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We're All Sitcom Characters Now
If you've ever watched a successful long running sitcom, you've seen it happen. The characters start out mostly normal with a quirk or two. Maybe a little neurotic, or slow, or promiscuous. Four seasons in and the characters have all become deranged parodies of themselves. All their most entertaining qualities have been heightened, everything relatable or normal has been squeezed out. The character that was a little slow is now a straight up drooling retard. The promiscuous character obsessively fucks everything that moves. The neurotic character is only a step removed from Howard Hughes in his final days. You watch the last episode and the first episode of a sitcom, and you'll barely recognize the characters.
It's obvious why it happens though. The writers and actors give the audiences what they want. Sitcoms are (or were?) a cuttroat business. There was little room for artistic integrity, vision, or any other high minded concepts. Give the audiences what they want, or they'll change the channel and the show will be cancelled. Just shut up and do it!
I regret to inform you that we are all on a sitcom now. Everyone is enmeshed with an attention economy. Be it farming engagement on twitter, or upvotes on a reddit clone. And unlike actors who only have to inhabit their roles for hours a day, for a shooting schedule that might be weeks or months out of a year, those enmeshed in the attention economy must be in character 24/7. On social media, on streaming, on podcast, on youtube, all at once, all the time.
Some have whole heartedly embraced this. Twitter is full of people being characters, allowing the algorithm or engagement to tweak the dials on their personality. Like a second subconscious that lives in the cloud. Catgirl Kulak comes to mind. He's out there using an AI catgirl as an avatar, staying more and more in character as some sort of neo pagan feral/trad nordic catgirl with hot takes. It's a dangerous game he's playing, existing more and more in a fictional role. But there are others. The preposterous performative pro-Elon or pro-Trump nonsense I saw and tried to avoid on twitter this last week was really something. Twitter super users who've built their brand on being staunch partisans like Catturd out there acting like absolute charicatures of themselves. They're just sitcom characters anymore, and rapidly approaching the braindeath of the latter seasons. Others I don't think fully understand what was happening to them. I wonder how much upvote driven personality disorders had to do with certain flameouts here.
Because eventually every sitcom hits the wall. The characters have been intellectually and emotionally abused and lobotomized to such a point where there is no humanity left in them to ritualistically beat out for the amusement of the audience. It gets it's final season where the writers attempt to rehabilitate them just enough to send them off into the sunset.
There are no writers to rehabilitate you when the algorithm is done with you, and you've lived inside a cartoonish and horrifying version of yourself for attention for years on end.
I've tried turning off visibility of things like individual post scores, but that does just risk you changing to focus on notifications, instead. And given the extent twitter has driven people completely bonkers, that might be worse than the karma farming. There's always been worries about the masks we wear molding the face -- and even some theories about using that to improve ourselves -- but having the masks get molded in turn is Not Great Bob. And then what exactly it seems to be driving even the boring people toward is kinda disturbing.
You can do some efforts to de-algorithmify yourself, but that's only going to get the worst of it, and maybe not even that. And it's pretty incompatible with having a career or even a renumerative hobby online. Even some offline small business work is becoming increasingly hard to kick off without it. I'd like to advocate some level of in vino veritas, but a) I don't drink, and b) that doesn't seem to work great for those who pick it up. Trying to actively avoid collecting enough of a following maybe helps? But I dunno if that's just because I wouldn't notice the microscale examples of the trend, either.
The one bright spot is that Flanderization does, at least in part, reflect another trait specific to media, not people qua people. Ted Flanders didn't turn from slightly-religious neighbor into a fundie just because time's arrow flew, but also because the shows writers needed something new for each episode. "Simpsons Did It" is a problem for South Park, but it's also an issue for The Simpsons itself; even if most viewers won't recognize the psuedorerun, the show's staff and a lot of the commentariat will. If you have to get a column out for your tech column the weekend and three videos M/W/F, you start diving into this sorta A/B-to-death-testing because you don't have anything else, and the content doesn't have that much to start with.
For normal people, that doesn't quite work that way. Yes, history rhymes, and I'm probably one of the worst people on this site when it comes to bringing up ancient history from the long-ago days of two years ago. But anyone that hasn't let the mask embed into their skull can and probably will find something new because the world is filled with new stuff. Get a hobby, touch grass, fight the dandelion infestation on your front lawn again (fuuuuuuuuuuuck), talk about cooking.
I've never had a problem with broadleaf weeds. Are you against using herbicide? I find spraying the whole yard is a waist, I spot spray broadleaf's with 2,4-D. Hit the dandelions before they go to seed and I just have to walk the lawn two to three times.
What do you guys have against Dandelions? They are free flowers.
Do you genuinely not understand it? The beauty of the lawn lies in its neatness and uniformity. Random weeds in random places break that uniformity. The result does not good even when the dandelions flower (which is a relatively small fraction of the year).
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