Things Normies Say

(OR: How to understand them if you are failing to help them)

21 May 2016

Updated: Wed Feb 5 21:35:51 UTC 2020

Amongst my line of work and my various encounters, I have discovered a wide variety of Normies. All of them are odd and different, but the vast majority of Normies have similar manarisms and misunderstandings of technology. For those out of the loop, this is what a Normie is:

Normie (Normie); From the word "Normal":

1: (noun) A pejoritive term for a person who is tech-illiterate to an extreme, towards computer systems and some common consumer electronics (e.g. Over-the-Air Television.), with a large failure to grasp basic technological concepts (e.g. the purpose of a Central Processing Unit) and the inability to figure out steps to complete a task on a computer by themselves, often with a high amount of arrogance, pride, pompousness. Often assosiated with end-users and home-users of various computer systems made by Microsoft Co. and Apple Inc. (usually).
Example: This Normie saw me using an SSH prompt and actually thought I was "hacking" the nearby bank.
2: (adj.) Being of a Normie intellect in a certain situation.
Example: John was being so normie right then.
Plural: Normies
Origin: IT Culture (late 1960's; mid to late 1980's), Hacker Culture (mid to late 1990's), Chan Culture (late 2000's), IRC Culture (late 2000's - early 2010's), Reddit (late 2010's).
Related Words: Casual, Cringeworthy, Dumbass, Filthy Casual, Idiot, Normieish, Plaid Normal, Reddit-tier, Script Kiddie, Skid, Stupid.

Looking at that definition, I am sure you can begin to paint a basic picture as to the horror of the Normie. It should be noted that not every tech-illiterate person is a Normie. For example, if you are an old woman who only checks email on her Windows computer and don't know how to do much else on it, this is not a Normie. A Normie is closer to the arrogance and annoyingness to a Script Kiddie, though not all Normies become script kiddies. These people have hope though!

On this page, which I hope to update frequently, I will put a variety of Normie terms on this page, as well as some other noteworthy Normie things, in an effort to help others in their failing quest to convert the Normies into tech-literate people and maybe even productive members of society!


  • Networking
    • Ethernet

      • For some unknown reason, the Normie thinks that Ethernet cables are obsolite technology. The Normie will insist this, yet provide no alternative, even though his only known alternative is Wireless networking, which he is an idiot at as well. When you attempt to say you use a "Wired Network", he will not understand. He will then attempt to speak some kind of Internet of Things Futurist philosophy, saying that your wired network is running contrary to the development of computers, and will then most likely say his ideal vision of the future which to you is a cringeworthy dystopia worthy of a cyberpunk movie and/or novella. When you mention the possiblity of having an internal ethernet switch system, or a powerline to ethernet adaptor, the looks you get will make you temporarily lose faith in humanity.

    • Wireless Networking

      • The Normie will often times not know the various encryption cyphers of Wireless Networking, nor will he know there is even a difference. Most of the time, they keep it at the default settings on their ISP-provided Router. He will often let others use the network without double checking their devices, and sometimes he won't even have a password. In addition to this lax security, the Normie sometimes has a guest network he did not know existed. The Normie oftentimes also has two seperate broadcasting SSIDs: One for legacy at 2.5Ghz and one for newer, faster hardware at 5Ghz, and not knowing there are two, he will always use the 2.5Ghz network on all hardware because that is the network that is listed on the default settings sticker on the router itself.

  • People
    • Eric S. Raymond

      • Normies might not know him at first, but when learning about Open Source, Normies often flock to this idiot. His works are false and he is an example of Normies leading Normies into doom.

    • Richard Mathew Stallman

      • I once linked RMS' webpage about the reasons not to use Skype to a person in an IRC chat (who was using KiwiIRC instead of a true client). After a three minute pause, his only reply was "I hate conspiracy theorists." People will be adversed to him for a long while but with enough pushing, you can break the conditioning much like how The Savage broke the conditioning of George Marx in the classic novel Brave New World by Aladous Huxley. By breaking the conditioning, Normies will eventully at least listen to him with an open mind. It still may take years for people to take him to heart and follow the philosophy of him, the FSF, and GNU (Though I don't agree with his choice for the 2016 Election. Trump all the way, baby!).

  • Politics
    • Copyleft

      • The Normie does not care about what is on his computer. He does not care how it is licensed, or what the terms and conditions are. He does not care how the Windows 10 system is a data mining machine. To the Normie, things "Just Werk". Because of this, he will ignore all your concerns about Digital Restrictions Management, the system he chooses to use, the things he downloads from dangerous third-parties, software licenses that are horribly written and hurt the user, software licenses that say you are only leasing the thing you bought and own, microphones that can be remotely accessed, Artificial Intelegence programs that evesdrop on you, and all other concerns. Because of this, the Normie thinks of the future as a kind of Cyberpunk dystopia.

    • Futuristic View

      • The view of the Future differers from one Normie to another, but usually it involves a heavy integration to The Internet of Things and an impossible interaction like the movies The Matrix and Tron. The Normie's vision is usually spot-on to a cyberpunk dystopia, except it is viewed as a utopia in the eyes of the Normie. This also involves the least amount of physical interaction with the computer, with the majority of tasks automated, as the Normie does not care about the fundemental workings of his computer. The vision of the future to a Normie is one where everything truly "Just Werks" with no need to press buttons, say anything, know how the computer works, or even have the need to turn it on. The future described by one Normie I spoke to was "A computer where you have nothing wired, and it is a screen connected to nothing and you type some buttons." A Normie does not care what the computer does unless it "Just Werks".

      Another odd thing is that the overwhelmingly idiotic futurist view rushes them to the next fad, like the iPhone, or etc. They seem to like percieved obsolecense as it is an excuse to get the latest and greatest thing towards the Future they dream of. In this flawed persuit, they believe obsolecense in things not yet obsolite, such as Ethernet cables (one Normie claimed that was something from 5 to 20 years ago, with a large range), Pay Phones, Land-Line Phones, Touch-Tone dial, Cable Television, Over-the-Air (Antenna) Television, and a variety of other weird things that are obviously not outdated. The term "outdated" and the term "antiquated" seem synonymous to the Normie, as they are interchanged frequently.

  • Shells
    • Basic Commands

      • The Normie needs to have his hand held tight because basic shell commands are beyond him. He is unable to use the shell without extreme guidence as he most likely never had to use the shell before. He will most likely say he is highly skilled in Windows, but what he means is the Windows GUI, so comparing shell commands in a DOS prompt with shell commands in a UNIX enviorment is not a succesful comparison to him. Once I needed to explain the entire concept of the `mv` command to a Normie who was attempting to use UNIX for the first time (after a lot of convincing), and he still failed to understand the purpose of the command. After running a tar command to uncompress a pre-compiled binary for the Icecat web browser, he claimed that he hated UNIX because "[i]n Windows you don't have to do this. You run an .exe or unzip a zip and you are done!" Attempting to explain that a tarball is an archive like a zip, he replies it is not because on Windows you do not have to enter a bunch of nonsense code to the command prompt just to open it. I then said that you do, and a GUI just runs the commands for you, and then he did not have a rebutle.

      The Normie frequently thinks basic shell commands are "code" and "coding", and will refuse to accept that shell commands are the basic foundation of any system.