This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
To jump off of this post downthread about the vibe shift around tech vs. the-rest-of-society, with the TikTok ban fast approaching, I have some thoughts to share:
This ban might be for naught: another app, known as RedNote, is being positioned as the next TikTok, and this app is more directly connected/controlled by China. This obviously seems like an own-goal. RedNote's developer is apparently hiring English-language content moderators to meet the rush head-on.
Related to this: where has the rest of the US tech sphere been on this? Were they silently hoping that Bytedance would sell such a massive platform to one of them, or hoping that the ban would drive users to their equivalent platforms? Do they regret taking this stance since the ban sets a dangerous precedent and these potential upsides will likely fail to materialize?
And related to that: will the vibe shift around tech post-Trump-reelection focus on "surveillance capitalism?" TikTok, as Fight For The Future likes to point out, was by far not unique in how it could potentially spy on users. Will the left laser-focus on the negatives of Big Tech social media now that Twitter and Facebook are staking themselves out as unfriendly territory?
And finally: does the Motte actually think the ban will 100% go through, or will some last-minute hail mary save TikTok for the US audience?
Edit: Interestingly, RedNote apparently has zero geographical siloing, and the CCP has been quick to breathe down RedNote's neck about it.
TikTok isn't being banned due to "potentially spying on users".
I wish a little that it was about spying on users. I wish more that it was about how TikTok is the worst thing humans have ever created. Hypershortform content is gigafrying the developing brains of young people, and then there are the peculiarities of its content. TikTok text-to-speech, obnoxious subtitles on every video, five hundred thousand shitty clips to the same fucking 20 seconds of a song over and over and over, TikTok dances, splitscreen videos of Family Guy clips and Minecraft because attention spans have apparently become that bad. Adolescents are mainlining psychic polonium just from all of these, and that's before we consider the psychic demon core that is social media.
Spying on users would be a good enough reason. I don't know how people respond with "My government is spying on me." Yeah but it's our government. It's a different and in many ways a far grosser abuse of power but at least you can say there are legitimate reasons for the American government to keep data on American citizens. There is no conceivable above-board justification for the Chinese government creating-via-numerous-cyberattacks a general database of American citizens and its existence alone is grounds to ban them from all American telecommunications.
It was probably expedited to congress because of AIPAC but that was long after Trump tried to ban it and well after the Biden admin had it investigated and banned from government devices. It also must be said that however much congress and their AIPAC handlers get their hackles raised about Israel and JQ shit, the actual power in this country, the unelected bureaucracy, is clearly highly invested in righties wasting all their time posting about jews. Look no further than that preeminent JQ voice of Nick Fuentes being a fed.
Regardless of the actual motive, absolute justification for the ban is and has been the CCP having a tool to introduce political narratives in a social media platform used by a massive number of Americans. It's not Reddit or X where they have to work with shills and botting, it's not /pol/ where they spam slide threads and run psyops like they did at the onset of the coronavirus. It's a platform they control where they can push the figurative button and suddenly millions of people are seeing the exact content the CCP wants them to see. Google does that too, but I know their reasoning, why is 'based China' doing it? It's not because they're ideologically lockstep. It's because for the last decade they've been waging a next-generation war on the American people by destabilizing our politics. I still don't get how this has been missed, after a year of seeing commentators on the right making incredible snipes of nefarious deeds being snuck by the masses, only Sam Hyde has voiced a fraction of the animosity we need to exhibit toward China, which begins with expelling every single Chinese national in this country, and even he softened that with using it to frame a joke about honeydicking.
I mean, I agree, but banning TikTok wouldn't do anything at this point. TikTok was the first, but once it proved that the thirty-second video + infinite scrolling model was much more popular and addictive than regular video, it didn't take long for other websites to copy it (YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, etc.). You need to ban the format, not just a single company.
Congress can't legislate video length and I don't think it's necessarily the format. Shortform itself is not fundamentally bad, comedy is perfect for clips, same for sports and video games. Where these degrade is the race to the bottom in algorithm-pleasing content, and AI customer retention could be legislated against. The scientific data on the destructive nature of social media piles by the day, so there's a compelling health interest, and a law that flatly prohibits AI customer retention wouldn't fall afoul of other constitutional freedoms, it's not what they're randomly pushing, it's that the content is being randomly pushed, and these are multinational corporations engaged in interstate commerce, so even a very scope-limited interpretation of the Commerce Clause would find some degree of congressional authority in regulating such practices.
From there, it's simple. No endless scrolling, the sites can't serve unsolicited content based on, for example, the notion a user might want to watch a video, and especially might thus want to keep watching videos. For YouTube Shorts and others this would mean a user could go to their subscriptions and watch all the new Shorts, but when they watched them all, that's it. For Instagram and others it would mean no generic "explore" pages. It can't show you something because it thinks you might like it. It could possibly serve content analyzed as objectively or justifiably similar. If I enjoyed an hour-long history of whatever, I could ask it for other hour-long histories of whatever, but it wouldn't be analyzing clicks, view-counts or retention in its pushes. It would just be "Here's 25 videos of measurably similar content." Same for searching, no more "related" no more "you might also like" no more "users also searched," literal searched text in the title or the video transcript, limited tagging to prevent abuse in the video descriptions, and nothing from the comments. Ideally it should be suddenly very easy to search YouTube and be so specific or maybe so wrong that it returns no results.
And of course, a categorical prohibition on minors using the internet. This law wouldn't be targeted at the minors exactly, nor their parents. It would be targeted at corporations with astronomic fines for violations. I wouldn't be surprised if Google is already anticipating exactly such a law and has at least the framework for DeepMind-powered age-based captchas, because the only question I have is if their analytics determine with >99.99% accuracy any given user's age, or age bracket.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link