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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   32435 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025

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One statement I've found that cuts across the bipartisan spectrum is 'the internet made us all crazy'. Conservatives will imagine liberal craziness, liberals will imagine conservative craziness, but everyone I've said it to agrees. Something broke in the 2010s. It was probably the smartphones, the internet was safer when it was anchored to a desktop that you had to walk away from to do anything else. Now we spend most of our waking hours plugged into the outrage machine.

One statement I've found that cuts across the bipartisan spectrum is 'the internet made us all crazy'.

It may be one of the factors, but not necessarily the primary one. People in the past refused to date or engage with people of other religions or classes. What I think really happened in the past decade, is that for many secular people the politics basically became the new religion - especially for those more radicalized ones. Internet may spread the radicalization more effectively, but the underlying phenomenon is still the same.

Yeah, unfortunately the underlying phenomenon seems to be the internet exacerbating tribalist tendencies,

Smartphones.

Then Social Media...

Then algorithmically curated feeds.

I think the last one is where the breaking actually happened. But I say this as someone who remembers original Facebook where you just got a feed of stuff your friends posted, in chronological order, without the site itself trying to guess what you would find most engaging/catering to your worst impulses directly.

You generally used the smartphone to send messages directly to friends, not have things mediated through an app that aggressively wanted to steal your attention.

Yeah you'd get in political arguments, but it'd be with actual friends and generally the temperature was kept below a boiling point. The algo introduced you to ever more distant strangers, who held ever more extremist opinions, and did its best to keep you in a happy little echo chamber where you had your ego stroked THEN were randomly introduced to an unknown wrong-opinion-haver to unload on.

Its not a new insight that ragebait and outgroup bashing are the most effective way to hijack human attention.

But now, that's how literally every single media platform works. There is no countervailing force whatsoever. Even sites that became popular for featuring cute and 'funny' content have bought in.

To say that I am appalled with where this once-promising tech has taken us would be an understatement.

But I say this as someone who remembers original Facebook where you just got a feed of stuff your friends posted, in chronological order, without the site itself trying to guess what you would find most engaging/catering to your worst impulses directly.

I remember this era as well (Facebook recently "shared a memory" old enough to vote). My dark-ish take is that very public efforts for "trust and safety" failed miserably because the median user looked at the drama that was strongly associated with "trust and safety" and decided that the site felt neither trusted nor safe for sharing going forward. Maybe it was inevitable, but it felt like a decent chunk of it was an own goal on the part of the social media companies.

Some day, this 2016 election is going to end.

It's comforting to believe that this is an unnatural state of affairs, but what the internet did is not make people crazy, but show them how much of a fraud the world they lived in is. Much of the things we now bemoan about the neoliberal consensus were already there in the 90s and the 00s, you just couldn't possibly know about them or get to care about them.

Kojima is often rightfully credited for shining a light of what ultimately was predicted by contemporary philosophers in MGS2: the interconnection and sheer quantity of information makes shared context impossible, which means that hard power reasserts itself as the only means of enforcement. And thus we go along the road of violence and conflict, because there is no possible way to negotiate between peoples that operate by mutually incomprehensible memes.

However, this is not unnatural, people have had many irreconcilable differences and assorted conflict in the past, it is simply History telling Fukuyama "We're done when I say we're done."

What broke isn't the psyche of people, but the unity of the unipolar American Empire, as its myths could no longer be sustained in the face of its contradictions. And insofar as much (though not all) of those myths are deathly lies, that's a good thing.

Fight! Fight! Fight!

what the internet did is not make people crazy, but show them how much of a fraud the world they lived in is.

It specifically made them think the world they currently live in is a fraud much more than ever before. The Right takes this to mean we must RETVRN to the 1950's (when we didn't notice the fraud) while the Left takes it to mean insane purity-spiral wokeism is the only cure.

History telling Fukuyama "We're done when I say we're done."

This is the most chillingly beautiful phrase I've read this week.

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