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I can't believe thanks to the internet undergoing enshittification I'm actually nostalgic for a time when it was casually racist, because that's somehow better then this "Watching the words that we say, big brother corponet is listening." bullshit
Somehow the bigotry of the old not-for-profit internet felt less harmful than the current model where corporatations fund bots to fuck everyone in the mental health for a grab at our empty wallets.
Back then the bigotry were mostly jokes than actual serious unironic targeting which you see festering nowadays.
A lot of it was ironic "It's funny because we know it's fucked up and wrong, if we legitimately agreed we wouldn't think it was funny."
Yeah, like a lot of racist humour in old british comedy shows is generally at the expense of the racist themselves, rather than who they're mocking
Back in the YTMND days I was among the "Moon Crew", people who made fads (what we called memes back then) about Moon Man. (The overtly racist version of the Mac Tonight character)
If I had known Moon Man would go on to be a symbol of the Alt Right, I'd have never had anything to do with the character.
Back then the joke was "Lol, Moon Man is completely insane and wacky.", but in more recent Moon Man material the joke changed to "Moon Man is based cause he hates women and minorities." and no one originally involved with how the character was back when he was a staple of YTMND has anything to do with it anymore.
No one actually had any support for the KKK, the chant just sounded funny on the old version of AT&T's text to speech
And when Moon Man was involved in storylines the villains were usually folks like Charles Moonington (An undercover terrorists pretending to be a member of high society) or Goofy Clown Face (an unapologetic pedophile) who were demonstratably worse than Moon Man.
Now when I see the character he's unironically supporting Trump, and actively battling against Sun Man (who in the original canon we made for the character was a self-hating black man who the "Three K Mafia" had to have around due to anti-discrimination laws requiring at least one black guy in the klan)
Moon Man was also shown as being clueless and out of touch with reality, because again, a major part of the character was that he was insane and not meant to be imitated.
It just pisses me off that he became a recruitment tool for Bigoted Movements, when again, he was largely satirical and meant to mock such backwards views. I mean shit, Moon Man's "songs" were largely specifically parodies of and homages to famous rap musicians, that should have been a big clue right there that no one involved with the character's inception actually hated black people. (That's actually how I discovered Tupac, look this was like 15 years ago, I was an edgy teenager back then)
It makes me fully understand the pain Anthony Starr feels when he gets those fan letters about "What a good American Homelander is", or how that guy who wrote that one comic felt when he had to kill off Pepe...
I was more thinking of the time people said the n word ironically, rappin for jesus and that guy who made that song about black people liking watermelon and kfc, as well as similar songs about white people, asians and arabs. My theory is that Etika's death killed ironic usage of the n word along with PewDiePie's bridge incident
I mean I kinda was too, no one was actually racist, it was just a gag... Instead of being a Alt-Right Nazi pretending it's just a joke.
Like nowadays people just post "kill n***ers" and then claim it's a joke when confronted about it. There's nothing funny about that. Compared to the "cop shooting the room because it was dark" joke
EXACTLY!
I hate that shit "Oh I'm only asking for a race war as a joke... Unless?"
There's not even humour in that. The best humour is when you're equally taking the piss out of each other
The Internet didn't so much get less racist as it simply got sanitized because they realized that they weren't extracting maximum dollar from non-white users. The hate simply got pushed further down into the dank miserable depths to fester while the rest of us get to pretend that racism isn't still a massive problem because black people are a marketing demographic now...
Fun thing is that because of that, you could theoretically live you entire Internet life without ever encountering racism. Only theoretically though, because racism still happens everywhere casually.
I've always said the best type of media on the internet is almost no moderation because that means anyone can post anything.
People who post stupid or nonsensical things would just get ignored anyway, there's no need for a mod tram to dictate what can and cannot be posted online. They should only exist to remove spam or brigading.
The wild west internet was great at this, we got some of the coolest communities and memes from all over the world.
Right around MySpace falling off, Facebook started agregiously taking over the majority of social media. Lots of forum sites are now dead or empty.
I wish we could use the dragon balls to revive forums.
That sounds like paranoia sir.