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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29305 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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The canonical example, the civil rights bus boycotts, worked because the boycotters, being a substantial portion of the bus company's customers, had enough leverage to cause them financial harm.

Sure, but why did they choose to do so? Was it an idea they developed entirely independently, or was it the end-point of a long influence campaign?

How many examples do you know of successful boycotts arising from moral outrage?

Are we counting only boycotts that actually have to be carried out and materially impact the target's finances? I can't think of a single one offhand. On the other hand, examples abound of shows, games, books, films, shows, websites, podcasts, etc cancelled or censored on threat of bad publicity, either directly or by threatening their partners or providers. These seem to me to be successful boycotts, no?

Conservatives love to say "Go woke, go broke," but where is there any evidence of this? I think this is as much copium as the trans activists I've seen insisting that Hogwarts Legacy is a terrible, low-rated, buggy game, even as it breaks sales records.

What evidence there was came from before the 2014-2015 inflection point. Since then, no, I think "get woke go broke" is entirely cope. It's rather the opposite these days, it seems to me. And of course, Hogwarts Legacy is making a mint, it's true! And I have tasks stacking up about art I need to rework for my company's game, because my boss worried that it's too close to the criticisms being leveled at Hogwarts.

The Woke don't always get their way, but they get their way much, much more often than anybody else does. One misses 100% of the shots one does not take; they certainly miss a lot, but given the sheer volume of the shots they fire, they can afford to. They are, observably, winning. That win doesn't look like them tanking a flagpole triple-A harry potter vidya release. It looks like them decisively shaping the entire ecosystem that actually creates such games, the artists, the coders, the designers, the press, and the public as well, such that things that get made conform more and more to their preferences, while things that don't conform tend, on average, to perform less well or to not get made at all regardless of how well they'd perform. And no matter the result of any individual struggle, their faction gains strength and influence for the next fight, always and without fail.

The Woke don't always get their way, but they get their way much, much more often than anybody else does. One misses 100% of the shots one does not take; they certainly miss a lot, but given the sheer volume of the shots they fire, they can afford to. They are, observably, winning. That win doesn't look like them tanking a flagpole triple-A harry potter vidya release. It looks like them decisively shaping the entire ecosystem that actually creates such games, the artists, the coders, the designers, the press, and the public as well, such that things that get made conform more and more to their preferences, while things that don't conform tend, on average, to perform less well or to not get made at all regardless of how well they'd perform. And no matter the result of any individual struggle, their faction gains strength and influence for the next fight, always and without fail.

What I was getting at with

Additionally, boycott sends the message that certain attitudes can be financially detrimental; even if parties which are directly at war are fanatical and don't care much about profits, they depend on many mercantile agents.

Thanks for saying it like I couldn't.

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