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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27276 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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From NYT (archive): Elon Musk’s Starlink has connected an isolated tribe to the outside world — and divided it from within.

As the speeches dragged on, eyes drifted to screens. Teenagers scrolled Instagram. One man texted his girlfriend. And men crowded around a phone streaming a soccer match while the group's first female leader spoke. Just about anywhere, a scene like this would be mundane. But this was happening in a remote Indigenous village in one of the most isolated stretches of the planet.

"When it arrived, everyone was happy," said Tsainama Marubo, 73, sitting on the dirt floor of her village's maloca, a 50-foot-tall hut where the Marubo sleep, cook and eat together. The internet brought clear benefits, like video chats with faraway loved ones and calls for help in emergencies. "But now, things have gotten worse," she said. She was kneading jenipapo berries to make a black body paint and wearing ropes of jewelry made from snail shells. Lately, the youth had become less interested in making such dyes and jewelry, she said. "Young people have gotten lazy because of the internet," she said. "They're learning the ways of the white people."

After only nine months with Starlink, the Marubo are already grappling with the same challenges that have racked American households for years: teenagers glued to phones; group chats full of gossip; addictive social networks; online strangers; violent video games; scams; misinformation; and minors watching pornography.

During the meetings, teenagers swiped through Kwai, a Chinese-owned social network. Young boys watched videos of the Brazilian soccer star Neymar Jr. And two 15-year-old girls said they chatted with strangers on Instagram. One said she now dreamed of traveling the world, while the other wants to be a dentist in São Paulo.

A case study in what happens when you take a “natural” society and introduce the internet. This relates in some interesting ways to an overview of Hunter-Gatherers and Play that I posted a few weeks ago in the FFT:

Given the indulgence that hunter-gatherer adults exhibit toward children, it is no surprise that the children spend most of their time playing. Play, almost by definition, is what children want to do. The adults have no qualms about this, because they believe that it is through play that children learn what they must to become effective adults. In a survey of ten hunter-gatherer researchers, who had lived in 7 different hunter-gatherer cultures, all of the researchers said that children were free to play essentially from dawn to dusk every day (see Gray, 2009). In a published report on how Ju/’hoan children spent their time, Patricia Draper (1976, pp 205-206) concluded: "[Ju/’hoan] children are late in being held responsible for subsistence tasks. Girls are around 14 years old before they begin regular food gathering and water- and wood-collecting. This is in spite of the fact that they may be married before this age. Boys are 16 years old or over before they begin serious hunting. … Children do amazingly little work." In a study of peoples with mixed hunter-gatherer and agricultural subsistence, in Botswana, John Bock and Sarah Johnson (2004) found that the more a family was involved in hunting and gathering, and the less they were involved in agriculture, the more time children had to play.

Hunter-gatherer children are never isolated from adult activities. They observe directly all that occurs in camp––the preparations to move; the building of huts; the making and mending of tools and other artifacts; the food preparation and cooking; the nursing and care of infants; the precautions taken against predators and diseases; the gossip, discussions, arguments, and politics; the songs, dances, festivities, and stories. They sometimes accompany adults on food gathering trips, and by age 10 or so boys sometimes accompany men on hunting trips. In the course of their daily lives, they see, hear, and have the opportunity to explore everything that is relevant to becoming a successful adult in their culture, and they incorporate all of this into their play. They play at the activities that they observe in the adults around them, and as they grow older, their play turns gradually into the real thing. There is no sharp division between playful participation and real participation in the valued activities of the band.

The above-mentioned survey of researchers elicited many examples of valued adult activities that were mimicked regularly by children in play. Digging up tubers, fishing, smoking porcupines out of holes, cooking, caring for infants, climbing trees, building vine ladders, building huts, using knives and other tools, making tools, carrying heavy loads, building rafts, making fires, defending against attacks from predators, imitating animals (a means of identifying animals and learning their habits), making music, dancing, storytelling, and arguing were all mentioned by one or more respondents. The specific lists varied from culture to culture, in accordance with differences in the skills that were exemplified by adults in each culture. All of the respondents said that boys in the culture they studied engaged in a great deal of playful hunting. The two respondents who studied the Agta—a culture in which women as well as men regularly hunt—noted that girls as well as boys, in that culture, engaged in much playful hunting.

Apparently, when children are free to do what they want, they spend much of their time playing at the very activities that they see, from direct experience, are most crucial for success in their culture. Their conscious motive is fun, not education. It is exciting for children, everywhere, to pretend that they are powerful, competent adults, doing beautifully and skillfully what they see the adults around them doing. From an evolutionary perspective, it is no coincidence that children are constructed in such a way.

Equally important to learning how to hunt and gather, for hunter-gather children, is learning how to interact with others assertively yet peacefully. In their play, children practice arguing. Turnbull has described how older Mbuti children (age 9 and up) playfully rehash and try to improve upon the arguments that they have heard among adults.

In a “primitive” or natural society, childrens’ play is an effortless rendition of adult activity. Over their crucial years of cognitive development, children slowly become adults through stress-free exploration and imitation. The playfulness guides them toward skill acquisition, not unlike a fun video game. In the absence of superstimuli, there is no better way to “play”, so boredom promotes the learning behavior effortlessly. This has the inherent benefit of acting as “shaping” (in a psychological sense) because the skill that is learned is never beyond one’s capacity, is imitated through one’s father, and with the older children who act as mentors (“the Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise”).

Their original arrangement was paradisal. Just from a psychological standpoint. It is the optimal way for a child to learn. When StarLink was introduced, the paradisal order was disrupted — innocent children have consumed Apple in the prelapsarian garden, so to speak. There is no turning back; they will likely look at their loincloths and feel shame at their nakedness. But I do wonder then, what about us developed people? Are we doomed to fall further and further from grace, our children forever destined to the cognitive hazards of superstimuli? Is there no way out, no rope we can grab to lift us back to grace?

If the paradisal order was so great, hunter-gatherers wouldn't have been getting stomped by farmers for the last 10,000 years. Yes, occasionally the nomad horse-archers went out on great rampages to beat the farmers - but they always lose in the end.

Suppose we took the socialist narrative as true. Maybe women did have better sex under socialism, maybe it was fine to work casually at your guaranteed state job and have fewer Bing Bing Wahoo electronic gadgets that destroy the souls of children. I expect people here immediately think about leaky refrigerators, televisions that exploded, 10-year waitlists for bad cars, breadlines, torture and repression...

Imagine that the social, human-enjoyment problems of socialism were greatly ameliorated - it still wasn't competitive. Capitalism produced greater technical sophistication, more advanced weapons, more of everything. Even if socialism was more fun, it couldn't compete. The innate human will to power and wealth draws people away from socialism. Likewise with hunter-gatherers. As Scott says, maybe it was really fun to hunt without much care for the future, have fun around the fireplace, skin and brutally torture beaten enemies. Maybe it was way more fun not having to do these tedious scientifically managed tasks. Even then, there was a darker side to their existence.

Noble or Savage, it still doesn't matter, they couldn't compete in armaments or numbers. And so they go into the dustbin of history. If apprenticeships and playful imitation were the optimal way to learn, they'd be the ones ruling over us. We need literacy, advanced mathematics, management and hyperspecialization to maintain a vastly more complex civilization. We need hundreds of thousands of words to describe everything in the universe, they only need to worry about things they can physically observe in their forest.

Of course there are problems in our civilization. Superstimulus for instance can and should be regulated. Education can be greatly improved, it's not fit for function even by scientific standards let alone student enjoyment. There are many political/societal problems that need to be addressed. But we're not falling from grace, hunter-gatherers are far below us.

The paradise I am referring to is the way that children are socialized and trained into adults. I’m not making a sweeping generalization about civilizational flaws — I understand the fall is irrevocable — though there are probably other ways that HG’s hold insight on maximizing happiness. If certain instincts originated in tandem with the HG lifestyle, then the HG lifestyle gives us a picture on how those instincts are best oriented and satisfied. We can then find their approximate civilizational version. For instance, if HG’s do a lot of things with their hands, then we may ask whether humans today are doing enough with their hands, and indeed studies show that enjoying hand-related hobbies is good for the brain and can be very satisfying. Consider how it works with other animals: were you developing the most pleasant enclosure for wild deer, it would probably just mimic their natural environment but without predators. So it is with Man (plausibly).

But back to the point, the children are raised with something we can call “adaptive boredom”. They get bored, which is a displeasing feeling, but that acts as a springboard to get them to playfully train as adults. Their training is stress-free, natural, and probably cognitively efficient. The phone-y superstimuli is introduced and suddenly their minds are focused on things which are more pleasant than anything around them, which replace boredom with novelty, but which do not lead to effortless adaption to adulthood. Those children now cannot enjoy the most pleasant path toward adulthood, because they have consumed the forbidden Apple product, and as such their mind is preoccupied with otherworldly pleasures. For the children to adapt into adulthood you now need to cajole them, punishment them, incentivize them. All of these are less preferable because they reduce intrinsic enjoyment of the activity. Meanwhile, the phoney stimuli is taking up cognitive real estate that really isn’t for the longterm good. That human instinct to pass by a tree and grab a desirable fruit is being abused by technological moneygrubbers, as the children now grab their phone and consume something pleasing the eye. It would be much better if they felt boredom, because the longterm displeasure from technology outweighs the temporary adaptive pleasure of boredom. (And this isn’t even going into studies on “wakeful rest” and the default mode network where boredom is shown to be healthy to the mind…)

Our civilizations did not always have superstimuli available to young people. You know, if you were growing up somewhere in the 19th century, you may be doing something like what the primitive kids were doing re adaptive boredom. Civilization did introduce unpleasant discipline, but there still would have been a pro-adaptive playfulness component, where the kid would “playfully” read an entertaining book which shaped his ability to read, or would “playfully” act out military drills, etc.

Great post.

In the past children played more often by being outside and interacting with other children which helped them to develop social skills. Of course that had its own trade offs.

or would “playfully” act out military drills, etc.

Yes, and girls could playfully act like mothers using dolls, which helped adapt them to becoming mothers later on.

  • It would be much better if they felt boredom, because the longterm displeasure from technology outweighs the temporary adaptive pleasure of boredom. (And this isn’t even going into studies on “wakeful rest” and the default mode network where boredom is shown to be healthy to the mind…)

Yes, this is the whole dichotomy between hedonism and becoming a slave of one's passions vs greater pleasure issue that as old as the ancient Greeks and probably older has always been a challenge for societies. Now far more so of course. Ideally there is moderation rather than no use of say video games, mobile games. But things are out of hand today, and that does have something to do with technological moneygrubbers.

Steve Sailer sometimes says that modern marketing departments are too effective. Under modern capitalism which is more efficient at getting consumers to buy stuff, the consumer rather than a rational actor, can't compete and is too easily manipulated. Children being even more vulnerable. This can also apply to the food industry where the people's best interest is different and conflicts with their hedonistic desires and the marketing department, developers of food that want to make it hyper palatable. There is also an ideological component to this which is about not only favoring the monetary interests of the "technological moneygrubbers" but also those who prefer the population to be pacified and at such not a threat to the ruling elite.

Technology it self provides more challenges, in addition to issues of ideology. I don't buy into the progressive myth that changes necessarilly improve society. Good things to work well, do so due to a delicate balance requiring various things necessary. Ideally we use technology to only get the good while mitigating the bad, but it doesn't work that way. The problem is that even people like me who want to fix things are not going to make it so society doesn't have the technology that it has now, and is technologically the same to the type of society that resulted in quite different childhoods.

One thing is true. For how much Internet, television, mobile phones give, they also take away things. More so now with Artificial Intelligence which is very woke/progressive intersectionalist, giving much greater power to those who designed it and leading to a more centralized world, unless enough other players like GAB AI start appearing.

Also, this point is directed less towards you but it is obviously possible for a society to be more powerful due to technology and its people living a more depraved existence.

War Communism might in fact be far more powerful way to conduct war than a society that doesn't treat its people like slaves, but it is a very shitty way to live.

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