: not a blog

23 jan 07

why do you hate wonko?

god. who cares?

because he was mean to me for no good reason over a long period of time. something about my personality rubbed him the wrong way, and to swat at me he would make one-uppish comments, or simply give some variant of "what you just said is stupid".

the whole of his interaction principally takes on the form of a continual game of one-upmanship. he wants to feel powerful, in this text environment where he likes to wave his pretend-scepter about, and he seeks this power by squashing people around him who make their own assertions, present their own personalities, make their own jokes, etc, as opposed to only smiling and listening to his prattle.

a number of people dislike him, from what i hear.

i used to think that our not getting along was just a matter of two inflated egos clashing, but i realized that i got along fine with others who were more narcissistic than either him or me. 'there's just something about wonko'.

actually, it's not that hard to pin down, but just coming out and saying it would make this reponse too short: wonko is an asshole. not a nice or pleasant person. uncompassionate, rude, childish, intolerant, and vain.

i remember one particular incident that was puzzling at the time, but was in fact telling, upon some consideration.

some new user was complaining to me about wonko, and i told him "don't mind wonko -- he's a content-provider", or something along those lines. at any rate, i didn't say anything bad about him. but, nevertheless, wonko had been frantically peeping into the room where i was explaining this to the new user, and started to send me increasingly hostile private messages, eventually culminating with "welcome to the ignore list, fuck-o!" i didn't know what to say.

but then i realized that wonko takes any reference to him in the 3rd person to be a hostile maneuver. it's related to his other achilles heel: having conclusions drawn about the psychological motives for his behavior. anything that makes him feel as though he's a goldfish in a bowl having its glass tapped on isn't tolerated. feeling like others know and understand him, and then write off his totality to be an insignificant one, is a position wonko seeks to avoid.

i needn't mention that any hint in the direction of a discussion as to how he got to be this way (the proverbial "head flushed down the toilet in high school" syndrome) reflexively causes wonko's claws to unsheath. while growing up he couldn't relate to his peers, and so opted instead to believe he was a superior species. a textual environment is a good place to help further this belief into adulthood, because projection is so effortless; if you want a silent faceless presence in a virtual room to be thinking you're great, then, by jove, that's what the silent faceless presence is doing.

something else i've noticed: people who self-identify as "smart" tend to fear and hate having their psychology assessed. i think it's because their brains are all they have, in a sense -- they've equated themselves and their value with their intelligence. and then when you start to pick at this ego construct (the brain/self), it feels like the universe is crumbling.

maybe it'd be therapeutic for wonko to have a roomfull of bots who behaved exactly the way he would like his audience to behave -- a pack of "straight men" who are there to coax out witticisms and insights, and then give him laughs, praise, and nods of agreement, as the situation demanded. robotic flatterers-at-the-court, so to speak -- this might relieve some of the burden on other users.

smj could configure wonko's account so that `$ com`, when typed by the person behind the user "wonko", would launch this quasi-com environment populated by bots sharing names with familiar users. then wonko could get his fix every few days or however often he needs it, and the rest of us won't have to suffer the burden of his text.

but it doesn't matter, obviously. the SDF social scene is a mostly-unpleasant waste of bandwidth, time, and LCD-juice. i thought i would be able to get into it again, but either it's changed or i've changed, and i can't get too interested.

i don't want to talk about wonko anymore.