Nothing is perfect. Perfect doesn't exist. So waiting for the web to destroy that for you seems... delayed. But better safe than sorry. The internet is all about breaking the illusion. So let's crack some walls...
Who Am I?
Excuse Me What GIFGiphyAnonymity!
No way. For all of human history, practically, we've known EVERYONE we encountered. A new person was like seeing an angel. The industrial revolution changed that with huge cities and then the internet provides even MORE anonymity again. This is the unnatural state. We're supposed to know each other down to the colour of our poop as babies.
Finding the Deal...
Going to thrift stores and yard/garage sales. Before everything was sold online it was a great way to find cool/slightly rare things for a reasonable or cheap amount of money. I'd even say that early EBay was still pretty decent at finding things cheaply. However, now everyone thinks that everything they own is a rare, one of a kind, super valuable item that's worth hundreds of dollars.
I think that shows like American Pickers, Storage Wars, and Antiques Roadshow have also fed into this, even though those shows can be fun to watch.
For example: Back in high school I used to go to this indoor flea market and get vintage vinyl for ridiculously cheap. I got The Beatles white album for literally $6. Cheapest price for the same thing on Ebay is around $50.
Agree to Disagree... and so on...
Not saying it was perfect but disagreements were a lot more civil. You used to have to disagree with people in person, it meant you actually had to be somewhat considerate both of their views and of them as a person, and very few people were convinced they knew everything so they were a bit more humble in argument and you usually went for a pint with the person afterwards.
Now you have a screen between you and the person you disagree with which means people don't see the person in the other side of it. They don't have to consider their point if view because they have some echo chamber they can retreat into and indulge in confirmation bias.
And people think they know a lot more than they do because they have google in their pocket so people aren't as humble as they used to be and are not so willing to consider that they might be wrong on something. You also don't have to be around the person afterwards you can act in really bad faith throughout without paying any price.
Like the Movies...
Liking movies or TV shows based on your own opinion. There have been so many times I've seen a movie and thought, "That was a pretty good movie, I wonder what other people thought about it... and my opinion was apparently wrong and I'm a horrible person".
Retouch
adult swim photo GIF by Rick and MortyGiphyTaking photographs - retouching has always existed but good grief, photos are edited to filth, it has become the norm to wear a filter or remove totally normal features to create a glittering perfect shot to post on the internet.
People don't just take photos of things to privately keep as memories, they also take them as a perfect advertisement of their lives. Especially travel photography with the sheer amount of photoshopped monuments and skies, I don't even know what's real anymore.
See there? Trust nothing on the web and also... trust it all. I know, it's a conundrum. You do realize the internet is a host of strangers spewing truth, lies and all of the in between? It's all about relating stories...
Years Later...
High school reunions. No one hardly has any anymore. Everyone can see what everyone is doing, plus it's easier to keep in touch with the people you liked back then.
I keep hearing about classes younger than me (I graduated in 07) that have big fun reunions around Thanksgiving or Christmas.
My 10 year was lame. A lot of people that committed to buying tickets just totally blew off the girl who organized it and she ended up having to pay the difference at the venue. They also blew her off when they volunteered to set things up. Only about 50 people showed up out of the 120 that actually planned on buying tickets. Doubt we'll even have one for our 20th. I thought our class was better than that but I guess not. She was really upset.
"Jennifer's"
Professional photography
I don't think it was ruined because everyone has a great camera in their phones. It was ruined by oversharing.
It was ruined by what are referred to as "Jennifer's" in the photography business. Essentially people who buy an expensive camera, use mostly it's auto functions, and pass themselves off as photographers. They undercharge, produce mediocre/garbage work, and drive actual trained professionals out of business by sheer numbers.
The OG
Having an original thought.
Before the internet, you could come up with a great joke, insight, idea or whatever, and you could go on believing you were the first person to come up with it. Now, almost any such idea that you have turns out to be pedestrian and commonplace as soon as you check with a search engine.
(I want to use a verb other than 'google', since I use DuckDuckGo. It'd be ironic if that was an original idea.).
Don't Doubt Skill...
Video games, but in a very specific way.
Specifically with competitive games. Playing against people is freaking amazing, and testing your skill at the game is something I love more than you could imagine. What got ruined was now for every little thing there's 20 articles about it and 300 youtube guides from pros on how to just META cheese anything.
It's completely unfun facing someone, and 10 seconds in you can tell the EXACT IGN page they ripped off from; and now instead of fighting them, you're fighting the strategy made up by the best player in the game. It's the must unfun, unoriginal experience and the entire time you just wait for it to be over. RTS games used to be tons of fun, but now there's a play-by-play guide for each second of the game. Games like TFT for League of Legends are only fun for the first 2 days before everyone and their mother plays ONLY the very same META OP 100% KILL THEM KOREAN STRAT from Youtube. Even fighting games like Smash brothers suck now.
I remember playing smash 4, and just horsing around with a buddy. He refused to do anything but play Mario, grab D-Throw up-tilt, up-tilt, up-tilt, up-tilt, Up-special true combo, rinse and repeat until 78%, fire ball to 80+, then grab>Pummel>side throw, footstool. Every single game, hours a day, for weeks because that's what the guide said to do.
I'm so bitter about it.
We Love Karen...
Megan Mullally Nbc GIF by Will & GraceGiphyThe name Karen. Might not have been "perfect," but boy was it ruined.
Information in general. Truth, maybe... The Internet made it so easy for malicious people to spread false information. The increasing popularity of any opinion makes it easy for people to have a bias regarding its truth. I hate it so much that I have stopped correcting people on the internet.
Ok. The best we can do is the best we can do. The internet can only host so much. So let's just figure out the nonsense together. This way no one is disappointed from what we thought was true.
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There are times it can be kinda sorta funny though! Here are some examples.
U/GregTheGreat657 asked: What is the dumbest lie that was actually believed?
The main culprits of these kinds of fibs are usually family members. Oh, the things they think they can get away with.
Seems legit.
My grandfather told me he got his gold tooth from not putting his tongue in the area he lost his baby tooth from. I'd try to get a gold tooth every time but I'd always cave at like a day or two.
It would be very, very hard not to cave. imagine if you did, and you fought the urge to put your tongue in your empty tooth, and then you didn't get a gold tooth.
Are you trying to poison me?
gross pie face GIFGiphyGrowing up my dad told us kids that eating pie without ice cream was poisonous. My mom thought it was funny until one day, when my dad was working out of town, she tried to feed us pie without ice cream and we all believed she was trying to poison us and would not eat it.
Pickle juice is good for a lot of things...but not that.
That drinking pickle juice will dry your blood up. My mom told me that (we're from the South we believe a lot of stupid stuff). IDK where my mom got it.
When I pointed it out to my High School Home Ec teacher she just looked at me like I was a moron... and I was an honor student.
It's actually good for muscle cramps.
Spotify is evil, but only because of the commercials.
My dad had weird rules to music. For the longest time I believe that Spotify would make me lose my hearing because he told me that the app used a certain frequency that the army used to torment POW.
Turned out he just didn't like the fact I was listen to music he hadn’t pre-approved.
It sucks when the people in authority you’re supposed to trust end up making stuff up. It can get extreme sometimes!
This is why I don’t work at an office anymore.
Matthew Perry Cubicle GIF by Nick At NiteGiphyI was working for a midsized company. One day we had a company meeting where the CEO gave a speech where someone asked if they were going to put in cubicles. The CEO swore that there would never be cubicles at a company he ran. We all believed him.
Three weeks later workers showed up and started assembling cubicles. Then we had meetings with our mangers where it was explained to us that they were not cubicles. They were 'work stations' and anyone who said the word cubicles would be fired.
That’s a very elaborate lie.
I called out from work because I was sleepy and wanted to rest. Problem is, I'd been legit sick the week before. So, nobody would buy that I was sick again.
So, I called the boss and told him I'd stopped off at the bank on the way to work, witnessed an armed robbery there, I was the only person who could identify the perp so I had to go to the police station, fill out a bunch of reports and sh*t and then sit in on a police lineup to make sure they had the right guy.
The boss was usually kind of a d*ck. But he went for it, no questions asked.
Compulsive liars are the worst.
In college it was always a struggle to get home for the breaks. I lived over 3hrs away and my parents never came to pick me up. A guy who was a resident assistant with me in the same dorm said his parents owned a private jet... and offered to fly me home for the upcoming holiday. He talked about it for weeks prior to next break, told me the type plane, all the other people he was taking and other details. I even turned down rides to go home.
Welp. It was all a lie. I was waiting with my bags packed ready at the correct pickup time (early in fact). He never showed up. There I was waiting when another RA saw me and asked when I was leaving for the holiday. After I told him I was waiting and the story he laughed and laughed....then said "Derek? Oh that guy lies."
I had missed all rides and was nearly stranded on campus. Ended up on the Greyhound the next day.
There are times where it’s your own d*mn fault for believing it. But you know what they say, ignorance is bliss.
I cannot believe people still fall for this.
lisa simpson episode 21 GIFGiphyThat vaccines cause autism. Andrew Wakefield, who published the article claiming this, admitted to making it up, but that fact doesn't matter, because people believe him anyway.
If there was anyone I'd kill with a time machine, it would be him because that has a very specific butterfly effect.
We’ve all told this lie.
I never fart in front of my husband. It happens once in a blue moon. A few years ago it did happen, he was thrilled but I convinced him that the noise was from the chair I was sitting on. I lived with that lie for about a year until I told him the truth.
How did the collectors fall for this?
In the 1800's, a man named Denis Vrain-Lucas forged tens of thousands of fake letters from historical figures. He made hundreds of thousands of francs from prominent French collectors by selling documents supposedly written by Biblical figures such as Judas, Mary Magdalene, and Pontius Pilate, and got away with it for years. This would all be pretty understandable--except that all the letters were written in modern French, on watermarked paper.
As I'm writing this, my husband told me a story of his own. When he was a kid, his dad told him that salt and pepper were opposites. Meaning that if you used too much of one, you could use the other to even it out. Eventually he learned better, because his cooking is next level good.
Stop falling for dumb sh*t. This isn't just a reminder to you, but also one to me as well. Because lord knows I've fallen for many dumb lies too
I can't tell you how many times in school I tried to devise cover ups to cover up cover ups. More often than not the planning and execution was a mess but the the stories themselves got so convoluted you'd think I was living in a film parody of The Matrix. Note to self... never steal you mother's jewelry and then try to pass it off as her new birthday present. SMH. I have no explanation or defense.
Never Gone
Erase Parks And Recreation GIF by PeacockTVGiphyEx-UC Davis chancellor Linda Katehi paid $175k to have the 2011 pepper spray incident removed from Google search results for the university, which brought the incident back into the public eye and was one of the scandals that eventually led to her resignation.
In the USSR
The soviet union trying to say that Chernobyl wasn't as big a deal as it actually was.
One of my grandparent's neighbors in Poland was a Belorussian guy from one of the closest towns to Chernobyl in Belarus. The Plant is basically on the Ukraine/Belarus border, and a huge amount of fallout happened in Belarus. No one was informed until everyone else was, even though they got almost as much fallout as Prypiat.
The way he describes it, they were across the border, so they didn't want to share. Even when they did, the Belarusian gov maintained the thought process that it wasn't a big deal, like the USSR was claiming. No one was to be relocated. He was a teenager at the time and left for Minsk as soon as he could because of how pissed off the whole thing made him.
His whole family stayed except for him, farming away while he was in the city and then moved to Poland after he met his Polish wife.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of his family died of cancer.
Dark Waters
The water crisis in Flint.
Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha had been in touch with the Genesee Department of Health for months about Elevated Lead Levels (ELLs), and they went out of their way to obfuscate the data and make it seem like everything was normal. Dr. Hanna-Attisha brings in a research team from Virginia which shows that the ELLs are correlated with zip codes that recently switched water supplies.
They still ignore/deny what's happening. Finally, Dr. Hanna-Attisha says "f**k it", and holds a press conference telling people that their water is unsafe and to stop using it immediately.
A major public health crisis could have been mitigated if the public health officials spent more time doing their job and less time worrying about whether or not it pisses the governor off.
The Papers
richard nixon president GIFGiphyIn 1973 the director of the CIA Richard Helms was worried that the watergate congressional investigations would spill over into investigations into the CIA so he ordered the destruction of all documents related to the MKUltra program.
20,000 documents were incorrectly stored with financial records and were not destroyed. They were later uncovered during an FOIA request and turned over to Congress.
Dodgers
Volkswagen and the emission dodging.
What was surreal was seeing thousands of them sitting in the parking lot of the Silverdome, the old Detroit Lion's stadium. I live just south of there and to see VWs mistake next to the derelict stadium was a trip. https://youtu.be/jJeYEnSD9G0.
Nevermind cover ups, those are some high crimes and misdemeanors. And so many plagued by tragic loss. Just so everyone knows... the Flint water is still poison. Let's continue...
The Graves
Katyn Massacre or Chernobyl.
Katyn Massacre: Red Army troops during WWII killed and buried 22,000 Polish officers. The German Army found this mass grave and asked the local SS Commander if it was his graves. The SS Commander said it wasn't his graves. The Red Army though insisted it was the Nazis that did it. Boris Yeltsin later admitted to grave in 1992.
Chernobyl: Basically, Chernobyl powerplant's reactor in the Ukraine in 1986 exploded and almost contaminated the whole of Europe. The USSR tried to cover it up, but Sweden detected the radiation from the fallout. Pripyat became a ghost town and the city of Chernobyl (the city the powerplant was powering) became semi deserted.
Lips Together and Blow...
Basically any case involving a dead about-to-be whistle blower. Killing someone is a good way to shut a person up. Its also a very good way of drawing attention to the person and what they had to say. The best way to cover something up is discredit the whistle blower.
Babs
fanning barbra streisand GIFGiphyI guess the Streisand effect?
For those who don't know, someone took a photo of Barbara Streisand's Malibu home and posted it online.
The photo didn't get much attention until Barbara Streisand tried to have the photo blocked for the sake of her privacy
Upon hearing that Streisand wanted the photo removed, the image became forbidden fruit and was viewed millions of times across the internet.
If she hadn't tried to cover it up, no one would have looked.
Karen
In 1974, Karen Silkwood was found dead, as a result of a car crash. Silkwood was a chemical technician and labor union activist who was about the reveal the safety hazards. Despite drugs found on the scene, the police and coroner didn't believe the drug claim and went looking for other likely others. After being informed about death threats from her family, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the State Medical Examiner found radioactive contamination in her body.
This prompted an investigation at Kerr-McGee, the company Silkwood was talking about, which reveal the very problems that were about to going to be exposed to the media. Kerr-McGee had to pay up for what was done as they were held liable.
Oh Florida...
bob ross painting GIFGiphyRecent Polk County, Florida deputies losing (stealing) cash evidence, trying to cover it up, and getting fired.
What have we learned? Nothing right? Read again, just lead with the truth. It'll sting but as you can see... the other options will make it all much worse. This is particularly important for any future politicians following along. Don't be these guys.
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