“From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls.” ― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
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The ‘rat person’ trend is here – and I thoroughly approve
Do you like sleeping, eating and scrolling? Me too. What if I told you this was also a way to protest capitalism?
Somewhere in Zhejiang province, China, a woman is living my
dream. She gets up in the morning and then, almost immediately, goes back to
bed. She lies prostrate all day long, scrolling, eating some food, opening some
packages, showering at 2am, then snoozing again. As a longtime sleep enthusiast
– and the mother of a child who thinks that 5am is a good time to start the
day, all systems go – I think this sounds like bliss.
The woman in Zhejiang is known as @jiawensishi – and also
“rat person”. I am not being rude; that’s what she calls
herself. There are lots of rat people out there: it’s a whole trend in
China. You might have heard of the “lying
flat” movement a few years ago, when young people lazed around displaying
symptoms of mild depression, and some thinkers, including the novelist Liao
Zenghu, theorised that it was a passive-aggressive resistance movement,
rebelling against the demands of materialism and capitalism. Well, “rat people”
are a rodenty
reboot.
You may be a rat person if you lack any desire to climb the
career ladder as well as any desire to do, well, anything except for eating,
sleeping and scrolling. Moving to the UK is, apparently, a risk factor for
going full rodent. According to the South China Morning Post, “Chinese students
studying abroad in the UK are among the most visible examples of rat people.
Faced with grey, rainy skies and high living costs, many of them choose to stay
indoors, avoiding social interaction to conserve their mental and physical
energy.”
It is a
principle of the 21st century that if something can be
monetised, then it will be monetised. And despite the
fact that rat people are supposed to be rebelling against the demands of hustle
culture, a fair few seem to be leaning into it. A cartoon character called Big
Rat, the unofficial mascot of the movement, has been slapped on merch and reportedly
brought in over one million yuan ($140,000) in sales. According
to Bloomberg,
“One influencer named Wang Yutong has already started using the ‘rat person’
idea to promote a skincare product.”
The crypto kids are going to get in on this and we’re going to have a RatCoin soon, aren’t we? You can stay in bed all you like, but capitalism doesn’t sleep.
The
‘rat person’ trend is here – and I thoroughly approve | Arwa Mahdawi | The
Guardian
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One Third of Americans Believe Russian Disinformation
NewsGuard-YouGov Survey Finds: “In the ongoing battle between fiction and reality, fiction — much of it created by Russia’s robust disinformation machine — appears to be winning. A national YouGov survey commissioned by NewsGuard found that one third of Americans believe at least one false claim being spread by Russian media outlets. The survey, conducted on a representative sample of 1,000 Americans, presented respondents with 10 false claims that have spread widely online, including three that originated from or were primarily spread by Russian media outlets.
Respondents were asked to identify whether each claim was true, false, or whether they were unsure about its veracity. The false claims were selected from NewsGuard’s Misinformation Fingerprints, a continuously updated data stream of provably false claims spreading online.
The survey found that Americans believe Kremlin disinformation at an alarming rate and are unable to consistently identify Russian disinformation claims as false. The results also show that Americans are widely vulnerable to believing falsehoods spread online across a range of topics including health and medicine, elections, and international conflicts:
Of the 10 claims presented, 78 percent of respondents believed at least one claim, and less than 1 percent of respondents correctly identified all 10 claims as false.
From Russia with Lies: Americans Duped by Kremlin Disinformation – Survey respondents were presented with three false claims that originated or were primarily spread by Russian state media outlets. One third (33.9 percent) believed that at least one of the claims was true.
Less than one quarter (23.8 percent) of respondents were able to correctly identify all three Russian disinformation narratives as false. For example, 61 percent of respondents were unable to identify as false the claim that “between 30-50% of U.S. aid money provided to Ukraine has been stolen by Ukrainian officials for personal use.”
One in four respondents believed the claim, which originated in an article by the Russian state media outlet RT (formerly Russia Today) and was spread by other state-controlled sources, to be true. For NewsGuard’s detailed debunk of this claim, click here…”
