I don't want to derail a post that wasn't mine but in the notes of a post, I questioned why people on here make anti-intellectualism a part of their praxis. In response, someone more or less said that on tumblr, there's anti-intellectualism combined with the idea that if any task is difficult to do, then it must be unnecessary or even outright bad. It's a hard pendulum swing from the "work until you die and never take breaks" attitude to "ummm I shouldn't be expected to do anything remotely difficult at all or anything I don't wanna do." If the difficult thing is akshewally evil, then that justifies the tumblr user never trying to better themselves or learn anything.
And I really think they were spot on. There are so many examples of tumblr doing this, but I think a big one is the people defending cheating and plagiarizing with AI in school. There's this idea that if school isn't a cakewalk, then it's evil and oppressive to students, and expecting the students to try and meet deadlines is evil, so they're totally justified in not even bothering to try and outsourcing all of their thinking because thinking is hard and it's very elitist of u to say students should think in school!!11!!! It's not about making learning and knowledge more accessible, it's about attacking the concept of learning itself because tumblr users are largely lazy (and scream in your notifications when you say so--ask me how I know lol) and they need to justify their anti-intellectualism and refusal to improve themselves, so they self-soothe over their own willful inadequacies by insisting the very thing they're expected to do is evil and therefore invalid.
It's fundamentally very childish. Something isn't harmful just because it's hard and potentially makes you uncomfortable. Some things that are very much worth doing are hard. Adult life is full of overcoming difficulties, and insisting you need your emotional support chatbot to do everything for you is essentially shirking adult responsibility. At the end of the day, you can choose to insist that every expectation to do anything remotely difficult is evil and you're justified in your ignorance and willful shortcomings, but the rest of us really don't have to entertain it lol, nor do we have to pretend you're entitled to a credential you didn't earn because you got the digital Magic 8 Ball to shit out text for you. “Cheating is heckin’ valid cuz school is hard and ur akshewally evil for expecting me to learn and feel the slightest struggle” is simply not a serious stance!