✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

The Bluetooth Test and other keyholes to the soul

experimental-history.com · 3,389 words · saved by 1 readers

I got a bone to pick with an ancient meme. Remember five years ago, when a viral post was claiming that you could judge someone’s capacity for “self-governing” by observing their behavior in the grocery store parking lot? Good people return their shopping carts, the theory went, and bad people don’t. Like everything that comes out of the website 4Chan, the Shopping Cart Test was designed to get people’s attention and then make their lives worse. These are the people who brought us Pizzagate, QAnon, Pedobear, the bikini bridge, and a high-profile heist of a flag owned by the actor Shia Lebeouf.1 So this meme, too, did exactly what it was supposed to do: it made people look and then it made them mad. The inevitable backlash came, the backlash to the backlash, the New York Times article, etc. People got bitter, then they got bored, then they moved on. But not me. I think the 4channers accidentally discovered something useful. They’re right about one big thing: our moral mettle will be tes

The Bluetooth Test and other keyholes to the soul itty bitty ways to be better Adam Mastroianni Apr 01, 2025 816 66 149 Share Article voiceover 0:00 -22:01 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. photo cred: my dad I got a bone to pick with an ancient meme. Remember five years ago, when a viral post was claiming that you could judge someone’s capacity for “self-governing” by observing their behavior in the grocery store parking lot? Good people return their shopping carts, the theory went, and bad people don’t. a trolley-fied summary of the meme because the original te

Explore this link on the map →

related reading