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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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I wrote about the likelihood of the Move To Mastodon resulting in a purity spiral of banning-everyone-who-won't-ban-the-target-of-the-week, and it seems to have already started. There's a reasonable summary from Reason here: Mastodon's Content-Moderation Growing Pains

The TL;DR is that Mike Pesca defended an article about puberty blockers by that notorious right wing rag, the New York Times, on a cool-kids-invite-only journalist mastodon server. This is an unforgivable sin in the mastodon universe, and earned calls to purge him as an "anti-trans ghoul" by other journalists.

Reason glosses over the most interesting part to me, which is the massive pressure imposed on on the journal.host moderators to ban Pesca but not Molloy under threat of their entire instance being purged from the mastodon universe (which was done anyway even after they surrendered). Some of that can be seen here. "A line has been crossed and if there aren't consequences it will be a wedge the TERFs use to gain entry into the broader platform." etc. etc. Money quote from one of their own journalist admins: “Banning someone for posting a link to an NYT article sets a precedent that we really need to work through.”

Another incident just happened to Raspberry Pi:

Raspberry Pi posted on Dec 8, at about 10pm NZT, about a new hire, Toby, who was previously a police officer who had specialised in building outdoor surveilliance equipment using Raspberry Pis...

Seeing this behaviour from a well-loved brand like Raspberry Pi was taken as a betrayal of the predominately leftist attitude of many instances. Due to the very different power dynamics of the Fediverse, it took less than two hours from the initial post and initial harmful replies before the official Raspberry Pi instance started being defederated

Now that Raspberry Pi has hit the #fediblock, recovery becomes considerable more difficult. Not only does Raspberry Pi need to withdraw their statements and issue unequivocal apologies, they must also apologise directly to the admins who defederated them, and demonstrate an ongoing commitment to change.

On the Fediverse there is no singular entity such as Twitter, Inc. that financially benefits from the presence of a brand, or benefits from the extra engagement and associated ad sales tha controversy will generate.

Brands seeking to join the Fediverse will need to invest not just in a social media manager, but compentent and long-time administration for the instance that is aware of the political dynamics of the Fediverse, in order to ensure that they are able to stay on the fediverse. (holy shit they reinvented political officers pretty quick, although given that they're all communists is it really "reinventing"?)

(Another instance, Mastodon.scot, appears to have been mass-defederated because they allowed a police officer to join. Or maybe they all insisted on typing in scottish accents and everyone thought it was gibberish, who knows)

I think there's a lot to be learned here about how organizations like twitter and reddit act as central authorities to prevent, abet, or moderate and sustain purity spirals, allowing incredibly "diverse" groups to avoid the infighting seen above so they can focus on torturing a common victim, while keeping the moderate wing sufficiently in fear of the radicals to make them obedient. Nate Silver is now mocking the "hall monitors" moving to Mastodon, showing a lot more brave defiance than when they were on the same platform holding the threat of a direct line to twitter's backchannel over his head.

I'm starting to wonder how much the great awokening of 2020 depended on central authorities endorsing (or simply failing to punish) radicals, sending normies like Nate the message that the Overton window is shifting and he'd better go along with it. Struggle sessions occurred in women's groups and fringe fandoms long before that, but even in those cases the knives never came out until trusted authorities gave the signal that the radicals would not be stopped, and that anyone who tried to defend themselves would face consequences. (Anyone who remembers "racefail" in science fiction would be in a good position to either support or rebut this, because it seems like the Ur woke purity spiral incident that I wasn't there to see).

In exchange for obedience and conversion, normies got some degree of protection as long as they weren't ever the last first to stop clapping at the latest public executions. And the radicals had administrative power they were too unstable to use taken away from them in exchange for being given the right to do anything they wanted to their victims with the authority's blessing. The administrators got a helpful volunteer stasi who would literally do it for free (particularly the entire reddit powermod ecosystem that emerged out of the SRS policing/mass reporting clique).

Musk buying twitter and all the various bits and pieces of private conversations we see echoed in the dissident press makes me think they're thinking along similar lines; that a strong central authority can also choose to check radical purity spirals and direct them into a cycle of self-destructive internal purges in much the same way that the Governor of Massachusetts ended the Salem witch trials.

It's encouraging to think that there may be a way to stop normies from sleepwalking into increasingly radical leftism, treating it as the new normal with no memory or recognition of their previous beliefs. Maybe all it takes is a central authority that aligns people's interests in a non-destructive way and refuses to grant cover to perpetrators.

I think there's a lot to be learned here about how organizations like twitter act as central authorities to prevent or abet purity spirals, allowing incredibly "diverse" groups to avoid infighting as they torture a common victim, while keeping the moderate wing sufficiently in fear of the radicals to make them obedient.

That's a very interesting theory.

Back when I was but a wee lad, I read some amount of Forgotten Realms books. There was this one following the adventures of some Drow priestess, which delved into the details of how their society was run. It was a long time ago, and I don't remember that much, but the TL;DR is that there was a lot of rat-racing, ladder-climbing, and backstabbing, all to get the favor of their goddess so she would grant you superpowers and status.

At the time I found it a bit ridiculous, how could a society like that be stable enough to create a marvelous city-state like the one being described? I remembered that a few months ago when someone or another was getting cancelled, and thought "huh, actually maybe a society of backstabbers is more stable than I thought", but I think you zeroed in on exactly what makes it stable. If it's a backstabber free-for-all, it's probably just a question of time before it collapses, but if there's, say, an evil spider-goddess of chaos, who's favor you can fall into and out of, the system might be more stable than you'd expect at first glance.

Funny how a silly fantasy book for teens ends up having so much insight.

there is nothing that prevents lawful evil and neutral evil societies from flourishing. it's the chaotic evil or lawful good alignment that leads to circular firing squads.

You're confusing lawful neutral with lawful evil, I believe.