Hi folks,
Recorded this interview with Trace at Manifest last month. We talked about evolving cultural dynamics online, reforming the Democratic Party, and how small groups of people can have disproportionate influence on public policy. Also discussed is the impact of places like TheMotte, both as a crucible for ideas and as a training ground for future writers and leaders.
Given Trace's prominence and contentiousness here, I hope it might be of interest. Look forward to hearing what people think, and perhaps sparking some discussion. I've highlighted one point of disagreement I have with his ideas [thusly] in the transcript.
The video, Spotify/Apple Podcast links, and a full 'Patio11-style' transcript are all available here: https://alethios.substack.com/p/with-tracingwoodgrains-journalism
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
[caveat: I'm not an unbiased interlocutor, here]
I think this is only true for a very specific set of things.
If this is supposed to be the reference to the Motte, it's worth exploring what, exactly that would mean. Are the original founding members from back when the CWR was on SSC's subreddit around? Does anyone remember their names, or even what they left over? Are we measuring by leadership and moderation, and Amadan tells us what the shape of this forum looks like? If we're measuring by volume, did Darwin tell you the shape of this community back on the subreddit? I'd love if it were true in some sense, where the community and outside impact was shaped by its most productive members -- a Motte that was Dean-shaped wouldn't be a bad thing! -- but no. Even for the absolute best writers, here, there's more to it than that, and looking through AAQCs and seeing many of the best have neither a high upvote score nor a lot of good follow-on conversation shows that pretty quick.
Or, for another example, one can readily look at the furry fandom. There are people in (or previously in) the fandom that have had massively outsized impact on the environment and the norms. Dragoneer (rip) shaped FurAffinity, Tourmal and three or four writers SoFurry, I'd assume there's something similar for IB and don't want to know; UncleKage runs Anthrocon with an iron mandible, so on. If you look at history, Fred Patton has a nice list of a few major creators of a handful of very specific pieces That Mattered.
And he also has a massive list, often of people (some much more active), that didn't. Anyone know who made and runs VCL without looking it up? What its ethos is or was? When the entire site died? Fandom culture knows the Burned Furs, even if they might not know the people who actually formed it, but does anyone want to pretend that these people actually drove the movement, rather than the drive-by SomethingAwful brigades? Weasyl? There is no FanLore on WerewolfDotCom, and no one cares what I could write about Chris, Lv246, and XZenGrim, even if it was once one of the more active forums of its age and focus; The WEREweb has almost entirely bitrot out.
I'm not going to throw away the Great Man Theory of subcultures, but I also think there are very dire limits to it.
The Burned Furs are the clearest-cut version: they were not the first 'clean up the fandom's image' group, and they weren't the last; there was nothing unusual in their presentation or their focus. But they were late enough that some of the conversations were web-indexed, early enough to not just get lumped into the SomethingAwful anti-furs, and tech enough to have forums of their own rather than YahooGroups, and either by effort or (mis)fortune received (comparatively) mainstream coverage. Associated Student Bodies is famous for popularizing the 'off to gay furry college' subgenre, but for all of its skill in writing or art, or consistency in output (which wasn't actually that great), more vital was its ability to get decent copy available for bulk publication (and a few fans with scanners willing to hoist the black flag). At the other extreme, there's a lot of ruin in an organization, but the final straw seldom has a name meaningful to anyone except the blocklists.
At best, this says something trivial about the importance of timing; at worst, this points to a far more serious limitation on the ability of a handful of loud and enthusiastic activists to actually make concrete progress in objectives. You need more than a compelling story, or a specific matter, or a really clear narrative. You need a fulcrum, or it's just chaff.
I don't think it's enough.
((While less confident, I'm not sure it's necessary, either. The flip side to the bad guys having an observable pattern, as much as they have alpha, here, they don't really have good stories. The argument against direct instruction isn't specific or cohesive, and it's won for literal decades.))
For example, Brigadia was an offhand comment here a week and a half before Trace published his expose (and a few days before Sailer and Stancil's and Musk's fight over the matter); genav and pilot news had covered the matter in an apolitical way in 2015 as Pearson and Rojas, and academic criticism had noticed the impact on CTI.
Props to Trace for finding the fulcrum he needed for it to get any recognition -- especially if that ended up everyone liking to see Stancil humiliated, but I'll also take just putting all these things and the cheating scandal together into a single piece and the right place at the right time and the right promotion. But it wasn't just a cohesive, compelling, clear narrative pointing out why this matters in a way they already agree with.
(I'd argue that the inclusion of the cheating scandal made it less cohesive, but a better work overall. But being a good work doesn't make it effective: it's only been six months into either bet, but I'm not exactly feeling worried. The best result we've actually gotten is Duffy trying to settle the case, something Buttigieg notably never did, and that's still far more than a day late and dollar short. Snow is still
workingemployed at the FAA.)Like Trace's claims about public institutions more generally, this depends on leaning so heavily on "in part" that it stops being meaningful. Yes, it's quite possible that small differences in openness to experience or willingness to do low-paid high-status work have a few percentages of impact on political breakdowns of different groups. But these differences or interest have existed for most of a century, and while there's also been a political discrepancy in academia predating the Eisenhower administration, Trace's thesis points to the evidence of a recent and far greater change.
And there's a much more obvious and more stronger cause for that change. The right-wing has abandoned by virtually every institution in the country because it has been abandoned -- or been ejected. There's staggeringly few 'institutions' where discrimination against conservatives is not endemic and overt; there's no space where law and regulation has not been turned against a wide variety of conservative behaviors. In academia, specifically, we're more than a decade downstream of the revelation that conservatives trying to build organizations in academia not only must accept members regardless of direct contradiction to a socially conservative belief central to the organization, but even accept officers; campuses have only broadened the breadth and scope of these policies since far beyond any focus against discrimination or for identity. In spheres that had external forces or pressures that maintained some level of parity in the past, like the military, after they didn't respond to more 'subtle' pressures progressives instead turned up the thumbscrews; in others, like police, it just became dogma to defund the institution for literally years. (And those, still, never became as progressive-dominated as academia has.)
Trace's response when pressed is to [insist that these pressures are "[...]not a function of institutional power[...]") because the same disparities show up in measures outside of preference falsification, when it's not to just say 'skill issue'. That's hilariously wrong given his specific examples -- we don't have the actually have the information to say anything about voting patterns, but there have in fact been massive censorship campaigns focused on donation patterns and the nearest proxies of voting affiliation we have in party affiliation -- but more than that it's not even wrong. The entire point of these campaigns are to prevent any remotely sane or risk-averse conservative from entering the field to start with. Finding that there are indeed few (poorly) hidden conservatives at the trail's end isn't even engaging with the question; it's just reframing it.
That doesn't just matter in the 'boo hoo conservatives' sense, or even the 'oh those dastardly leftists' sense, regarding why things are the way they are, or even in the descriptive sense of what would need be done to change things. Saying the left will be 'reliant' on these institutions is wrong; trying to use these behaviors to predict the shape of 'new leaders' coming up into progressive spheres is wrong. The left owns these institutions in the sense you or I would own a cheap Harbor Freight screw bit; there is nothing so trivial that they will not bring it to bear, and nothing so dishonest and credibility-destroying that they will resist the urge to break them into glitter for even a second.
And well before that, it doesn't even tell us what there will be to lead. Especially as the actual capabilities that 'elite human capital' claim that they're focused around shrivel up and blow away in the wind, the actual groups will be The Groups, in the sense of unions and minority affinity orgs and scammers rather than the education and enthusiastic and careful-about-the-truth, because whatever might have once tied the professional class to those things is gone, replaced with a dress code and a lawn sign.
This one I have a lot more sympathy about because I believed it once, too. I can't give the hard counterexamples without self-doxxing, but to give a publicly-known one: no, you can not compete with FIRST and VEX by providing a simpler, better, easier, and cheaper product. No, it doesn't matter how bad the color sensors work. A literal decade-plus of compute advances and some mindbogglingly bad decisions by these companies makes a better mousetrap easy; it does not make a path to your door.
If this is a descriptive position, it's true and disappointing; if it's a normative one, it's wrong and appalling.
The first rule of any systems reliability problem is to solve for 'who can't be hit by a bus'. We're just downstream of a massive scandal because too few people are willing to retire from politics; the Democratic party has had a narrow House loss become significantly less narrow because multiple members have just up and died post-election, and only missed it getting even worse because the Republicans haven't done a great job either. I don't mean to say that just as a memento mori. There's always more work to be done. Even if you're not getting up there in years -- though that makes it the discrepancy more overt today -- you should be passing on skills and getting new insights and, yes, recognizing when someone else is a better choice for a job than you are.
People have, in the history of the world, given up power. Even if you don't think it's out of the goodness of their hearts, it's simply because they couldn't use it as well directly. If the most powerful thousand people in the country can't come to this revelation, there's something more broken in the system than any mere issue of politics. If they did, and deny it, that's a moral failing on them. Stealing fire from the gods might not have worked out great for Prometheus when he got caught, but it doesn't make Zeus any less of a dick for holding it close to start with.
There's an argument against passivity in general. But knowing you're trying to take down absolute jerks matters; knowing you're taking down people who will break everything else matters. Actually saying it, explaining it, when it's still relevant and before they're trotted off the stage, matters.
But these are all lazy nitpicks!
I put good effort into those nitpicksWell, no. I actually do hope Trace's Centre for Educational Progress project is successful, even if I'm not optimistic. Education and upskilling and excellence is important, and the disinterest modern schools hold those topics in is one of the more critical civilization-threatening projects. And that, I expect, is what lead this entire conversation to exist. These points are all, yes, all just leading to what Trace wants to do with CEP.
Which means it's a problem if the way they're supposed to flow naturally toward Trace's theory of change, and they don't. That's why I'm not optimistic.
If excellence were enough to take down the teacher's unions, they'd have fallen out of favor decades ago to the first set of a half-dozen Karens decades ago, or a bucket scooped from the grease trap in the last decade. If all that you needed to do to get people talking was formally writing down mind-numbing details into a good cohesive story that tells people why they should care, the phonics people would have completely purged whole language people decades ago, and Orson Scott Card would have solved gay rights in 1980. If producing good solutions to long-standing problems is enough that's great, but one of Trace's CEP people points to Mike Rowe, and there's a punchline to that joke. I'll applaud Rowe for the extent he hasn't let politics (or getting maximum public attention) core out his brain (at least more than a Koch donation), but the man's 62, and MikeRoweWORKS has been around since 2008.
It's only skulls of travellers paving this road, but there's still skulls, here.
While your opening argument could be construed as just a quibble about the exact coefficient of the power-law distribution that Trace is alluding to, I generally agree with the thrust of your response as a whole.
As I note in the transcript:
Trace's approach can demonstrably work for situations like the banning of the American Bully XL that he cites. You can look at recordings of any local Council meeting to see dozens of these sorts of examples every year, where decision-makers have been motivated to pull a single policy lever at their disposal in order to satisfy the demands of some small group of people who were motivated enough to show up and communicate clearly. Where the approach is necessary, but substantially insufficient, is when you're trying to influence the most complex systems in the known universe - multi-functional institutions. There, a far more comprehensive strategy is required. After all, Gramsci's Long March that brought us here was the work of generations.
That's certainly part of the disagreement, especially in terms of ability to successful policy campaigns, but I think there's a deeper disagreement specific to just the relationship between enthusiast focus and mainstream attention (or even attention among other enthusiasts). It's also is a disagreement about what extent :
is true, both for the Bully XL question and in general.
From my understanding, the theory here is that the CEBRDD, BullyWatch, and Lawrence Newport "raised salience", and that explains why everyone was talking about it. We can actually examine this! Newport first posted on Twitter on the matter in April 2023; BullyWatchUK only created an account in July 2023. Tracking websites is harder, but CEBRDD's first domain name registry is October 2023, and BullyWatch's website probably started early spring 2023.
Okay, that lines up real nice with MP Hayes pushing for a ban in June 2023, if perhaps a little messy. What's the problem? Well...
What else happened, in June 2023 and the preceding months? I don't have Trace's full list of those seven activists, but either he's including names that can not accurately fit as "didn't have any background experience", or he's missing names that were a large part of the drive. Indeed, if you start poking at the history there's actually a lot of salience-raising starting from conventional media in 2022 by orgs unrelated to Newport, and there's a lot of motivation for legislation completely separated from a bunch of technical analysis, and a parallel campaign that started in Ireland.
I'm not saying these CEBRDD guys (and women) didn't matter at all... but even before we get to the question of whether they drove the policy campaign, they clearly couldn't have driven the why is everyone talking about this. To the extent that they did matter or show up after they got into the policy debate, I'm not sure how much it reflects them driving the reporting versus reporters looking for someone available to quote that they'll agree with.
The power-law distribution, now matter what its exponent or dividing line, was not the actual important part driving conversation.
That's a particularly severe case: (oftenly gruesomely) dead kids and women, a very narrow timeline, and a very specific set of proposed Important Unrelated Activists. And can certainly believe there are some matters where this traces the whole path. But it's hard to evaluate them, because for every genuine grassroots operation you'll pretty quickly find several where, on further inspection, it turns out that the 'grassroots' speakers are tots-not-speaking for a large organization they're an employee of which focuses on this topic, or they're very intimately tied to a prominent example of the case, or where the genuine grassroots are just laundering the opinions of the media organization interviewing them.
To be fair to Trace, I think he argues that a lot of this particular set of problems is also downstream of the pipeline issues, and is suggesting development of separate programs outside of those tools to provide a sort of outside pressure against that bureaucracy. Demonstrating the bad results of popular policy by contrasting to a good external policy won't solve the whole bureaucracy, but it's a fulcrum to get public attention and undermine the proponents of the bad policy if they don't take it up the new alternative.
To be less fair to Trace, there's a really concrete example of exactly that having happened in the very specific sphere of education... but charter schools are a very awkward fit for all of his recs. And Gramsci's long march worked without presenting much in the way of generally useful things, instead favoring benefits for its own advocacy core.
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It's an odd shill (edit- as in, advertisement/solicitation) that advertises on the Motte with a claim that the Motte is a subject of conversation, but links to an article transcript that doesn't include the word.
It was a conscious decision to leave it subtextual, particularly through the edit. On the one hand, the event where this was filmed was full of Motte posters, many of whom are now in various positions of authority. On the other, I felt that insights into the sort of dynamics we see here, though a particularly intense example of the sort of online spaces we spend much of the interview discussing, are generalisable. Ultimately, I didn't want an audience unfamiliar with this space to feel unable to engage with the ideas.
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FWIW, he asked us if it would be okay to post this.
We said yes, and warned him he'd probably be getting flack from Trace-haters.
There are Trace haters here?
Trace has history. In 2020, he was bothered by posts from FCfromSSC and others for posting views that they don't want to share a country with Trace or other Blue Tribers and that Red Tribe needs to not cooperate with Blues on problems they started (rioting, along with Rittenhouse, was a big topic at the time) and then he took issue with some dehumanizing rhetoric towards criminals like robbers calling them "scum" and "rabid dogs" and eventually announced that he was starting r/TheSchism along with another user with a bunch of numbers for a name that had his own reasons. I think this post is probably relevant there, too.
Some time later, the furry crossword hoax was pulled on LibsOfTikTok by Trace, and other comment history accumulated that was used against Trace by other users here. After the David Gerard article, Trace basically flamed out. He had a successful Twitter account at that point, and he didn't really need this place anymore.
I don't like how he exited and I think this place is worse off without him and I don't really agree with much of his reasoning about this site being bad that I've seen him post elsewhere, but I will give him that it must be pretty annoying to already be left of center in a space like this and then get multiple people who link 5 year old posts at him aggressively to tell him how wrong and hypocritical he is. The rules allowed the behavior, but it was too bad. Everyone makes mistakes, missteps in rhetoric, or failures to predict, and one weak spot of forums like this is that they're perfectly preserved, forever. I've seen the same kind of digging up of old posts impact other users here in a way that I don't find helpful.
Anyway, Trace is wrong, this place is way better than Twitter. I'd guess he gets more haters on Twitter, but they're of lower quality and he can snipe back as much as he likes.
Sorry for re-igniting old drama. If I characterized this wrong, let me know in the replies.
I'd be more bothered about people bringing up five year posts if the posters (or institutions) involved with them were willing to say "I don't believe that any more" or even "that's out of context" (along with an explanation if needed). I would agree that if that's the case, bringing up the five year old posts is crass and usually inappropriate.
But that's not usually what's happening when people bring up old posts here or on LW. (It often is in the outside world, of course.)
Looking into it again... maybe, yeah. The LibsOfTikTok thing was pretty relevant to bring up for that story in particular. Trace never disavowed the hoax, and then he wrote another thing that was sorta relevant to it. It is also noteworthy that Trace waged the culture war outside of this forum in a more real way than almost anyone who has ever commented here with the LibsOfTikTok thing.
Trace has a history of being, I dunno, mentally unstable in terms of his online persona, with TheSchism and then this swearing off of the site. Given those two actions, I think it's fair to say that he was never very in love with the principles of this site in the first place, a "fair weather friend". I'm not in disagreement that rules like the one we operate under can be a burden, and that sometimes, it's best to drop all pretenses of fairness and tell people to bugger off, but since this is a public forum and low effortposters and partisans naturally select themselves out and everyone else can only just... reply to your posts, it's not a huge problem. In contrast, Twitter sucks. I've tried it and I found a couple profiles I like other than Trace, but the format doesn't really lend itself to good conversation like a place like this does. Everything peters out, Trace is fickle at best at responding to his commenters, character limit, have to click many times to continue reading conversations, etc.
Oh well. If he wants to join the McDonald's of websites, the Universal Culture melting pot shitstorm and thinks it's better, what can I say? I guess it probably is better for him since he wants more exposure.
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Thanks for sharing, wow people were really nasty to him. I don’t really know all of what was going on but it’s a shame because I haven’t seen anywhere near that level of personal mud flinging in my time on the site so far!
There's a lifecycle that a very specific sort of amazing poster here can fall into (if he's young enough).
The exact same fucking thing happened to ymeskhout, another former mod. A kinda similar thing happened to Kulak_Revolt.
Trace was a very highly valued member of the forum, and the forum was even prepared to look past the fact that he tried to recruit all the left-of-center users to a new subreddit. Then the rest happened.
I agree that criticism of your writing seems a lot more personal when you make your writing your job. But I'd go further and add there's also an element in the lifecycle where some of these people made their writing about themselves- specifically their own moral self-perception- and that criticism stings all the more when you publicly fail to meet your own publicly espoused ethics.
I don't remember ymeskhout burning out, but the other two at least had high-profile moments where they failed to meet the standards they claimed, and then rather clearly disliked that standard being held against them. When you make an unequivocable moral standard about why others are wrong to act in a certain way, and then equivocate about it when you do it yourself, the substack paywall becomes a the most generous sort of affirmation. On the other hand, a diverse audience of many contradicting and even disagreeable views who will scorn your self-image of yourself as a morally superior person for free.
On the other hand, you have an audience that is largely composed of people who like you and your position enough to give you money.
Wasn't he pretty clear about being tired of dealing with certain views that would simply not respond to evidence?
Less of a "personal" thing or "flameout" but in the same vein.
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Oh that's sad, and kind of recent too. I disagree with Trace's manipulation of Libs of TikTok, but it looks like he regrets it too. And that commenter was an asshole to bring it up on an unrelated thread.
It's sad to see Trace ragequit. He's a good poster, a shining example of the kind of person that keeps me around the rationalist-adjacent sphere. I worry about the motte's inability to retain quality centrist and left-of-center members, even though myself I am far right.
He's a big fan of the block function on twitter, along with plenty of other large accounts. I wonder why he didn't avail himself on that more on TheMotte.
Really? Where did he say this?
(And "It was bad tactics" or "I really don't like how it made people hate me" don't count.)
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Rittenhouse was such a perfect little scissor...not shocking that was the first step in driving people apart
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Amadan's put me as having a "mad hate" for him, and while I try to be even-handed with my interactions with him directly, I've also abandoned TheSchism as a result of his behavior and have been trying to keep any discussion on twitter as fact-specific as possible because I don't see any possible progress or even third-party benefit from value discussions. There's been a few times that's tested my commitment against unfollowing people for disagreement.
((While I hope he has luck putting his money where his mouth is on CEP, I expect that if he gets remotely close to a serious concrete policy going anywhere against or parallel to progressive institutions, he's going to get figuratively drowned in teacher's union meat. And more likely he's going to find his compatriots taking a train straight to Abilene the second one of The Groups makes any demand, no matter how direct the contradiction to CEP's goals, like he did when he thought Yglesias actually meant anything when talking new centrism.))
I expect Trace would point more to the results of his last conversation here.
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I don’t hate him, but anyone who ragequits a forum forever because people said mean things about them immediately loses respect from me.
Honestly, it wasn't even the rageout. Catharsis doesn't have to be pretty. It was more the gap... anti-moe? The gap/contradiction between his opening narrative pitch of 'hello respected friends, let me tell you of a guy who talks shit about the Motte' and then the flame out 'screw you guys, I hated you all anyway.' It's not like it was any sort of surprise or carefully guarded secret, but false friendship for the sake of shilling a substack of all things...
You know what gap moe means?
Man I had you pegged as a 50 year old Fox News boomer.
I don't know what gap moe means. Please explain.
I looked it up.
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Urban Dictionary
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A 50-year old is an X-er, not a boomer, and not even an especially old X-er. The boomers were their parents' generation.
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I am adding 'Fox News boomer' to my list of pejoratives.
No it’s not a pejorative! The thoroughness of your empirical research is rarely observed among the brainrotted younger generation.
Gattsuru?
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Dean not only knows what gap moe means, he's embodied it.
(Also I don't know what it means and this joke is based on a 2-minute google search.)
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He has this weird one-two "pouncing panther - wounded gazelle" gimmick, that I personally got rather fed up with. Maybe he got better after moving on from here, but that would go against my priors of how becoming an influencer affects people.
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For various definitions of "hater", yes. I think he's a very interesting writer and thinker, and I firmly believe his heart's more or less in the right place. I also think he's one of the better examples about how these virtues are insufficient in the present situation.
What do you mean by the present situation? The information environment more generally or this specific podcast?
The culture war more generally.
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It's worth... well, there's nothing to forgive, so no fairness needed from me since no offense was taken. I am not making a critique about the interview in any sense, merely raising an eyebrow at the pitch / appeal to the audience. Which is not suspected of being Tracing's responsibility in any way.
Maybe it's mentioned in the video and not caught in the text.
He said the interview included discussion of "niche online communities," which it does appear to include. That is nominally "places like TheMotte," but you're right that the actual discussion is quite non-specific.
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