Un Populi

The latest "unpopular opinion" trend seems to be jumping on the bandwagon of criticizing Blue Origin flight 31 for Likes and other social media attention. Because of course it is. Genuinely unpopular opinions, when expressed on social media, earn crickets at best, and commonly attract reams of negative commentary of their own.

I, for my part, don't really have much of an opinion on space tourism. If Jeff Bezos wants to launch his fiancée and a bevy of celebrity women into sub-orbital space, it's his money. I think that attempting to cast it as a sort of "one giant leap for womankind" was a bad idea; but the online bickering over whether any or all of the women count as "astronauts," if the flight was "inspiring" or the degree to which misogyny is playing a role in the teapot tempest this has stirred up has faded into so much dueling virtue signalling.

And I think that this is where the "unpopular opinion" trend has gone. As noted, in a venue where the goal is to gain social credit, genuinely unpopular opinions have no place; being the odd person out on a topic that people sincerely care about tends to be a one-way ticket to vitriol, if not death threats. Even on a platform like LinkedIn, where most users are commenting under their real names and their profiles include enough information to uniquely identify them, they'll unload, without a second thought, on others who say things they don't appreciate.

Being just another among many to say what others are thinking doesn't carry the same sense of courage and free-thinking that pushing back against an imagined consensus does. But maybe it should. People cast their circles' conventional wisdom as unpopular opinions because jumping on the bandwagon has a negative connotation. But if people clearly appreciate the 50th, or 5,000th, person posting the same thought online, why maintain the pretense that there's something bold and iconoclastic there? Why create the idea that there's a legion of wrong-thinking sheeple that one is rising above, when instead there's an entire audience whose egos are clearly being stroked?

The list of virtues and vices people may have should be allowed to keep up with the times. If conformity to ideological viewpoints is seen as virtuous, then let people be open about the fact that they're publicly conforming, and that they're rewarding people for that conformity. It's the only way for honesty to also be a public virtue.