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Following up on a discussion with @drmanhattan16 downthread:
I think the answer is usually going to be "yes."
A couple months ago, during some meta-discussion of disappearing threads, I wrote up my thoughts on conspiracy theories as countersignaling. As long as there's incentive to appear cool, independent, unique, there is incentive to push the boundaries of acceptability. It's called "edgy" for a reason.
One of the common cultural touchstones for edge is forbidden knowledge. As a result, anywhere you find edgy status games, you'll find someone claiming to know whatever it is They don't want you to know. Except...if one can just say it out loud, how cool and secret can it really be? The theorist is incentivized to play up their edge, a rebel who won't be cowed rather than an attention-seeker. As an aside, antisemitism is past its heyday because it's not very good for this. Enough people pattern-match it to "attention-seeker" that it loses its edge. This is the result of decades of memetic immune response to those status games. Of course, given that one very definitely can get banned for it, it retains edgy credentials...sometimes.
(Note that I'm not claiming the antisemites here are just edgy. I understand you're pretty serious about the subject. The motte is a weird place and has other status games; personally, I think that COVID skepticism has a grip on more of the edgelords.)
In the end, some people will find themselves drawn to signal their edge. Those who do so overtly will usually end up banned, unless they signal something really milquetoast, in which case they're probably "cringe." Those with a little more tact, though...they are incentivized to find something under the radar. To maintain that sweet, sweet plausible deniability while still getting a rise out of the opposition. They need something that will prove their status as an independent free-thinker who doesn't fall for the party line.
And they take the black pill.
Edgy is just an aesthetic now. It doesn't mean a damn thing. People who self-describe as "punk" will mandate all the exact same speech codes in their spaces as HR departments in multinational megacorps across the world do, if not even more stringent. Rebellion has been successfully co-opted by the monoculture and you can buy it at your local strip mall now.
In addition, that isn't really what people mean by infiltrating spaces. It's not about simply existing in those spaces, it's about wresting control of them and changing their culture. We're talking about the mirror inverse of far-left reddit power mods taking control of a formerly-apolitical space and mandating leftist politics and banning all dissent, something that happens all the time. Do you have any instances of anything like that? Trump supporters wresting control of a forum and banning trans-positivity and requiring people use the birth names of trans people? Banning anyone who advocates for anything other than zero immigration?
Or the barber pole turns eternal. Perhaps the true counter-culture in a society awash with twitter narcissists, outrage porn and nihilistic realpolitik is a throwback to something like Victorian era propriety. Subs like /r/Cleanlivingkings and /r/nofap (although the latter included a bizarre strain of muslims struck by self-loathing for being horny and masturbating) always fascinated me for this reason. Maybe if we can make it edgy and high-status to be a decent human being without coding it red or blue, to value honesty, earnestness and a moral code we can rein in the brinksmanship and hatred coursing through our country's veins. A man can dream.
And if Your (the royal you, not picking on you personally) visceral reaction to this is 'But the left/right are the lying fascists/cartoonish villains intent on destroying society, consider that you might be part of the problem.
And then the barber pole, which turns eternally, would continue to turn, making it, as they say, "cringe" to be concerned with honesty, earnestness, and a moral code.
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I suppose I was trying to invoke the high-(social) status low-class activist being invited as a set piece to a high-class gathering. The avant-garde artist, philosopher, psychologist, social scientist etc. rubbing shoulders with wealthy elites. The elites are wealthy and control what is fashionable to some degree, but they don't control what is cool, right?
When our news anchors are dishonest demagogues who rant from our televisions every night, when corporations are legally obligated to fuck their workers and society in the name of shareholder value, when half of the political body is constantly outraged at the party in power, maybe the counter-culture move is a retreat to decorum and a stricter moral code.
Straightedge reached a decent level of popularity at my high school which is amusing considering nobody drank or did drugs. I bet the majority of our class of a few hundred were virgins when they graduated. It's somewhat perplexing in retrospect.
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It depends. That is why there is a new niche of the right that is 'edgy' yet holds high-status belief, such as being pro-vaccine (or downplaying vaccine side effects). Criticizing the woke but also being pro-vaccine or downplaying vaccine side effects is appealing to the likes of Marc Andreessen, Scott Adams, and other high status people. There is way to have the best of both worlds or to have your cake and eat it too.
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4chan. White supremacist entryism on a few boards starting circa the turn of the 2010s followed by every board getting swarmed and quality subsequently going down the gutter over the last few years. Whole site has changed drastically from pretty apolitical to extreme far right and driven off most people I met via it; in 2010 one could talk on /an/ without the thread getting derailed and destroyed with how dinosaur reconstructions with feathers are a Jewish plot to undermine the white race, which dog breed is most Aryan or Jewish, which human races should be reclassified as animals. None of those are hypothetical examples.
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Are you a fan of Uncle Ted, by chance? This sentence is essentially the thesis of The System's Neatest Trick.
No, just an observation made from my time in and around countercultures.
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I think in the current political climate, the infiltration and take-over of online spaces looks very different for progressive and right-wing invaders.
Progs use an entryist approach to either get into positions of power or to get the sympathy of people in power and then use top-down enforcement of increasingly strict rules to force their opponents out. E.g.: "This space is unwelcoming for X demographic / we need representation of X on the mod team, we need to use inclusive language to make this place welcoming to everyone!"
Right-wingers are currently powerless to infiltrate prog spaces because they will be banned on sight. They can, however, turn neutral spaces by spamming them with aesthetically unappealing opinions. Other people then drop out voluntarily either because they don't want to be associated with witches or because the aesthetics of RW opinions become unbearable to them. Examples include what happened to Voat or pretty much every Youtube alternative out there. E.g.: "Hey guys! Let's talk about the Holocaust for the 54.000th time this week. What about them Jews, amirite?". There is a degree of "left-wingers can't stand disagreement" to this but I would venture that everybody has their limits. The only user I have blocked here is our friendly neighbourhood pedo. If he were to post much more and I wouldn't be able to make his posts invisible to me, I would leave this place.
We did have a few moments in the past where aesthetically unappealing opinions worked to drive out some more sensitive right-wingers; I particularly remember a few abortion-related meltdowns back when we were still on Reddit. Since then I don't think we've experienced a repeat of the sort of long, detailed and many-sided discussion of abortion that precipitated it, and in general I do get the sense that the shock contributed to us becoming more of a safe space for the right wing only.
Unfortunately, without naming names, the people who were actually the first to be affected seemed to come from the best rather than the worst side of the spectrum of right-wing posters. For all the appeal that the idea of balanced offense to everyone has to me (for what it's worth, I even briefly brainstormed about the most offensive-to-the-right belief I could defend in good faith, and arrived at something like "mandatory mRNA vaccine drive to eradicate STDs, so we can reap the utility gains of more unprotected sex among strangers; the additional unwanted pregnancies can be taken care of by subsidised access to abortions"), I therefore fear that selecting for the thickest-skinned of posters will not only not remove the ideological bias, but also push the average quality down.
There seems to be a pretty even balance of pro-choice and pro-life posters here. See the latest discussion in this thread.
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Indeed, Scott talks about this effect. Like, explicitly- he mentions that if you have a forum rules allowing any opinion and only police on tone, then your friendly neighborhood pedo will manifestopost. 4chan using racism to drive out liberals is probably a live demonstration of a, ah, less highbrow version of the same phenomenon(it does, in fact, have rules).
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