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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.
COVID skepticism does not neatly map to "edge" for a few reasons.
If it comes to "conspiracy" or "forbidden knowledge" then it instantly runs into the problem of equal and opposite conspiracy theories. Take someone living in Sweden. That person is a trusting, humble person who believes everything their government says. They do not care for forbidden knowledge The exact opposite, therefore, of an archetypical covid skeptic. Except... Their government IS covid skeptic, and thus they are too. They think all the countries doing lockdowns and forcing masks on people's faces are somewhere between silly and tyrannical, because this is the consensus in Sweden. And, like the rest of the world, Sweden has it's "conspiracy theorists", except in Sweden that means supporters of the mainstream narrative on covid, or zero covid advocates, who accuse the Swedish government of, approximately, a conspiracy theory to kill Swedes.
Are Swedes edgelords? Quite the opposite, in my experience.
No matter what position you hold on Covid, you almost necessarily must believe at least some conspiracy theory. Either Sweden's government is engaged in a conspiracy to kill people with covid, or another pro-lockdown regime is engaged in a conspiracy to needlessly perform lockdowns. Either Fauci conspired to stop people wearing masks, or conspired to make people wear masks.
As for aesthetics, the policy of... doing nothing, lacks a distinct, sharp edge to it. Far less cool than throwing everyone into lockdown and making them wear apocalyptic symbols. If you wanted a world of edge, the aesthetics of lockdownism certainly have a sci-fi evil supervillain edge to them. The contrasting aesthetic is usually middle-aged casual wear and when covid skeptics want to go edgy they do so by adopting the aesthetics of their opponents.
If my goal was edgy, I'd know where I'd plant my flag.
People can come to the same conclusion for normal or for conspiratorial reasons.
I don’t even think that the lockdown conversation is particularly conspiratorial in America! It seems like a straightforward extension of other mainstream personal-liberty narratives. “Fauci told people not to wear masks” is an observation, not a conspiracy. Neither Sweden nor the US has to be conspiring—one of them just has to be wrong.
The Motte has a giant soft spot for vigilante science. Before COVID that meant talking about the replication crisis, maybe nootropics sometimes. But now there’s a whole world of Ivermectin, long COVID, lab leak proof, etc. The budding countersignaller gets to pick and choose his point of attack. Given the chaotic state of COVID research, he may well be right. Given the sorry state of COVID tribalism...it doesn’t really matter whether he is.
How do you distinguish "edgy countersignaller" from "principled libertarian" in this case, though?
You check if he’s actually talking about state power. Defunding the FDA fits. Complaining about lockdown calculus or the surveillance state, sure. “Do your own research” messaging, not so much. I don’t even know what libertarians say about the lab leak.
If he spends more time smugly asserting that Real science is suppressed, that such-and-such study is flawed, that anyone who believes the mainstream is a sheep, a shill for big pharma, and a bad rationalist to boot? Maybe he’s interested in something other than pure libertarianism.
But libertarians also think that people should be free to do their own research, and should not be mandated into going along with the herd?
There may be a useful distinction to draw between 'wonk-libertarianism' (ie. defund the FDA) and 'folk-libertarianism' (ie. don't tread on me) but I'm not convinced that one is 'edgier' than the other. And 'folk-libertarianism' is extremely common in the USA among people who wouldn't self-identify as libertarians -- so framing those people as edgelords I think is incorrect. Also uncharitable and dismissive, which is really no way to be.
I’m not talking about folk-libertarians or the USA in general. I’m talking about the Motte. Out of the very small set of Mottizens, some subset are lured to the edge; out of that subset, I think more are currently attracted to COVID counter-narrative rather than antisemitism or 9/11 truthing or whatever. I’d expect this theory to hold on other discussion boards, too.
This includes no claims about the principled libertarians, whether here or out in America. I’d like to think I can tell them apart!
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