This bit is the midpoint in a valuable thread on The Philosophy of Shitposting™, and it’s refreshing and thought-provoking to see it spelled out so clearly.
For background, Corey and his company do high-end consulting that can deliver big rewards for large companies, not primarily by helping them control their spending on big metered infrastructure services.
It’s a bit like going over your monthly budget to find the places where you could tweak your cable plan and cancel a subscription you forgot you had, maybe brew more coffee instead of stopping at the shop… but for companies burning millions a year on those services.
The ecosystem he works in is simultaneously Very Serious, Aggressively Techno-optimistic, and soaked in carefully tweaked marketing messaging. ~Shitposting~ is a signal of authenticity, a demonstration of confidence, and a way of cutting through aforementioned marketing fog.
…But it’s frequently an excuse to just be cruel, as well — to deploy constant barbs and snipes and drag down individuals who are trying their best to do good work in systems that they can only incrementally improve, not fix entirely.
I know @karenmcgrane and @beep and I often joke about shitposting as a brand re @autogram_is but we’ve had similar internal conversations about the fine line there, the boundaries between puncturing inflated corporate narratives and cruelty towards the people who do the work.
It’s encouraging to see other folks articulate the principles and explain with reasonable humility that they mess up and have to fix it sometimes. Brands are a plague but humans populate them. It’s complicated.
(Er, primarily… honestly unsure how the ‘not’ jumped in there, gonna blame Siri, because that’s how I roll when the typo is mid-thread.)