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Notes -
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?
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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