An Internet Forum Bestiary

Here are some personalities (perhaps "poses" would be a better word) that I am tired of seeing online.

The Rebels

Rebels think themselves wise or good simply because they take a position contrary to whatever the majority of a given group thinks about something, when their thinking is nothing but the photo-negative of conformity. Look for this whenever someone tells you he's a "free thinker," "alternative" or whatever. Remember: Even if you do march to a different drummer, you're still marching.

The Instantly Cool

ICs imagine that coolness (733tn3zz, "cred," etc.) is something that can purchased or otherwise acquired from some third party or by aping the beliefs, dress, manner or lifestyle of some subculture. It has apparently never occured to them that the minute, I mean the very second, you consciously mold yourself into something that is not authentically you in pursuit of approval from others, coolness is gone. A costume is a costume, whether it's a grey flannel suit or the pierced/punk thrift store look.

The Xenophiles

Xenos admire something in direct proportion to how "different" it is to what they're used to, reflecting very little (or not at all) on whether or not it's actually any good, or even if they actually like it. They are, as W. S. Gilbert put it in The Mikado: "The idiot who praises, in enthusiastic tone Every century but this, and every country but his own..."

The Internet Nostalgists

INs wax on endlessly about the "good old days" before the Internet "went capitalist" and "sold out" by allowing commercial activity. To hear these people (old, bitter Unix snobs, mostly) talk about this supposed Golden Online Age, you'd think it was some utopia of Cool, Tech-Savvy people doing Smart and Clever Things - sort of a cross between the Bloomsbury group and Xerox PARC. Well, I was there, in college in the late '80s; the pre-Web, pre-spam, pre-public days of the NSF/Internet - which was supposedly so exalted over the hoi polloi and their vulgar wasteland of dial-in BBSes, GEnie, etc. And folks... then as now, the 'Net community was a very mixed bag. All the personal and social pathologies were already evident.

The Politically Incorrect

PIs are a subset of Rebels; people who think that hypersensitive "PC" sanctimony on the part of others authorizes or even requires them to talk like actual racists, misogynists, gay bashers, etc. (I'm not denying the blight of "PC" on American culture; it's all too real. But we're not going to get past it by confirming the worst fears of the "PC" more-sensitive-than-thou types, even if we are kidding as we do it.) "Look! I'm being gratuitously offensive! People are, like, UPSET with me! I'm a RADICAL!"

The Pseudo-Illuminati

The Pseudos are obsessed with having the Inside Track on something - Hell, anything - because it makes them feel "special." This manifests itself in two principal ways:

1) Obscurantism: The more marginal and "weird" something is, the better. The more people who know about it, the more it should be shunned. (Reference the earlier Xenophiles, as well as the frequently-observed phenomenon of people hating any music band that gains an appreciable audience.)

2) Arrogant Exclusion: How many of us have run into these "If you don't know, I'm not going to tell you" types? Nothing makes them happier than to litter their conversations with allusions to books, movies or songs that few people have heard of. Yet if you ask, "That sounds interesting, where can I check that out?" they either go stone silent or change the subject.

The reason, of course, is the same one behind calling them Pseudo-Illuminati; they're not really In The Know at all. They've never made any original aesthetic or intellectual discoveries... they got it all second-hand. Someone else told them about this book, that movie or some odd style of music, which means - GASP! - that they, too, were once Out Of The Loop.

Honestly, I don't know who they think they're fooling. We all learn about pretty much everything second-hand. Take a song, for example - unless you wrote the damned thing yourself, you heard about it from others who got there first. "No biggie," as we used to say. Ah, but for the Pseudos, it is a biggie because it reveals them to be just like the rest of us rather than Ascended Masters of Hipness. They would rather die than admit there was a point in their lives - perhaps quite recent - when they had no idea who Warren Zevon was, had never seen a David Lynch movie and thought H. R. Giger made wristwatches.