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Comment by jackweirdy | Hacker News Reader

"In contrast with (my) generation, which had spent most of its time online learning to code so that it could add crude butterfly animations to the backgrounds of its weblogs, the generation immediately following had spent most of its time online making incredibly bigoted jokes in order to laugh at the idiots who were stupid enough to think that they meant it. Except that after a while they did mean it, and then somehow at the end of it they were white supremacists. Was this always how it happened?" Patricia Lockwood, London Review of Books, Feb 2019

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I wonder how true anecdotes like that might be?

For example, what portion of trolls who said [offensive thing] ironically for shock value ended up internalizing that [offensive thing] later on?

And is this like the concern that violent video games normalize violence?

"Haha I was only pretending to be retarded"

I don't see the value of such broad generalizations.

I agree. The whole citation reads unsavourably. To paraphrase: my generation used said medium to be creative, while that other generation used same medium to express bigotry. That's the kind of statement that puts up a forest of red flags about the author's credibility.

> In contrast with (my) generation, which had spent most of its time online learning to code so that it could add crude butterfly animations to the backgrounds of its weblogs

Patricia Lockwood sounds like she is praising her generation for being holier-than-thou and basically adding to the issue. There is no way this is just limited to the following generation. It's deeper than that and most likely something to do with the human condition.

It's probably more related to the geekier and/or generally more technically productive people that peopled the internet in the pre-smartphone age. It used to be that you had to learn and practice and exercise skills to become proficient to use the internet, now its basically as mindless as television for [probably] most people.

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