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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.
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