I recorded an episode of Rage Select’s “Dojo” the other day with Jeff, owner of the website (for those curious, you can see our Let’s Play of Who’s Your Daddy here: https://youtu.be/C6_UO84tM_c), and afterwards we hit up the nearby bar for their half-dollar hotwings and beer. Jeff and I had a loooooong talk about, well, lots of stuff. One thing that came up was something Jeff had been mulling over for a while: What is the actual point of negative internet criticism?
I don’t mean people who’s job it is to critique movies. And I don’t mean critiques in general. I mean people who seek out those who have positive opinions on a thing, and then try to tear it down.
We all do this. You do this, I do this...and we are assured in how right we are. “Well, I’m the one who’s correct, so I need to correct this person.” When you see someone talking about how they like the Prequels, we are compelled to jump on them, tearing at their spirits until we break them.
Expressing an opinion is perfectly fine - it’s healthy discourse to disagree.
But allow an example for me: for a substantial period of time, whenever I mentioned Pacific Rim on my personal Facebook page, at least a handful of people would violently tear into it, with an unflappable conviction that this goofy movie about robots, monsters, and indistinguishable white boys wasn’t just a bad movie, but it was their actual duty to prove to me, and everyone else, that we were wrong for enjoying it, and we should...I don’t know, repent? See the “light”?
Jeff talked about a troll who was still rummaging around Rage Select, and what happened when John and Amanda, frequent guests on the show, played a WWE game. John and Amanda are huge WWE fans, and have their own wrestling podcast on OneofUs.net. This particular troll began jumping all over the comments section, practically screaming about how terrible and stupid and fake wrestling was. When pressed for why he felt the need to do this, his apparent response was that he was actually trying to ruin it for them. He actually felt that their time was “better spent elsewhere.”
There’s a level of insanity that goes with that mindset - this hyper-negative-cynicism online that seems to be born from a real and vibrant desire to take things we like away from each-other.
We’ve been seeing this a LOT with The Force Awakens. There are those who want to tear down the people who love TFA because they are “true fans” and the rest don’t “get it.” There are those who want to tear down younger fans who enjoy the prequels because, well, they’re kind of terrible (see, I do it too). Some websites are even using this internet hate-machine to generate revenue based purely on hatred and cynicism alone. It’s one of the main reasons I despise CinemaSins - they are the poor man’s Screen Junkies/Honest Trailers. Instead of poking fun at the movie and having a sense of playfulness, the CinemaSins “Everything Wrong With ____ “ is mired in pure cynicism - the kind that actually ruins movies for people and that douchebags can link to and say “Look! This movie you like? It’s a piece of shit! Now I can prove it in list form!”
I worry that the internet is turning us all into Jason Pargin’s, but without the intellect or wit - all bitterly cynical and utterly unimpressed by modern pop culture without a lick of fun or engagement left in us, because it’s smart to hate.
Thoughts?
