# Everyone Online Sounds Like an Absolute Fucking Poseur Lately  ## Metadata - Author: [[Freddie deBoer]] - Full Title: Everyone Online Sounds Like an Absolute Fucking Poseur Lately - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: The author critiques a trend among Millennials where they adopt flashy, performative language and political correctness while hypocritically appropriating cultural slang from marginalized groups. This behavior reflects a lack of genuine self-confidence and integrity, as they often preach against cultural appropriation while engaging in it themselves. Ultimately, the piece highlights the disconnect between their self-righteousness and the reality of their actions. - URL: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/everyone-online-sounds-like-an-absolute - Source File: web-only ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > “Millennial snot,” an important concept and appropriate term. Though there are many examples offered in the piece, you already know what Millennial snot is. It’s some overeducated shithead with an email job saying “Uh, I’ve unpacked the privilege knapsack in intersectional space, OK sweetie? Get on my level.” “Whoa, did you just say ‘handicapped’? That’s a big yikes, chief.” It’s a form of engagement, quintessentially Millennial, that’s defined by a combination of self-righteous liberal politics, out-of-date internet lingo, terms from university humanities departments that have become mimetic in the past decade, and a performative, shit-eating quality of being perpetually amused with oneself. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jar95tg1mzxym1vfhrankqf6)) > The purveyors of Millennial snot attempt to fool themselves and the world about their level of self-belief with two primary tools: one, through embracing the preening sanctimony of contemporary left politics, acting as though they simply *are* the campaigns against racism or injustice or need, themselves, expressed of course in an obfuscatory academic vocabulary; two, through the language of droll disdain that has become the default idiom of the 21st century as insecurity has become the universal marinade of American elite life. It’s the fusion of modern progressivism’s self-celebratory nature, the discourse norms of our most overeducated age cohort, and the reflexive retreat into triviality as a self-defense strategy. It’s an inescapable style of online engagement even though the heyday of this way of talking is now firmly in the past, just like the heyday of the Millennials who popularized it. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jar9av9vc8e3q6xax0ek7d1f)) > *[All culture is appropriated](https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/theres-no-alternative-to-cultural).* There is quite literally nothing that exists in culture that is not the product of some amount of borrowing, and influence always extends in both directions. Gospel was a white artform before it was a Black one. Does that somehow undermine the Black contribution to gospel? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jar9gkdjwn4dzhzz2f4t6ffz)) > Everybody can use whatever language they’d like, and with a few exceptions, I’m never going to find the particular idiom or means of expression offensive, only sometimes the expression itself. But that doesn’t mean that every use of language is of equal value; in particular, some uses of language are defined by inauthenticity, amount to a pantomime of someone else’s organic expression. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jar9sadwvab7rgbraaf2qntr)) > It all comes down to the same two culprits, which are not at all restricted only to Millennials but which are particularly acute for my generational cohort: fear of aging and the elevation of insecurity to a virtue. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jar9twwbayd58a83xtrxp4ph)) > It’s entirely unclear to me if humanity permits a space between “actively stigmatizing” and “openly self-aggrandizing.” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jayscey1gdry9mp4wv9523dx)) > The borrow someone else’s words because they do not have any faith in the value of their own and then insist that said borrowing is, in some strangled way, a politically radical act. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jar9yp76qwn7q9kk6zdagkpc)) > See the online ADHD community, which is the most nakedly self-celebratory space I’ve ever witnessed, and I’ve been to a CrossFit studio. I certainly don’t think that you should face stigma for having a minor-but-vexing neurodevelopmental disorder like ADHD; I also don’t think you should build an entire culture around the idea that people who have it are, like, the new bohemians or whatever, the people who really *feel* things and are so much more intuitive and emotional and creative than everybody else or whatever, and that’s exactly what the ADHD people have built. (I assure you, I am not exaggerating.) ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jara0jgf7cmd1vkp048gae46))