Matt Labash writes:
Say Andrew and your readers, slight bone to pick with you. I never slagged the Millennials' intelligence. The word "Millennials" never even appears in my piece. And in fact, as you tacitly pointed out by your first excerpt, I went out of my way to state how smart most of the people in this meme culture were, even if it was misapplied intelligence.
Make no mistake – I was in fact slagging a group of people. An intergenerational one, plenty of whose worst offenders are closer to my age (41), and who should know better. (Ben Huh, for starters.) But if you and yours actually read past my "mini-rant" as your reader characterized it, you/they would see it wasn't a mini-rant at all. It was a maxi-rant. (8,500 words of it). Which wasn't even always a rant. About half of it was pure character study, with actual flesh-and-blood human beings in it. (Double Rainbow Guy, Tron Guy, the Huh? Guy, Scumbag Steve, Ben Lashes the Meme Manager). Many of whom have complicated and qualified relationships with the culture that purportedly champions them. Particularly when that culture says it's okay to make fun of Down Syndrome kids who can count to potato. Tell your readers to skip ahead to the last 1,000 words for that part, if they don't have time for the rest.
I understand it's more fun for them to instead pipe off in half-cocked angry letters, than to actually engage with the thing they're criticizing. Which is part of the problem with Internet Culture, generally speaking. Since everybody has a voice, nobody can ever shut the hell up for the five seconds it takes to listen and actually entertain a different point of view. And here, I was told they were supposed to be the tolerant ones.
I'm really sorry your 23-year-old-pal thinks I wrecked Social Security for him, even though I won't be collecting it for another quarter century myself (if I ever see it). But what that has to do with why LOLcats is a higher art form, and not a cynical con brought to us by the New Overlords of Web 2.0 – of which we're all supposed to be dutifully worshipful of at all times – I'm not quite certain. Memes are the new Beatles, according to one of your readers? Bronies are keeping comedy alive? Good lord, we're even worse off than I thought if that's the case (and I never cared much for the Beatles, for the record – I was a Stones guy. Though before your readers start piling on over dated references by sad middle-aged writers, I only mention it because your reader brought them up by name.)
Even the 4channers I met at ROFLcon would take serious issue with that sentiment, as they, too, are tired of beat, rehashed, mash-up culture, and of their own internal entertainment getting run into the ground by the likes of icanhascheezburger.com, which slaps a watermark on content that isn't their own, pays nobody for it, and then mass produces crap which it gussies up as "culture."
It's not that I don't get it. There's just not that much to be gotten when you're watching a Pop-Tart cat run across the screen to Japanese Vocaloid music with a rainbow shooting out of its ass (Nyancat). It's thin. One of your readers charged me with criticizing a technology I don't understand. This may surprise him, but I too am familiar with the internet, have been on it as long as he has if not longer, and know how to go to Meme Generator and crank out 25 Scumbag Steve macros in two minutes. If the Tech Triumphalists want to pretend like that's a creative act worthy of study and celebration, then they are, in fact, showing more creativity than I credited them for – just not in the way they intended.
The maxi-rant is here, if you need the link again. The last 1,000 words are here.
The Dish 