February 12, 2018:

That rejection emphatically includes the small crowd of blowhards who knew my name in high school and turned up on social media thirty years later thinking they were friends.

One's an attorney who made a career of evicting poor tenants from slumlike apartments owned by his corporate employers. Seemingly in his view that makes him an expert in business models. He liked to post back-of-the-envelope arithmetic displaying crass incomprehension which he insisted was definitive. I suspect he was drunk. He certainly was wrong. And certainly was arrogant to imagine he could be right in opposition to the actual experts on the business model in question, myself included. People who lived that life and helped invent the model. I blocked him and moved on.

Another's a successful author of romance novels for bored dimwits. Her opinions were as trivial as you'd imagine. Ignorant conflation of antiwar with counterculture, the Nixon narrative. Exasperating. Unintelligent, uninsightful, unreasoning, untrue. I rolled my eyes before blocking her and moving on.

A third's a would-be cult leader with a craving for control. She postures as Internet Expert, a New Media Marketing Guru, throwing around definitive pronouncements like confetti, as if she were the Pope of Virality. Her advice is generic, one-size-fits-all, but she doesn't know that. She's ignorantly repeating generic, one-size-fits-all advice she's encountered from another loudmouth Internet Expert, another New Media Marketing Guru who isn't. Example: Apple is "closed", so, ignore that entire ecology. As if boycotting the largest consumer electronics company in the world were a winning strategy for sales. Stupid. Aggravating. She knows I work with the real experts, the people who invent the New Media Marketing strategies which actually work. When I need expert advice I can ask the actual experts. Not her. She's about opinion masquerading as expertise. Smoke came out my ears before blocking her and moving on.

There were some dudes who are nice and mean well. But aren't friends, weren't friends then, aren't going to be friends because they found me on Facebook. It's hard to understand what they were thinking. Perhaps it was all about ratcheting up their friend count, I dunno. I blocked them and moved on.

This makes me feel both angry and elitist. Which is fair to no-one. They're just the usual Dunning-Kruger blowhards who think they know, but don't. Ordinary everyday actual residents of the real world, that is to say.

My elitism has a different origin. I grew up being lied to, so that inaccuracy causes me stress. My brain goes, "Uh — wait — no seriously that's not right..." A dance of confusion and alienation I find disorienting, and exhausting.

You can't correct the Internet.

But you can block the ankle-biters and the high school blowhards and the Dunning-Kruger egomaniacs. Life's better when you do.