Can you be a bit more precise for what you mean? Even though I’m well aware of the Dark Brandon meme, I still don’t know for sure what you’re referring to.
tl;dr Dustin Moskowitz taking further his use of dank memes to make himself and EA more relatable, by becoming a notorious edgelord, like Elon Musk, or Biden, in the form of Dark Brandon, was something I thought could potentially be a good idea. I’ve since concluded it’s unnecessary, especially given a downside risk like how doing so might inadvertently cause a toxic cult of personality around an unwitting Dustin.
Sometimes I use shortform posts as a notepad for unrefined thoughts that I might refine later. I posted the last couple on mobile which maybe has a default tag of ‘frontpage’ that I didn’t notice. Those shortform posts wound up on the frontpage by mistake, so it’s fair that they were downvoted.
Anyway, what I mean is:
All kinds of people will hate any given billionaire for umpteen reasons. Most of them don’t mitigate it but Elon Musk does by being relatable. A lot of that is by turning his personal brand into one, big, dank meme.
Elon Musk did so in the vein of Donald Trump, by roughly channeling another pop culture aesthetic you may also be familiar with, Big Dick Energy.
Seeing how both Trump and Sanders boosted their popularity by becoming more relatable and leaning into memes as part of their personal brands, juxtaposed with how unrelatable Hillary Clinton was, with her best attempt at a meme being the still cringe “Pokemon Go. To. The. Polls,” Biden has successfully maintained some relatability through the meme of Dark Brandon.
Dustin Moskowitz has become more relatable to the EA community at large through his increased willingness in the last year or two to engage with us directly, and through dank memes. I think this is genuine and has had a positive impact.
EA is sometimes stigmatized as out of touch, elitist and unrelatable. This is in spite of the fact it focuses on activities that, say, the median American may respect: trying to end factory farming and global poverty without overly guilt-tripping average individuals about it; supporting more political stability in a not-so-partisan way; or reigning in out-of-control industries that threaten civilizational destruction.
Like how Biden has wanted to stabilize the economy, defend democracy, and tackle climate change, he’s still demonized as a woke corporate communist dictator. Dark Brandon succeeds as a meme by ironically mocking the idea that Biden is a force of evil when he comes across as the biggest old fogey ever. Likewise, effective altruists are sometimes similarly demonized.
My tentative conclusion was that, if Dustin Moskowitz were to channel the Dark Brandon aesthetic as Elon Musk has been able to channel Trump’s meme aesthetic, could negative stereotypes about EA be turned on their head to humanize the community and make it more relatable.
I’ve concluded the answer is no for multiple reasons, such as the brand of EA not being as bad as feared in the wake of the FTX collapse, and there not being a need of a big, billionaire personality to fill the shoes left behind by SBF, especially because Dustin and the rest of us want to avoid at all costs the risk of him mistakenly falling ass-backwards into a personality cult around himself.
Can you be a bit more precise for what you mean? Even though I’m well aware of the Dark Brandon meme, I still don’t know for sure what you’re referring to.
tl;dr Dustin Moskowitz taking further his use of dank memes to make himself and EA more relatable, by becoming a notorious edgelord, like Elon Musk, or Biden, in the form of Dark Brandon, was something I thought could potentially be a good idea. I’ve since concluded it’s unnecessary, especially given a downside risk like how doing so might inadvertently cause a toxic cult of personality around an unwitting Dustin.
Sometimes I use shortform posts as a notepad for unrefined thoughts that I might refine later. I posted the last couple on mobile which maybe has a default tag of ‘frontpage’ that I didn’t notice. Those shortform posts wound up on the frontpage by mistake, so it’s fair that they were downvoted.
Anyway, what I mean is:
All kinds of people will hate any given billionaire for umpteen reasons. Most of them don’t mitigate it but Elon Musk does by being relatable. A lot of that is by turning his personal brand into one, big, dank meme.
Elon Musk did so in the vein of Donald Trump, by roughly channeling another pop culture aesthetic you may also be familiar with, Big Dick Energy.
Seeing how both Trump and Sanders boosted their popularity by becoming more relatable and leaning into memes as part of their personal brands, juxtaposed with how unrelatable Hillary Clinton was, with her best attempt at a meme being the still cringe “Pokemon Go. To. The. Polls,” Biden has successfully maintained some relatability through the meme of Dark Brandon.
Dustin Moskowitz has become more relatable to the EA community at large through his increased willingness in the last year or two to engage with us directly, and through dank memes. I think this is genuine and has had a positive impact.
EA is sometimes stigmatized as out of touch, elitist and unrelatable. This is in spite of the fact it focuses on activities that, say, the median American may respect: trying to end factory farming and global poverty without overly guilt-tripping average individuals about it; supporting more political stability in a not-so-partisan way; or reigning in out-of-control industries that threaten civilizational destruction.
Like how Biden has wanted to stabilize the economy, defend democracy, and tackle climate change, he’s still demonized as a woke corporate communist dictator. Dark Brandon succeeds as a meme by ironically mocking the idea that Biden is a force of evil when he comes across as the biggest old fogey ever. Likewise, effective altruists are sometimes similarly demonized.
My tentative conclusion was that, if Dustin Moskowitz were to channel the Dark Brandon aesthetic as Elon Musk has been able to channel Trump’s meme aesthetic, could negative stereotypes about EA be turned on their head to humanize the community and make it more relatable.
I’ve concluded the answer is no for multiple reasons, such as the brand of EA not being as bad as feared in the wake of the FTX collapse, and there not being a need of a big, billionaire personality to fill the shoes left behind by SBF, especially because Dustin and the rest of us want to avoid at all costs the risk of him mistakenly falling ass-backwards into a personality cult around himself.