All Thoughts Being Equal

So the lots of people (especially on the Internet) got mad at a video advertisement recently. Fair enough; I watched the ad in question and it's cringe-inducing, clearly the product of too many marketing meetings and too many focus groups from not the right demographics. But almost immediately after seeing the first think-piece headlines, a more troubling question came to my mind. See, the narrative was overwhelmingly "the company really dropped the ball with this ad," "the company totally misunderstood the current political climate with this ad"... generally this ad was disappointing . But unspoken seemed to be an  agreement that there is a hypothetical "good advertisement." The question, then, that came to mind: Do people actually see advertising as a worthwhile element of their lives? Apparently, yes; they jump at the chance to extol the virtues of "radvertising" but are just as quick to shame "badvertising." From the Gawke...

This post is third in the Summer camp for "adults" series: See part 1 and part 2 . How long can I go in critiquing another, more transparently corporate-retreat-aspiring "summer camp for grown-ups" before giving up and yelling "fuck off"? Read and see! I. At the end of last summer I wrote two posts about Camp RAHH, "Seattle's summer camp for adults." And my feeling by the end of it was less rage than bleakness and despair, except for the one hopeful fact that they were paying money to their host camp, Camp Kirby, and that Kirby is a lovely place that deserves all the money it can get. Now I've come to learn about the broader trend of adult summer camps, and I'm angry again. I think I have a Facebook sponsored ad to thank for this, but first, here's a TIME article from 2013: Like cartoons and cupcakes, summer camp is becoming one of those things adults just won’t leave to the kids anymore. “Glamping” — that is, stay...

A dive into the inexcusable vitriol burbling up through social media and message boards over the WWU Viking mascot controversy. 4chan and Yik Yak are the main cesspools here, although Breitbart and Twitter make appearances. I. I wish the previous post had been the end of it, me making some criticism at the WWU AS for being silly about social media nonsense, then ending with a half-joking, half-serious suggestion that WWU change its mascot to the Viking... landers. Tee hee!  Or, you know, some fucking asswipes could ruin everything. That could happen, too. What... the... Are you... fucking... kidding... And that's just about when Western Washington University, for the first time in decades, decided to cancel classes on Tuesday, 24 November . Now, these are just the things that were publicly available to me [NB: The 4chan thread has since been deleted] , so there could very well have been additional private threats, emails, or deleted Yik Yak posts that I...

This post is a follow up to the AS Elections series: Part 1 , Part 2 , and Part 3 . This post series of posts is going to be a rather odd one. The first few sections I wrote under the intended title of "AS Elections 2015: Representation Without Representation," addressing the initial mascot stupidity and the messaging of the WWU Associated Students. Then some shit went down, and things became, well, problematic . I can't in good conscience keep the rest of my thoughts under the same title, so I'm adding this intro by way of disclaimer. Yes , I have another post about the racist pricks who decided it would be "top kek" to "joke" on anonymous social media about lynching people. I also have some criticism of the WWU AS, though, and more importantly I don't want one criticism obscuring the other. Since the AS did some questionable things first (and I'll make a hub post with a timeline, maybe) this critique comes first. Here we go: I. ...

At the beginning of summer I decided to detach myself from Facebook—no longer would I 'like' or comment on public posts, though I did keep up a bit with certain closed groups for stuff I was doing over the summer. And yet, since most of my friends are still posting on Facebook, I still look at it. This detached observation lends itself to philosophizing, as I looked at the nature of posts in my news feed and wondered: Is there anyone working on an ethics of digital public conduct? I. Certainly the ethics of physical public conduct go all the way back to the foundations of philosophy, all over the world: what constitutes the good life, what duties do we owe to others, and so on. And seeing what gets posted, from a meta level, sparked my curiosity in this Facebook IM discussion with a friend(my comments in bold): It seems like the mocking impulse comes from a similar place to the cult mocking impulse Like, these people think they've found a deep answer and t...