Goodnight, Twomad

I grew up on 4chan. It felt like the cool and edgy older brother of the Internet. I started browsing the infamous /b/ board when I was 13 and at the top of the page reads this, “The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact.” I took this disclaimer very seriously and I think about it almost every time I am on the internet. “Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact.”

As the internet has evolved from random videos that the population had deemed worthy to go “viral”, to a more curated and categorized attention seeking circus. For the gaming “world” and Twitter, it seems like the more controversial and edgy you are the more successful you will become. A negative attention economy I guess. People love to be outraged. People love to feel morally superior to others and they like to feel like they can decide are immoral being punished. Social media Schadenfreude. This context is important when talking about Twomad’s online persona.

Twomad was a very chaotic energy on the internet. This isn’t a deep dive or anything but all you need to know is that he “shit posted” a lot on Twitter, streamed, and occasionally made YouTube videos. His nonstop tweet marathons were incredibly fascinating to read and reminded me of Lucy Ellmann’s ducks, Newburyport. Some allegations came out that he didn’t take seriously and for some reason that’s reason that people are now celebrating his death. And I mean celebrating. Their celebrating will, also appear edgy and will attract their own small amount of attention and the cycle continues.

I think Twomad would be making fun of his death if he could. The internet is a place where you can anonymously be nasty. I’m not defending Twomad, he probably did horrible things just like every human ever. What makes me upset is this weird game that people online insist we play that because Twomad didn’t publicly apologize or something means that he should be rotting in hell for all eternity. (Apologize for something that never was proved from my understanding but that’s not even the point.) The thing is, only a fool would take anything they see online as fact. Let alone fact, only a fool would take anything they see online as a reason to pass divine moral judgments on a stranger.

Then they all end up celebrating this real persons death because of not even second but third hand information that they read from the internet. This fake moralized outrage about stuff pisses me off. I’m not defending a rapist I’m saying that people LOVE to HATE and I just can’t stand that they have to wrap it up in this feigned moralized manner. It’s disgusting to celebrate someone’s death. There’s  this hateful chronically online that I can’t stand. I’m not going to complain about double standards, cancel culture, or any of that other boring stuff I’m just going to say that there is a brand of nefarious, rubber necking drama hungry nerd that’s always online just waiting to be “outraged” so they can project all their weird aggression and “moral superiority” over other people. These people will also  think an hour long“video essay”  will educate them enough to realize that “this person DESERVED to die!” People will give attention to a mentally ill person then be surprised and outraged when they say or do something controversial or unpopular. People will feed into this outrage machine and be surprised when there’s nothing but extreme personalities that pop up.

Good night, Twomad