Has post-irony ruined the internet?

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I don't think it's a coincidence that the rise in post-irony, politicization and cynicism coincided with the rise of social media as the dominant platform.

Before the widespread social media almost everyone on the internet - even sign-up forums - was an user. When you went on the internet the 'real world' - outside of news - was mostly left behind. There were a few exceptions, but they they were just that: exceptions. And it wasn't in-your-face as it is now.
There are no women on the internet was as much a joke as a statement that sex and gender didn't exist. Race didn't exist. Nationality didn't exist. And if the latter did it was mostly in relation to timezones and latency.
You didn't sign up with your real name, and in fact were discouraged from doing so. If you tried to draw attention to your real self you weren't just an attention whore, you were probably an idiot too.

Irony was just irony without being post-ironic.
Shitflinging between Euros and Americans was ironic. Trashing religion was ironic. Saying nigger or 'hating' Jews was ironic. A picture of Bush Jr. holding corn was just ironic. Forums and communities didn't have laundry lists of rules against 'racism', or 'Rated PG Parental Guidances' because those were rarely necessary. 'Trolling' was mostly just dedicated shitposting rather than the kind of vicious smear campaigns we have today.
It was all "For the lulz". Everyone had the piss taken out of them. And it was fine because it was all a joke.

Then comes the rise of social media. Suddenly there is this pressure to have and maintain an identity. And unlike previous forum names and trip codes, it was to be cross platform and indistinguishable from your real life identity. You no longer left your baggage at the door; you were to take it with you everywhere you went.
Now we have to sign up with our real names, we are clearly male or female, or any of the other dozens of genders and sexes. Our 'race' matters, our jobs matters, what we write on other websites matters. And all the shitflinging of yesteryear is now serious business.
In fact, all of it is now serious business. What I am in my daily live is now of utmost importance online. And even if I don't want to, it follows me if I'm not careful. There are only a few refuges left.
And I'm not even talking about embarrassing stuff. Cases of wrongthink or upsetting the resident circlejerk are met with people shifting through your personal life and those of everyone you know with the purpose of completely destroying you.

What at first was just for the lulz has been replaced with this distinct nastiness. And all those communities that pretended to be retards for laughs ended up attracting people that were dead serious.

It's weird to think I've been part of something that my friends and family have never experienced or inquired about. This culture of cultures, a gateway into the abyss.
The pioneer spends no time more than necessary away from exploration. The internet has become smaller now, and pioneers find their discoveries to be niche. Soon everything will be centralized and controlled.
Perhaps there's greener pastures for chan culture, for those edging and willing to find uncharted lands. Perhaps we'll stay there until civilization rolls in. I refuse to believe the people here who seek the darkest corners will let their passions of discovery die out.

I blame MySpace. But then again putting up personal info isn't something new. Remember when the internet was full of geocities homepages for your dog?

Irony is self informed hypocrecy. When a person says "they're doing it ironically" they know they are hypocrites and that they ran out of logic to twist

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Actually trashing religion was serious from the start.

STOP

Zizek agrees
youtube.com/watch?v=Zvdmnk7cJ4Y

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How many people here think we are about to start the post-physical era?

good post tbh

There was a shitload of drama even back in the early 2000s. I've seen a lot of people blame the internet being shitty now on narcissism, and i feel like that misses the point. Even if you didn't type in your real name to most people they still assumed being Dickman1235 or whatever as a real identity. Almost every big problem you can point to internet communities has it's roots in real life social problems

I'm in the same demographic, But I never supported the way things changed.

Dickman1235 is your identity just on that one place, though. You might be called out around that site, or maybe a few other places, but the internet changed when it was expected that you'd be putting in your real life identity. Now there is very little distinction between real life and online life.

good post but when you say nothing new is being created I think you mean nothing new is being ~financed~
there are a billion new ideas, people have teeming minds bursting with creativity dispite the education system's practically overt mission to stop that from happening. The issue is more that it costs double for the security for Mrs.Trump to live in a golden tower than it does for the entire annual national endowments for the arts. Remember in seasame street when they had little segments of animation from someone who obviously did LSD? Remember animation? Remember a middle class of people sustained on industries like music? Remember 150k/yr saxophonists? Remember Reading Rainbow?
I blame the actual structure of the internet, everything becoming browser based etc. and I mean the original intention of internet founders was to have it so whenever you add useful data to the network, you get a small micropayment. Instead, as it turned out, facebook and google steal your data, then try to sell it back to you in the form of advertisement. The internet as we got it is just totally random data, that's why the peak of it's experience was the 'random' board 4chan/b/ 2004 (newfags gtfo). But if Fb and other evil monopolies simply monetized, then we could sustain a middle class around paying you for your own funny ironic meme page or whatever.
There's a way out, a light at the end of the tunnel, gentlemen, and that is called the install GNU/Linux and go to >>>/gnussr/ pill. Because free exchange is communism.
I think that once we all are finding ourselves communicating and expressing freely on decentralized platforms, free from backdoors and surveillance, with likeminded individuals then a dual power will seriously start to take off and blossom. With this, new life and new culture. The Ancaps that recently won out on bitcoin need to loosen their values for a minute alongside the commies who need to actually use money and wield power to get what they want done. ∀ little ketchup and mustard to smash the state.

I actually invest regular time in maintaining and being the sole content creator for a moderately big meme page on FB (it has good engagement with 2400 page likes, which is good considering memes are non-english, written in my tiny euro language for my small home country audience).

It's really funny how I have been in this ironic chan culture since 2009 now and have always enjoyed chans as my hobby, coupled with learning chan culture and history, collecting memes and what not, but since social media emerged, I realized that for the sake of my professional career, I need to utilize social media. I created that meme page initially out of boredom, but some memes struck accord with normies and I though I could try and use this meme page as a tool to learn what kind of normies like which memes. If you wish to do the same, here are some basics:

I know nobody asked for this autistic greentext guide but I thought it's relevant to this thread if some of you have been wondering how to have fun herding normies with your superior chan knowledge of memes :'(

Fuck I forgot to add that I wanted to learn how to play around with social media algorhythms so I can later implement them to my professional career pages in social media.

I just realized this thread makes me so sad that PhpBB forums are a dead thing. Used to be an admin of one of the more active forums back in a day.

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Umm… that's a cursed image, because that's not Descartes, that's Voltaire.

Truth is irrelevant on the internet.
There is an image of a man and a caption claiming that the man is Descartes then the man is Descartes.

Yeah, and the quote is actually from Rousseau.

Was the internet a mistake?

And neither of them ever said it but that's the "joke".

I've never had a social media account outside from a high school Livejournal in the dial-up days, under a fake name. I'm so glad for this. It's the one thing in my life I did right.

youtu.be/2doZROwdte4
Video talking about a similar topic, Im retarded and cant embed.

great vid

Agreed. I've never done social media, I never will.

Pre-commercialisation was the old internet.
You faggots have no idea what it was.
Everything you have consumed is that, consumables.

I'm online because after escaping it, I made such horrific mistakes in my life that i was forced to return. Now my life is irredeemable, my health ruined and my mind inoperable.

Thanks, it is interesting to learn about this sort of stuff.

Is this edgy or sad.

remember when old people acted like old people?
shit is so fucked

Is this that video where a guy who's never read DFW simplifies his entire message into poptimism for the sake of his shallow yootoob video?

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You're welcome. One thing I can assure you all is that alt-right memes are not popular at all, most normies don't even recognize Pepe, only the really #woke freelance journo types and other chan autists do.

Social media happened.

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I better call my boss and tell him I won't be at work today because I'll be too busy hanging myself.

Me too, that is in part a big reason why I am here. Those people who "grew" up on 4chan ended up blaming the wrong things for their lives being stagnant for the last 10-15 years. I was always trying to find an economic reason. It led me to the right and Ron Paul and then to the left. Funny thing, I never was just a rank-and-file Democrat at any point.

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Words can't express how much I hate Holla Forumsreddit.

No, in 2007 the entry level to use the internet was just lowered.

I honestly would prefer that 4chan just died out at this point. It's well past its prime and at this point it's basically just a subreddit.

About right.
God, I miss the Patriotic Nigras

I am so fucking agitated right now.

I wouldn't wish this on any imageboard, not even 4chan deserves that.

Kinda same. Even though there are still some good threads (sometimes) and posters on it, it pains me to see that state of my home board nowadays.

Technology in general was a mistake.
We were much happier living as hunter gatherers.
Our primitive brains didn't fully adapt to living in society yet and this is the cause for most of the pain and suffering we see today.

8ch isn't any different. Ironically Holla Forums is the top board with the least ledditors around. But don't be fooled, this entire site is just a leddit colony.

I wish I could say you're wrong.
Maybe imageboards just can't exist in the new Web 3.0 hellscape that awaits us.

This was me but no ICQ and with a Diablo II shortcut on the background. At least we've proven that the Internet isn't immune to dialectics.

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What did you do exactly, user?

WRONG
They deserve everything for inflicting meme magic and the AR on us.

Watched Lucky Star

I really miss the Flash community. I don't think it is ever appreciated enough, just what we had back then. All those creators animating stuff and making games purely for fun and out of genuine interest. We'll never see anything like it again.

Fuck I miss armor games

That's the natural progress that follows with the decadence of our consumerist society.

how comes every time I visit Holla Forums I get hit with nostalgia

You know what brings real nostalgia? Old forums. It's horrible how few peoppe go there anymore

was I wrong for being optimistic for our future?

YouTube poop is just an inferior knock off of animutations. I miss those

I wish I were rich enough to buy out all of the major social media and web forums and then delete them. The Internet is so dead, I wish lainchan hadn't been abandoned and subsequently overrun by Holla Forumsyps, it was a last refuge of mine.

Back in the early 2000s there was at least the sense that things would get better.

At least you were not the only one, a lot of people thought that Bush was just an anomaly, that after he got kicked out everything would return to normal. Turns out there was no "normal" and the suburban relative prosperity of the post-50's decades was the real anomaly. In the capitalist system, which naturally concentrates wealth into smaller and smaller percentages of the population, underemployment, squalor, disenfranchisement and alienation are the real norm.

i remember still being delusional and euphoric about libtardism

Even early Youtube still retained the spirit of the old Internet. I say 2006 was the last true year for old Internet culture. Honestly nothing after 2006 feels real to me.

The good old 5 star rating, oh how I miss you.

It's weird how completely alien even the idea of the earlier internet feels now. Entire communities build on designing, distributing and discussing content freely are just gone.
I miss this sense of having real distinct communities, or rather being able to find them practically everywhere.
8ch and the smaller (image)boards still have that a bit. But at this point it's not just the real world that flows over into the internet, but places becoming indistinguishable from one-another, or simply dying out.
4chan is a pretty dreary example of this. It hasn't just become "normal", it's indistinct now. Outside a few niche boards it's basically reddit, tumblr, etc. except with 'anonymous' posting. And even then people can't help themselves but bring in Facebook and other normie drama, which itself is just an extension of real life.

What previously felt like this unspoiled wilderness has been changed into this wasteland of market places, social media, advertizing, DRM and carefully cordoned and monitored pens. And if earlier you were encouraged to explore, today's internet entices you to stick to familiar spaces like Facebook.
I feel depressed now.

I know what you feel. I used to be really into Garry's Mod parodies on Youtube back in late 00's and one that I made struck gold and got hundreds of thousands of views. It felt like top-notch irony back in the day, but compared to how cynical and unfeeling the internet has become at this point, that shit feels innocent now.

What's worse is that those niche boards are just lagging behind in the terms of shittyness, for example my beloved homeboard which was once full of proud pissbottle-using NEETs is now on the same level of cancer as eg. Holla Forums or /a/ was a few years ago, ie. latent normalfaggotry which seems decent almost bearable when compared to the post-GG/Trump cancer.

This. Cities are abominations.

Yeah, it was so much better back in the day when you could die at 25 of teeth infection.
Get an internship in a farm or do some wwoofing for several months, it will cure your "return to nature" fantasy quickly.
Pre-modern life was boring and stupid.

hurts don't it

It's fucking funny how this didn't happen in Japan. If anything, cellphones have always been a huge part of 2ch.

Very relevant: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galápagos_syndrome#Mobile_phones

Meh, the first imageboard filled to the brim with otaku, Futaba, has had a board about parenting (yes, seriously) for quite some time.

great thread could use a BAMP

This is why so many Japanese websites had old ass looking designs and still do, to make them easier to browse in cellphones.

What was your home board? Mine was /sp/.

he's referring to /jp/

All a man really needs to be happy is just a house, a wife, a family and collecting and seeing the full result of his labor.

Good goyim. Do not draw attention to 🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧us🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧 please.

It's because to get access to the internet pre-2007 you had to be a tech-wizard in the eyes of the normies.
Back then, everyone who made it to the internet usually met close-knitted communities and it was them, who had to fit in.
But with the entrance requirement lowered there was a mass influx of users who just overwhelmed the close-knitted communities.
Most of them still would be unable to use a forum nowadays, but what for, there are sites like tumblr and facebook specifically casualised and catered to their abilities.

Blame kikebook

No, you had to have money.

who /had dial-up/ here?

I am so sick of watching anything resembling culture being ripped open for profit. The fact that the budding cultures of the internet even 10 years ago have already been destroyed and replaced with facebook "culture" is absolutely horrific.

I honest to god hope there's never a furry facebook but it looks like they're targeting us too now.

No. Not really.
By the end of the 90s-early 2000s the internet was already something well known and any idiot could simply put the AOL 5.0 CD in the tray and follow the easy steps to connect to the internet.
What I believe really brought the normies in was the spreading of broadband connections and all the shit it made possible thanks to le web 2.0, cancer like social networks and stuff.

This. I'm 25, but getting old isn't fun.

Wasn't that when AOL opened Usenet for retards? Not that I would remember, I was busy shitting my diapers back then.

I remember when I used to ask my mom to quickly browse sites about Star Wars and shit and download them, so I could then read them without wasting money. Good times.

It's weird how we had to watch how much Internet to use.

Don't forget THE CAKE IS A LIE XD

I want to get off Mr. Bones Wild Ride

fuk. every time I see posts talking about runescape back in the day, it makes me want to play RS classic, but then I realize it will never be the same as back in 2006-2007.

Just like TF2

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Im seeing a lot of nostalgia here. I think the problem is that we are/were so wrapped up in the present that it is/was hard to imagine the future.

Why would anyone believe that what was atypical would remain atypical, when we know that capitalism thrives on breaking down cultural barriers and expanding markets? I think that 4channers/early internetters (not one) assumed that their experiences were different because they were different instead of realizing that it was simply the material conditions which were changing.

A related thought I have is that postmodernism et al is not about discovering when things changed amd got weird, but pointing out how weird everything has always been. So the experimentalism of early internet was not the outcome of the eccentric personalities that happened to be the pioneers, but rather that those far out spaces were the outcome of structural economic factors. The audacity of channers corresponds to the audacity of capitalism in the wake of the failure of the soviet union (with a similar associated wake up period occurring now).

Three examples: is it not similar to muh gentrification, where initially weird people move in but pave the way for the commodification of their culture? Then the yuppies move in and they're horrified but it was a logical outcome.

Just like "lasseiz faire" capitalism leading to monopoly capitalism. Now naive capitalists want to return to a time before crony capitalism, yet this state of affairs itself inexorably led to monopoly.

Last, Debord points out in SoS that it is not the youth who bring change, but capital. He says this is new, but was it so different in the time when, say, metal smelting was invented? Its like inventing the sword and having a great time until everyone else has one too and you lose your advantage.

In essence, who are/were you to think that what you were doing was yours or would remain so? Its obvious early NEETs didn't create the infrastructure they used- why would they retain any control over it?

I think technology is making us confront the thorny logic of identity/difference. We want to be different but are we? How will we differentiate ourselves when all our thoughts are immediately transparent? The time is coming. Basically I get that times changed, but there's also the matter of critically engaging our past and present psychology and expectations.

blimp

Screencapped

REEEE stop reddit spacing
Having given this more thought, I agree. I don't think it was the influx of 'normies' as some people claim. The internet as described here survived the popularization of usenet, the advent of browsers, the disappearance of dial-up, even 'primitive' social media such as MySpace and copycats.
I think the problem was allowing commercial activity on the internet in the first place. That created the conditions for the monetization and centralization of the internet. Facebook wasn't a watershed as much as it was milestone within this development.

If we're lucky the commercial and non-commercial internet will just drift apart. People that want a sort of commercial, television experience will stick to their Facebook pond, and hopefully leave the rest alone.
One problem I see though is how people today are introduced to the internet tese days. Search engines at the beginning of the 2000s were pretty sub-par. I recall how you'd enter the internet through communities. Which would link to each other.
But today you can stick to Facebook and never go somewhere else except Youtube and Wikipedia. And even the latter are no longer necessary: You can watch videos on Facebook, and algorithms pick your news. You never have to venture outside.
Below is an interesting article I found that also deals with this.

Iran's blogfather: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are killing the web
archive.fo/Xjn78

anyone else notice after about 2010 4chan became flooded with people DEFENDING parental shit rules? No more angsty teens having their escape, you weren't allowed to say shit without having someone's dad enter the thread and tell you to start being more responsible. There's nothing worse that hearing "advice" from someone who is a dad. You've kind of lost your entire moral credit by then, you made a kid. It has to die now because of you.

Honestly, the "edgy" meme really ruined a lot of stuff in my opinion, internet was supposed to be edgy even in retarded ways, It was part of the charm to do or say the most absolutely retarded shit. This and the fedora meme, not saying they were never used correctly but take stuff like "madness" from newground, creepypastas, gore threads, all stuff that now would be/is called edgy to belittle who partecipates in it. I mean what the fuck? Wasn't the internet supposed to be moronic, childish and irresponsible? Really even the pol phenomenon if you watch it closely is totally unrelated with past internet racism, now it's serious shit. There was a time where serious shit was loathed it had no meaning or power. It's sad not because there is serious shit now but that you can't have fun. I mean even on 4chan hobby boards everyone seems like a pretentious smell farting teacher constantly signalling facebook style

The unfiltered internet as a kid was a great thing. I know it sounds a bit of an over exaggeration but I think it really shaped how a lot of us are today. I'm a bit younger than people in this thread but as long as I can remember I was using it and the earliest I can fully remember is like being like 8 in 2006 and just browsing whatever I could find.
Without that I doubt I would be in this job as I can coast through tech support with just the knowledge I've picked up myself through just being left to it on the computer at home as I never actually had lessons.
I'll be very interested to see how history looks back on that period and whether it even will be remembered past threads like this because I feel like you could write history books on it.

stop this meme.

I think that the way internet currently operates - centralized sites that provide content to passive customers - is the reason here. For example, by using torrent one can easily share HD movies with other people from a home computer and connection; doing the same with centralized servers requires a shitload of capital once you get to the number of customers that Youtube has, and you still can't match the quality. A lone guy can buy server space and make a cozy site, but if it ever gets popular, he'll eventually budge. Especially if lawsuits are involved.

Where do you think the internet came from? Inb4 muh darpa because where do you think the military gets its money from? Taxes on commercial activity. From the very beginning everything on the internet was commercial because it was obvious even then that the creation of data and sharing ideas is commercial. All exchange (of ideas or commodities) is commercial under capitalism. Communism has always been the negation of the project of private property through its completion, through the structural tendency of property to trend toward being ownable by anyone.

I think that early internet users have a lot to be proud of because it did set the stage for everything getting meta and weird like it is now. But where we are now is a necessary consequence and the necessary condition for the next step. Instead of bemoaning how shit only you used to do is now passe and banal, take heart that you have changed the world and can continue to do so. Just as the earlier period of isolated online communities couldn't last, present conditions cannot last either.

The reason why youre all chafing is because your weirdness is now normal and you haven't reached the next level in the meantime. If you hate seeing the shit that was yours and that you have defined yourself by being reflected to you from corporations, then you really hate yourself. But thats good because the normies getting edgy now aren't there yet. What's left is to discover what is more obscene than obscene, what your own next steps are, and not to hope that no one catches on. Its good that people catch on- mimetic spread is precisely how communism will be achieved. But that doesnt mean you can't continue to find the true statements that offend people at whatever stage of development. Just dont expect that youll never have to move on because ideas will only keep spreading faster and faster.

Hold up, I was on the Internet in 94 if that qualifies me as being apart of it. Sure, I was a kid and didn't know much outside of my ISP's directory and early search engines or site lists but "pre-commercialization" Internet was just a hobbyists pursuit. Discovery.com simply had a picture of a butterfly I remember. Cartoon Network's website just had a listing of their shows and a Space Ghost banner. Chat rooms still had trolls and provocateurs too.

From my understanding there was even a "REEEEEE NORMIES" phase when the Baud came integrated into PCs in the 80s on the BBS. They called them Christmas newbies as we call our summerfags today.

One of the first "FUCKING NORMIES REEEEEEE" moments happened with Stallman and Xerox: oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch01.html To commemorate the event, installing printers on GNU/Linux is to this day a pain in the ass.

Same here, I've been going on /lit/ regularly for years, but it's becoming fucking unbearable. Half the the threads are about shitty youtube meme philosophers and its easy to tell most of those petersonposters don't even read

We don't need irony or sincerity. What we need is authenticity.

How could you forget about September?

back in the 60s when the marxists realized their bloody utopia failed they said "well that didn't work lets try something else" so they shifted their focus to culture and turned into postmodernists the worst of which was Derrida… this man simply hated the west because he saw power structures everywhere so essentially post-irony is cultural marxism because it subverts absolutes in the sincere values that were passed down to us through the stories in the bible this actually reminds me a quote from Nietzsche who by the way predicted exactly whats going to happen so anyway Foucault was a big fan of Nietzsche and he wrote a lot about power like biopower for example and its because the cultural marxists are obsessed with power they just want to control you because they cant climb up in the dominance hierarchy so once you take that into account it becomes bloody clear that post-irony is just a leftist coping mechanism and because they hate hierarchies so much and lets face it the west became the best of all possible worlds because of competition and hierarchies the postmodernists want to destroy it so really this whole nihilistic irony in shows is because the cultural marxists took over the humanities and the show writers graduated from socialist institutions to write nihilistic hedonistic shows where the characters like the show are low in the dominance hierarchy so they self-critisize so you wont be able to do it to them and that brainwashes people into believing postmodern thinking so the so called "patriarch" male gets pacified and we know from genesis that when the snake offers the apple of knowledge to Eve she causes Adam to eat it too and they are kicked out of the garden of eden and everything gets worse from there so you could say that the snake is a postmodernist trying to lure in the woman who gets indoctrinated into cultural marxism and then pulls the man into it and then God kicks them out for disobeying so their actual utopia is lost and I'm afraid we're on that road since a lot of young women are being caught in this postmodernist trap because of leftist brainwashing in university and a lot more women are graduating than men while men feel less and less valuable and you can think of God as being reality who will kick us out of our first world nation into a dictatorship if we keep going that way its not too late she still didnt take a bite out of the apple but were getting there so God didnt want you eat from the tree of knowledge because he wanted you to be ignorant but because its bad deceitful knowledge that will only cause you harm and the snake being Satan ruler of the material world does it to gain control over man so are the cultural marxists who are just seeking power ironically Derrida the father of cultural marxism wanted to dismantle power structures but at the cost of destroying everything western so if you want to avoid being a postmodernist stop watching nihilistic shows and clean your room instead sunshine and read Solzhenitsyns book the gulag archipelago and then you will know that communism killed 100000000000 people and it bloody terrifies me that people think it "wasnt real communism" so you think you will be the "good Stalin"? think again sunshine women and men are biologically different and its the cultural marxists that try to deny this but accuse me of biological essentialism although theyre the worst racists of all because they think black have their opinion formed by their race so here it is again we see relativism and thats really what post-irony is all about because of leftism

cool pasta

This is what happens when you actually take the "reddit spacing" meme seriously.

think again sunshine

Can't argue with any of your points but we had Shrek is love Shrek is life 7 years later so I'd say we're sailing even atm.