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Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 18, 2022

"Someone has to and no one else will."

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I don't follow a lot of popular media in the way of movies music tv, so rather about fashion sports or cars.

Percentage that is human in the sense that real human fingers typed words that the human brain attached to them would tell you he genuinely believed? 85-90%+

Percentage that is organically human, in the sense that at no point has a paid marketing campaign influenced that human opinion being typed? <10%.

Humans are basic and easily manipulated into parroting a narrative. Parroting the narrative is enjoyable; look how many people will go out of their way to call into a sports radio show just to say the same nonsense they heard another caller say about "Dak Prescott just can't win the big games" or "Defense wins championships" or "the trouble with arsenal is they always try to walk it in." It makes the reddit commenter feel like a big boy to give the big narrative. Other posters with brains the size of navel oranges upvote the narrative, reprocess the meme, and turn it into homoerotic copypasta.

So I'd say it's less about real grassroots versus fake grass AstroTurf; it's more about organic native grasses versus GMO seeded chemical fertilized drought resistant MegaGrass. Once upon a time one could be sure a plant in your garden was native if it was ugly and thorny, but we're so far down the process of hipster recursion that most of those ugly thorny opinions are just dollars flowing to some substack or some podcast advertising Athletic Greens.

Percentage that is organically human, in the sense that at no point has a paid marketing campaign influenced that human opinion being typed? <10%.

Another aspect of this to keep in mind is that a vanishingly small amount of opinions are original. And the seed comments on a matter are much more likely to become consensus.

I'm not a big football watcher, but I watched all the World Cup games for the fuck of it. An interesting dynamic I noticed in online discussions is that the earliest or most common opinions of a specific play or decision became the consensus, and this was seemingly random and often totally wrong.

The average "fan" is probably just parrotting an opinion someone else said earlier somewhere else.