quoting
naddr1qq…58skAct I: The Mask of Cordiality
What the hell is this "GM"? I see it flashing across my screens every morning. A flick of the fingers, an acronym worth three hundredths of a second. And yet, we still believe in it. The official narrative, the one fed to us by etiquette manuals and cheap psychologists, tells us it's a gesture of openness, a "recognition of the other." Nonsense!
Let's forget about Austin and his performative acts. This isn't performance; it's automatism. It's the Pavlovian reflex of the digital human being who is afraid of silence. The true intrinsic value of "GM" is relief: the relief of not being alone for a moment, of receiving a ping that confirms our existence in the vast sea of the web. But it's a false, drugged relief, because the one who uses it isn't truly "recognizing" anyone. They are punching their membership card. It's the "present!" of the army of conformists.
If in Homeric poems the greeting was an epic of words that sealed alliances and destinies, today "GM" is the sigh of a flock afraid of getting lost in the fog. Where has the dramatic tension of human interaction gone? Gone, swallowed by the laziness of two letters.
Act II: The Functional Deception (or the Drug of Efficiency)
"But it's efficient!", the technocrats will scream. "It serves to initiate interaction!". What interaction, pray tell? It's the interaction of a robot pressing a button. Its effectiveness is that of a dose of morphine: it calms you, gives you a false sense of control, but it doesn't cure the disease.
The disease is fragmentation, loneliness, the inability to start a complex discourse. "GM" does not solve these problems. It anesthetizes them. It deludes us into thinking that throwing a pebble into the digital pond is equivalent to taking a swim. It is functional to the system, not to the human. The system wants flows, attention, data. And "GM" generates flows. It's the fuel for the engine of engagement. But for us, human beings, it's just a surrogate, an emotional fast-food that leaves us hungrier than before.
Act III: The Great Betrayal of the Market (or the Punch in the Gut)
And here we come to the point that infuriates me the most: the exchange value. Here the betrayal is consummated before our very eyes. Those charlatans, the crypto-influencers, had the audacity to transform the most human of greetings into a token, into a tradable commodity.
Is "GM" worth dollars? Then it's worth nothing in humanity. They sold the last shred of authenticity on the altar of speculation. It's the height of hypocrisy: they boast of community, family, positivity (the famous "vibe"), and in the meantime they use this word as bait to attract suckers to be plucked in the cryptocurrency market. It's not a greeting, it's a lure. It's not a value, it's a price. And the price is paid by our dignity.
Act IV: Toxic Sociality and the Dictatorship of the Smile
Let's look at the social value. Ah, the collective! But if "GM" is a glue, it's a glue that excludes. Those who don't say it, those who arrive late, those in the wrong time zone, are automatically outsiders. The community that celebrates itself with "GM" is a sect. A sect that imposes a mandatory smile.
This is the dictatorship of toxic positivity. You can't complain, you can't be critical, you can't bring your bad mood into a group that starts its day with a choral "GM". If you do, you're a spoilsport. It's a mechanism of social control more subtle and more powerful than any law. The pressure to conform is suffocating. And so, where is the ethics in all this? There is none. There is only the instinct of the herd, reassuring itself by barking together at dawn.
Act V: The Symbol That Doesn't Deserve to Be Remembered
And the historical value? How will it be remembered in a hundred years? As the epitaph of our linguistic decadence. We will be remembered as the civilization that reduced the poem of the morning to an acronym, that sacrificed the complexity of the word on the altar of speed.
Or, and this is the only hope, it will be remembered as the germ of a new tribalism, of a new form of global aggregation. But even in this case, it's a poor tribalism, made of codes and not of flesh, of screens and not of gazes. "GM" might survive as the fossil of an era in which communication triumphed over relationship. A sad relic.
Final Verdict
So, what is my judgment on "GM"?
It is a failure. Failed as art. Failed as relationship. Failed as authenticity. It is the digital opium of a people who no longer have the courage to look each other in the eye and say "Good morning" with all the slowness and weight those syllables deserve.
But beware: its condemnation is also its greatness. Because "GM" is a symptom of a desperate need for contact. It is the strangled cry of one seeking a tribe. And this, as pathetic as it is, is profoundly human.
My verdict is relentless: "GM" deserves to be celebrated only as a warning, as the alarm bell of a society that is forgetting what it truly means to meet another person. If you use it, know that you are signing your surrender to banality. If you refuse it, perhaps, just perhaps, you are still fighting for the complexity of living.
And with that, I bid you farewell. But not with a cowardly "GM". With a real, heavy, unbearably slow and magnificent: GOOD MORNING.
Julia de JP on Nostr: GM ...
GM