@elementals I don't really know, I come from a different world compared to most people like this. before I started using social media on a very limited basis in 2016, my only presence on the internet was anonymous imageboards, and most of my exposure to this sorta stuff was from just pursuing it out of my own interest and also because I studied philosophy in undergrad. so it's something I've always engaged with in earnestness, and I think most people just treat these things as like, a passing bit of entertainment that they encounter in the algorithm-driven hellscape of the internet today. people learn to mimic the signs because they get to feel included in a community centered around a Potemkin village version of whatever politics or philosophy or whatever it is that they claim to care about, maybe they even read a little, but they never do the work

as far as I'm concerned this is a direct consequence of the wider problem in amerikkkan culture where the humanities are treated as something that basically has no real value. it's an evolution of the "oh how are you gonna get a job with a philosophy degree huh?" smugness that I have encountered many times in my life where the humanities is now a commodity to be passively consoomed and then discarded once it ceases to be entertaining. so I absolutely will not give anyone the benefit of the doubt who does this. they're all part of the problem, I don't fucking care what brain disorder diagnosis they have. people don't do this shit with STEM, or at least not as much, because culturally we're conditioned to think that STEM is Real Intellectual Stuff and the humanities is something that only stupid people who are bad at math can do. it makes me fucking sick that not only has an entire half of human civilization/culture been reduced to a set of empty signs to be consumed, but it's something that I care a lot about, something that I'm actually good at, but I will never be taken seriously by hardly anyone, never be able to get funding to work on this stuff seriously, because we live in a fucking fallen world