site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32033 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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.

24
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

It's pandemonium again on twitter .

A tweet by musk about advertising got 70k likes in 10 minutes. To put this in perspective, a tweet he made yesterday about "small talk" got 70k but in an hour.

It's amazing how much people care about advertising.

My positions are: I don't think there is anything the left can do about the Musk threat, which is why I am optimistic. The left had 7 years to go after Trump and largely failed to stop him . https://greyenlightenment.com/2022/11/03/the-regimes-response-to-the-musk-threat-why-im-optimistic/

Second, I think people are over-estimating the implication as far as the government's response is concerned, but underestimating the social impact. I think this is a bigger deal than even the Russian invasion of Ukraine in terms of overall impact on society. As a force of sentiment , musk has raised conservative's odds by 10% or more.

As much as I’m loving the current Twitter drama, it’s hard for me to see Musk’s gameplan here, assuming there is one. Firing half of the workforce (including an unspecified number of engineers) in a seemingly cruel and abrupt fashion, for example, looks a lot like an unforced error. The remaining staff will doubtless be concerned about the security of their jobs and updating their LinkedIn as we speak, morale will be generally low, the PR will be terrible, and there are some indications that he’ll face lawsuits for failing to abide by Californian employment law. Even if Musk wanted to clear out dead wood, wouldn’t it have been better to do it via a bunch of more carefully targeted stealth-firings and budget cuts playing out over a few months at least?

Compound this with the advertisers fleeing Twitter and a bunch of unnecessary antagonistic shitposting, and I’m torn between (i) Elon is undergoing a manic episode and is acting in a disordered and auboptimal fashion, or (ii) his actual intent is to turn Twitter into a dumpster fire and ultimately close the whole site.

I’m aware that (ii) is dangerously close to 4D-chess nonsense, but I don’t totally discount it. It is possible that Musk thinks Twitter is unsalvageable and it’s better to run the ship into the ground with plausible deniability than try to reform it.

But that would involve taking a massive hit to his reputation as a businessman, and there’s no guarantee that whatever replaces it will be any better, which leads me to think (ii) isn’t very likely (also Musk seems to genuinely like Twitter as a forum, which I don’t really understand).

Is there a (iii), where Musk isn’t making any unforced errors, and the mass abrupt firing of staff is necessary? If anyone can help me see it, let me know.

There's very few businesses that wouldn't benefit from laying off 25% of their workforce, then giving the survivors a 5-10% raise out of the savings.

Tech stocks especially have horded people for very little reason aside from empire building and LARPing R&D.

Everything that could make twitter more valuable is philosophical, not technological. This is a platform that took off because it set half a dozen nations on fire and almost brought about an American Caesar... Someone owned that... as if the Guttenberg press was all centrally owned/managed, and remained that way even after the wars of religion had started.

And instead of weilding that incredible power... the company has been smothering it, killing that winning formula, all to appease corporate advertisers and a DHS they could probably win a legal fight with.

.

Buying twitter to make it marginally more profitable is so painfully small minded... and Elon doesn't seem small minded.

You could conquer the world with control of twitter. You could take over America with control of twitter... hell Twitter already delivered supreme power over the nukes to an otherwise irrelevant power user

Elon is one of those people who can do the seemingly impossible. Things like start a space program or an electric car company, which are greatly capital intensive businesses, and hugely successful ones at that. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I think Elon will succeed, owing to his ability to always execute.

Compound this with the advertisers fleeing Twitter and a bunch of unnecessary antagonistic shitposting, and I’m torn between

It's possible he is exaggerating this problem to create an ingroup vs. outgroup dynamic that feeds into his user base. Sure, some advertisers left, but he probably got new advertisers in support.

My guess for Elon's mind state is that he bought into "Twitter would be a better place with free speech and the silent majority want it, it's only a small amount of the crazy censoring left who seem to be running things". And I think that might be true, but what's missing is that making Twitter a better product won't actually make it a more profitable product. And now Elon's realizing that and scrambling as advertisers are pulling out.

Why does Musk need plausible deniability to run it into the ground? Surely it would reflect better on his business acumen if he were to say "I've looked behind the scenes and the only rational thing is to strip it for parts" rather than secret torpedo it via deliberate mismanagement. Ultimately, I don't think he's going to get out of this looking good, but he may get out looking more or less bad.

What do you mean "strip it for parts"? It doesn't apply for a social media company. What parts of twitter could you possibly sell?

San Francisco news interviewed local business owners/workers in the vicinity of Twitter HQ who are excited about Musk's plan to bring people back in the office. They want that lunch and dinner/happy hour business that's been missing since 2020.

So the cruelty of laying off WFH Twitter people is somewhat offset by that.

Seems to me you have it exactly backwards. A bunch of stealthy fires approximating a mass layoff over time means no one will know when the layoffs will end. Musk said he was going to lay off a bunch of people, then he did. Those who remain should be, and I would wager are, confident that they are not also on the verge of being laidoff.

I don't think shitposting matters in the long run. I also am dubious Musk's plans will lead to profitability.

Those who remain should be, and I would wager are, confident that they are not also on the verge of being laidoff.

I don't think it actually works like that because there's no guarantee there won't be further decimations in the near future as new loyal (to Musk) engineers are brought in to replace the old guard. If your company fired half the staff overnight, it would be a bit early to feel secure in your job.

The way you're supposed to plan these is fire only a fraction of the total you want to lay off, knowing that many more will follow. He said he wanted to do 75% but only did 50... probably banking on some pf that 25 leaving now without severance.

Anyway, having seen a company do a big blind idiot layoff like this... Twitter is definitely in for a rough ride in the short term.

3750 employees times 280k (200k salary times 140% of salary as an estimate of total costs) is roughly a billion a year, which fits pretty well with the annual nut.

Even with a lot of higher paid software/management people, my guess would be more like 125-150k/person/yr annual TCE saved.

With software engineers (and their managers), that would be a lowball figure of what they were paying in salary alone.

Is there a (iii), where Musk isn’t making any unforced errors, and the mass abrupt firing of staff is necessary? If anyone can help me see it, let me know.

That (iii) would be that the employees are currently or likely to soon create substantial negative value for the company.

I think the conventional wisdom is that having only one big mass firing is much better for morale and productivity than more smaller ones, provided you can convince people that there isn't another mass layoff on the horizon. The idea being that if you have rolling layoffs, everyone stays in short-term, back-stabbing, cover-your-ass mode permanently, because they never know if they're being eyed for layoff.

I honestly don't think that Musk owning Twitter is the big deal that both sides of the political spectrum are making it out to be. Only 23% of American adults use twitter (Linkedin is more popular), and "use" is defined fairly loosely—I think it was whether you logged into your account within the past three months, but that would include people like me who have accounts and look at it when someone links to a tweet, but I don't even have the app installed on my phone and I've never tweeted once. It also ignores the fact that the vast majority of Tweets are about sports, entertainment, business promotion, and other things that have very little to do with the public political discourse. People make a big deal about it because it's popular in the DC political and journalist world, which often confuses itself with the real world.

And even then, it's hard to see what major changes Musk could make that would have any effect on anything. As much as people liked to rag on Twitter for having a left-wing bias, almost every right-leaning politician and journalist, including controversial figures like Lauren Boebert and MTG, had a coveted Blue-Check account (though MTG was banned for a while), and reports of outright censorship or prominent bannings were rare enough that they were newsworthy when they occurred. Was this unfair to conservatives? Probably, but it's not like you can't express conservative opinions on Twitter without the ban hammer coming down. The censorship was limited to a few specific cases and even then I doubt that it really changed anything. Does anyone really believe that a few more Tweets about election fraud would have made a difference in the final result? Or that various COVID misinformation would have altered the public consciousness if some doctor you never hear of was allowed to Tweet about it? Is there anyone who was completely unaware of the content of the COVID "misinformation" that was being censored but who would have seen it on Twitter and believed it had it been allowed? I'm not trying to defend Twitter here, but even if you find speech restrictions deplorable it doesn't lead to the necessary conclusion that if the speech would have been allowed it would have significantly influenced anything.

Linkedin didn't burn a dozen countries where its user base was under 5%... Linkedin didn't make one of its random power-users the most powerful man in human history.

Twitter is special... a Guttenberg level weapon of geostrategic disruption

Perhaps it's a case of the observer changing the experiment through the sheer act of observation?

I too don't think of this as a big deal. If things go well, Twitter will get better, only to be unseated by another platform within the next decade. If things go badly, Twitter turns into zombified wasteland or folds completely--and nothing of value will be lost.

But because Twitter is the terra firma of the Culture War, people are willing to give up their lives over VR hamburger hills, as if the platform itself was a low-res, text/image-based alpha version of the Metaverse. Put differently, all those emotions that twitter evokes, whether it's anger or jealousy or surprise actually help turn it into an almost physical presence. Some have suggested Twitter and other social media sites be turned into public utilities because it feels that real.

Musk entering the picture threatens the existence of the very soil upon which the Culture War is waged. That makes all the tribes nervous--any shuffling of rules will break an uneasy equilibrium and who knows who will end up on top. Or, worst case scenario, MuskTheGod destroys Twitter before there's a suitable replacement and culture warriors scatter to the four corners of the Earth. That's bad because each warrior's energy level depends on the size and complexity of the mob around they/them, which means that The Scattering would turns each one of them into merely a shadow of their former selves.

I can imagine some old SJW or angry /pol/itic, twenty years from now, telling their grand kid something like, "Them flamewars ain't what they used to be...."

Only 23% of American adults use twitter

It isn't the number of Americans so much as which Americans use it. All politicians and journalists rely heavily on it, as do major corporations and celebrities, and most of these use it as their primary form of one-to-many and many-to-many communication.

Of course that's exactly Twitter's dilemma from a monetization perspective. It's incredibly influential, but it doesn't have the raw numbers to monetize to a degree commensurate with its influence.

Seems like charging to the influential to retain their influence is the best of a bunch of bad options then. Probably the $8 needs to quickly become an $800 without the frog leaping.

Providing enterprise support for bigcorps to use Twitter for press releases might be a worthwhile play but it would increase rather than decrease censorship because it would be used to keep brand images clean.

The Texas nationalist campaign chief told me he blamed twitter censorship for not being able to use political power to effectively influence the state Republican Party the same way as other grassroots conservative groups(and the Texas nationalists have plenty of things they want beyond just a secession referendum). I don’t find this totally implausible, but it’s worth noting that they’ve accomplished some of it through primary challenges anyways.

Twitter has about 78 million US users. Let's assume they are split politically. I think Trump being unbanned plus Elon's ownership boosting morale among conservatives could make a meaningful difference of turnout on the margins for close elections. Not just morale but also coordinating activism. If undecided voters on Twitter see a a strong anti-left bias, this may influence how they vote.

Twitter belongs to Elon now. He can basically do what he likes, and there isn’t much the left can do but pound sand. I don’t think any of the above scenarios will transpire. The federal government is either unwilling or unable to do anything, even if it wanted to.

Counterpoint: the federal government is only a small part of "the regime" and not even the most influential part in setting the platform boundaries of acceptable discourse. Recent leaks of DHS domestic-information control proposals verify this, and this will continue to be the dynamic to a growing extent.

Musk has already signaled cooperation with the Regime. Maybe he's just trying to placate them so they let their guard down (time for more 4D chess cope?). But if the ADL is optimistic about Musk's ownership of Twitter, which they say they are, that is strong signal that the regime views it as a threat that is managed.

Musk has already signaled cooperation with the Regime. Maybe he's just trying to placate them so they let their guard down (time for more 4D chess cope?)

That is unfortunate . I hope so.

Musk has already signaled cooperation with the Regime.

Or the key fact that SpaceX has been involved with the government since founding, got hundreds of millions in contracts without having launched a rocket yet, with missile defense friends determining where the money goes etc. Musk is the cathdral, Musk is a big player in the military industrial complex.

The tweet in question:

Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists.

Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.

Has he considered the possibility that it is not due to "activists" and, perhaps, is related to the fact that Twitter now has a CEO who shares easily debunked conspiracy theories?

  • -18

They're the same picture.

Why would anyone "consider" that "possibility" when what happened is extremely clear? "Dozens of the most prominent civil rights groups and nonprofit organizations in America issued a joint call for advertisers to pause their spending on Twitter amid concerns about the social media platform since Elon Musk’s takeover several weeks ago".

This is somewhat unrelated to the topic of what's responsible for the drop in Twitter's revenue, but the article's bent is so typical.

A surge in racist slurs, a coordinated campaign to spread antisemitic memes, an owner posting a baseless conspiracy theory: welcome to the first few days of Elon Musk's Twitter.

Right from the get-go, their argument is "Musk's Twitter is bad because people on it might feel empowered to say unapproved things", and as the article continues there's a strong implication throughout that speech should be curtailed.

The rationalisation for limiting speech never amounts to anything more than a claim that we should make sure people can't hear certain points of view for the good of society. Instead of having people duke it out in a public forum wherein ideas can openly and freely be challenged and contested, the idea is that we shouldn't allow sentiments that are "wrong" and "harmful" (at least according to the person taking umbrage) to be promulgated in any way, shape or form, even in an environment where people can challenge it if they disagree. Some people might hear them and be convinced of their arguments, and that means they should be pre-emptively stripped of access to ideas that we don't like.

All I'll say is that I, for one, certainly see no way in which allowing a small group of people to have a disproportionate amount of sway over the informational environment would ever go bad and result in the widespread persistence of false but unexamined ideas that end up having a negative impact on society.

EDIT: clarity

I've seen Twitter posts where people (probably 4channers or sth) were just spamming slurs in response to Musk's Twitter purchase... Despite the fact that there haven't been any moderation changes, as far as I know. I doubt it's activists pressuring advertisers as much as advertisers taking the temperature of the room.

Don't worry guys! Nobody pulled out of twitter advertising due to pressure from activists who don't like free speech. They pulled out due to pressure from democrats who don't like free speech.

GM pulled out advertising. Now that twitter is private, we have no way of knowing for sure.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats