18 Things The Internet is Way Too Hard On

Image via Complex Original

Pop singers are our modern version of virgins tossed in the volcano. Every so often, the culture feels like we have to sacrifice one of them so that we'll have a bountiful harvest and our gossip rags will continue to move off of newsstands. The Internet's treatment of Miley Cyrus has been the harshest pop star attack since the Britney Spears head-shaving.

Months after our initial twerking outrage, Miley still pops up in the news and whatever-you-call-TMZ, and nobody is sure exactly what sins everyone is so bothered by. She hasn't committed crimes or offended foreign dignitaries like Justin Bieber, yet she is still the target of parody videos and hateful screeds. The sum total of Miley's crimes seems to be that she twerked at a shitty award show, she seems to be having a lot of fun while she is rich, young, and sexy, and she sticks her tongue out a lot. If that's enough to get you pilloried by the court of Internet opinion, there should be a lot more people in the stocks.

In the era of The Wire, The Sopranos, and Deadwood it must have truly sucked to launch an HBO drama. Whoever created K Steet (a 2003 HBO drama I've never heard of either) must have had quite a few stiff drinks as they waited for the sweet release of cancellation. AMC is the new home of unrealistic expectations. After three massive hits (at least from the blogger and Tumblr curator's perspective), whimper after whimper has followed. The Following and Low Winter Sun didn't just get negative reviews from the Internet, television commentators wrote about the shows as though they were personally offended. Critiques of these series read like pleas to the TV Better Business Bureau; people felt they were promised better. Groucho Marx told us "They can't all be gems." As fans of a form that requires executives, writers, and massive crews to all be working in sync, we would do well to remember that.

Complex Sports' own Justin Block had this to say about LeBron's relationship with the Internet:

"No other player in their prime has been hated more and respected less despite their accomplishments than LeBron. Was Jordan, Shaq, Magic, or any other of the game's greats ever treated this way, in such a senseless manner? For every bandwagon Heat fan, you'll find at least two intense LeBron haters on the Internet."

Where does the hate come from? Larry Bird was a shit talker, Jordan was an egoist, yet they never attracted the same levels of disdain. Are we going to blame LeBron for leaving Cleveland for Miami? Every twenty-something in history, except maybe Jim Brown in his prime would have made the same decision. We should find a way to enjoy LeBron in what's left of his prime.

Sports Twitter is one of the cattiest, cruelest places on the Internet. If you think teen girls are harsh on celebrities, just watch grown-ass men talk about athletes, coaches, and sports journalists. Athletes take a lot of shit, but the hate is tempered by the understanding that commenters could never actually play one percent as well as the star they're calling a bum. Every Facebooker and Tweeter, no matter how bad their grammar, thinks they could be a sports writer. Simmons gets more flack than most because he is a product of the Internet. He rose to prominence by writing about sports from a fan's perspective, complete with mailbags and long pop culture sidebars. Though Bleacher Report, KSK, and Deadspin make fun of the guy a lot, they owe Simmons a debt. Their cheeky style is built on the Simmons blueprint.

Since Simmons launched Grantland, his attempt at ESPN meets The New Yorker, he has added the intelligentsia to his list of Internet enemies; they seem to view him and his website as an interloper in the thinkpiece game. Yes, Simmons speaks his mind when perhaps he shouldn't (which has gotten suspended by ESPN), his Boston homerism is the stuff SNL sketches are made of, and the man holds a grudge, but most of his haters are simply the product of envy. Those guys sitting at home live-tweeting exhibition games as snarkily as they can look at Simmons and ask, "Why not me?"

Nothing is more annoying than people getting offended on the Internet. It's grating even when they have a point. Twitter users and bloggers getting up in arms about corporate social media gaffes has to be the most mind-numbing part of the digital news cycle. Do we really need to demand an apology because some intern forgot to switch her Twitter accounts when she went to the bar? Must we punish a brand for clueless hashtagging? On the bright side, it does seem like we are starting to get past our collective obsession with #corporatesocialmediafails. Word is that no one got fired for that plane-in-the-vagina tweet, and that's a good thing. Everyone makes mistakes, even people who write branded sentences for conglomerates.

If memory serves, the only award show that was remotely relevant to the national media fifteen years ago was the Oscars. Now, the New York Times dedicates serious coverage to the MTV Award Shows.  Perhaps there just isn't enough fodder for our never-ending news cycle, but outrage at events designed to provoke outrage feels about as Orwellian as you can get. We have created an award show monster and now we must raise our pitchforks in anger every time a new dumb statuette is given out or the imagined solemnity of these events is violated.

To fill pop culture's gaping maw, we have invented new award shows in recent years. In the last few years, The Billboard Music Awards, The Young Hollywood Awards, and even the American Humane Society Hero Dog Awards have been crammed down our throats. It looks like the Award Show Industrial Complex may never slow down. There is one way to stop these award shows from currying so much Internet favor of course. We could always stop watching them.

If we ran all of the pompous showrunners out of town, we probably wouldn't have many showrunners left. To be clear, Sorkin has his problems; his position on Salon's infamous Hack List is at least partially deserved. Every episode of The Newsroom is a heated race to see if the man understands technology or women less. Will McAvoy's monologues rate so highly on the smug index that they break the scale. But, let's be honest, The Newsroom is not terrible. At times it rises to the level of good. This isn't Two Broke Girls or Mixology. The series is much more like House of Cards: it just isn't as good or important as it thinks it is.

Throwing out his most recent project for a minute, let's remember that the man wrote A Few Good Men, Sports Night, The West Wing, Moneyball, and The Social Network. There's a resumé that, at the very least, isn't something to be ashamed of. Sure, the guy puts his foot in his mouth from time to time, but beloved outspoken white men Kurt Sutter, Matt Weiner, and Dan Harmon aren't exactly known for their diplomacy either. It might be time to let the man write his seven-page walk-and-talk scenes in peace for a while, and then maybe he'll come back with something better than The Newsroom.

Fedoras have become shorthand for out of touch, misogynistic nerds. Yes, there are certainly enough pictures of fedora wearing cretins on Reddit to support this theory, but let's take a moment and separate the hat from the men who wear it. Fedoras used to be the go-to hat of detectives, gangsters, and rakish whiskey-swilling businessmen. The socially awkward have appropriated the hat in recent years because, to them, it suggests that no, it isn't that they're uncool, it's that they were just born in the wrong time. If they had come of age in another era, they would be suave gin bootleggers or something. Yes, that's weird and creepy, but just because the fedora is a big part of nerd delusions doesn't mean that hat itself is that bad. Wouldn't you rather see a fedora than a Corona straw hat or a visor with hair stuck up through it? If Justin Timberlake can embrace the fedora, maybe you can too. 

Every couple of weeks the Internet asks us to be outraged by a poor tipper or rude customer at a restaurant. Inevitably, the story is more complicated than the victimized server lets on. Even in cases when a customer is actually a dick (like the "I give God 10% why should you get 18?" lady), it is hard to justify scorn and threats from millions of Interneters as a fair reprisal for one comment, no matter how snarky. Many of us who have ended up producing content for the Internet had shitty jobs . Every writer, actor, artist, and filmmaker seems to have worked in a restaurant at one point or another. We're sympathetic, and we should be, but that sympathy should maybe manifest itself in some way other than poor tipper witch hunts.

When is George R.R. Martin going to finish the A Song of Ice and Fire Books? Whenever he wants. What will J.K. Rowling write next? Whatever she wants. Different art forms come with different demands, and novels take a long-ass time to write. If the general attitude of the Internet is to be taken a face value, we would like it if every popular author was chained to their desk and forced to deliver us volume after volume of the same story until they keel over and die. Once that happens, we had damn well find a few long-lost manuscripts to publish posthumously. The Internet behaves as though an author who doesn't spend every waking moment expanding their signature world has betrayed us. As an Internet, we need to stop believing that these writers are personally torturing us by not finishing more books we love. Perhaps they aren't playing some cruel joke on us, but writing sprawling genre fiction in thousand page installments, is, you know, kind of hard.

There are no sure things in life except for death, taxes, and collective outrage at Facebook updates. It seems that we have short memories when it comes to changes to Facebook and Twitter's UI. A change is made, we flip out, we adjust to the change, a new change is made, and we flip out again. Every time one of our favorite websites changes we cry out, "Why couldn't it stay the same! It used to be so simple, so elegant!" Of course, we forget that we've said that exact same thing dozens of times before. On the bright side, this collective freak out is a shared ritual in a world more meaningful connections are rapidly deteriorating.

There are some terrible aspects of bro culture. One need only read leaked emails from a lacrosse team or fraternity to see the awful depths of bro-dom. Though their sandals and cargo shorts make us want to believe that all bros are bad, this minority of deviants comprises a small fraction of total bros. Many bros are fun-loving guys who just don't want to think too hard. Bros and their natural companions, the basic bitches, are usually just trying to have a good time. Sure, that good time involves Bud Light towers, fist-pumping music, and quoting Anchorman (still!), but are most bros really doing us any harm? The depraved actions taken by a few St. Patrick's Day revelers, upstart financers, and Old South fraternities make-up only a small, albeit awful, piece of bro culture (this may also be the only time you ever see "bro" and "minority" in the same sentence btw). Bros are annoying, but while they're taste is awful, they aren't necessarily awful people.

No one enjoys bashing the Tea Party more than I do. How can you not make fun of a red-faced man dressed like a colonial re-enactor angrily waving a flag with a snake on it at an under-attended political rally? Before we return to our regularly scheduled neo-con mockery, let's think about where the Tea Party came from in the first place. A big chunk of the Tea Party's anger comes from frustration with urban liberal intellectuals (us) ignoring or mocking their point of view. How do we respond when they express their concerns? Well, we mock their point of view some more. Though you may love bashing Marine Todd  and misinformed aunts, we should ask ourselves if it's worth poking this bear so much just because it makes us laugh so damn hard.

This isn't a complaint about the conservative vitriol spewed at Obama. Let's be real, that doesn't really happen on our corner of the Internet. The Obama conspiracy theories and misguided Republican memes only cross our paths when Gawker or BuzzFeed deliver them to us for mockery. The young left needs to stop being so hard on ol' Barry. For half a decade we've created a steady stream of thinkpieces that basically amount to "I volunteered for a few days on his campaign and he hasn't done all the things I wanted." That's how politics works. You devote your time and energy to a cause and then that cause fails to live up to expectations. It's called democracy. Campaign promises are broken because those promises failed to account for resistance from other side in the first place. Just because you rang a few doorbells in Iowa doesn't mean that you get to attack the man for being unable to push comprehensive immigration reform past House racists. Let he who thinks he could possibly reason with Ted Cruz cast the first stone.

Cracked has sneakily been producing some of the best pop culture commentary on the Internet. They are particularly good at analyzing those moments when comedy and political correctness collide. Gladstone's recent piece for them, "Three Modern Satirists Screwed By People Who Didn't Get the Joke" digs deep into the incompatibility between satire and social media. Social media runs on sound bites and hashtags. Satire requires the patience to establish context and mock something by inhabiting that context. You can bet that at least once a year The Onion, The (soon to leave us) Colbert Report, and Patton Oswalt will be dragged across the coals of the Internet for people who didn't watch the entire segment, read the entire post, or view the tweet in context. It's not surprising that there are so few prominent modern satirists. In the mile-a-minute Internet world, there is barely time to process all the headlines, let alone take the time to understand that they were written in jest.

Megastar actresses are managed just as carefully as corporate brands. Jennifer Lawrence is that beautiful swan who still can still channel her inner ugly duckling on command. Emma Stone is a stunner with a touch of the class clown. From their publicist's mouth to Us Weekly's ears. With Hathaway, there has been some kind of brand malfunction. Whatever carefully calculated gambit was intended backfired and the Internet decided they hate Anne Hathaway. And no, they can't tell you why. Theories abound, such as, perhaps, we just hate her stupid face. The truth is that our collective opinion on Anne Hathaway is the same as our opinion of every star, something formed of an unholy brew of gut reactions, mixing up the characters with the performer, and careful spin. It's time we gave Ms. Hathaway break. After all, she was the best part of Les Mis (but yes, that's not saying much).

Your parents' end of the Internet has become just as obsessed with blaming millenials for everything as they have with crediting themselves for everything. We're pretty sure that Time and the New York Times pop off a piece with "millennial" in the title every time they need to nudge themselves over a page view quota. When you search "millenials," the first results bring you titles like "Why Millenials Can't Grow Up" (Slate), "Three Reasons Millenials Aren't Ready For Real Careers," (Business Insider) and "Do Millenials Stand A Chance in the Real World?" (New York Times) I haven't linked to these articles because here at Complex we prefer our clickbait with sideboob or wearing yoga pants, not with a smug sense of superiority. Since the dawn of time older generations have been blaming younger generations for society's ills. It's just a shame that some pretty decent websites are getting so many page views off of this irrational generational tension when they could be spending their time on more high-minded pursuits curating sideboob slideshows, because at least sideboob slideshows have their basis in fact. 

Television finales are held to impossible standards. When you think back on finales that have been deemed by Internet consensus to have stuck the landing all you have are Breaking Bad, The Shield, Friday Night Lights and Six Feet Under. According to the Internet, if you aren't one of the ten best shows ever made, your finale is garbage and the writers are monsters. It seems that with every notable show that comes to end the hyberbole gets a bit more exaggerated, the rending of garments and gnashing of teeth grows a bit louder. You thought that the Dexter backlash was bad, and then How I Met Your Mother ended and things got even worse. The finale of True Detective, a show that had only run for seven episodes, got the thinkpiece machine churning with rage when they ended the show the way that ever Southern Gothic procedural ends. It would be nice if we could just applaud our favorite shows coming to an end rather than accuse finales of retroactively ruining years of viewership; but if we did that, what the hell would all of us freelancers writer about on Monday morning?