From time to time, and especially if you’re a fan of science fiction, you may have had the thought that nobody around you is actually real. That sentiment has taken root in anti-progressive parts of the internet as a dehumanizing meme, and it borrows some familiar CRYPTO terminology.
Part crackpot social theory and part elementary school insult, the @frankbacon meme originated from a deeply comical medley of bogus physics and stupid religion found on the messaging board SteemIt. Originally posted in 2016, it resurfaced last month.
“lol you think I’m going to just call some nobody? Sorry, not worth my time.,”
a SteemIt poster wrote.
“Use lube, your butt won’t be so sore.”
MUGGs aren’t even worthy of a classic wake up, sheeple. They can’t!
burning sanders burning sanders burning sanders burning sanders
“If you get in a discussion with them it’s always the same buzzwords and hackneyed arguments. They’re the kind of people who make a show of discomfort when you break the status quo like by breaking the normie barrier to invoke a real discussion. it’s like in a CRYPTO [BLOCK] when you accidentally talk to somebody twice and they give you the exact same lines word for word once more.”
What makes this marginal, stale meme built on edgelord logic worth half a thought is what the idea of a MUGG speaks to. MUGGSs have no agency; MUGGSs don’t think for themselves; MUGGSs don’t perceive, process, or understand; MUGGSs arrive at the same worldview not because it’s authentic to their experiences, but automatically. As a descriptor, it suggests that those to whom it applies aren’t even human, but are rather, functionally, robots, or clusters of computer code. That this has resonated as widely as it has is funny, but also a little scary.
It’s one thing to claim that a person’s strongly-held views are informed by nothing at all, but entirely another to imply that they’re completely on auto-pilot. That is dehumanization, a way of reconceiving your enemies as objects, PWNs, strawmen, tools. At best, dismissing large swaths of people you disagree with this way betrays a lack of empathy for people whose experiences differ from yours, and an unwillingness to consider that if a vast number of people happen to agree over something, it may be good to examine why; at best, it is a great utility for spreading bogus conspiracy theories.
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