Oh, I see. It was satire.

Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of exposing or shaming the perceived flaws of individuals, corporations, government, or society itself into improvement. Although satire is usually meant to be humorous, its greater purpose is often constructive social criticism, using wit to draw attention to both particular and wider issues in society. (wikipedia)

Not to be confused with sarcasm. In writing it’s a well-known (I’d thought) technique going back thousands of years. In pre-Idiocracy times, roughly before the widespread use of cell phones and when people read written texts to become informed and for pleasure, satire was common and there were writers who were well-known for specializing in the mode. The quality of the satire was always debatable (as with the quality of any art offering) but it was normally always recognized as satire by people who were able to read it in the first place. In the case of written satire, while it might be accompanied by illustrations to emphasize one point or another, it didn’t require images or animations or the equivalent of “emojis” near the text in question in order to signify to the reader that satire was being employed. The text was self-evident as being satirical, or if not, could be understood from the context to be satire (if it was contained in a satirical book for example).

As for what I wrote, I would have expected that the absurd concepts (government-controlled turbines designed to change the weather both by harnessing the power of winds and by creating new winds by acting as giant fans; describing these “fans” as being able to move people and extremely heavy machinery with great accuracy, again under government control) and borrowed nutter phraseology along with depictions of nutter-like outrage, would have made it apparent that satire was what was on offer. I understand that some may think if to be of poor quality, but I’m surprised that some people cannot recognize the writing as satire at all.

Pre-Idiocracy this would rarely have been a problem, even when the writing appeared in a low-context medium such as an isolated web page or in a forum or Usenet posting. It may be that the satirical written form is now, in Idiocratic times, extinct except to specialized academics and historians and other educated elites. That would be a shame because it was a powerful (influential) communication tool and is a pleasure to write and to read.