bogleech:

holy shit this thread put to words so many things I think about almost every single day, and it goes longer if you want to read more.

I was there for every single thing he’s talking about here. Like he says of himself, I WAS one of those assholes when I was young enough, or I tried to be, because it felt like you had to go along with the Edgy Meme Machine or be on its shitlist for life, being the same cultural state that created things like Encyclopedia Dramatica and elevated South Park to the pedestal it’s still pissing down from.

Not a day goes by I don’t have flashbacks to how weird it felt, wondering if maybe I just imagined that my entire generation for a solid ten years seemed terrified to express anything other than pessimism and spite.

You really can look at the kinds of people now who wave around their hitler pepe memes and see that it’s exactly the same attitude, only they stopped trying to pass it off as just “dark humor” and have mutated it into essentially their whole religion.