MudMan

Even better. There’s a solid chance Bumble wasn’t even born when loss.jpg happened.

What a life.

“Under the age of 30”, huh?

Alright, nerds, just so we’re clear, that was more than 15 years ago. Assuming this is current, which it probably isn’t, that “53yo” dad was in his late 30s at the time, could very much have been posting about it when it happened. Given the current average age for having kids, “bumblebeebats” was probably wearing diapers by the time the Internet got to the point of entirely abstracting it to shapes. There is a longer period of time between loss.jpg and now than between the first rickroll and loss.jpg.

If it makes you feel any better, all of this is hurting me just as bad as it’s hurting you.

Oh, so it’s even worse. They aren’t trying to get any practical effect, it’s just pointless vandalism that won’t achieve anything. Cool.

Please explain to me how this keeps climate change in the public consciousness. We haven’t spoken about anything even vaguely climate change-related in this entire thread. None of the discourse around it is about climate change. It’s a distraction, at best. It’s the sand the “people and the media” bury their heads in.

I hate the defeatism, too. If it doesn’t do anything, then why even bother? Let the people who are… you know, actually working on it do their thing and get out of the way with the cornstarch and the stunts.

I also don’t get the necessity to be defensive about it. I get to very much advocate for climate change action (and take action myself, by voting accordingly if nothing else) and still acknowledge this was a dumb thing, which is… honestly pretty obvious. Speaking of bad optics that make you lose the culture wars, denying how dumb this was just makes you seem delusional. After all, if climate activists are so obviously wrong about the obviously wrong thing why would they be right about the other thing? There is literally no upside to this.

No.

And you can’t make me.

And since a protest is ultimately an attempt to manipulate an entire people into shifting the national consensus over to your opinion, if I’m refusing to stop being dramatic about the optics of what they did then what they did was an abysmal failure.

That’s the point people are trying to make here. That ultimately this thing is marketing, and that if everybody is pissed at you after your marketing impact you just did bad marketing.

Alright, you want me to tone it down? Here it is toned down: it’s not the puppy coat.

It’s Apple’s hydraulic press iPad advertising.

You do realize that isn’t any better, right?

Nah, when you deface a one-of-a-kind prehistoric monument that not only is of genuine historical relevance and recognizable worldwide but also a key cultural touchstone with deep identitarian components for a whole country you are deep into Cruella territory. In good faith. Genuinely. I’m not even English and I am pissed. You don’t even get the usual excuses about bourgeois art these idiots have used for other stunts like these.

This is literally supervillain stuff. It’s the stuff they put in Superman movies to show he’s gone bad. In the zeitgeist of normal humanity it’s shorthand for “these are the bad guys”, right alongside suspiciously spotted fur coats and shooting your minions for failing to catch somebody.

How anybody wouldn’t get this makes me not only question their ability to socially engineer a planetary revolution of the ways we generate power and consume goods, but the ability to function as an adult and put their pants on in the morning. If I hired a PR consultant to advertise “climate action” and they proposed this I wouldn’t just fire them, I’d sue them for trying to sabotage me. It’s incredibly stupid. Seriously. Genuinely. As somebody who wants these people to actually succeed.

Oh, is it? Man, this is such a Rorschach test of a thread.

Is the point of a protest to be in the news? I guess the clout economy has rotten our brains after all.

I mean, yeah, you can make news by acting like an idiot, in that the people that oppose your cause will thoroughly cover it. It’s not hard to be in the news with a protest, as long as you don’t care why you’re news. Stage a mass murder of puppies to protest against the lack of gun control and I guarantee you’ll get a spot in Fox News every day for a year, very much accompanied of a pro-gun lobbyist commenting the footage.

That may be the core of the confusion here. I’m saying that turning climate change activism into the puppy murder cause is not an effective way to curb climate change. I’m saying that feeling powerless doesn’t make it any more effective at curbing climate change just because it gets news coverage.

It’s not making anybody aware of the issue who already isn’t, because everybody is already aware of the issue. It’s not explaining anything about the issue to anybody, because all we’re talking about here is the stupid stunt. It doesn’t convince anybody who was neutral or hostile to the cause because they came off as complete idiots at best, malevolent assholes at worst.

So I guess my answer to your question is that even if the jet thing did nothing it still was more effective than this. Because it’s not about being in the news, it’s about making effective action more likely to happen.

Oooh, oooh, I got one.

I went to multiple protests after the Iraq war and got my Iraq war-supporting government to immediately plummet in support and lose the next election. It was nice. No harmed irreplaceable monuments that I remember. The marches I attended were entirely peaceful, as well.

Did the other thing achieve any of that?

I’ll say the jets were effective in that I don’t like the jets while I am primed to try to physically stop you from doing the other thing if you try it in front of me. And I already agree with the underlying point already, so imagine how the normies that don’t think about this at all feel.

“Ah, a cartoonish self-parody of activists defacing a monument I’ve spent my entire life feeling a sense of kinship with, I feel compelled to rethink my stance on this dry, complex political issue”. That’s a bold pitch for a PR stunt.

Oh. No, I meant the strip, not the activists. The implication is that we’re all so dumb that we end up underwater but we’re still complaining about how the activists were assholes. For the joke to work, the stunt itself needs to be pointless. If the stunt was indeed to “provoke action against climate change” the strip would make no sense. The premise of the joke requires the action it’s defending to be useless.

So yeah, to me this transmits that a) the author thinks the action itself did not work and was not going to work in the first place, and b) the author thinks we’re getting angry about it instead of taking action against climate change because we’re dumb and we don’t get it, so the action was fine, it’s our fault.

It’s the children who are wrong, but also we’re entirely powerless, but it’s because everybody is stupid except for us, only the activism is to make everybody else stop being stupid only it can’t work becasue of how stupid you all are. Impotence and Skinner-esque arrogance for a tasty mix of surreal kafkaesque self-contradiction.

And beyond getting charged it’s the optics. I am from a place where you’re less likely to get shot by police and where serious charges are not likely to come from protesting (at least back then, it has gotten worse). But even then the marching orders were that if cops charge or disrupt the protest that’s good optics, if the protestors riot unprompted that’s bad optics, which should be pretty straightforward to understand.

The dictionary definition I was going for is: “The quality or condition of being impotent; lack of strength or power”.

Oh, spare me that rhetroric. Protestors in the 90s and especially the 2000s felt just as disenfranchised. That’s how you end up protesting in the first place. And those were the nice ones. The stories my parents could tell you about the 60s and 70s.

It’s not like “don’t be an idiot” is a struggle only now. I was in protests back in a different millenium where the smart ones were already standing in front of cops and bank windows to stop the idiots from throwing rocks at them and spoiling the whole thing.

The despondent “you just don’t get it” online discourse is pretty new, though.

Man, the way this channels a mix of “it is the children who are wrong” and sheer impotence is hitting me hard. I mean, it really explains so much about modern activism.

Well, and also one to make it less like Latin. And the same with French.

People have been beating this thing with a stick for many centuries. It’s part of the charm. And now it’s doing the same to every other language. That’s maybe less charming.

Well, yeah, but that’s the clarification I’m making. By default you DO need a connection to create or sign in to an account to complete the install process as it’s currently presented, but once an account is set up you can log in to that machine whether it’s connected to the Internet or not. The summary makes it sound like you need to be online for every login, which is not the case.

The summary is slightly misleading, you can log in offline on a computer with a MS account. In fairness, the language on the article around this is pretty confusing, but you’re not locked out of your PC if your Internet is down, which is what the bullet point summary implies.

That’s a fair point, I do pay for subs in some smaller sites. A lot of the time I still watch the Youtube version because… well, that way the creators get paid twice and I’m probably already on YT, but still.

Yeeeah, but my issue with that is they generated the expectation that it’d be free by using their investment money to muscle out smaller competitors. There was a time where Youtube was the biggest of a set of UGC video sites and some of the others were competitive. Now it’s the only real alternative.

So from that perspective they made their bed, now they sleep in it.

OK, can I be real about this for a second?

I’m torn about Youtube ad stuff. Genuinely.

On the one hand the ads suck, we have a good way to bypass them and I certainly don’t want to watch Youtube videos if the ads are unskippable.

On the other hand, if I’m being honest I watch more Youtube than Netflix or Amazon Prime and I sure give those guys money for a subscription. If I counted the cost per watched minute, Youtube Premium would make way more sense than a bunch of subs I do pay.

But I also don’t want to watch a Youtube that is a paid service. That was never the point. The reason I engage with it so much is it’s supposed to be UGC, not TV.

So yeah, torn. Youtube is very weird and the relationship we all have with it is super dysfunctional, creators and viewers alike. We made a very strange future and now we have to deal with it.

Nah, it would be very hard. Presumably this only works if they can insert ads on the fly so they can cycle ads based on region and time. Static ads on videos would have been easy to do and easy to bypass.

If you don’t know how many ads there are or what they look like or how long they are it becomes very hard to do timeline nonsense to avoid them. It also seems like it’d be expensive to do at the scale Youtube needs it, but maybe they figured it out. That would suck. We’ll see, I suppose.