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Anonymous06/21/25, 13:08No.24484721
>everything has to be a meme
>any attempt at sincerity is just being "corny"
>most media made nowadays is filled with whedonesque dialogue and absurd levels of snark
>All discussions about every topic online are ironic with people looking to get "owns" instead of actually engaging with each other
>Insincere clicktivism everywhere. People regularly trying to ruin lives over topics they know nothing about.
He was right. We now live in irony hell.
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Anon06/21/25, 13:15No.24484730
It's subversion and I agree it is hell.
However, the snark and irony in conversation is usually a shit test in my experience. If I can show some diligence and show I actually know or have experienced something I am often met with genuine curiosity. I think people are just so used to grifters that sardonic humor has become a defense. It isn't perfect, but it works.
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Anon06/21/25, 13:16No.24484733
jakposters are irony-poisoned down to the marrow of their bones.
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Anon06/21/25, 16:16No.24485180
Paradoxically, 4chan is the only place I feel like I can be sincere.
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Anon06/21/25, 17:01No.24485272
how many times do you need to make this thread[/lit/thread/24482546#p24482546]
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Anon06/21/25, 17:18No.24485313
Now if only we could get the esoteric Kunt and the jesus poster in here
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Anon06/22/25, 02:54No.24486539
bump
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Anon06/22/25, 03:35No.24486598
Can you imagine what he would have thought about the world we live in now? He was shitting himself and ultimately roped over fucking television and Rush Limbaugh level programming. You can’t go fucking 5 minutes without seeing a meme or hearing a reference to one nowdays. He’d shoot himself on live television.
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Anon06/22/25, 04:04No.24486625
>>any attempt at sincerity is just being "corny"My attempt at an intelligent comment is sincerity is viewed as "corny", while people desperately attach themselves to irony, is because the average person hasn't changed in the regard that they're still deeply afraid of being an authentic person. It's a security blanket. The average person cannot handle being emotionally vulnerable or otherwise exposing themselves in a way that might lead to a more personalized attack or their "true" feelings being mocked.
Ironically, people are quite robust; they excel at dealing with physical trauma, they're great at working through material problems, they're great at adapting to new lows, a person gets paralyzed and they'll settle into a new normal in 4-6 months. A person's ability to naturalize physical tragedy is astounding, but we fucking suck at dealing with mental, or emotional, issues, so here we are. And I don't profess or even a single moment that any of the modern culture surrounding "mental health awareness" has improved conditions - if anything it's added a kind of fashionable context to the negative. It was simply easier to normalize feeling bad than to actually fix it or do anything about it. "Everybody is a mess, so it's actually fine for me to be a mess and not do anything about it. That's normal."I think in some way this is also why people have a deep resentment for people who're openly passionate about something and/or anyone even remotely unusual or eccentric.
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Anon06/22/25, 04:27No.24486651
Personally, I embrace radical self-revelation.
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Anon06/22/25, 05:51No.24486736
Are you the same person who posted the
> Why do online spaces seem trapped in layers of ironic distance, making sincerity feel risky or uncool?
threads?
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Anon06/22/25, 05:59No.24486745
This is a stupid idea only a pretentious idiot would think is important. He never had a single good idea about anything, however he was a decent writer.
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Anon06/22/25, 17:39No.24487810
You live in a cynical age, thats all
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Anon06/22/25, 18:05No.24487854
Wallace thought that showing sentiments was inherently embarrassing and that he needed "lean in" to it in order to be "genuinely human"
His sensibility was embarrassing
Noble sentiments have nothing to be ashamed of
I think he's on to something in that the media environment makes people self-referring in a way that short-circuits us--which he perhaps got from McLuhan ...
But "Irony" is hardly "the problem", irony just means complexity and is one of the main styles in literature (the other being the naive or supernatural)
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Anon06/23/25, 13:40No.24489801
If he felt this way about the world in the 90s and the 2000s, I can't imagine how much today's world would have broken him.
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Anon06/24/25, 03:47No.24491713
These threads are what he posts.