Ransomware

This is the headline we've been waiting for since like February of 2020 and it's fucking here: 

People vaccinated against Covid-19 can go without masks indoors and outdoors, CDC says

I've been driving around looking for the rapturous crowds rushing into the streets, but all I get is slow traffic of other suspicious looking weirdos like me driving around, looking for the rapturous crowds rushing in the streets. Imagining this moment a year ago, I would have lost all my money betting the public reaction would be, at best, muted.

That said, I probably could have guessed part of the reaction would be abject hostility, just because I'd been primed by the prior four years that we were living with an endemic chunk of the population determined to take anything positive and turn it into something something antifa something.

I can only go by what I've seen on facebook. I'm one of the few who hasn't cut off every right wing uncle and high school acquaintance who has since become the type of person who quotes Florida Georgia Line lyrics and unironically follows, like, Stacey Dash. I don't even hide their feeds. I'm lucky I can see something pop up that they've sourced from OANN or whatever and not take it as a personal attack or just have my blood boil in the face of such wasted human effort. There's a context to how people think that I'm interested on sociological and historical levels, a context I know I can't recreate or even really fully understand on my own, with my own biases and preferences and habits of thought that somehow do not include multinational plots among secret organizations and entire governments designed to kill just me. Call it humility, I guess.

I even read through some of the hate posts, just to understand, if that's possible. None of them are actual news stories, of course. Each is a commercial and the product they're selling is the click-reader themselves, or more specifically, a version of the click-reader who is likely to both click and read. Which they've already proven they're susceptible to because look, here we already are at the fucking Blaze or what-the-fuck-ever. It's a closed-loop sales ecosystem that conjurs, manifests, feeds, maintains and sustains itself by convincing the readership that a) they are the most important of all the readerships because b) people outside the readership are their enemies and c) nobody else has the courage to tell them This Secret Truth except, by happy coincidence, for the outlet they happen to be reading/watching/experiencing right this second. You should be afraid. Enemies are everywhere. And only one outlet is brave enough to tell you exactly who they are and what they are plotting while you are sitting there playing Fruit Ninja like a good, upstanding American. Fox News is selling more Fox News really and Newsmax is selling Newsmax and Alex Jones is selling... well, a lot of shitty pretend supplements, but also more Alex Jones.

It's "information" in the same way that soap operas are information, meaning it's entirely made-up, goosed for maximum drama and (importantly) serialized so you have to come back tomorrow to see what the libs are up to next. Otherwise you could, you know, die or get injected with a 5G chip or interned in a labor camp for the crime of being white and stupid. At least with the soap operas, all they were selling was the soap.

It's not going to get better just because people can walk around without masks. In some ways it's worse because now we have to deal with people who were already pricks now being insufferable pricks as the first time I show up somewhere, make tan-lines clearly visible, sans mask, I'm going to be doing so with people who never wore one in the first place (because freedom) being like "yeah, look who finally came around." Facebook I can take, but this, this is going to be a hell of a thing.