site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

3
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

adds cost to virtually every single consumer product currently in existence

I assume it was someone else who said they were a Gmail user? YouTube and Gmail are both extremely common and valuable consumer products. Equivalent levels of email service were and are much more expensive if not ad supported. YouTube provides you access to more media for free than you could ever consume, far more than premium paid services like pay-per-view or classic HBO. You can use both ad-free if you want to pay for the premium version or are okay with ad-block. There is clearly a category of products that is cheaper because of being subsidized by advertising.

To address your other point about polluting the information commons: it is a simple fact of life that the information commons is polluted in far more pernicious ways. People once espoused the idea that an object’s acceleration under gravity was a function of its mass. This was the accepted wisdom of both experts and the masses. There is wrong information out there. It's up to you to figure out what to believe; there's no oracle to consult for truth. Except, if you want to filter out advertising, then there is an oracle, and the pollution is trivial to filter out. A machine can literally do it. Ad-block at the browser or DNS level has nearly perfect accuracy.

You also assert that this hinges on:

advertising dollars from other productive uses

It's not at all shown that this is a zero-sum game and that advertising is net negative in sign. The marginal cost of actually delivering the advertisements on the internet rounds to zero. The question, then, is where the dollars used to produce and target ads would have gone. If your counterfactual is curing cancer, sure, but that seems unlikely. If the marginal dollar goes into producing Lululemon as a status and social signaling device which simultaneously makes my wife's butt look good, that has positive utility to me. If the counterfactual is my tax dollars go to support yet another starving artist who would have been a marketer at Lululemon, that's net negative utility to me.

I hate advertisements too. So I pay for services I value and ad-block everywhere else, because FM, they're still getting the analytics at least. I don't think anyone needs to come and save me from advertisements, and I don't think enforcing any sort of ban would be at all practical. Your assertion that it would be practical assumes:

because marketing by its very nature needs to be noticeable.

No, these are just the most annoying ads to you. Guerrilla advertising and astroturfing are real things. And no, ads in general are not "noticeable" to normies; they are just part of the background fabric of life. Have you ever watched a normie browse the web? There are advertisements that would make my eyes bleed, but they just scroll along happy as a clam. They do not feel bothered by them in the same way you or I feel bothered by them.