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I find myself looking back on the history of YouTube anti-woke politics in light of the whole Charlie Kirk thing. Because I never really knew or cared who Charlie Kirk was, and my first exposure to him led to a reaction of "oh this is just Stephen Crowder but as a smug Christian."
This led me to reflect on the declining quality of human being in the...words fail me. Alt media? Internet political influencers?
I have a lot of nostalgia for The SkepticsTM and that entire era of YouTube talking head. (Often not even a head, just an avatar pic.) Now whenever I fish around for that level of quality, it simply isn't to be found. We are all infected. We are all dumber than we used to be.
Some of this is downstream of the YouTube algorithm in the sense that it incentivized shorter more quickly-produced low-effort content. Back in the day people used to make video essays, or cringe compilations. If they did something live, it was a Hangout, an informal podcast involving people who sure look like genuine friends having genuine discussions. Often with no live video feed. These days it appears to be some guy pontificating off the top of his head, repeating himself often, talking in circles. Kyle Kulinski now does the same thing that Tim pool was doing a few years ago. Hassan Piker appears to just be an LA nepo-baby himbo socialite, and he's very much a step down from whatever Vaush is/was, who was in turn a step down from Chapo Trap House (these are all things I dislike, but I note the decline in quality).
I've also noticed the trad motive decay. Originally, "based" was a punchline and no one pretended to actually be socially conservative, in the same way that Marilyn Manson isn't actually a Satanist, all the upside-down crosses are just there to trigger the normies. I suppose this shouldn't be surprising; the original anti-woke thesis was "look I'm liberal/democrat just like you, but you're so smug and obnoxious and factually wrong I find myself becoming conservative just to spite you."
(That was the original troll op: trying to make the point that the other party is so thin-skinned, fragile and unreasonable that they'll very predictably flip their shit over "it's okay to be white.")
In particular, Twitch seems to be full of fucking townies. No one talks philosophy or has a dignified intellectual persona. The era of Sargon, Dr Layman, Dev, Kraut, and Vee shooting the shit as genuine friends is long over, it's just influencers chasing clout all the way down now.
TL;DR: Asmongold is a shittier Sargon, and current-year Carl is also a shitty caricature of himself.
This is a rambling drunken phonepost, so forgive me. I mourn for the lost Internet of yesteryear. The only place on YouTube I see anything like that old level of genuine quality is EFAP.
Jordan Peterson is another example of steep decline in quality.
Even people who comment in writing have seen decline. For example, Scott himself. I don't mean to say he's bad now, or that his stepping back from the spotlight wasn't justified or even wise. But nonetheless, AstralCodexTen is no SlateStarCodex.
But further, I think there's a reason for the decline in good commentary: there is a deep crisis of faith in western institutions. I don't want to say "We all just need to clap our hands for Tinkerbell and believe!" because I believe this loss of faith is, at least to some extent, justified. Take the Epstein files. Half of Trump's cabinet made numerous public statements about releasing these files and clearing everything up for the public, only to backpeddle in the most pants-on-head, clown-world fashion once they came into office. And let me not mince words about what popular perception is about the Epstein affair: people believe this is Israel blackmailing US politicians, quite likely including Trump himself (who is almost daily seen with Epstein's next-door neighbor, Howard Lutnick).
And it's not just the Epstein files. Everything is suffering this same crisis of faith. Take the HHS with RFK Jr.. Or the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Or even the Federal Reserve itself. Across all these institutions, we see accusations of at best policy motivated by partisan politics, if not outright criminal fraud.
Even areas that should be free of this sort of thing are not. For example, Larry Summers says inflation was crazy high in the early 2020s, we just changed the metric, while CATO says this is uninformed madness and you should definitely not pay attention to Larry Summers. Let me remind you, Summers is not a WoW streamer blabbering about a topic he knows nothing about; this is the former president of Harvard, with a PhD in economics, who has been a top-level advisor to multiple administrations on this very matter.
Finally, take the gorilla in the room: immigration. Third-world immigration is no longer perceived as a matter of "oh, there's some people who just wanted a better life, and some people think we should let more in, and some people think fewer." That's... soooo 2010s. No, today at best the contention is "you are importing people with the intent that they will influence elections by one day voting for you", and even that's the nice right-wing position; the bad-boy position is "there are people who are outright trying to replace the native demographics." These are no longer fringe positions confined to obscure image boards. This is now mainstream. And the tacit question making the air so thick one can scarcely inhale is: "and what is going to be done about it?"
So I ask you, how exactly is someone supposed to give measured, insightful commentary about this? Go ahead, read Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature. Sound like fitting commentary today, with Ukraine and Gaza all over your feed? Well, that's why we don't have commentary like that anymore.
It fascinated me to see some here start backpedaling before I heard the admin do so.
The weirdest thing is the administration brought this on themselves. It's not like Epstein was a grassroots thing that they were forced to confront. It is specifically their making noise about it during the campaign that revived interest in the affair in the first place. Keep in mind Epstein died during Trump's first term, and yet somehow the fanfare then was minimal compared to what we see now. Why would they drum up attention about it, only to backpeddle? I mean, they did the same thing with auditing the Federal Reserve and Fort Knox. And annexing Canada. And Greenland.
Like what is sincere analysis of this stuff even supposed to look like? Because the most charitable interpretation I can give is "Ah, don't worry about it, they just say dumb shit for attention," which should already be a sharp indictment of officials entrusted with enacting national policy, and even that's not what I really believe.
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I think you end up with MASSIVE selection effects over the medium term.
I want you to think, REALLY think of any 'popular' political streamer who is known to have a healthy home life, wife/husband, kids, no social drama bubbling up.
Probably hard to come up with more than, say, 3, right?
I'll give you Joe Rogan right up front but he's not primarily political, really, and he's now so untouchable that he isn't subject to 'normal' pressures by any means. Also Jesus Christ Joe Rogan is almost 60.
ShoeOnHead is maybe the only one I know who managed to escape the pits and make a fulfilling life for herself relatively unscathed... and she had some close calls.
Charlie Kirk was arguably one of the few who had his life together from the start and maintained his popularity while still being a solid family man. And see where that got him.
The fact is that people who have the time and inclination to do this as a 'career' are less likely to have their life together in other ways, and won't really be able to devote efforts to keeping their domestic life on track if they are serious about staying relevant. And if they are not already in a stable relationship when they get popular, think about the types of people they're now likely to attract by having their face out there next to extreme, controversial opinions. You're arguably selecting AGAINST good partners, maybe even permanently killing your chances of having one.
In short, the ones who will actually stick around (before crashing and burning spectacularly) are already likely to be the most unhinged/unbalanced, and the general pressure is towards more extremism to maintain relevance. The ones who are stable and manage to get a family going will probably fade out naturally when other things just become more important to them.
And you see what that leaves us with.
Consider that one of the secrets to maintaining relevance in the attention economy is to constantly be embroiled in drama and controversy, and thus people who have stable home lives are not only at a disadvantage is how much effort they can commit to the bit, but also having less 'natural' controversy disadvantages them.
And the filters for who gets popular in the first place are arguably worse too. Rather than a celebrity working their way up to prominence doing movies, TV shows, and having to get through a lot of gatekeepers, it is essentially some 'random' ordinary person getting elevated to stardom, and they probably have a lot of personal issues already, which won't get better with fame. Give these people tons of attention, adoring fans, sexual access to women, and the feeling of having power, and expect their worst traits to eventually manifest in full, and there is NO real limiting factor on them, nobody who can tell them 'rein it in bud' and actually enforce that edict.
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It would be a much more worthwhile post to delve into why these YouTube 'philosophers' of yesteryear stopped doing what they were doing.
One thing to note would be that almost half of these creators stopped doing what they were doing because of altercations with voices that were further to the right.
Such as Kraut organizing a secret discord server to finally lift the veil on scientific racism once and for all, and in the process torching every single 'liberal' ethos one can think of. Down to meticulously deleting every single negative comment on the videos he made on the topic. Videos that were full of errors, both factual and conceptual, that left one wondering how on earth this man ever captured anyone's ear.
Or Sargon, who championed the freedom of speech of rape jokes all the way to national television in the name of an already established political party. At a time where most right of center minds were fixed firmly on the mass rape of young British girls at the hands of immigrants. Becoming publicly known as 'UKIP rape joke man'. A mass rape that Sargon claimed was always going to happen regardless of immigration. As if there was some invisible hand in the sky that doled out rape to meet a quota. I think it's fair to say Carl Benjamin has moved on to much greener pastures with traditionalism rather than holding on to his half baked 'Liberalist' philosophy.
To that extent it's hard to understand how most of these guys ever got anywhere outside of just being loud voices that spoke against feminism in an appealing accent (or not, Vee and Layman sound terrible). But considering how obviously out of depth they were when it came to anything that wasn't a howling feminist, I think we are better for them being gone. Hell, maybe they didn't even do anti-feminism all that well either. How would one know?
Regardless, Asmongold does the slop better, and there are plenty of right wing voices that do genuine political content better. I don't miss the awful political commentary at all, which was only designed to tactfully place somewhere safe from the 'extreme right' and the 'lunatic left'. Without ever saying or believing anything relevant or real.
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I'm old enough to remember the time TheAmazingAtheist got in trouble for a leaked video of him sticking a banana up his ass. There are a lot of words one can use to describe that era of YouTube influencer. "Dignified" is not one of them.
What the fuck?
I’ll always remember the hilarious Encyclopedia Dramatica write-up on him and their dredging up of now deleted videos they recovered, of him making legal threats against them and other parties for criticizing his content.
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Can I just say I think you're just factually wrong about all of this.
First, I'm not sure if this 'Charlie Kirk was apparently just a shock jockey' shtick is genuine ignorance or some kind of bit, but for instance here's the Vice President of the United States taking over his long-form podcast. I honestly can't understand people who comment 'who is this guy' or 'he doesn't seem important' without doing any basic research. He was probably the most important political operative on the right, supposedly one of maybe three people who had the President's ear, and likely also won the election for Trump by being the most significant organizer of Republican's ground game. But instead you watch a couple of TikToks and conclude he's "just Stephen Crowder but as a smug Christian". Don't you have any curiosity at all?
On the idea that there's no long-form content on Youtube anymore, I have to imagine you're just not looking. That's basically all I watch! In fairness, the main topics I follow are religion, various political channels, and some misc nerdy topics (All videos I've watched in the last week). So you may be correct that in the topics you're specifically interested in there's no long-form content anymore, but I kind of severely doubt it.
Yeah I’m literally watching a high quality two hour documentary on the conquest of Greece by Rome while working out, right now. On YouTube. For free.
I think the lament says more about the OP than reality; long form and high quality content is broadly available it’s just increasingly not produced by the typical blue tribe producers.
If you’re deeply embedded in that cultural narrative, yeah sure it might feel like we are declining culturally. Lots of cultural institutions output have been horrific for the last 10-15 years.
But my access to high quality information and educational entertainment has never been better.
I have to be extremely meticulous about deleting any watched video that even slightly deviates from my regular feed of photography and musicianship related videos as well as hit "hide" on any recommendation that deviates from those or my feed will inevitably be invaded by shit tier clickbait crap. Just the other day simply watching one astrophotography video was enough to make a bunch of "nobel winner warns about new voyager discovery" crap videos enter my feed.
The same way if I try to find anything with search, I have to add "before:2026" or within a page or two the results are polluted by clickbait shit.
Wait wtf why does this have any effect? Not doubting that it does, I just struggle to think of a mechanism.
Wild ass guess: It switches to a different internal search engine that's more classic style instead of "recommendation" based.
Maybe it's piggybacking on the cluster of people who use before:2022 or before:2021 to exclude AI SEO slop? Perhaps you have found a way to make yourself look like a sophisticated search user without actually invoking any sophisticated search functions.
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Is that something people really dispute these days? 2025 surely doesn’t seem like the high tide of high cultural achievement to me. I’d encourage people to give me their best vanity pitch for the western world today and among those who’ve answered me thus far, the results haven’t been very encouraging.
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The new generation has nowhere left to discuss politics or philosophy in a way that actually encourages discursive skills. Forum culture is dead; Reddit’s new UI prevents longterm discussion by hiding all replies automatically and showing few comments + algorithm promotes short form content + mod culture promotes consensus with severity. Facebook / YT have comment UIs that discourage long discourse by making it impossible to keep track. Discord is either too localized or too populous for long arguments. Three more things work against the youth: (1) the popularity of Hip Hop culture with its proud disdain of any kind of thinking, making middle class Whites more likely to respond with an emoji or a SYBAU when confronted with an argument. (2) The increase in economic and academic competition, meaning kids have less time discuss freely and for fun. (3) The increase in addicting content online, sapping attention.
I could live with YouTube comments if they didn't randomly get deleted by the algorithm.
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The number of living humans who are actually interested in "talking philosophy" is minuscule. Even among people who are otherwise highly intelligent and capable. Even TheMotte these days is more interested in the concrete play-by-play of current events than anything theoretical. (Although frankly, this is probably not too different from the historical norm on TheMotte. Current events have always dominated the discussion. We went through an anomalously philosophical period around 2022-2023 due to the advent of AI, and since then have regressed to the mean.)
And that's for a good reason. Philosophy is by and large pointless intellectual wankery with anything real world applicable either few and far between or already invented centuries or millennia ago.
It's a bit like the number of living humans interesting in talking math except even higher mathematics has plenty of useful or even revolutionary real world applications.
The best things in life are pointless.
Masturbation is pointless too, but damn if it doesn't feel good.
Much like masturbation, I'd be much happier if philosophers kept it to themselves.
Have you ever been in any "philosophy" circle? It quickly becomes unreadable because every single person will come up with their own definition for already defined words to match one of their theories, and then will use them in concert to try to make their thesis a mathematical proof. You end up with sentences that look like plain English, but are completely unintelligible. This is the antithesis of good communication and discussion.
There are plenty of other types of academics (in both STEM and the humanities) who are also doing work that has roughly the same level of impact on you and your life (~zero). Philosophers don't seem to be much different from those guys. Why single philosophy out for such ire?
Several (both online and irl).
I don't believe I've ever seen anyone actually do this. I can imagine what it would look like, but I've never actually encountered it. The greatest and most common danger is that you run into people who are just kind of dumb and don't have anything interesting to say. But that happens in everything, not just philosophy.
There are a number of papers in the analytic philosophy literature that try to present themselves as having achieved a "mathematical" level of rigor. Maybe this is what you're talking about. But you're incorrect to say that those papers are "unintelligible". Usually it's just a matter of understanding how the key terms are defined; hopefully the author will define terms that they're using in an unusual or idiosyncratic way, and if they don't, it's probably because they assume that you already know the definition of the term based on prior experience with other relevant literature (physicists do not use the word "work" in the way that people do in ordinary conversation, but that doesn't mean they're obligated to define it for you every time they use "work" in the physics-sense).
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That's a natural bias in any community of free-thinkers.
The Motte on average is much more critical of Ukraine in general and Zelensky in particular than your average subreddit.
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I didn't think the motte hide comments with lots of downvotes the way reddit does. Does this mean something else?
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All those but are bullshit but I'll pick this one out to prove you wrong cause whenever am I gonna get a chance to talk about this again?
I think zelensky is a fucking moron prosecuting the war entirely wrong for political reasons. He dismissed his best commander because he was getting too popular and might defeat him in the next election. He replaced him with an unpopular commander that wouldn't threaten his political career, problem being the reason this new commander isn't a political threat is because he's incompetent. He keeps pointlessly throwing his best troops into meatgrinders in order to achieve a "win" which he believes ukraine desperately needs but he never explains what good any of these "wins" would do even if they ever materialized. Zelensky has put his own political career ahead of the life of his own country. I think ukraine would be much better off if zaluzhnyi was president rather than zelensky.
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I'm not sure if any of the pro-Ukraine posters are particularly committed to Zelensky the Man, unless he's meant to symbolize the entire Ukrainian cause here.
...plenty of us have, indeed, "stepped outside of the pro-US-centric narrative", ie. considered the arguments of the pro-Russian side and their interpretations of the various events, and found them, to put it mildly, wanting.
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What? I don't know what you mean by the last one, but I disagree with all the other ones, and I'm pretty sure I could write something doing all thr things you're telling people not to, and get lots of updoots.
I'm not questioning a bias existing, but you're getting in comically wrong.
Your most downvoted comment ever was this one, which as far as I can tell is trying to say that intelligence is a bad trait because being intelligent increases your ability to do things and some of those things are bad? Not really sure, some of the context is deleted comments.
Your second most downvoted comment ever is the comment I'm replying to right now, complaining that people downvote you for bad reasons.
It does seem like your takes on Ukraine in particular don't land with this audience. Aside from that it seems like you mostly get downvoted when you make low-effort dunks. And you just genuinely don't have that many downvoted comments.
All that said it seems like you genuinely do have different perspectives. I don't know that we have very many people who are fully immersed in Russian culture on here. I bet a lot of your stuff would land better if you expanded a bit on the things that seem obvious to you but which the rest of the people here seem not to be taking into account, particularly the things where mottizens are pushing for policies where there's common-knowledge russian history of how that went horribly wrong.
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I would love to talk about theory, but I'm not sure interesting discussions of theory are available. The overwhelming amount of theory has always been apologetics - start with a desired bottom line, derived from vibes which were absorbed from or imposed by the environment, and reason backwards until a good theory that just so happens to prove the bottom line (or, "surprisingly", more of the bottom line than anyone dared to ask for before) is formed. I don't see how this could be avoided structurally - unlike scientific theories, philosophical theories have no ground truth to answer to, so there is no competitive advantage forward reasoning conveys. Even so, this could be fine for a discussion environment, as even if no individual theory-builder ever changed their mind due to theoretising, a number of theory-builders with diverse bottom lines could compete over theory-consumers on the elegance of their apologetics, and even on the aesthetic appeal of the bottom line that they already were living. However, this requires an actually diverse set of people willing to theoretise; and neither society at large, nor this forum in particular, has done anything to rein in the forces that compel people to just assimilate to one or another existing bottom line rather than hold onto their idiosyncrasies alone and weather hostility from all. As a result, the only innovation in theory we would be getting is different contortions reaching either a conclusion that we need between 1 and 50 Comrade Trumps, or 1 and 50 Comrade Hitlers, or maybe very rarely between 1 and 50 Comrade Mills.
Sure. But, what else is there to do but press onward anyway?
In order to get an actual understanding of the Culture War, which is this forum's raison d'être, you have to theorize about the psychological and material motivations of different factions and individuals, you have to produce a unified narrative of historical causes, you have to take an accounting of the ethics and implied metaphysics of different positions, you have to have some notion of the aims of political activity in general... in short, you have to do philosophy.
Without a theoretical account of the Culture War and its constitutive elements, the forum is reduced to simply giving a factual account of current events, along with perhaps some strategizing and some sentimental commiserating with people who are on the same "side" as you. In other words, you'd just be fumbling about in the dark without any understanding of what's going on. A mere subject of historical forces rather than someone who might hope to know them.
Science is not exempt from politics and emotion. Otherwise, empirical research into race and sex differences, or even just IQ, wouldn't be as touchy as it is. Researchers get invested in their own theories all the time even when there's no overt political content, "science advances one funeral at a time", etc.
We just went over this. It certainly seems to be the case that philosophical claims are either true or false, just like most of the other ordinary types of claims that we're familiar with. MTF transsexuals are either women, or they aren't. There are either mind-independent ethical facts, or there aren't. There is either at least one conscious entity, or there isn't. The ground truth that these claims answer to is the same ground truth that everything else answers to: the facts of reality.
Of course, there have been many attempts throughout the history of philosophy to show that individual philosophical questions or classes of questions are in fact meaningless (in the neither-true-nor-false sense), contrary to initial appearances. But these types of arguments too depend on their own non-trivial assertions about reality.
It's true, our present lack of intellectual diversity isn't really conducive to good discussion. But we still have substantial disagreements on this forum regarding AI, race and immigration, the ethics of sexuality, etc.
They're not "touchy", there's just an effort to censor one (or more) side. Maybe because there is in fact a fact of the matter one can appeal to.
The claim was not that the process of science cannot be corrupted. The claim was that there's at least some theoretical yardstick some evidence that could be offered on many issues or some prediction that could be validated. The people who do things like try to stop genetic data being available for intelligence research or studies being done on smoking or gun deaths aren't evidence for the other side, they are proof for the claim: both sides seem to have some sense of where the confirming or disconfirming evidence is, one side has simply decided to defect.
And nothing can really eliminate the risk of defection so it's hardly damning for science that some do.
There is (seemingly) no (obvious) empirical fact that will settle the debate over whether MTF transsexuals are women, and yet the claim "Caitlin Jenner is still a man" would be censured very aggressively in lefty spaces.
The same goes for religious claims, ethical claims, all sorts of claims for which no empirical verification is possible.
I previously argued that a sentence need not be empirically verifiable in order to be meaningful or truth-apt in general. So, if you're trying to assert that "being able to answer to a ground truth" just is the same as "being empirically verifiable", I would reject that.
I think there's a difference between censoring speech made for claims that we cannot really settle beyond raw power or tolerance and censoring research that theoretically can settle those claims. It leads to a strange agreement between the censor and their victim on the stakes in a way that doesn't have to be true in other case.
Maybe Frankfurt's distinction between lying and bullshit - lying at least acknowledges the concept of truth even as you point people away from it, bullshit denies that the truth is meaningful in the first place.
Yes, statements can be truth-apt without being empirically verifiable in practice. OrAnd there are cases where the stakes or what would settle the issue are themselves in doubt. In which case there's nothing for it but philosophy I suppose , since that's the role it can maintain in a world where science is ascendant.
I think a lot of the actual culture war debates do not escape empiricism in practice though, even if people try to insist that it's just a matter of differing definitions floating in the ether.
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This seems like the worst possible example - “Are transwomen women?” seems to be a question where 90% or the disagreement about the meaning of the word “woman” and only 10% about ground truth.
If you exclude people who believe in intrinsically gendered souls (for whom the question, “Can female souls be incarnated in male bodies?” is meaningful even if the correct answer is unknowable with mortal technology) I don’t think you would get any disagreement on questions like “Does Caitlin Jenner have testicles?” or “Does Caitlin Jenner have a considered, sincere belief that she is supposed to be a woman?”
Its not really a disagreement about the meaning of the word "woman" because if it was, the trans movement would have a consistent and coherent answer to the WIAW question.
And you just refuted the transactivist point of view by making an obviously correct argument about the meaning of words.
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Oh but you would!
Mereological nihilists deny the existence of testicles because they deny the existence of compound physical objects in general (often because of the same Sorites-style arguments that people use to attack conservative ontologies of gender in the first place).
Eliminative materialists deny the existence of beliefs, so they would deny that anyone believes that they are a man or a woman.
So, it turns out to be rather difficult to cleanly divide sentences into two groups of "these are the nice empirical truths that we can be certain of" and "these are the nonsensical philosophical claims that just come down to verbal disputes", because it turns out that almost every sentence you can think of is ultimately the subject of philosophical disagreement.
If you think there is a ground truth of the matter over whether testicles and beliefs exist, in spite of the philosophical disagreement concerning their existence, then it's not clear why you wouldn't think that there is a ground truth of the matter over whether women exist too (along with, presumably, some sort of criteria for determining whether an entity counts as a woman or not).
Both of which are extreme minority views held by a tiny number of people that even other philosophers mostly think are wankers.
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... and mereological nihilists and eliminative materialists have negligible relevance to any actually existing argument about this subject. Certainly below the lizardman constant.
"I don't think you would get any disagreement on" doesn't mean "literally 0.0000 percent disagreement".
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How is the meaning of the word "woman" separate from the ground truth? The argument of the gender critical side is that the trans definition of woman is simply incoherent and anything close to the traditional definition simply returns false for the TWAW claim.
If anything, the idea that these things can be split has been mercifully killed by trans activists themselves: they claim some sort of sharp distinction but in practice what's happened is that anyone claiming the right to the term "woman" has at least a claim on all female privileges and rights no matter how self-evidently absurd it is.
So either the definition of trans is self-evidently incoherent or it's making a claim about the underlying facts (e.g. trans-identifying males are closer to females in their offending patterns in prison).
The trans-inclusive definition of "woman" is self-evidently incoherent. But pointing that out is an argument about the meaning of words, not about what Caitlyn Jenner is.
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I do find myself thinking about abstract political questions (usually steeped down from current issues, but abstracted from the immediate contextual details) from time to time. Maybe I need to start a list and write a couple of paragraphs to make a top-level post occasionally.
Dewit.
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I for my part would certainly appreciate such a post.
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Now that you see that it is only shadows on the wall, get out of the cave! Sorry the tragedy is entertainment and you just found out that it isn't entertaining. None of these talking heads are there to inform you or improve your life, they are there to entertain you, to distract you and to passivize you while the future is being stolen by subscriptions.
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Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
Maybe Mark Klein?
I'm not sure what would have been an equivalent excess to blow the whistle about before the Bush administration, just from a technical perspective.
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this guy? https://youtube.com/@Kraut_the_Parrot/videos
I ran across him some time ago, he seemed like a smug liberal idiot making slickly wrong videos. Seeing as he's left twitter and moved to bsky? He was ever.. friends with e.g. Sargon?
Bizarre.
Can you point to something showing how these people were ever quality?
Grading on the curve of being a leftist podcaster/streamer I think Vaush is quality. He is legitimately funny and doesn't give off the kind of feminine energy that typically drives men away from the left.
It was fun watching him tee-off on the snowflakes in his chat about trying to get Jesse Singal banned from Bluesky for... something I guess?
He is legitimately funny but in part because he comes up with whole new levels of reddit: argumentum ad Marvel Movie for instance.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=kVuqXQYwD30
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So strange that Chapo Trap House is popular. I tried listening to a couple episodes and it is egregiously bad in every aspect.
I could honestly never get into it either and I was very sympathetic towards that side of the Left. I think I did hear one full episode on Robin DiAngelo.
Going off that and my general sense of that side of the left: it all seems to be about feeding a demographic left behind by to the longhousing/PMCing of the Democratic party after the Hillary/Bernie fight, combined with a deeper resentment about the state of the economy from the downwardly mobile middle class types who read enough theory to be able to make it a socialist issue.
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So as long as the internet was a niche thing you could be comfortably detached and ironic. I miss it too.
But the normie masses came and took everything seriously. It basically became a even lamer and gayer form of the real world.
Nowadays, there's no distinction between real life and the internet, and that hasn't been to the benefit of either.
The old soul of the internet is dead, or if it is still alive, it is only in little isolate pockets in communities too small to be relevant. Alas.
As a thought experiment, the Internet in some ways looks like large-scale direct democracy (literally upvotes). Beyond the tractability questions of direct democracy a few centuries ago, the form of government is also generally acknowledged to suffer from known issues like tyranny of the majority, or even by particularly motivated minorities. Which seems a lot like what we see going wrong in online culture, in my opinion.
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