🔗 The Great Dumbening:

But their blatant stupidity is why they’re so popular. It’s the uncomfortable truth underpinning pretty much everything that’s happened in pop culture — including politics — since the 2010s social media revolution. The online platforms that created our new world, run on likes and shares and comments and views, reshaped the marketplace of ideas into an attention economy. One that, like a real economy, is full of very popular garbage. And, also like a real economy, is now so vast and important that it’s virtually impossible to change it. If you want access to it, you better get comfortable making lowest-common-denominator bullshit in front of a camera. And, of course, it’s a lot easier to feel good about doing that if you’re an idiot.

Dumbasses talking to other dumbasses about stupid, ignorant stuff is nothing new. What’s new is that big corporations have found a way to monetize this dumbassery via social platforms and that has introduced all sorts of weird and malicious incentives.