All things must fall into a rigid binary. Everything. The right-wing rainbow is just a block of red next to a block of violet. When they do black and white photography they take it literally — max contrast, only solid blacks and solid whites. It’s all hex #000000 and hex #ffffff. It’s ridiculous.
Here’s the latest imaginary binary, wordcels vs shape rotators. There are only two kinds of brains!
Quick, how many cubes can you rotate in your brain? If you’re struggling to even form the image of a cube in your mind, let alone rotate it, then I’m sorry to say that you’re not a shape rotator. You are, in fact, probably a wordcel. If you have no idea what wordcel and shape rotators are, I will explain it to you, and I’m sorry your curiosity has brought you to this article.
At its base, the dichotomy is simple. Wordcels are people who are good with words. Shape rotators are people who are good with math and abstract thought. Use of the terms has skyrocketed online in the past few months, and especially in the last few days.
I’m sorry, this is insanely stupid. Here’s Marc Andreessen trying to be quantitative and instead coming out as a guy who makes up imaginary statistics to characterize people he doesn’t like.
Why do wordcels win head to head fights with shape rotators? Shape rotators spend 90% of their time rotating shapes and only 10% wordcelling; wordcels wordcel 24×7. Asymmetric warfare, outcome predetermined.
— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) February 2, 2022
Classic wordcel gibberish.
But look, these are bogus categories — there is a spectrum of mental ability, with different people having a different range of abilities, it’s not all one or the other. Further, individuals vary over time: when I’m writing something other people will have to read, I’m thinking about the words, even if the subject is something scientific. I can also get locked into problem solving mode, where I’m wrestling with abstractions. When I used to write code — and I’m sure some of you are familiar with this — I’d get into the zone where your brain is 100% machine, focused on tracing multiple lines of logic to track down a bug or implement some novel and non-intuitive function. It was great until you snapped out of it at 3am and forgot where you were or how to speak. I’ve literally had moments of verbal paralysis where my brain had to stop carrying out spatial deconvolutions to remember what English was.
These loons are taking the variety of entirely human modes of thinking and trying to cluster them into two terribly unuseful discrete and rigid “types”. People don’t work that way!
But there is a purpose to their madness. Once again, it’s a verbal — dare I say “wordcel”? — tool for conservatives to attack the left for being inferior thinkers while simultaneously patting themselves on the back for thinking like “scientists”. Let’s label those loser Woke folk with a shiny new derogatory term, never noticing how unscientific their whole approach is.
Much of America’s culture war can be cynically flattened and viewed through the lens of these two words; “woke” wordcels live in the land of philosophy and books and liberal colleges, clinging to ideals espoused in their precious books, tweeting about Wordle, while shape rotators are out here coding, building businesses, doing engineering, etc. etc.
And oh, boy, here comes the validation they need:
So goodbye STEM under the wordcel woke onslaught @pmarca https://t.co/fGW8TuuyPx
— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) February 3, 2022
Hah. I doubt a Jungian psychologist can spin even one three-dimensional cube in his mind!
Sheesh, now I’m doing it. This is stupid. Still, it might catch on with all these right-wing aliens from Remulak.