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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13796 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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I've seen Freddie de Boer, long ago, inveigh against this habit from young Progressive activists as something like the "Magic Word" theory of politics; if you can just get the dreaded magic word to be applied consistently to the thing you abhor, then broader society will have to accept that you won the argument, and then Progressive social change will surely follow. He probably had some Marxist materialist complaints to go with it, but I think the observation and critique itself is really useful as a phenomenon I see constantly.

Like many people, I started noticing this in the early 10s, and one thing I've been curious about is, to what extent this was influenced by the fact that millennials and later generations grew up with video games being just a typical pastime? Video games, obviously, exist in an artificial world of computers and code, where developers can and do set up strict rules which can create arbitrary "win" conditions that have little to do with whatever underlying reality the game might be trying to simulate. Some even have "Magic Words" like iddqd which explicitly allow you to circumvent traditional vulnerabilities your character normally has, and the game universe will strictly conform to your Magic Word (unless you're in a Nightmare, anyway). Many games have glitches and exploits that allow you to gain advantages that the devs didn't intend but which the game must honor, at least until the devs push an update (even then, single player offline games can just not be updated).

Perhaps my thought is on this because of hearing about something kids are calling the "Klarna glitch," where you can enter someone else's name and SSN at checkout to charge someone else's account for your purchase. Calling it a "glitch" makes it seem like it's something that the "developers" of our universe accidentally "allowed," when, in fact, it's just criminal fraud that doesn't have very good pre-enforcement.

I think it's much more simply a form of in-group pressures, which have grown stronger in the age of social media. If you don't use the most extreme adjective to describe [negative thing X], then aren't you really actually in support of [negative thing X]?

This is not something unique to social justice progressives.

that millennials and later generations grew up with video games being just a typical pastime

The three generations before millennials spent 90 years straight calling everything they didn’t like communism, so I don’t think it’s just the video games.

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