Hater: on the virtues of utter disagreeability

A manifesto for everyone tired of pretending to like things—really, really bad things.
Hater begins from a simple premise: that it's good to hate things. Not people or groups or benign belief systems, but things. More to the point, it's good to hate the things everyone seems to like.
Scan the click-baiting headlines of your favourite news or pop-culture website and you're likely to find that just about everything—from a premium cable adaptation of a novel to Will Ferrell singing a Whitney Houston song at a college commencement ceremony—is, supposedly, "what we need right now."
We are the victims of an unbridled, unearned optimism. And our world demands pessimism. We need to curb our collective enthusiasm. It's vital to be contrarian—now, as they say, more than ever. Because ours is an age of calcified consensus. Criticism has been supplanted by aggregation, be it in the form of Rotten Tomatoes or the cumulative...