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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   34926 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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And to think that this all happened because Scott platformed Mencius Moldbug back in 2013. Search your feelings. You know it to be true.

I wouldn’t really mind Elon becoming techno-monarch tbh, but I don’t trust Trump with absolute power.

I don't agree with your first sentence. As cliche as it might seem, I am coming around to thinking that it all kicked off with GamerGate, when lots of people started noticing that something was off.

I think pro- and anti-GamerGaters both tend to overestimate its impact. I tend to think GamerGate was just one instance of Toxoplasma of Rage that served as a political awakening for some people. I don't think it was more impactful than other Toxoplasma skirmishes, like New Atheism or BLM.

Though I must admit, GamerGate was also a conflict that almost entirely passed me by. I had one friend in college who I had one conversation about it with, and I was vaguely aware of Anita Sarkeesian, but neither side was salient to me (I play video games from time to time, but I'm not a "gamer", and I've never been an SJW or woke scold) and so I was never very invested in it. It would be like me trying to get involved in the "pro-shipper vs anti-shipper" debate in fan fiction communities. I have my principles, and they might align with one or the other side of that debate more than the other, but I'm also not fighting in that war because it seems dumb and fake to me.

Let me take the neutral ground and say that GamerGate wasn't the precipitating event, but it was pivotal insomuch as videogames were (and still are) a universal hobby of young men. And when confronted with the blunt and obvious truth of Noticing the blue-hairs ruin everything, one could either go down the trail of Noticing everything else or sticking your head in the sand and saying it's a good thing. The 4chan/Resetra divergence, the chud/woke speciation.

It was the universal radicalizing event of the generation, and even those who were normie enough to not care were inculcated with the memes (on both the left and right.) No one questions the cultural impact of music or movies. Video games as a medium are larger than both combined. At some point, video games transitioned from being influenced by political trends to making them. Comparing the financial success of chudgames vs wokegames has become a tribal sport.

Which is to say... if someone plays a piece of media for thousands of hours, having it consume every waking moment of their lives, of course it would effect their political values. New Atheism and BLM are dead and gone but people are still mad that they got rid of Tracer's ass wiggle. I think you're just disconnected with what young men back then and now consider important.

It's a bit sad when you think about it - the greatest generation got world war 2, the boomers got the free love revolution, and millenials got... gamergate. (Gen x get nothing, as is tradition.)

GenX got 9/11 and the war on terror.

You know where the name "millenial" comes from, right?

Most Millennials were children when the towers were hit.

I guess the actual fighting in the WoT was done mostly by millennials though.

The Millennial generation was so named (in the 90s) because the Millennium was expected to be the defining event of the generation -- turned out that was a pretty lame event, but the overturning of American hegemony by a gang of religious fanatics came just after and has shaped life since.

Most people put the first millennials at around 1980 -- which makes the bulk of the generation at least aware of what was going on, and the oldest of them 21. The last Boomers were 4-9 y.o. during the Summer of Love (depending where you want to draw that line), and the first ~24. This does not seem like a big difference to me, unless you are arguing that the defining event of the Boomer generation wasn't until sometime in the late 70s when all of them were grown up?

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