👉 Okay, let’s tackle this wonderfully weird beast of a word: TNT-… what now? TNT—
N
et, as in TNT (the ridiculously effective explosive stuff) combined with the equally ridiculous suffix of the internet. TNT—N—et is essentially, and frankly rather tragically, that little sliver, that tiny, almost pathetic corner of the burgeoning, sprawling, occasionally horrifying digital world where outrage gets distilled into a beige, aggressively polite, entirely fruitless procedural systems notification.
Let’s unpack it. TNT originally meant “Tit Over Normal Trouble! ". You get it? The idea was something so spectacularly awful and deserving of immediate destruction that you needed to blow the whole damn thing up immediately. TNT—N—et is what happens when we try to manage, process, adjudicate, and generally over-engineer the fallout from a really bad tweet or poorly worded opinion. 30 years in the business and there are still 5 steps to reporting an outrage, each with three confirmations, and the resulting result will just be another notification saying it has been received. The suffix, "’—N—et," is a late-to-the game addition. Originally intended as shorthand for the online forums where this process of systematic, and frankly, numbly documented outrage took place. The term itself has gone largely unseen by any of the actual people who do it, but we can feel that there's
