Comment by rsp1984
1 year ago
It was a well planned and executed publicity stunt:
1. Maximize attention on social media by being super obnoxious and arrogant ("dawg I ChatGPT’d the license")
2. 1 day later while the chatter is still going, write a mea culpa and take on the poor victim role ("grew up in a single mother household on government subsidies")
3. --> Repair most of the reputational damage but keep all the attention.
None of this is illegal, but it's exploiting a system of mutual trust and I wouldn't want to live in a world where everybody acted like that.
P.T. Barnum once said, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity,” which is almost as good as Oscar Wilde’s version, who put it like this: “There’s only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
Thus is the new norm. It plays well with how the platforms distribute content. I have faith that history will not remember those.