, here’s the king of the Cyber Hipsters, Robert Scoble, complaining about some asinine bullshit.)
6. They’re elitist and unethical (And that’s not where the bullshit ends with TED)
7. They revise history (if the Shel Israel example hasn’t convince you of that yet.)
It’s amazing that a group of people like this exist during the worst American economy since the ’30s (and perhaps in time, maybe the worst ever). But they do exist, and they’re awful.
Thankfully, there’s something we can do about them, and it doesn’t involve murder. It involves calling them out on their bullshit and making sure everyone knows how truly terrible they are.
Come next September though, it’ll be on you to take them down.
As for me? I’ve done all I can in informing you, so I’m off to the next great adventure. Ok. Maybe not great. But funny. For you. Not so much for me …
You’ll see what I mean soon enough.