Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.

Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
    21·
    2 days ago

    Billionaires have a new start-up, Objection, that allows them to “sue” journalists by “summoning” them to a “tribunal” staffed by chatbots. They targeted journalist Gary Baum with their first “lawsuit”, which provoked Baum to write about them for the Hollywood Reporter. Like all vampires, upon being exposed to sunlight, founder Aron D’Souza threw a hissy fit has shuttered everything “temporarily”.

    • EFreethought@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      7 hours ago

      “I can’t tell you how many billionaires and CEOs have called me in absolute tears about their lives being destroyed by one article.”

      I would pay to see a billionaire or CEO in tears over an article.

      And if stopping them were that easy, why hasn’t it happened yet?

    • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      1 day ago

      D’Souza has observed that his friends are “the best little boys in the world. They all went to the fanciest universities and won all the prizes.”

      and wiped out several cities in the process

      My profile of Sackler, it turns out, was the first case to be brought before Objection’s tribunal, although the company told me there are now dozens in its virtual docket. “You’re Exhibit A,” D’Souza said, observing that the verdict on my work was part of the company’s soft launch: “Building software is hard.”

      did they try to turn their first target into unwilling and adversarial beta-tester?

      After we spoke, I awaited my verdict before the Objection tribunal in the Sackler case. None arrived. Eventually, the landing page was taken offline. I asked D’Souza about it. He explained that Objection would “hold off publishing any adjudications” until “a new major strategic partnership” was announced.

      so it seems

      (As a general matter, D’Souza questions the common journalistic practice of quoting “experts” as part of coverage.)

      it does fit a pattern

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      2 days ago

      In D’Souza’s interview with the Australian newspaper, he explained why: “It’s only the top 1 percent who matter. These are the people who are going to be the value creators” when, in his view, AI soon completely transforms just about every aspect of economic life.

      D’Souza continued, “Ultimately, what’s the last job? It won’t be knowledge work. It won’t be physical work. It will be interfacing between the physical and the digital worlds, and right now that frontier is journalism.”

      Taken together it becomes incredibly transparent that the actual goal here is to transform themselves into a kind of priest-king class, exercising absolute authority on behalf of the remote and unfathomable god that they built. Just please pay no attention to who built the AI, who runs the AI, or where all the money and power end up.

    • sansruse@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      2 days ago

      I don’t understand what the point of this business is, except to grift off the aggrieved rich failsons unable to handle the horribly difficult work of hiring a PR firm to smear the people they’re mad at. At first i thought that it could be to create a formal ‘social credit score’ for journalists and integrate it directly with different publications to quantify how mad the ruling class is with a given individual, in order to discredit them or bar them from work or chill their speech, as D’Souza implies here:

      One of my final questions for D’Souza — who told me he’d been in a slew of talks with media owners about his venture (“I’m coming to New York next week to meet all the big guys”)

      but that sort of thing happens already. Nobody who seriously challenges power is getting hired at The New York Times or The Washington Post. That’s just a top down directive from the owners. What is the point of this? it’s staggeringly stupid. Just shit talk these people in your private Signal GCs, guys. Andreessen and David Sacks and Karp will be happy to help you compose a peevish Xeet or a lawsuit. stop being weird losers.

      Special mentions:

      Then, of course, there are billionaires and their heirs. D’Souza believes that “many journalists are more powerful than billionaires,” explaining, “I can’t tell you how many billionaires and CEOs have called me in absolute tears about their lives being destroyed by one article.”

      god, journalism would be so much cooler if it could directly remove money from the accounts of the Idiot Rich. Alas.

      “It’s only the top 1 percent who matter. These are the people who are going to be the value creators” when, in his view, AI soon completely transforms just about every aspect of economic life.

      🫩

      • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        1 day ago

        Honestly, I think D’Souza explains the business best:

        Once Objection issues an adjudication, satisfied clients can pay an extra fee to promote the finding “so it engages with the disinformation as it spreads through social media,” D’Souza says. “What I know from the Gawker litigation, having dealt with not just Hulk Hogan but dozens of other parties who felt like they were aggrieved by the media, is that they actually don’t want a financial remedy. What they want is a moral victory. Most of them just want a PDF that they can send to their investors and their family which says, ‘I did not go to Epstein Island.’”

        Questions answered by t-shirt, etc.