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Scott has a new post on AI and money in politics. I'd like to take a step back and talk about how we got here.
In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United that there are essentially no constitutional limits on political spending and advertising. At the time, it was widely anticipated that this would turn American politics into the wild west of corruption, crony capitalism, and corporate propaganda. But in the years after the decision, the feared corporate catastrophe failed to materialize. Trump didn't win in 2016 because of corporate support. In the primary, he bragged that he was self-funding his campaign and so wasn't beholden to special interests. On the Democrat side, Bernie Sanders got a lot of milage out of constantly reminding people that he didn't have a SuperPac.
In 2019, Scott wrote the prophetic Too Much Dark Money in Almonds, in which he pointed out that wealthy actors are probably underspending on politics and then brainstormed ways to turn money into political influence. By 2022, we started to see serious attempts at using previously-unheard-of amounts of money to systematically affect the political process. Sam Bankman-Fried was too-clever-by-half donating money he didn't technically own, but Elon Musk's aquisition of Twitter ended wokeness overnight and likely won Trump the 2024 election. If Scott is to be believed, the cryptocurrency and AI industries are well on their way to fulfilling SBF's dream of rooting the state.
Why did it take 10+ years for this to happen? My hypothesis: cultural inertia (and shame).
Despite being purported as the main beneficiaries of Citizens United, big corporations weren't really trying to spend large sums of money on politics. Exxon Mobil didn't park an oil tanker full of cash in the Chesapeake waiting for the signal to shower Washington in oil money as part of their dastardly plan. That just wasn't how buisinesses operated. It took time to develop both a theoretical framework for how to turn an abritrarily large amount of money into political power (it's a lot more complicated than simply buying ads), and to develop a philosophical framework for why this isn't cartoonishly evil.
I think a big reason money in politics didn't manifest the way the doomers predicted is because money in politics just isn't that effective when employed the way envisioned by the doomers. Taking out hundreds of hours of ads just doesn't move the needle all that much. Instead, as Elon showed, what actually matters is institutions. Buying twitter isn't really something exxon or disney is realistically going to do.
The question is, for political purposes, is any of this affordable? Can you buy Harvard and the rest of the Ivy league? Probably not. Can you buy disney, youtube, etc? For most people, the answer is going to be no. And even if you can, like Bezos did with the Washington Times*, you'll discover your ability to influence the influence your institution wields is still limited by staff.
Edit: Meant the Post.
You could buy an astroturfing campaign.
I sometimes wonder why this isn't more common. It should be very cost-effective, given how few people participate in online discourse, social-desirability bias, and crowd behavior dynamics mean you only need ~5% of that small minority to start forming consensus around something.
You could, with a small team and a stock of authentic-looking sockpuppet accounts, own the reaction comments around some political podcast, the chat for popular streamers, the topics in political subreddits, etc. For a pittance in paid subscriptions to influential writers, you could maybe even turn the direction of their output - audience capture is a thing.
Astroturfing doesn't work, the ground withers if theres no traction. No amount of leftist 'trans women are women' in vidya or policy or media made trannies more popular, the only thing that made trannies popular was bailey jay for a brief while in the mid 2010s.
Influential writers lose influence when they start pushing stupid points, Jordan Peterson went downhill when he became weird lobster medicine man, Ibram X Kendi and all the antiracism shills died when the thermostatic moment passed and you didn't get cancelled for not doing the public prayers.
Creators botting up their numbers lose real humans because real humans aren't sheep just following a flock, we don't even care about comments unless we're validating our own biases. Left wing news media are the ones that curtailed all their comment sections, right wing media all let their comment sections run free. Astroturfing comments to talk about how Mirpuris aren't actually grooming kids and its actually white pedos largely responsible for CSE doesn't make people go 'oh wow thats true I was just being racist' it makes people go 'fuck these gaslighters'.
Astroturfing is easy to blame for outcomes because it externalizes blame - we don't need to change we just need to stop the evil baddies from doing their bad thing and our Good Easy Moral Message will come forth! Staying the path is easy if you don't actually care about how destroyed your entire reputation is on the path.
This is the literal opposite of true. It made them more popular in terms of more people identifying as trans, and seeking referrals for medicalization, it made the more popular in terms ot vast swathes of society seeing it as fine and normal, it made them more popular of institutions catering to their every demand. They were so popular that it took absurd transgressions for the tide to change, and that my prediction that it is about, from a few years ago, was seen as somewhat unhinged. Even now that the position that we want too far with the trans thing is more mainstream, we're still nowhere near back to it's levels of popularity from 10-15 years ago.
A) You're 100% right and I'm downplaying astroturfings role in creating a massive problem that I am dismissing out of hand because my own cultural circle smacks down tranny agitprop so I am, despite my presence on this board, still unaware of the depth of the rot that you guys are experiencing.
B) I'm still right that astroturfing didn't move the popular needle. It didn't make trannies popular generally it made autogynephiliacs and hormonal teenagers and mentally weak people latch onto a thermostatically salient expression of individuated maladaptations. I maintain that ROGD is the primary effector for trannification of teenage girls, and that it isn't trans agitprop that made them go one way but just idiotic teens (I realize this invalidates my statement about people not being sheep, but I thread this needle by not treating teenagers as people). Parsing the specific numbers is immaterial for whether astroturfing moved trannifycation or if trannyfication was just the latest means of Rebelling Against The System, but I maintain that the astroturfing didn't move where it needed to: the apolitical normie. Screeching slacktivists filling feeds with astroturfed agitprop talk to each other, and you can replace trannies with migrants with late term abortion or whatever cause celebre that group is predisposed to cloister around to begin with.
So, I am prepared to be wrong. I am of the belief that peoples personal beliefs are individuated and not subject to change just based on a tiktok feed telling them endlessly that Hasan Piker didn't zap his doggo so MAGA is actually evil or whatever botted message is being pumped out. The Internet Research Agency in Russia isn't inventing anti migrant sentiment out of thin air, its merely pouring gasoline onto a simmering fire. Astroturfing is pictures of flames for people to get shocked over, and maybe its fuel, but its not heat.
I agree and disagree at the same time. Once you reach critical mass, social contagion is probably the mechanism with the strongest effect, but there's usually a ground zero. The illustrative anecdote / analogy that goes around is anorexia. Apparently in Korea (I think) it was literally unheard of until some newspaper covered the cases in America, and then suddenly they had an epidemic.
I mean, look, we still exist within the bounds of the physical universe. Le Rationalists love acting like everything is an organic process that is essentially impossible to influence top-down, and Social Constructivists love to act like with enough propaganda they could literally warp time and space, but I think there's a happy middle. You can push the boundaries quite far, but at some point reality will start reasserting itself, and that point is probably somewhere far before sending rapists to female prisons, because they declared themselves to be a pretty little princess.
Those girls would have latched onto something else were it not for trans as a means of coping with the difficulty of being a teenager. These girls would have been cutting and starving themselves if their first reference point was a Sandman or a 90s heroin chic comic in the library.
As much as the real world exists we do live in Modern Times where wordcel smartypants get to distort the presentation beyond our eyes. A teenage boy in Wyoming who can't put on muscle and hates herding will latch onto the trans agitprop from Desmond Is Amazing stans, while his father will choke down Tucker Carlson slop about Portland being a drug infested hellhole overrun by diseased immigrants. Wordcels dictate the terms when reality assertion isn't proximate but when the agitators enter real world suddenly their fancy words become just hot air if they can't match the reality they've been asserting.
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