…and boy oh boy did he catch what he was looking for: a bunch of ass-kissing.
It started with this tweet yesterday, in which he announced that he was one of the most hated people on the internet. This, of course, is overly dramatic. The vast, vast majority of internet land has no idea who he is.
I can only imagine that this brought forth a stream of praise, worship, and other assorted brown-nosing. Instead of leaving well-enough alone, today Dave went back to the well, writing a pretty long post about his new mission to make people like him.
Some things just cannot be made up.
There’s so much humor in that post that I scarcely know where to begin.
There’s this idea out there that I’m rude and angry and do things to deliberately hurt people. Nothing, I mean nothing, could be further from the truth.
What he probably means is that he doesn’t do things with the sole or primary intention of hurting people. This might be true. There are plenty of examples that would make you wonder, but in most of them you can find a different primary motivation and slide the offensiveness or insult out of the spotlight, either as “unintended consequence” or “nice perk”, depending on how big of an asshole you think he is.
The problem is that people rarely stop to explore the speaker’s intent when they’ve been offended.
Much of Dave’s post oscillates between fishing for compliments and self-aggrandizement. An interesting combination, for sure, but the kind of folks that will take the bait here probably won’t even notice the puffery.
The saddest thing about this whole post, though, comes at the end:
So yes, I am one of the most hated people on the Internet, but I honestly don’t believe what people hate is me, I believe they hate what people have told them to hate.
Even at his clearest moment, he still refuses to believe that there’s something about him that people dislike. Surely it’s not him. It couldn’t be. He’s such a nice guy. Right?
Sure. I’m sure that’s it. People hate him because they just don’t know him well enough.
The real issue, in my opinion, is that Dave has a certain image of himself that isn’t particularly accurate. He thinks that he is kind, compassionate, worldly, and thoughtful. This image is basically wishful thinking, reinforced with years and years of confirmation bias.
Fact is, though, that all too often, Dave is grouchy, arrogant, over-bearing. He always has an excuse for it, to rationalize so he can continue to believe he’s a great guy.
This new mission isn’t going to accomplish anything until Dave can take ownership of the fact that there are people who strongly dislike him because of his own personality flaws and not their own misinterpretations.
Hackers create BotNets to be able to launch “Denial of Service” attacks on site they intend to “take offline”.
I suspect Dave will endevour (once again) to create a StarWars (in the Reagen sense) defense network that attacks anyone that offends him with their writings about him.
That approach will not likely make him the mosyt loved man on the Internet. It MIGHT make him the most feared.
I fear his revenge. He’s pretty ruthless when offended by a critic.
Why do so many blog about him in anonymity? For the same reason they might criticism the King. For their own protections and to make the issue about ideas and NOT personalities.
I think Bart Mandelbrot’s reply to Dave’s ego-wankery exercise is completely on the nose:
“I think you’re overestimating your own importance. Most people ‘on the internet’ have no idea who you are, much less hate you. Personally, I don’t hate you – that’s a pretty strong word. I do think you’re an insufferable jerk with a grossly overinflated sense of self-importance – which you can’t help but expressing even when stating your new ‘mission’ to become less hated. That’s exactly why I unsubscribed from your blog – the few nuggets of interesting information I gleaned were insufficient to outweigh my distaste for your constant negativity and grating tone. If this post hadn’t turned up on Techmeme I never would have seen it. Why don’t you just go away for a while and try to get over yourself. You’re not doing very important work these days anyway. Flickrfan? Newsjunk? Come on.”