Signal Decay
26th May 2021
Severian indulges in a little sociology.
The white pill in all of this, comrades, is that thanks to social media, pretty much all prefab identities are starting to work like that… except one. It’s possible to fake being a member of pretty much every single behavioral subgroup out there, with almost-nonexistent actual risk. It’s more expensive to fake “biker” than “Mob guy,” and “Mob guy” is more expensive to fake than, say, “SJW,” but all of them amount to little more than clothes, tats, and lingo. Indeed, the signal for “SJW” is so far decayed that being #woke is nothing more than a Twitter purity spiral — “Titania McGrath” is a parody, I’m told, in the vein of “Godfrey Elfwick,” but really, who can say? The signal has been completely lost in the noise, and almost all behavioral subgroups are suffering the same fate in the social media age…
…except one. You can change your clothes, comrades. You can certainly change your “gender,” and you can even change your “sex.” But one thing you absolutely cannot change is your skin color. Real blacks, like real bikers or Mob guys, have known this for a long time, which is why guys like Obama and Colin Kaepernick are so obnoxious — they’re not really black, and they know it, because the real blacks themselves let them know, every minute of every day. So, too, soon enough with the other skin color.