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

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Notes -
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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