>Either he's feigning ignorance over why anybody would be the slightest bit empathetic toward the death of Eric Meyer's daughter or he's too much of a robot to actually understand.
Nah. This kind of human behavior isn't the least bit surprising to me. My questions thereof were more so rhetorical; I mean to draw attention to what I feel is the absurdity of this behavior. People do things contrary to reason, sometimes even in spite of it. Birds go tweet tweet.

>To jump to the conclusion that it's all just for show, and nobody will actually take any sort of real action is pure cynicism.
This is the conclusion to which you have jumped, not I. I fail to see where I even implied anything of this sort.

I don't believe that people are doing this as an empty gesture without any feeling behind it, at least not universally. I do, however, think that it's ridiculous.

For me, perhaps it's not the sorrow, or the condolences, that I find to be most ridiculous. On the contrary, it's these things prepackaged into something of a meme that I find to be most alarming and highly artificial.

Foremost, the hashtag #663399becca is a hideous contrivance and shits all over the poor girl's name. I guess #rebeccameyers would have been too pedestrian. I question, why purple at all? Most people have favorite colors (the blog post argues otherwise). Why make this the focal point? Why would you summarize or even emblematize her existence with her favorite color, of all things? First person to answer along the lines of "because CSS" should get metaphorically smacked upside the head.

It reminds me of when the students at my younger brother's high school collectively wore hoodies in "solidarity" regarding the death of Trayvon Martin. To me, this whole #663399becca is the same brand of stupidity. It's essentially wearing a digital t-shirt that proclaims "HEY EVERYONE, I'M MOURNING THE UNTIMELY LOSS OF REBECCA MEYERS." How about you? Oh, I see you have on the purple t-shirt on, and your accessible uniformity brings me comfort.

The whole thing is cheap and mass-produced like a Wendy's value meal. It's a 9/11 bumper sticker. It's a Che Guevara t-shirt.

It's a gimmick, and it actually does a disservice to her memory, because now it's not really about her, it's about the color purple and your hexcode-hashtag and your purple avatar and maybe we should make the header of this website purple. The name of the blog post is "The Color Purple".

I fully understand that people are sooner moved by tragedies "near" to them more than the comparatively distant deaths of countless people. Nothing is surprising about that. But how about these people be about it rather than wear it?

It's ironic, the desire to make the hashtag a trending topic on Twitter, because the very nature of trends is that they're transient, which are exactly the things that death and loss are not.

So I see my colleagues hop on this bandwagon and I think, yeah, go ahead and wear your purple avatar for a day, or two days, or a week. Eventually you will change your avatar to something "normal". In fact, after an arbitrary amount of time, that purple avatar will be passé and everyone will have moved on to newer gimmicks.

And yet I'm allegedly the robot here? Do robots typically question their programming or try to see past their own bullshit? One commenter even described me as "disgusting", but if anything that's precisely what I seek to not be.