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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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Kiwifarms, again

From the telegram, kiwifarms is back up at kiwifarms.top - in addition to the onion address. Their new IP seems to be from orcatech/vanwatech, who host 8kun - 8kun had trouble during the jan 6th hearings.

In a featured post, Josh is locking the threads of keffals and associates, and asking people to leave them alone for the moment. User responses range from "well, that sucks" to "yes, sir" to "probably the best move at the moment". Probably partially cope, but none of them want the farms to go down every two days.

Yesterday a discussion about this pitted "blocking some keffals posts strategically" vs "that's giving into the leviathan, never flinch, it's what they want". Ignoring the political violence detour, josh's probably making the right choice - and probably should've done something like it days ago. I'd still prefer lighter (very strict wordfilter? banning doxxing/anything implying violence or doxxing but allowing any other posts?) restrictions a week ago to banning the thread outright a week ago ... but if that wouldn't have worked, temporarily lock the thread outright might've saved the rest of the site.

Speaking purely in abstract and putting morality aside for a moment, the correct strategic move in all-out war (and the move the 4chan of old would've taken) would be to utterly destroy keffals under a barrage of pizza, dildos and boxes of printer paper, as an example to all. But it seems there isn't the stomach for such things anymore, even on the farms. Has even the sharper side of the internet softened over time, or was this something you could only get away with before authorities learned about the internet? Or before everything was so centralised? Why would that have happened then but not now?

Even in the “good old days”, incidents like that were relatively rare.

Modern cancel culture is, on average, far more vicious and with far more lasting impacts on people’s lives, compared to what the old internet used to dish out.