I agree that this is a meme. It’s not a meme with widespread meaning yet, but I think a chip on the forehead, the obvious young age of the boy, and his expression of mixed happiness/fear is enough to convey something about the state of society that calls for nervous laughter.

I 100% agree with you.

I do, of course. I even do my hair. I didn’t mean to imply that one should not care about it hygienically, just for your own health and personal self image.

I just don’t understand the urge to thrust gender identity onto hair style and then argue about what that means to the polity online.

Why do people put so much energy into projecting identity politics on a superfluous detail like hair? Who cares? It’s all just a vanity concern, selfishly obsessed with what others think about how you look.

Does your hair make you have some intrinsic identity to others that you are or are not going for? Fuck you, I don’t care.

Do you authentically care, yourself?

Maybe you care about the politics - I can understand that. There is legitimate fear around legislating serious, dangerous things to your identity (not hair). Why the fuck are you spending your time and energy on hair???

Emotions are each examples of a continuum. You can be any level of sad or happy or angry, etc.

I’m not sure the distinction of spectrum from continuum is useful for understanding the world though. It’s just conversationally helpful.

Perhaps everything is a continuum but we just manufacture a spectrum so we can classify people for our own ease of conversation.

I think there is a path forward where the internet and the content on it are sufficiently commoditized that the costs become trivial to average people, like the cost of running an LED at night, and so monied interests move into other areas like robotics and the internet begins to drift back toward the idealized vision mentioned in this post.

I doubt it will ever drift all the way back, but it is getting super cheap to run edge compute and store data on the cloud.

It’s getting increasingly cheap to write code with LLMs too, and if that continues to evolve at the rate it’s going then users are not going to feel locked into their big-name platform of choice anymore. Porting from Apple to Google to Microsoft to Amazon to Self-Hosted etc, will be a lower and lower bar with fewer and fewer barriers for the average user, making for a hint of that old wild frontier feeling online again.