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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   26275 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

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Haha. I figured there must be a software glitch showing zero posts 12 hours in.

Turns out we were all Iranian/Israeli bots, our uptime not so good lately.

And the Israeli bots are suing their government over unpaid bills.

Maybe traffic is low due to the site being down for awhile last week.

As a doomscroll addict, I always wonder how that drives people away. When the site is down I just check tomorrow. Idk how you'd enjoy using a site, hit a roadblock and then just never come back.

Many articles have been written on the topic of how users get annoyed by long webpage loading times. And a one-time roadblock is one thing, but a roadblock that pops up repeatedly and at random intervals is another—uncertainty is a real mood killer.

That's very fair

I'm definitely not representative, I love this place, I'll take the abuse lol

Lots of discussion in the last few weeks on the dating recession, and I wanted to add another (anecdotal) data point to the pile.

I've been swing dancing here in Baltimore on and off for about the last three years (started in 2024 after my girlfriend broke up with me). Initially classes and actual dancing were heavily female dominated, often at ratios of 5:4 or even 3:2. This year that has completely changed: my class tonight was short 11 follows in a class of ~30 total people, meaning the ratio of men to women is about 2:1. The instructors managed to get some more advanced people to drop in to help out as follows, but half of them were dudes who wanted to learn the follow part. This was roughly true in the last session of the class as well although not as pronounced.

What I hypothesize that has happened is the message that dating apps don't seem to work has trickled down to the male part of the population. Around the same amount of women are taking this class as in the before times (2024), but the number of men has almost doubled. Men are starting out to try and meet people in real life again! Which is awesome. But for whatever reason, this hasn't happened with women.

I'm not entirely sure why this is, because dating apps don't seem to particularly work for women either. Maybe the illusion of abundance is enough to keep them from thinking that they need to meet people in real life? Maybe they're all in a situationship with the same man (lol)? Maybe women just have stronger social connections in general and don't need to do something like dancing to meet people?

Thoughts TheMotte?

Because women get a steady diet of fear porn about how men are all out to get them(and to be fair, some are. Not all or most, but certainly some). When they've had 'men are malicious and dangerous' pounded into their skulls they'll not go out of their way to meet men. Simple as.

As @Quantumfreakonomics alluded to, a much larger proportion of men are "out to get them" in the sense of a pump-and-dump. Unfortunately, I doubt that their cautious instincts are well-calibrated on average to avoid this, but it is a legitimate cause for concern on their part.

While that’s fair, there’s a pretty easy remedy against the classic pump and dump- don’t sleep with him until you have your relationship. The classic pump and dump scenario might include some deception, but it does not typically imply rape.

Or even better, save it until marriage. Unfortunately, outside of religious communities, that doesn't seem to be the preference of either men nor women.

A coordination problem, you say?

I think two things can be true at once, for example the average man on a dating platform might not be out to get you, but the average man you meet on a date made on that platform might be. The average man who manages to get you agree to sex on the first date is probably not going to be around for a second date.

Basically, the question to ask would be: "If this guy is such a great catch, then why is he single?"

I think there is a large gap between the hottest man (by whatever metric) a given woman might get to have sex with her and the hottest man a given woman might get for a longer term exclusive relationship, and a minority of men use that to be unethical sluts.

An awful lot of women don't actually care, though, except for the implications to their status. I met a very beautiful girl through a friend and she confided in me that her dating-app match had just messaged making it clear he expected her to put out on the first date (in about four hours time). She raged and vented for some time: did he really think she was the kind of girl who would do that?

You've already guessed the punchline. I commiserated with her over the failure of her date plans and she looked at me like I'd dribbled on her shirt. "Obviously I'm going. He's hot," she huffed, and flounced away.

It’s way too early to be reading blackpills like this.

Consider the implications for a hypothetical “no hook-ups” dating app. Are they really going to ban people for consensual encounters? How would they even know?

This encapsulates my entire objection to the Apps as a class.

Regardless of how they advertise the intentions of their service, the ONLY thing they 'promise' is to show your profile to other people, and to initiate a connection if you both click 'like.'

They have done no vetting, their algorithm is sorting your matches but makes no guarantees as to quality, and they give you no recourse if your match doesn't pan out despite doing everything 'right.'

They abdicate all responsibility for filtering and policing and otherwise giving any useful feedback, basically disclaiming any blame for what happens after the match. WHICH IS THE PART THAT MATTERS.

And yet, they expect to be paid money for this service, and refuse to openly admit they can't help police people's behavior, continually implying the blame lies solely with the user.

This would be intolerable in about any other industry.

Anyway, if I were going to pass just one law to regulate these apps without banning them outright, I'd require they post their 'success rates' for the average user (by gender) for both achieving matches, and achieving actual relationships.

And have these appear on the screen for like 5 seconds every time you boot into the app.

If you're going to turn dating into a casino, you should be required to post the odds.

You've already guessed the punchline. I commiserated with her over the failure of her date plans and she looked at me like I'd dribbled on her shirt. "Obviously I'm going. He's hot," she huffed, and flounced away.

And then people accuse me of hating "natives" when I express the (justified, I submit) contempt I have for these people. And my tax money is going on funding this shit. People complain about their tax money going on migrants with different values here in the UK, never mind that these migrants make up a small portion of society and there are lots of "natives" that don't even pay much tax in the first place, so the per "native" price they are paying is relatively small. On the other hand the tax there aren't that many people like me, I pay a shit ton of tax and there are a shit ton of these "natives" who make bad decisions that society (read: taxpayers like me) end up subsidizing and we're supposed to just sit and take it. I'd wager I'm personally paying 6 figures in GBP each year directly subsidizing the likes of these people. Few things make me seethe as much as seeing the government's yearly breakdown on where the money I spend paying tax ends up going.

I have at least 1.5 orders of magnitude (closer to 2 actually) more justification to be pissed off at the "natives" than the average "native" has to be pissed off at a poor migrant care worker. And yet...

  • -15

Not English. I met her back in Japan - she was some non-Japanese Asian ethnicity like Korean or Indonesian. No idea about her finances but we're definitely not talking welfare queen.

Getting corrupted by the westoid mindset is just as bad in the long run because it's contagious. She might not have been a leech and may have had a background which could fund her behaviour, in which case more power to her, she's not the sort of person who I'd want in my life but that's fine, different people are different. What's not fine are the people who are like this and fund it off the taxpayer's teat and then lecture us for our values. Neighbour, have you looked at your values???

Okay, that adds another layer to it. If she's managed to score a Japanese guy, she was probably willing to put up with more crap from him because of the Japanese attitude to foreigners. Though apparently Japanese have a good impression of Indonesians (if I believe online search results) while seemingly there's a more negative attitude to Koreans.

So it depends exactly where she was from and if the guy was Japanese or not. I mean, I still think she's an idiot, but there's more going on there than simply "yeah of course I'm gonna sleep with him, he's hot".

There may have been an element of that, I don't know. I can't remember if the chap was Japanese but she certainly had no shortage of non-Japanese admirers. She was half-French, or she'd grown up in France, if I recall correctly, and was involved with the embassy in some fashion. It's a fleeting impression from a while ago in any case so my recollections could be incorrect in any number of ways.

What makes it so vivid for me is the memory of her confusion at my confusion, as if it was weird and rather impolite of me to not be familiar with the kayfabe involved. Clearly, it was very improper of me to expect "there's no way I'd sleep with that guy!" would not be followed up with "brb, fucking that guy".

I filed it away as another part of the world I'd failed to understand until then.

On the other hand the tax there aren't that many people like me, I pay a shit ton of tax and there are a shit ton of these "natives" who make bad decisions that society (read: taxpayers like me) end up subsidizing and we're supposed to just sit and take it.

Assuming you have citizenship elsewhere, you could move elsewhere and not pay those tax rates. Natives who complain about funding migrants don't have that option.

Well, unlike the natives, you joined the society willingly with full knowledge of the deal. I'm not saying you're not entitled to wish it were otherwise or advocate for it to be so, but I am no particularly sympathetic to your complaints.

Pump and dump from Chad >> Lifetime of Brad.

Listening to a hot chick talk about her dating life when you haven’t banged her feels like a humiliation ritual.

Listening to a hot chick talk about her dating life when you haven’t banged her feels like a humiliation ritual.

Especially when interjecting sarcastic remarks which make her cry ("and after all that you slept with him anyway") makes YOU the bad guy.

That's the kind of behaviour that is frustrating and that her mother should have smacked out of her.

Plainly, she is that type of girl, she just was affronted by the guy being so explicit about it. He was hot enough that she agreed to go on a date, so she probably would have had sex anyway, he just needed to play the game. Demanding at the start that she put out (or, the presumed implication, he would call off the date) was insulting: if he would call off the date, then she wasn't hot enough for him.

Now, whether that was a bluff on his part or not, I don't know, but she didn't call him on it and so yeah. We're just arguing over the price now.

"Obviously I'm going. He's hot," she huffed, and flounced away.

This is pretty funny, but I might compare it to the oft-ignored advice to not "stick your dick in crazy." It seems to me both sexes are bad at putting down and holding to firm and sane boundaries if the individual in question is hot enough.

I know I've put up, in brief courtships, with some pretty noncommittal/confusing/game-playing behavior because I found the individual in question very attractive. There was certainly some stewing in those situations, but in my heart of hearts I have to admit that if they'd resolved their confusion and stated what they wanted clearly, I'd probably have gone along with it. But my response to that kind of behavior, absent the stewing, is basically to shut down and move on, in annoyance, so these kinds of things never advanced. I'm willing to trade a lot of attractiveness for stability and common sense.

I counter your n=1 anecdata with my n=1 anecdata; I got dragged to dance classes by my girlfriend and our class is (remains? I don’t actually have eyewitness evidence as to the gender ratio pre-2025) heavily female skewed, roughly 3:2 women:men.

Unfortunately(?) it’s not the sort of skew that tests my fidelity; I would rank the quality of IRL women on offer somewhat lower than I would have ranked those on offer on the apps. And with the significant added problem that the apps were designed to solve: namely that IRL, you don’t know if they’re going to be receptive to solicitation, whereas online, you do.

Perhaps, but at any offline event the attendees are physically present and unmediated by anything other than the immediate social standards. You're not limited to one introduction a day, or waiting around for a six word reply that never comes, or seeing only what they looked like five years ago in their best photos, and so on. And while there might be thirty other people at the class there isn't a thousand other people (a number of whom aren't even real) vying for attention as they rotate past on an endless carousel.

Besides that a lot of people can enjoy music and dancing for their own sake. Dating apps not so much. Figuring out a tactful way of assessing whether someone is single seems like a small trade off.

Figuring out a tactful way of assessing whether someone is single seems like a small trade off.

You’d think so, but no, it’s an insurmountable, socially paralysing cliff face for anyone vaguely neurotic (my past self included), especially those who have been involuntarily stewed long enough in the social messaging milieu of “Expressing unwanted romantic interest to a woman is Basically Rape”. But if she’s on an app, then she’s Asking For It so can’t really call you a creeper for cold approaching, can she?

Most people (both here and in wider society) seem to condemn dating apps in The Current Year; I still think they’re fucking great, because - while they certainly have many problems - they also solve many problems.

To be fair, dating apps haven’t gotten me a respectable wife in my half decade of using them, so they have technically failed the assignment. But dating apps have gotten a lot of Zoomer girls into my bed, which is certainly worth partial credit when 6 years ago I was staring down the barrel of incel-dom.

Most people (both here and in wider society) seem to condemn dating apps in The Current Year; I still think they’re fucking great, because - while they certainly have many problems - they also solve many problems.

Yeah, using dating apps to find chicks, sending rideshares via apps to deliver them to your place, and ordering alcohol through app-delivery for the dates, is *chef’s kiss* when it comes to effort efficiency in Current Year. Booze and broads straight to your door.

Born too late to explore the earth, born too early to explore space, but born just in time to lay pipe without having to leave my place or take girls anywhere to monkeydance for them.

To be fair, dating apps haven’t gotten me a respectable wife in my half decade of using them, so they have technically failed the assignment. But dating apps have gotten a lot of Zoomer girls into my bed, which is certainly worth partial credit when 6 years ago I was staring down the barrel of incel-dom.

Partial credit? More like enough extra credit to offset the original failed assignment with bonus points leftover to spare. woody_harrelson_wiping_tears_with_Aplus_report_card.gif

Dating is anti-inductive. A parable:

Back in the early days of Tinder it was common for women to mention that they love to watch tv, specifically Netflix. There wasn't any subtext to this. That was in fact what they loved to do, and so they put it on their dating profile. Men, wanting to get laid, responded by also putting how much they loved Netflix on their dating profile, and by asking women they matched with to "Netflix and chill".

This did not result in previously unheard of numbers of interest-matched couples forming relationships. It resulted in the word "Netflix" or "tv" becoming a gigantic red flag.

If you've been at it for a few years, presumably you're in some of the intermediate/advanced classes. You allude to the social dancing also, but I'd be interested in a specific breakdown of the ratio between beginner classes and the more advanced classes and the social floors. I'd also be interested to hear what the vibe's been like among those men, particularly the newer ones - do they seem like they're interested in dancing or just pulling?

It'll be interesting to see how long this lasts. IME, dancing scenes don't stay tilted towards an excess of men for very long, as the etiquette of asking women to dance means men either get in each other's way asking women to dance, or get no dances at all. In the reverse case, where there's an excess of women, the men are busy dancing, and surplus women often dance with each other or get asked to dance the next song or the one after.

I did swing/salsa/ballroom/etc dance classes off and on at a UC school from 2011-2014. Every single class session had more men than women :(

Conceptually, the men in a dance class can be divided into 3 groups: (1) men who are there primarily to meet women; (2) men who are primarily there to learn dancing, but meeting women is a secondary goal; and (3) men who are strictly there for dance and not to meet women.

My guess is that the vast majority of men in your dance class belong to either group (1) or group (2). Which makes sense. It's no secret that there are a lot of young men out there who are fairly desperate to get a female romantic partner. And most men, at some point, are told that a good way to meet such a woman is to do some mixed-sex activity.

Maybe they're all in a situationship with the same man (lol)?

You can laugh, but I definitely think that this is a factor. It seems pretty clear that ultimately man is a tournament species. In the absence of laws and social and economic constraints, most men would build a harem if they could and most women would join such a harem. Dating apps allow people to circumvent some of these constraints because they make it much easier for men to enter into relationships with multiple women without those women knowing about each other. (Or at least allowing those women to avoid facing the reality that they are part of a harem.)

I've observed it multiple times over the last 4 years.

Any space that is likely to have attractive, single females to interact with in a group setting will quickly draw males who want to interact with such women, and inherently, more guys show up for this explicit purpose. So there DOES NOT exist any mythical IRL space where a straight guy can enter and find a favorable gender ratio to work with. Other than a college campus, perhaps. Other males would notice and also come to exploit it.

This creates the gender imbalance, and the attention/distraction gets overwhelming for some of the women, who might stop showing up altogether (or go to events specifically reserved for women).

This further throws off the Gender imbalance, and also might block new women from joining. No woman is seeking out a space because she heard it had an excess of single guys. And even if some of the guys give up and leave, there'll be plenty more new guys coming in to try their luck, so this imbalance can persist for a while.

So the only women who continue show up are extraordinarily confident... or already have partners. This is maybe the final blow, when the remaining pool of women are already partnered, and drag their partners in with them so that the actual ratio of single women to men is even worse than it appears.

So you can legitimately have like 5+ single guys for every 1-2 single women in attendance.

This happens in any space that doesn't intentionally filter by gender.

I've also commented on the difficulty of getting women to show up to social gatherings even when directly invited. If there aren't other women already going, they're less likely to show up themselves. Even when they claim to want to go they have a decent chance of flaking.

The ability to ensure that a certain number of attractive women will be present is thus very, very valuable.

Most spaces/events don't have someone with this capability.

I'm not entirely sure why this is, because dating apps don't seem to particularly work for women either. Maybe the illusion of abundance is enough to keep them from thinking that they need to meet people in real life? Maybe they're all in a situationship with the same man (lol)? Maybe women just have stronger social connections in general and don't need to do something like dancing to meet people?

Partially that they seem to have female friend groups that they can spend time with.

Partially because a lot of women, esp. those with anxiety and other mental issues, find it easier to just stay home and binge Netflix or play games online and build "communities" in Discord or similar.

I know of an upsetting number of women whose lives are basically "work/school, outings for shopping and then... staying in at home, nose shoved in their phone with a TV show on background." They're being 'social' in that they're texting/chatting with a bunch of people, but their actual social presence IRL is virtually nil, and it is VERY hard to coax them out of this cocoon.

Ask me how I know. Female shut-ins are an increasing phenomenon, I think.

And because the underlying logic of romance is "men chase, women select," guess what happens if women don't make themselves 'available'? Men have fewer people to chase, and women have no pressure to take any 'active' steps to find someone.

Also a lot of women don't understand how to do the intermediary stages of the dance where they make themselves available but also do some mild shit testing. Or atleast conduct it in a sane way.

I've been involved in multiple conversations with single friends of my wife where they're forlorn over some potential beau not leading hard when they've dropped the handkerchief via liking 2 IG stories and stonewalling DMs. Literally seen women crying over failing to inspire hot pursuit vis texting conduct on their part that, to me if received from an online dating match would have me assume that they're soft dumping me.

lso a lot of women don't understand how to do the intermediary stages of the dance where they make themselves available but also do some mild shit testing

Yep, separate but related issue. Young women don't know how to flirt, nor how to gracefully reject advances (or reject them in a way that encourages future attempts). I used to think it was just me being autistic, but nah. Often the signal just isn't there.

when they've dropped the handkerchief via liking 2 IG stories and stonewalling DMs. Literally seen women crying over failing to inspire hot pursuit vis texting conduct on their part that, to me if received from an online dating match would have me assume that they're soft dumping me.

REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

I've also taken the initiative to push forward whenever I see any positive sign of interest whatsoever and gotten HARD rejected when I finally cross whatever threshold of comfort the woman apparently held in her mind. There's no push-pull. Its just me pushing pushing pushing then an ABRUPT pull away when some arbitrary line is crossed.

Like, I've legitimately heard a woman say that even viewing someone's IG/Snap Stories should be an actual hint, but then you follow up on such things and try to ask to meet up in person and they are suddenly super busy and can't make the time. Because guess what, in person you're expected to use your words and physical touch and you're not 'protected' by a digital barrier of plausible deniability any longer.

Something about the dopamine hit of being desired and getting the other party to express interest being enough stimulation, then the actual stress/tension of actually reciprocating interest seems to snag many of them.

I'm reminded of a platonic female friend of mine who had this like 6 month crush on her boss and was eternally talking about how she wished he'd do all sorts of 50 Shades activities with her.

Then he made one like off-color milquetoast but not like insane joke at the end of a meeting and she instantly icked on him/wanted to take him to HR. A certain part of female sexuality is wanting to be the proverbial dog barking behind a fence who doesn't do anything when let out, but some of the instant 180s I've seen as a third party are jaw dropping.

This is my diagnosis.

There's a solid number of women who are absolutely down to clown if you get them in the mood. They don't just talk the talk.

But many, MANY of them get engrossed in the fantasy, they read the romantasy books, watch the shows and movies, maybe even watch the porn, and will engage in massive amounts of dirty talk, digitally, but are terrified of having the actual physical interaction. Maybe they dip a toe in and then immediately retreat back to the safe, comfortable world of fiction.

And in some cases, if you end up part of their fantasy world, and then break that fantasy in some way, either from rejecting them, or giving them the ick, or, hell, you actually help them act on the urges but your performance isn't up to snuff (good luck living up to minotaur standards), and they get incandescently angry at you.

Something about the collapsing of the ideal they imagined to the dirtier, lacklustre reality leads to disappointment that manifests as anger.

Its something like accepted knowledge that women get off way more on the mental side of sex whereas men, despite being very visual, really need physical interaction to be completely sated. Hence why strip clubs for women aren't really a thing. And current tech is much more catered towards entertaining the mental aspects of sexuality, whilst keeping the physical at a 'safe' distance. So I'd guess many women now have a completely enclosed, fantasy-centric approach to their pleasure, and the thought of making the jump to realspace is daunting.

A certain part of female sexuality is wanting to be the proverbial dog barking behind a fence who doesn't do anything when let out, but some of the instant 180s I've seen as a third party are jaw dropping.

I can understand changing your opinion on your coworker because he makes an off-color joke, but what I find genuinely hard to understand is the having of a months-long intense sexual crush on your boss and telling your friends you want to do BDSM with him. That's wild.

Then he made one like off-color milquetoast but not like insane joke at the end of a meeting and she instantly icked on him/wanted to take him to HR.

To what extend would you guess that this ick was motivated by having a crush on him that was unrequited for 6 months? As a third party reading a second-hand text description, it appears to me like cliche-level sour-grapes behavior.

This was like still during the crush, though. If I recall correctly the joke was something like that they were traveling together and there was enough of an age gap that a coworker remarked it'd look like a father and a daughter then he said something to the effect of he'd hope he's in good enough shape that she'd look like a second wife

Ah, the joke being about her and the age gap makes this more intelligible.

This was like still during the crush, though.

If anything, that makes the "sour grapes" scenario far more likely.

I've been involved in multiple conversations with single friends of my wife where they're forlorn over some potential beau not leading hard when they've dropped the handkerchief via liking 2 IG stories and stonewalling DMs. Literally seen women crying over failing to inspire hot pursuit

Most agentic and emotionally resilient young women.

They’ve more than done their part in deigning to perform the Herculean emotional labor of liking 2 IG stories and stonewalling DMs. Men are supposed to read their minds and know when and how to message them and court jester for them.

Exactly plus it's like... On a scale of 1-10 where 10 is a marriage proposal and 1 is a restraining order I'd have read these messages as a 2.5/10 at best and desisted from further pursuit if I'd been the recipient.

I feel like I'm only successfully married now since my wife is essentially male-brained and met me in the middle in terms of communication

Isn’t Pilates very female and very attractive for the most part but does not have men showing up?

Does pilates encourage interaction between the participants?

And ask any given woman what she thinks of random straight guys showing up to her pilates class.

When I lived in a city, I used to go to yoga 3x a week. The intro classes were generally 60% women, but intermediate/advanced classes could be 10-16 women and 1-2 men.

For the intermediate classes, the other regular guy and I would show up early, BS some, set up our spots, and start doing some warm-ups. A few women would trickle in. 30 seconds before class started, 6-10 women would show up and unroll their mats. The second class ended, they'd roll up their mats and bolt.

Other dude was a married 50something grandfather. I was in a relationship and not looking. I barely talked to anyone besides him. The two of us were hardly putting out predator vibes. Even so, a good half of the women attending class were like frightened gazelles approaching the watering hole. Some had rings on, some didn't, but some without might've been married and just avoiding a ring for comfort during class. Even so, some of them must've been single.

I always wonder just how many of the single ones complained that they couldn't meet anyone, but even in strongly gender-segregated hobby environment, they didn't spend 1 second longer there than they had to.

Yep.

Dance classes/socials at least anticipate that you'll be interacting with the other members, and physically touching them, and getting to show off a skill.

The logic as to why single men would be able to pull attention there is at least sound... if there's a decent gender ratio.

Classes where you just show up, do some work on your own at an instructors behest, then leave without much of a fraternization period might encourage familiarity over the course of time. But that means the guy has to keep showing up, repeatedly, to show he's not just there to pull women, and HOPE that one he finds attractive is open to approach. Not a very active approach angle.

I teach Krav Maga classes at my gym, and when people, especially women, are new they tend to come in two minutes before class, do the class, then bolt, but warm up over time to the social aspect of it. If they don't, they often disappear within a few weeks.

But I've noticed a somewhat unfortunate selection effect where the single ladies who want to take the classes often have sexual assault, stalkers, or similar trauma that compelled them to seek out such training. And they thus have personal issues that make them a little wary of male attention in general.

So ultimately, the sort of event where:

A) Attractive, single women would attend;

B) They're actually actively looking for partners/accept approaches;

C) Aren't damaged goods;

D) Interaction between men and women is encouraged;

and

D) There's a balanced gender ratio.

Just do not seem to exist hardly anywhere, even when people try to intentionally create such spaces.

One's workplace might be good for this but huge risks there.

One's workplace might be good for this but huge risks there.

This one is something of a funny disparity. As an employee at various state government agencies, the hammer of HR has always been hovering, especially with any perceived "power disparity." An attorney dating a legal secretary could expect to be fired if it goes south, even if the attorney wasn't the supervisor. On the other hand, I've seen HR turn a very blind eye to 2 attorneys dating, even when one was the supervisor of the other (until it became so public and such a problem internally that they had to do something). Huge, huge risk for an attorney to date a non-attorney, even if historically that kind of intra-office thing led to marriages.

But small firms? The stories I've heard (from reliable sources) make half of them sound like a continual frat party (especially the ones that are a bunch of solo attorneys or partnerships sharing office space--one I'm very familiar with had a legit "who's the father" freakout among the attorneys with a secretary). This is not all that surprising given the personality types involved, and also that plenty of women get jobs at firms looking for a lawyer husband. You've mentioned being at a small firm, so even if yours is professional, I bet you know of some that aren't (which means you just need to get invited to those holiday parties...).

I have managed to find a balance where I can have a jovial atmosphere around the office, keep morale up by occasionally going out to dinner with staff but otherwise keeping healthy distance such that I don't engage with their personal lives much and definitely don't have text conversations about non work stuff that might lead elsewhere.

That said, since legal assistants tend to either be young women in their early 20's OR older, 50+ ladies, I do see the temptation that arises when you've got a nubile young thing around a bunch of Type A personalities.

I know of at least one attorney who imploded his personal life (not his law practice, funny enough) by getting an assistant pregnant.

We do a Christmas party that involves our other offices every year, and like 5 years back one of the attractive younger assistants got pretty drunk and was hitting on me slyly but openly. The means and opportunity was there, but equal parts concern for my job AND the fact I was still with my ex at the time kept me from acting. In all retrospect, since the assistant left the firm not too long thereafter, and the Ex broke up with me, it probably wouldn't have done much harm in the end. But its the principle of the thing.

It didn't even leave that much impression, since I cannot even remember the assistant's name. Else I might have tried to look her up after the breakup.

My point was it’s not “intentional filtered by gender”. Though there are strong norms against it. Same thing as a girl showing up to a basketball court. Though I am semi-ok with that if they have legitimate game since there are no such thing as an adult female games.

It does kill some male space vibe. And it’s a little weird to play hard against a girl.

As far as I know Pilates does not exclude male participants. But it’s not a thing men have interest in unless maybe your gay.

Men will have interest in it insofar as it can lead to meeting attractive women.

I just think 'you're only doing this to get in my pants' is a reaction women often have when the guy enters the female-oriented space.

Sure. And if you cross a social taboo line without seeming very genuinely interested that’s a reasonable reaction.

I would add it’s very nice having male/female coded spaces. Less of those exists today. I don’t like it when girls join my basketball game. Occasionally it is fine. But if it was 15% female it completely changes male dynamics.

Doesn’t speed dating have a problem with not being able to get enough men?

Not in my local area, distinctly the opposite.

But given the type of woman who signs up for speed dating (read: they aren't getting much attention elsewhere) men may have caught on as to the selection effects at work.

I know of an upsetting number of women whose lives are basically "work/school, outings for shopping and then... staying in at home, nose shoved in their phone with a TV show on background." They're being 'social' in that they're texting/chatting with a bunch of people, but their actual social presence IRL is virtually nil, and it is VERY hard to coax them out of this cocoon.

Ask me how I know. Female shut-ins are an increasing phenomenon, I think.

I don't know if it's increasing, but it's certainly a contributor to every public social space being a sausage-fest. "The elites don't want you to know this, but women are only 20-30% of the population" might not be factually accurate, but it's directionally correct.

I sometimes ask LLMs to do Fermi estimates on the number of single women in the U.S. who meet certain sets of criteria in terms of their eligibility as a partner.

Those results are usually disheartening on their own. But I haven't dared ask what percentage of those women are actually 'on the market' in any real sense, that is, available such that you might encounter them if your social surface area is reasonably large.

I fear that a relatively chaste/modest, low maintenance woman is also less likely to be out and about and open to meeting people. If you do see them in the real world you'll pass like ships in the night. AI boyfriends might exacerbate this.

I go to restaurants and bars these days and the phenomenon of "woman sitting by herself but dressed up like she wants attention" doesn't seem to be a thing (if it ever was?). You see older adults (in my area, anyway), a few mixed groups, usually one (1) lady's group sitting all together, and a smattering of couples or lone dudes.

More and more young adults living with parents gives a hint here.

Last year I encountered an extremely tragic case of a young lady, cute, petite but pleasantly curvaceous, smart, but her entire life was just working in her parents' business, taking classes, then home to live with her parents, where she played LoL or Overwatch until like 1 a.m.. If she went out it was usually with the same 3 people. Desperately seemed to want a relationship, but didn't know a damn thing about flirting and... get this... at age 25 her mother still controlled her bank account.

I don't think she realized how much of a honking red flag that last bit was, a guy won't want to date a woman whose mother has that much sway over her life at that age. She didn't get out to social events often enough to meet many guys, and wouldn't know how to converse with them if she did. And, alas, she turned my own offer/request for a date down.

She's like 80% of the way to being the complete package for a stable, friendly type of guy, but I daresay she'll hit 30 without a serious relationship under her belt unless she gets out from under Mom's thumb and puts herself out there while avoiding the pitfalls of modern romance.

Or mom makes her put herself out there until she goes out with someone. It happens.

From what I've seen, mom is the source of the problem, wants to control her so she doesn't get into trouble but also wants to be 'best friends' with her.

The habits she's built up are probably quite set now.

This happens in any space that doesn't intentionally filter by gender.

Larger social dance events like full weekends of workshops and parties are one of the few places that does this obviously and explicitly and still gets away with it, by selling "leader passes" and "follower passes".

Turn up as a male follower. They exist (and are getting more popular), usually taken by experienced men who want a new challenge (it also helps you understand the leader steps better if you know what your follower has to endure when you do a certain figure).

Yes, it's very useful for skill development, and it's really fun dancing with women who know both roles and can pass the lead back and forth during a song.

I also do dancing (competitive though, not social), our classes are 3-4 women per man, and have stayed this way or if anything the most recent new cohort is even more female dominated. I highly recommend dancesport to any men who are interested, at intermediate+ levels almost all couples end up 1 man + 1 woman so as a man you don't need to be as amazing to make it up there. I wouldn't recommend using this as a way to meet partners though in the short term, that's gonna get noticed and you'll be ostracized very quickly (and for good reason, we do this because we want to get good at dancing, not because we're horny, it's actually a surprisingly sexless sport, despite what the rumba may appear like to you). Longer term once you're actually good and in a stable dance partnership plenty of couples end up marrying each other, but this is a very different thing than hitting on women after 4 weeks of slow waltz.

Thoughts TheMotte?

Was it a beginners class? My experience with kizomba is that the classes (particularly the beginner ones) may be heavily male, but the socials are overwhelmingly female. Because kizomba is easy to follow, women learn super quickly and stop going to the classes, but still go to the socials because they like the dance.

I don't know enough about swing dancing to say whether or not that's the case, but if it's significantly easier to follow than lead, then that could be something. Although that wouldn't explain the change in the last couple of years.

It’s way easier to follow swing dancing than lead, or at least I had more trouble learning it than the women I danced with did. Either I’m unusually bad at dancing or one role is easier than the other.

Leading is indeed much harder because you have to decide what to do.

Depends on the dance, leading a jive is easier than being a follower, the follower steps are much more complex depending on the choreo.

Leading properly (instead of just doing the leader steps/choreo) is a skill as well, but it takes like 4-5 years to learn how to do correctly, you're not going to learn it by going to 1hr weekly social dance classes.

I commented on the dating recession as well previously, but ill add another hypothesis: The dating recession is probably downstream of the friendship recession (Ill make a longer post talking about this, separately. As i feel it deserves attention by itself.). Even today 2/3's of couples start out as friends first. The dreaded "friend zone" a lot of guys want to avoid might be your best shot in actuality. I suspect a lot of women don't want to go out on a date with a random stranger they met on the street, at a bar, dancing, etc. (although there are still a chunk of women where this works!), and prefer friends first as way to gauge compatibility (or they just value the friendship!). There is also a safety aspect in that you know that the man in question is a descent person.

One thing that should also be added here is that you have to be comfortable genuinely being friends with these women (not just a friends to get in your pants kind of deal.), and be comfortable with the possibility that it wont go in a romantic direction. Even if it doesn't go that way, you made a connection that's valuable in its own right, and you may be able to date other women she is in proximity with.

As for why women might not be keen on going outside to make friends, or engage in hobbies that lead to friendships. I'd suspect its a combination of the "friendzone" problem in men's case. And a jealousy/toxicity problem with many women, where they are jealous of how another women looks, or just a toxic person, etc. (the movie Mean Girls comes to mind). The decline of 3rd places also may play a role. Its not that those kinds of issues weren't present in the past, but people are probably much more sensitive to these issues now, for whatever reason.

How do men meet women in your culture, and what are romantic relationships between men and women like?

One thing that should also be added here is that you have to be comfortable genuinely being friends with these women (not just a friends to get in your pants kind of deal.), and be comfortable with the possibility that it wont go in a romantic direction. Even if it doesn't go that way, you made a connection that's valuable in its own right, and you may be able to date other women she is in proximity with.

The proximity with this is important, I met my wife by getting set up by a friend of hers that I met on a dating app but didn't hit it off with. But the idea that single men who are serious about making a partner should settle for a friendship with women they meet is just an absurd delusion some women harbor who haven't ever seriously thought of the logistics of single men dating. I'd need to have maintained literally hundreds of female friends by the time I met my wife for this to have been a plausible strategy, it just doesn't really work. I'm sorry but if it doesn't work out you can't expect him to stay friends with you, it just doesn't scale. It's not personal, it's just that forming a strong attachment, getting stuck in the friend zone as it were, and then getting rejected in the end eviscerates a portion of your soul each time.

I think it's more a case of "one of your 20 friends is a woman from work you met 4 years ago. You were in a relationship when you met, but today you're both single. You go for your usual coffee catch up and decide to do it again next week instead of the usual next month. You begin dating organically after this."

I don't think the play is to maintain a friendship circle of hundreds of prospective girlfriends. Meeting people through friend groups or work does seem to be some great mechanism for finding the love of your life.

Right, having some women who are friends is definitely useful in a number of ways. Maybe I misread the OP and they weren't suggesting it as a main strategy, but there really is a strain of thought among women that a man who would be interested in dating but not becoming friends is some kind of contradiction. "why would you date someone you wouldn't want to make your friend?". It makes a kind of sense from the perspective of the selective sex but it just isn't workable.

I've basically resorted to telling any women who suggest mere friendship "I literally have all the good friends I need or want." Nicely, but making it clear I'm not that guy who will remain in orbit indefinitely.

Now, if I know them as part of an existing friend network or through work or because I happen to run into them on semi-regular occasions, fine. I can pop by, be friendly and engaging, and see where it goes. I just won't be fielding long, emotional text conversations or helping them move heavy objects.

The effort required to put up even the facade of friendship with multiple women doesn't seem worth it unless she is actively wing(wo)manning for you. And maintaining mere 'facades' of friendship is way too manipulative/dishonest for my taste.

And my experience with women wingmen is laughable. They'll bring this one friend who is "single and super nice that you should meet" to a gathering. And she's 50+ pounds overweight or a major butterface and usually poor social skills to boot (i.e. there's reasons she's single). So you have to politely reject without either insulting your friend or the referral.

Happened to me 2, maybe 3 times in the past 5 years? And if you're out and about they'll suggest the most insane approaches to you. "You should talk to that 45-year-old cougar-looking lady with the back tattoo!"

Yes, having female friends is important so you can have a some social proof you're not a creepy loser and have access to her potentially single friends, but don't expect them to be that big a help in landing one.

So you have to politely reject without either insulting your friend or the referral.

In the long-ago pre-covid times, a female friend of mine tried to set me up with one of her friends, and was describing her. I pointed out a glaring red flag that was obvious even in my friend's super-glowing description, and the response was "well, if you're going to have standards like that [i.e. any standards], prepare to die alone." She couldn't have created a better summary of the dating market if she tried.

Its very fair to ask a friend "this person sounds great... why are they single?"

There's a few fine answers to that question.

One of my buddies got his GF from our friend group b/c the current GF asked her friend, who is close friends with my buddy, if he was single and looking and then had the friend nudge him in her direction, and things worked out well because the friend was a good intermediary and could vouch for both parties.

But they'd had a decent amount of time to assess each other from somewhat afar. It wasn't a cold/blind introduction.

I've basically resorted to telling any women who suggest mere friendship "I literally have all the good friends I need or want."

Based. “Thank you for reaching out, but all available positions have been filled. I’ll keep your resume on file and let you know if any openings emerge.”

And my experience with women wingmen is laughable.

And even when women attempt or “attempt” to wingwoman for a male friend, oftentimes they can’t help but still accidentally or “accidentally” throw the male friend under the bus: “This is @faceh, one of my besties. He’s a total sweetheart and like a brother to me, always there to listen and lend a hand.” In which case at most a friendzone just +1’d in terms of the population size.

One of the best wingwoman experiences I’ve had was from a girl I had maybe met once in person before then. I don’t know if it was intentional or not. She introduced me to a female friend of hers and was like “teehee this is [my first name], he’s the one hooking up with [hot chick they both know].” Cut right to the chase with the most value-add information she had. Female mate-choice copying FTW.

I totally agree. The two exes ago girl (last girl I was probably in love with) begged me to stay friends with her after she broke up with me, despite the fact the first time I had hung out with her we had fucked. The entire relationship was completely romantic (we had sex 80+% of the times we ever hung out), but she seemed to think that somehow the relationship had a strong platonic foundation that we could maintain. I initially agreed because I thought I could change her mind back. That obviously didn't work out, and I learned that this woman was a terrible person to be friends with because her extreme dogmatism combined with terrible mental health. I ended up terminating the friendship after a couple months because I realized she was never going to get back together with me, and that I didn't really want her to anyway.

On the flip side of the coin, I think having female friends who you have no intention of sleeping with ever is perfectly fine and perhaps even good. Women are just as diverse as men when it comes to platonic personality, and it seems crazy to remove 50% of the population from the friendship pool solely because someone might get feelings. I have few very close female friends from college/work that I have absolutely no feelings for and I'm very glad they're in my life. I would never be open to a relationship with any of these women, and unless you plan to get married, I think the friendship->lover boundary should never be crossed, because unfortunately you can't really go back.

I initially agreed because I thought I could change her mind back.

Been there.

Its odd that I used to (and somewhat still do) believe that there was a specific sequence of words I might be able to utter that would 'fix' things and get them back to where I wanted.

But attraction really don't work that way.

and I learned that this woman was a terrible person to be friends with because her extreme dogmatism combined with terrible mental health.

Also been there. Had a really awkward Friends -> mutual crush -> 'breakup' -> friends -> FWB -> breakup/blocked sequence with one girl. Took me like 5 years to realize she was irretrievably messed up in the head and she was happily using me as a psychological crutch, which was causing a drag on my mental health. She reacted poorly to my attempt to create a boundary, which confirmed that cutting her out was the right choice.

I think having female friends who you have no intention of sleeping with ever is perfectly fine and perhaps even good.

I've got a solid handful of such friends, and the thing they have in common is I have negligible levels of sexual attraction to them (like, I wouldn't turn down an offer, but I get no arousal just from being around them) and they're usually partnered to someone and thus I mentally sort them as 'off the market.'

I think the friendship->lover boundary should never be crossed, because unfortunately you can't really go back.

I think you can, but in my experience you need like a solid 18-24 months of virtually zero contact and of course lingering feelings can flare up so you have to keep a boundary in place on how often you hang out.

Me, I am loathe to give up a connection with someone I share a lot of pleasant memories with.

I honestly can't blame anyone they get into a relationship with from being antsy about it, though.

Romance is just a messy thing, tied in with our baser instincts. Even having a fully intellectual comprehension of how it works you'll still be susceptible to the standard traps and pitfalls.

One of the wonders of AI machine translation is that you can pull-up any Iranian state tv clip on YouTube get instant English subtitles.

One particularly amusing clip was when they had the Persian equivilent of Steve Kornacki at the big board breaking it down on the map, complete with animated missiles and drones blowing up American bases. I was surprised that the map they use for Israel The Occupied Territories includes the Golan Heights, but not the West Bank or Gaza.

Of course, despite the conspiracy theories, this works with Hebrew-language Israeli sources too. Channel 14 is what I have heard is the conservative news station in Israel. I'll let you know if I find any nuggets worth sharing.

The farsi and hezbollah aligned nuggets worth sharing will mostly be on memritv er long, I would think.

Today I was listening to a Maiden Mother Matriarch podcast (paywalled on Substack, but available with ads on Apple Podcast), with Louise Perry interviewing John Daniel Davidson, and there were a lot of both dubious and interesting things there, but the one that caused an emotional reaction for me was the discussion of "screens," which I've been having with some in person friends, and seeing around Substack lately as well. I don't like the paradigms of the discussion, but have trouble articulating why. Especially when Davidson kept repeating "it rewires their brains" over and over again. My pop neuroscience model is built on a few fluffy books about neuroplasticity from a decade ago, but I thought basically everything required our brains?

There are indeed a lot of things on the internet, and especially social media, that are bad in the way casinos are bad, but calling this "screens" feels like calling slot machines "levers" or something. It's not like I could have accessed the podcast, other than by learning about it online, anyway. Was it more virtuous to listen to Davidson talk than to read him on Substack? Maybe! I was doing work with my hands while I listened.

Jonathan Haidt thinks that children shouldn't be able to post on social media or have smart phones (or internet enabled private devices more generally), and I think that may be reasonable, especially in regards to people posting photos of themselves, sure, everyone should think long and hard about doing that, and usually shouldn't. But at the same time, I don't really trust the enforcers, and do think that the rules wouldn't fall where I would hope.

Louise Perry didn't push back as much as I would have liked against the "demonic, insane, evil" rhetoric in regards to "screens" (by which I think Davidson meant something more like "the unfiltered internet"), but did mention something like that she thinks it's probably alright for her children to watch fairy tales sometimes, but that it's weird and a bit disturbing if they're watching another kid play on Youtube. And I agree that, yes, that's kind of weird, I wouldn't let my children watch that. I didn't let my child watch more than one episode of "Is it Cake," either, because that also seemed a bit weird.

Anyway, is there anyone out there who has an actually useful way of discussing "screens," especially in respect to children, but also in general? If I had more attention to devote to the topic, maybe I'd try reading Heidegger's Simulcrum and Simulation, since at least the title seems like it's heading in an interesting direction.

There are indeed a lot of things on the internet, and especially social media, that are bad in the way casinos are bad, but calling this "screens" feels like calling slot machines "levers" or something.

This is the part where I think you’re wrong. Because it’s possible to have a lever that is not attached to a slot machine, so there is no slippery slope from “Here’s a lever (that teaches you the educational engineering mechanics of fulcrums!)” to “You are now addicted to penny slots”. But it is NOT possible to have an internet-enabled device that lacks a slippery slope from “You are watching an educational Youtube video” to “You are now addicted to dopaminagenic slop”. It’s literally one click away. With the physical lever, you have to actually get off your ass and go to a casino; and as Scott tells us: you get an outsize effect from minor inconveniences.

I have a hard enough time avoiding slipping on the Youtube slope, and I’m a 30-year-old academic with enough self-discipline to finish a PhD. You wanna put five year olds on the top of the slope? Get outta heeeeeere

(What I will say, though, is that it’s better to have a five year old addicted to dopaminagenic slop than no five year old at all, so I actually support kids being raised by screens if it means TFR goes up. Just don’t delude yourself that the practice ain’t cookin’ their brains)

But it is NOT possible to have an internet-enabled device that lacks a slippery slope from “You are watching an educational Youtube video” to “You are now addicted to dopaminagenic slop”.

What does that mean? I'm pretty picky, and often do look at Youtube or Instagram, see that there's nothing interesting there, and then close the tabs and go to bed or sit under a tree with a physical book. Maybe I'm a bit odd. If I'm feeling... stressed? I'm not sure what the state is... I'll refresh The Motte or something over and over for a while, and yeah that's dumb, I shouldn't do that. I should probably take a nap at that point.

I was listening to my daughter play Hytale, and she was narrating some story about a dragon, and she was going to send it food so it wouldn't eat the villagers, and then she was making them a protector, and then it was raining pigs, and there was a zoo, and it sounded very similar to when she's drawing and narrating stories about how her doll is putting on a party, and these are invitations, here have an invitation, and now they need to reverse for their performance, and so on and so forth.

What does that mean? I'm pretty picky, and often do look at Youtube or Instagram, see that there's nothing interesting there, and then close the tabs and go to bed or sit under a tree with a physical book. Maybe I'm a bit odd. If I'm feeling... stressed? I'm not sure what the state is... I'll refresh The Motte or something over and over for a while, and yeah that's dumb, I shouldn't do that. I should probably take a nap at that point.

I'm right there with you, but I don't think it's universal. I feel like I won the lottery of fascinations because the supposedly-addictive (and also useless) content that gets spread around is just boring to me, so I don't get sucked into those holes. It takes zero effort whatsoever on my part.

Same. I think my snobbishness saves me. If I swipe through Youtube shorts, my brain doesn't dump dopamine, it goes "this is shit" over and over again and gets more annoyed with every swipe.

Video is the wrong format for most content, and short form video is the wrong format for very close to absolutely all content. The very few exceptions to that rule where discovered 10 years ago on Vine, and done in thousands of variations since.

One big issue with Haidt's stance is the question of effectiveness and the rights we have to give up in order to ban children to begin with. Meaningful age verification by necessity means ID verification, anything else can be easily bypassed.

Maybe it's worth the cost for no one to have anonymity to the sites they use, and for the possibility of everyone's face and identity connected directly to the accounts to leak (like what happened somewhat with Discord recently where they leaked face scans) just to stop children, but it's not free.

And that's still assuming it does stop children. China's attempts to curb childhood gaming has not worked out that well. Because they just used someone else's face/ID as identification. Either by sneaking it, or the parents who are cool with that behavior just allowing them on. Just like how the parents who hand their kids an iPhone already are liable to just make an account for them too when asked.

"Additionally, minors circumvented the regulations: a survey revealed that 77 percent of minors used other people’s identities, such as that of a parent or older friend, when registering for game accounts. "

This is China and they're failing to keep kids from doing what they want. It's not just enough to have facial scans or ID uploads, doing those is sacrificing privacy for little benefit. At least if it worked the sacrifice would have some meaning! But it's not going to be enough, we have to be Mega China to be meaningfully effective, we have to be more invasive than the authoritarian communists because even they are failing.

Is that still worth it? Haidt correctly diagnosed a problem in society and then decided the only solution is nuking everyone's freedom just to fail anyway.

Yeah, I think it's very difficult to implement policies from the company side. Davidson said that he thought it was utterly insane that families in the 90s bought computers and connected them to the internet at all, but as I say, he was on a podcast and published a book, so how extreme could he really be in that respect?

Instagram is interesting, because it shows different faces to different people. Also on Maiden Mother Matriarch, Jean Twenge was talking about how it conforms to the insecurities of girls, especially, but an adult might get a totally acceptable Instagram feed. My feed is a couple of IRL friends, a bunch of totally normal art, and some costumes, but I didn't have an account until I was almost 30. AI also sees extremely sensitive to phrasing, so if you write to it as an adult who's trying to get something done, it will be your colleague, but it's hard to pretend to be someone else effectively enough to guess how it will respond to them.

My ideal policy would be one that sidesteps this problem by being a uniform policy for everyone. I don't know if it's possible, but what I'd aim for is putting a bit of friction on the slot machine lever.

For example -- banning endless scrolling feeds. Banning autoplay, except in certain cases like music playlists or playlists created by the user themselves. Having a delay (5 or 10 seconds?) before showing recommendations of other videos to watch. Or even a gradually increasing delay the longer you've been watching. Anything to making watching the next video a bit less appealing than doing something else.

Would people start just making compilation videos to work around this limitation? Probably. It's a hard problem to solve.

What I'd really like is a lot stricter rules around what is appropriate for a "kids" section of a website, like Youtube Kids. Some sort of maximum measurement of how hyper-attention-grabbing a video is, and while this could be done with objective rules, it's pretty hard to measure for every video. But we do manage to have rules around content, so I don't think it's undoable. Then at least parents could let their kids use just that app and not worry about their brains turning to mush at such a rapid rate.

Another thing we could aim for, possibly something we should aim for first, is decreasing the friction on the alternatives.

What would you rather children and adolescents do instead of watching things on screens?

Are there obstacles to them doing that now?

Yep. All this handwringing over screen time when the possible alternatives are likely unavailable, unlawful, uninsurable, require an adult's constant participation, and/or would raise eyebrows with the Karens/curtain-twitchers and get the authorities called in.

Which means the Internet is the final frontier (in both the 'infinite probability space' and 'the last one that exists' sense), and to a point is still beyond the reach of the Karen. (Which, of course, is why the states proposing this are who they are.)

The thing that people tend to miss is that it is vital to the health of any society that Karen must be oppressed, because she deserves to be. But then again, that's just the mission statement of/justification for [classic] liberalism.

it is vital to the health of any society that Karen must be oppressed

Only in the sense of "You're oppressing me by not letting me oppress others!" (cf. the Cavaliers in Virginia.)

I'd rather they be playing outside and getting exercise, playing with friends, reading, doing creative stuff. The latter two are lower-friction than they've ever been, though the first two (especially playing with friends) are higher than they used to be, partly because of cultural changes, partly because of modern car-centric suburban development patterns, though I won't get on my soapbox about that right now.

I do think that reducing the friction on the alternatives is good. But I disagree that we should do this first, because the problem of easily accessible and endless over-stimulating video is a really big problem and not that hard of a problem to at least put a serious dent in with a bit of effort, in my opinion. And reducing friction can only get you so far, when the friction for the thing you're competing with is non-existent.

And of course, different people can work on solving different problems.

Though of course, the demand for dopamine rush can quickly shift to something like video games. For that, I'd love to see an age rating for games and TV shows that includes a score for their addictiveness, so parents can make informed choices.

For example -- banning endless scrolling feeds. Banning autoplay, except in certain cases like music playlists or playlists created by the user themselves. Having a delay (5 or 10 seconds?) before showing recommendations of other videos to watch.

This is equivalent to "open source software is illegal".

Open source software doesn't usually have mass-market adoption and it doesn't do this kind of skinner-boxing engagement hacking in my experience; of all possible tech regulations I don't think this one is likely to be an issue. Also, in practice, these restrictions are almost always predicated on market share & revenue and again I don't think open source software has to worry about this.

I think you can get 99% of the way there by making this law apply to software available to the public, produced by for-profit companies over a certain size in terms of market cap, or view numbers, or some other hard-enough-to-game metric. It's fine if Big Vinny's Open Source Video Sharing Site with 153 users doesn't follow these rules, that's not what kids are watching on their iPads.

I still see issues here.

  • Open source software can be written by one person and distributed to a number of users that is both unknown and outside your control. It would be bad if your software becomes commonly adopted by 10 million people who all download it for free and you suddenly find yourself in court.
  • Open source software can also be copied by vendors and resold without additional permission, and you don't want to add together the total number of users from the vendor and the 153 users, and put requirements on the guy with the 153 users.
  • Even if open source gets exempted, if there are any paperwork requirements to prove that your market cap or view numbers or whatever qualify, that alone could kill open source software. And even if those requirements only apply when you are sued, who in their right mind would release software and take the risk that some day the attorney general will force them to produce usage numbers in court?
  • Also, you need to be careful that things like "has a paid banner ad and a GoFundMe" or "offers the software for a nominal copying charge" or even "actually sells other things on the website" don't count as for-profit, even if it has a million users and isn't registered as a nonprofit.

Is that still worth it? Haidt correctly diagnosed a problem in society and then decided the only solution is nuking everyone's freedom just to fail anyway.

The social media ban isn't really the main goal of organisations like Haidt's. The goal is to get kids off smartphones. That is much easier for parents to do when 'I need Snapchat to talk to all my friends' is no longer true. Even if a social media ban can be bypassed, there's no reason to do so if none of a child's peers are using the platforms. The same is true of school smartphone bans. It's much easier for parents to say 'no you can't have a smartphone' if smartphones are a prohibited item in school.

Worrying about kids' privacy when preventing them from accessing social media is kind of ironic. The kids are already sharing their deepest, darkest secrets with these platforms. We're trying to prevent them giving up their privacy.

It's also worth talking about the actual technology used for age verification. In the UK we have it for porn sites already. 90% of them use third parties like AgeGo which don't require you to upload ID (although you can), they just use age estimation from a face scan, which isn't even saved once the check has been done. It's fine.

Worrying about kids' privacy when preventing them from accessing social media is kind of ironic. The kids are already sharing their deepest, darkest secrets with these platforms. We're trying to prevent them giving up their privacy.

It's not kid's privacy, it's adult's privacy at risk. The only meaningful way to have age verification is to have ID verification (and even that isn't actually enough even with China's much more strict ID system). The entire idea of being anonymous on the internet must be destroyed just for a chance that kids might get off the phones.

The goal is to get kids off smartphones. That is much easier for parents to do when 'I need Snapchat to talk to all my friends' is no longer true. Even if a social media ban can be bypassed, there's no reason to do so if none of a child's peers are using the platforms. The same is true of school smartphone bans. It's much easier for parents to say 'no you can't have a smartphone' if smartphones are a prohibited item in school.

Parents can do that already anyway! You can simply not give your kid a smartphone if you wish. You can lock it down via various methods if you want to. There's not a bunch of smartphone drug dealers passing out free samples to children.

The parents who just hand their 3 year old a phone to babysit for them are the same parents who are just gonna let their kid scan their face to make the Instagram account. We can see by their choice that they're fine with their kids being online.

which isn't even saved once the check has been done. It's fine.

Not only is it very easy to bypass (as we saw with people even using video game characters with it) and you could just use your parents/older friends like the kids in China do but it's an obvious lie and Discord already leaked tons of users just a little bit ago. If you seriously believe that they're deleting everything, I got a bridge to sell you if you want.

You don’t need a foolproof system. You need a system that imposes enough friction to meaningfully reduce the fraction of teens on social media.

These are very different things. Notably, the drinking age does not mean 0% of your local highschool goes to a kegger before graduation- does this mean it doesn’t work and should be abolished?

You don’t need a foolproof system. You need a system that imposes enough friction to meaningfully reduce the fraction of teens on social media.

Sure, but again consider China. They went really really restrictive and have managed to only get ~20% off. Is that meaningful enough to you?

The level of friction necessary is to be a Mega China. Maybe Mega China is worth it, but the debate needs to be honest about just how strict internet access needs to become to be worth a damn.

Otherwise it's the same logic as the crazy climate bureaucrats who, because they can't implement harsh climate restrictions, decide to put water limiters on our showers and low flow toilets. Making everyone's life worse just so they don't feel bad about their complete failure. People should either be honest and admit that Mega China is a fine tradeoff for them or give up on the theater and take the L.

The most important factor in anyone’s life before a certain age- probably more like 21 for most people, but certainly before 15 or so for the vast majority- is not government policy. It’s parents. And parents in the US are unusually willing to exercise their authority to curtail screen time/electronic entertainments. That they do so imperfectly is a much more eminently fixable problem than screens being bad.

Banning social media before a certain age, for example, will meaningfully convince parents to enact and enforce that rule in a way that Chinese gaming laws likely won’t, because American society is different from Chinese society and the inherently subsidiarist nature of minority allows this solution to work better.

The only meaningful way to have age verification is to have ID verification

As I mentioned, the UK manages porn sites perfectly well without mandatory ID verification. It may not be completely impenetrable, but that's fine. Surely you would be happy about this fact, rather than demanding something that you say is bad? You seem to be arguing that a) the current system is insufficiently robust and must be reformed and b) a more robust system would be bad. Why not be happy with our imperfect system?

Parents can do that already anyway!

That is a very naive position. It's technically correct, in the same way that I can technically go and live in the woods. In practice, peer pressure is immensely powerful, and parents find it extremely difficult to tell their kids 'every child in your class has a smartphone, but you can't have one'. Even if successful, it still causes parents a huge amount of stress having to constantly re-fight the battle every day. That is why we have rules around kids smoking and drinking. Technically, we could abolish age restrictions and just say to parents 'it's up to you'. In reality, humans are a social species that work around norms. The free for all status quo simply allows those norms to be set by tech companies, rather than by parents.

If you seriously believe that they're deleting everything, I got a bridge to sell you if you want.

And why exactly does Pornhub or AgeGo want a grainy, 3 second video of my face at 2am? Leaving aside the fact that big companies do, in fact, obey the law as a rule, because breaking it is bad for business, you seem to imply that these companies are holding on to data that they have explicitly promised to (and are legally obliged to) delete for the sake of being evil and creepy, in spite of no actual benefit to them.

Yeah, I’m not a big fan of the UK system (from my understanding, users have to buy a card from a retailer that validates age, typically in person?), and it has some obvious and well-documented faults. But it’s still not quite as stupid as asking people to upload their photo ID.

That’s presuming you can get the system without getting OFCOM and that whole related mess — the ease of the system for normies may well have made that more palatable politically! — but my guess is that they’re separate results of different political drives.

from my understanding, users have to buy a card from a retailer that validates age, typically in person?

I haven't heard of that one. Ofcom lists a bunch of acceptable methods here, but none of them involve buying a card from a shop.

Huh. I guess I was thinking of the older MindGeek AgeID system, which seems to have been sunsetted before being broadly implemented. The OfCom list there looks nearly identical to the proposals most American social conservatives (or anti-social-media people) have proposed, when they've considered any detail, with the sole exception of 'phone-based filtering'.

All of them seem to have similar privacy concerns: there's still a single point of data ownership that connects a user's meatspace name to their account(s). The ICO double-pinky-swearing people to safety doesn't really seem that persuasive from a security perspective.

Let's go over the acceptable method

Facial age estimation

Requires your face, thereby identifying you.

Open banking

Requires banking details, thereby identifying you.

Digital identity services

Vague enough that maybe it doesn't require it somehow for the "digital identity wallets" but questionable as to how the digital identity wallets verify it then without identifying you.

Credit card age check

Requires your credit card details, thereby identifying you.

Email based age estimation

requires your email for the purpose of linking it to other things you use your email for like banks and utility, thereby identifying you.

Mobile network operator age check

Requires you to have your mobile network confirm you, thereby identifying you.

Photo-ID matching

This is obviously identifying you.

You claimed "without mandatory ID verification", meanwhile every single one includes a form of mandatory identification. And despite that, it still fails as I've outlined in another comment.

Not only is it easy to bypass through the many many many sites that don't bother because they aren't big/based in the UK, but they also have obvious weak points for any non retard child to do.

Stuff like facial age estimation has been bypassed by video game characters and YouTube videos (and perhaps AI videos too), credit card/ID can be bypassed by just grabbing your parents wallet, mobile network operator age just use your parents or a friend's number.

It leaves the "in China 80% of kids are still gaming" problem left unsolved.

You claimed "without mandatory ID verification",

I think that meant a government issued ID document, not the act of identifying.

Requires your face, thereby identifying you.

That isn't what I said. My exact words were '90% of them use third parties like AgeGo which don't require you to upload ID'. That obviously means uploading e.g. a driving licence, not age estimation through the camera.

Because yes, in order to use age estimation, AgeGo will need a short video clip of my face, which will then be deleted once the verification is complete. If this counts as 'identifying me' then fine, I don't care. It's worth it if it makes it harder for children to watch porn.

More comments

As I mentioned, the UK manages porn sites perfectly well without mandatory ID verification.

Oh please I visited the UK three months ago and stayed there for a few weeks, it was a trivial matter to find sites that didn't demand some form of proof. I live in NC where we have similar laws, it is also very easy to get past because I'm not giving my ID to porn sites.

And if I find it really easy, I assume any teenager with decent motivation and a lack of retardation can also do it.

Surely you would be happy about this fact, rather than demanding something that you say is bad.

Because it's not a fact, it's a failure. When I say effective I mean effective, not theater. They are easy af to bypass.

Even if successful, it still causes parents a huge amount of stress having to constantly re-fight the battle every day.

Will kids never ask their parents for a smartphone or social media in a world where it takes a facial scan? Seems like a pretty wild claim to me.

That is why we have rules around kids smoking and drinking.

Parents who are cool with their kids smoking and drinking let them! They'll buy cigarettes and alcohol for them. It's just not many parents are cool with it.

And why exactly does Pornhub or AgeGo want a grainy, 3 second video of my face at 2am? Leaving aside the fact that big companies do, in fact, obey the law as a rule, because breaking it is bad for business, you seem to imply that these companies are holding on to data that they have explicitly promised to (and are legally obliged to) delete for the sake of being evil and creepy, in spite of no actual benefit to them.

Then why did the discord leak happen? You could just as easily say the same thing about them, and yet tons of people got their identification revealed anyway. Leaks like this happen constantly with people's data. Your argument is refuted by the real world happenings.

it was a trivial matter to find sites that didn't demand some form of proof.

And there are further ways to avoid giving away your Valid Personal Nomenclature....

Oh please I visited the UK three months ago and stayed there for a few weeks, it was a trivial matter to find sites that didn't demand some form of proof.

I agree, but the system is new and there's obviously going to be a degree of cat and mouse. If we required perfection for every system we wouldn't have any systems at all.

I assume any teenager with decent motivation and a lack of retardation can also do it

I'm less concerned about teenagers and more concerned about very small children. 40% of six year olds own a tablet in the UK, and another 40% have access to one. Before the current rules were in place, most of them had access to the infinity of online porn. My eight year old neice doesn't have a smartphone, but kids at her school do and have shown her videos of ISIS beheadings. This concerns me (and approximately every parent). I suspect you don't have kids. I assure you, internet libertarianism becomes much less appealing once you do.

Then why did the discord leak happen?

Because Discord used a different third party verification company with a different process.

I for one wouldn't be concerned about a six-year-old finding porn because they aren't going to watch infinity of it (unlike twelve-year-olds). My guess is that on opening such a website on accident they're going to think it's weird and gross and close it immediately and maybe, maybe ask their parents a few questions that the parents would prefer not to answer but should be equipped to anyway.

I agree, but the system is new and there's obviously going to be a degree of cat and mouse. If we required perfection for every system we wouldn't have any systems at all.

"Not perfect" is overselling it too, not even close to effective is the more likely truth. Even if it's already at China levels (doubtful given it's way less strict), then 80% of children still have a means of access without issue.

I'm less concerned about teenagers and more concerned about very small children. 40% of six year olds own a tablet in the UK, and another 40% have access to one. Before the current rules were in place, most of them had access to the infinity of online porn.

"Access" sure that is technically true, but how many six year olds care to sit around and watch porn anyway? Tons of them will just be grossed out as little kids tend to do with sexual things. Maybe like 10+ or something will have a meaningful cohort seeking out porn but that's already in the age that just clicking on sites until something works or taking their parents ID from their wallet should be simple and obvious.

My eight year old neice doesn't have a smartphone, but kids at her school do and have shown her videos of ISIS beheadings. This concerns me (and approximately every parent). I suspect you don't have kids. I assure you, internet libertarianism becomes much less appealing once you do.

I do have a three year old so I don't have much experience with Internet access, but at home I do know there's a very simple fix. Don't let my kid have a phone. The same way I wouldn't let them drink or party. Out of the house I can't control, but if it was say, the early 2000s I also wouldn't be able to stop my kid and his friends going on the computer during a sleepover at a friend's house If they wanted to look up ISIS videos either.

I agree with phones out of school. In fact the mechanism for banning phones is simple, the adult in charge of monitoring them doesn't allow phone use. Simple and easy and any parent can employ it right now if they choose. If they're too weak willed to say no, then they're gonna be too weak willed when they say "mommy can I scan your face for Instagram pweaseeee, all my friends parents do it!"

Because Discord used a different third party verification company with a different process

It's perfectly safe until it's not, in which case it becomes "uh it was just that one". But how do you know in advance which one will be saved and leaked?

My eight year old neice doesn't have a smartphone, but kids at her school do and have shown her videos of ISIS beheadings.

Ah, older siblings. Where would we be without them? (A better place, perhaps?) Perhaps more interesting is the apparent fact they're able to correctly spell 'beheading', given their typical performance on the more pedestrian spelling tests and the lack of auto-complete.

Kids have been grossing each other out and watching absurd nonsense since forever. Porn is kind of like that [for them] too, for that matter, though I get that women (and their simps) complain about normalizing the concept that women have sex, occasionally on camera- which is naturally/by instinct what they're trying to stamp out. Of course, these women will then turn around and assert that a 7 year old boy willing to play with the dollies is trans and needs immediate medical treatment.

I'm less concerned about teenagers and more concerned about very small children.

I believe you are incapable of telling the difference between the two. That property affects young adults (and by extension, older adults) more negatively than it does small children, for obvious reasons, but it's fun to do that to them so people see that as a value-add. It's neutral at worst; it's not like they vote.

The free for all status quo simply allows those norms to be set by tech companies, rather than by parents.

Or rather, currently the norms are set by reality, not parents. Naturally, parents are very angry and Stressed(tm) out about this.

Zero-knowledge proof of age systems would be a very easy way to handle age verification without having to provide any identifying information to any third party instead of faffing around with crap like AgeGo or face scans.

Of course, I wonder why this will never happen ...

We're probably 5-10 years out from "device with (parental) content locks enabled is able to internally detect and choose not to render objectionable content" (for separate check boxes of "nudity", "violence", and "heretical ideas", naturally). I have pretty mixed feelings about the idea: device-side removes a lot of the privacy concerns, but every year it feels like my freedom to do what I want with my electronic devices gets eroded.

Do the zero-knowledge proposals have good answers for the actual human parts of the systems? It's cryptographically interesting, but seems like it requires issuing authorities and all sorts of other identification crypto infrastructure from what I can tell.

Well, you do need a centralized authority but any jurisdiction interested in implementing such a policy has the nation state ready to step in.

The initiatives mentioned in pbmonster's post look pretty interesting qua implementation.

It's coming, and soon. Zero-knowledge proofs for age are in the design of the age-verification framework of the EU Digital Identity Wallet, and in the specs of the Swiss eID law they passed a while back. Both involve an app on your phone holding your ID and your crypto keys and generating ZKP responses to things like age requests.

Both designs are decent in my opinion. Once you've come to terms with the slippery slope that we'll soon have digital ID checks everywhere, all the time, there's not much to criticize. It's probably the best way to do it, if we agree that we need to do any of that. But also, it's pretty far from a "very easy way". This scheme absolutely needs a central authority (probably a national government) doing the final ID/age check and then the issuing of crypto keys. I'll be curious how the US handles this. I expect Google/Apple to take over that task, since the majority probably won't trust the government to do it right...

That's actually quite well implemented: I didn't know about those initiatives.

I do honestly agree that with the advent of LLM's, the time of the internet being an anonymous wild west has pretty much already ended. Once we've decided that we need online ID checks, it does seem best if we implement it in as privacy-preserving fashion as possible.

Of course, I wonder why this will never happen ...

Please, tell us.

Yes, I have a lot more sympathy for trying to get parents to not let their kids have smart phones, in comparison with not letting them have computers more generally. I don't want my kids to have smart phones until they're old enough to drive, but we'll see if that ends up working out or not.

But US parents are already unusually likely to set screen time/technology use limits, partly driven by conservative parents’ ideological beliefs. That they often do this in a non-optimal way and it isn’t spread evenly through society are fixable-ish problems.

I rate the the harm of screen time roughly by how hard the content on the screen tries to claim your attention. At one end of the scale would be a screen that displays a static image of a still life painting - this is clearly no more harmful than an actual physical painting, except that it might hurt more if it fell on you. At the other end is rapidly cutting and highly animated brain-rot videos with over-the-top sound effects, in an endless stream that a child can flip through continuously. (Or the equivalent for adults).

Mr. Rogers is the show I always go to for what I would consider to be a beneficial use of screens. Aside from the positive lessons, it's slow and very minimally attention grabbing:

  • Most of the time, there's not a lot of action on the screen.
  • Mr. Rogers, the other actors, and the puppets speak slowly. Mr. Rogers often pauses to give the viewer time to think about what he's said or asked.
  • There are very few cuts or camera movements.
  • The sound effects are all piano, not different instruments that change all the time.
  • And of course, ideally, it's a show you put on and don't let your kid play with the remote to change the channel.

The show is more attention grabbing to a child than staring at a blank wall, and roughly on the order of playing with some toys or having a conversation with an adult. All of the aspects I mentioned are in very stark contrast to what's on youtube shorts or tiktok today. If Mr. Rogers is an oatmeal raisin cookie in terms of appeal, the stuff many kids watch today is heroin.

Of course, this is all aside from violent, emotionally disturbing or mature content, which, while there are probably disagreements about what is harmful at the boundary, most of us would agree is not appropriate for children -- though adults know how to process it healthily. I do think though that hyper-attention-grabbing content is bad for adults too, even if we're better at restraining ourselves from indulging in it too much.

...but calling this "screens" feels like calling slot machines "levers" or something.

I'd go much, much broader than that. It's like calling slot machines, toasters, forklifts, and home gyms "levers". Sure, they all have the same basic interface, but they're wildly different than each other in every way that matters.

"Screens" covers direct communication with IRL friends, pseudonymous (or real-name-but-it-doesn't-matter) social media like Twitter/Discord, longform content like ebooks/movies/TV/podcasts, shortform content like news articles/memes/alerts, official interactions with the government or other institutions, ads, games, work, etc.

Being on screens all day is probably worse than pulling levers all day, but it's still wildly underspecified. Even if they define it better in the actual podcast than your comment, it still feels like they're over-reaching with the label.

(unless they're talking about eyestrain and neck problems, but I have a feeling that never came up)

Anyway, is there anyone out there who has an actually useful way of discussing "screens," especially in respect to children, but also in general?

I'm keeping an eye out, but I haven't really seen it. One step better is people talking about "algorithms", and how there's a race to the bottom as genuine value loses out to virality.

I think the point of "screens" as a concept is to tie in the current moral panic about children's internet use with the earlier moral panic about children watching too much TV.

I remember someone trying to write a serious analysis of what "screens" is actually about and pointing out that there were two different issues:

  1. The child is staring at a wall. "Screen time", going all the way back to TV, is replacing activities like outdoor play and in-person socialisation that are more beneficial.
  2. The writing on the wall. The screen is displaying content, and that content may be harmful. (It may also be educational, but fear sells better). And here there is a massive increase in variance from TV (the vast majority of which was harmless slop) to the internet, which includes everything from MIT Open Courseware to pro-eating disorder websites.

Moral panics about trash media go back a long way and long predate screens - there was a similar panic about mass-market novels, for example. And they almost never make the distinction between the two issues. My sons spend "too much" time on screens, but I follow what they are doing, and it is net educational. If I thought screen time was stopping them socialising in person (they can't do much of that because autism) I would curtail it. It is making it harder to get them to do outdoor exercise.

Yeah. I've got a two year old and if you leave any sort of an autoplay going for more than 2-3 videos you quickly end up offramping to some mix of pure AI sloptent, Elsagate content or 'Youtube Poop designed to stimulate unattended toddlers via a mix of stock sound effects and popular action figures'. Say what you want about 'unattended child stays up till 2AM and ends up accidentally seeing the Indie French Avant Garde stuff' atleast that was gated by time and attention spans.

6yo uses Youtube Kids on iPad so we have to approve each channel individually. 9yo mostly drives himself, and is primarily interested in educational channels when he is less tired and Minecraft slop when he is knackered, which is pretty harmless. He has unintentionally conditioned the algorithm only to show Minecraft slop if he lets it autoplay.

I've seen that on Youtube, but not Netflix or PBS kids, which is what I'm most familiar with. I've seen a lot of Gabby's Dollhouse lately, which isn't fantastic, but seems reasonably innocuous. Youtube Kids especially seems to be absolute garbage. Octonauts looked fine. I watched a lot of hours of my brother playing Mega Man and Super Mario Brothers as a kid, which was not very productive for sure.

seen a lot of Gabby's Dollhouse

Watch the cat, I think it often looks like it would prefer to be elsewhere.

My father reports being an introverted child in the 50s and 60s, and spending a fair amount of time literally staring at a wall. Sometimes playing wall ball with himself. My mother had a swimming pool, so was better off. My impression from Southern American writing is that people spent a lot of time squatting beside roads and getting into fights. I suppose it's fair to ask, when doing things through a screen "what's the alternative at this moment?" If the alternative is "get more sleep" or "spend time in the garden," then, certainly, one should go do that.

Yes, this is what bothers me.

If I watch shows, do taxes, make arrangements to meet up with friends, learn a craft skill, write an essay, facilitate a video call between my mom and her grandchildren, and troll my outgoup, all on screens, then I should probably also go touch grass or something, but some of those are way more subject to overuse than others.

The algorithm discourse bothers me less, I am more concerned about my children seeing wildly different content than me on the same platform.

Anyway, is there anyone out there who has an actually useful way of discussing "screens," especially in respect to children, but also in general? If I had more attention to devote to the topic, maybe I'd try reading Heidegger's Simulcrum and Simulation, since at least the title seems like it's heading in an interesting direction.

I think of it in terms of "passive entertainment". That is, anything that you can do that keeps you entertained in some form while requiring minimal input from the user. This also includes reading, watching television, and listening to the radio. Anything where you can sit down and vegetate, stop interacting with the world and still find yourself entertained by someone else. The reason why "screens" are particularly bad, is that the content you can now consume lasts forever. Compared to a book that ends after a few hundred pages and you then have to buy a new one, or Saturday morning cartoons that only lasts until Saturday morning is over, the internet produces content faster than you can consume it. Especially if you don't care that much about the quality (as is often the case with children). Now add all the ways in which online content is designed to capture and hold on to your attention for as long as possible, and I think the problem starts to reveal itself.

You have an eternal source of easy stimulation that is much easier to engage with than anything else, because every other thing you could be doing requires more effort. Even pulling yourself off the screen to go to the bathroom can be hard. This creates a habit of spending as much time on the computer as possible, which then results in spending less time on healthy activities, such as moving your body around or interacting with other people in person. As you neglect those real-world skills, they start to atrophy (or in the case of children, never develop) which makes it even more difficult to do anything but sit with your iPad.

All this is before we get into how a specific piece of content might be bad for you. Just limiting what kind of online content children can watch (like YouTube kids, or requiring ID to access porn sites), I think misses the mark. If children (or anyone, really) spent the majority of their free time watching TV or reading fiction, I would think that is also really bad. But home computers, with social media and video games, are really the first thing to be so engaging as to make this extreme mass consumption viable on a large scale, where it consumes both free time, work, and school. The people spending all day passively reading or in front of the telly, used to be either weird loners or mentally ill. Due to phones and computers, this has now changed to be an increasing amount of the population, and something that starts in childhood. I think that is legitimately a real problem that should be dealt with.

But home computers, with social media and video games, are really the first thing to be so engaging as to make this extreme mass consumption viable on a large scale, where it consumes both free time, work, and school.

At 115+ IQ, probably true. But the 100-average masses were watching TV for n hours a day for large enough values of n to support a moral panic back in the 1980's.

Heck - there are middle-aged women with >100 IQs who could spend 4+ hours a day reading romance novels and Readers' Digest short fiction if they had access to enough of it - which is almost as passive as TV-watching. The moral panic about housewives reading novels instead of engaging in the types of community-building activities housewives with free time engaged in was also real - my mother-in-law was not allowed to read novels as a child except when set by the school.

I think the word "moral panic" makes it sound made up. Like people were manufacturing concern for their own gain when none was warranted. I think current internet usage makes it clear there was good reason to be worried about tv watching and reading novels. Like, spending 4 hours a day (28 a week) watching soap operas is probably bad for you. At the time, there was enough friction that people would eventually get back to their daily life. Besides, as long as the activities are done in moderation, there are certainly worse ways to spend your time. But in excess, it turns into vegetating and losing your life to escapism. In the modern day, content has been optimized for engagement, so moderation is becoming increasingly rare. I believe this has very real negative impacts on people that result in negative consequences for society.

Less socializing means less dating and fewer children. People become isolated and easy to manipulate. Their physical condition worsens, which results in worse health, thus more time spent sick, which puts pressure on health care, and reduces quality of life. Your military worsens as an increasing amount of recruits are couch potatoes with no emotional resilience, as they have always been able to escape their problems on the internet. The list goes on.

I don't know how to solve this without resolving to extreme measures, but I think it is overall a good thing that people are noticing the problems.

I believe this has very real negative impacts on people that result in negative consequences for society.

Are you sure you don't mean it the other way around? Most of your arguments are examples of negative externalities for society, not of things that are primarily negative for the individual. I'll grant you worsening health from lack of physical activity, but what else? At the end of the day, I think if you're concerned about the consequences of excess of a pleasurable activity on society, you should bite the bullet that what you really care about is society, and you would support moderating it even if it genuinely made the individual happy with no personal downsides. The fact that staying in front of the TV all day turns you into a diabetic couch potato is incidental; you would still see negative effects on society if people were spending too much time on a more photogenic, healthy or #inspirational hobby, just because they'd be doing that when they could be working, raising families, etc.

And looked at it this way, I think it becomes important to emphasize that human beings are not ants. Pleasurable leisure pursuits are not some annoying cost-sink that screws up functioning societies, they're what a functioning society exists to provide for its citizens. The central trade-off of civilization is the question of how much painful drudge-work we are willing to undertake today so as to buy ourselves leisure time tomorrow. Of course, maybe we're currently living beyond our means in this sense - maybe the amount of fun TV-watching we're cashing in is outstripping our ability to maintain that standard of living. But in and of itself, four hours of leisure out of twenty-four don't seem trivially unsustainable.

I would think the negative consequences for the individual are obvious: Worse physical health due to a sedentary lifestyle. Vitamin D deficiency when too little time is spent outside. Worse social skills and fewer friends due to not socializing. Worse mental health due to not not socializing and being constantly bombarded with viral posts and articles that are often emotionally charged, leading to compassion fatigue. This all leads to lowering the quality of life. These all seem fairly obvious and pretty serious.

Worse physical health due to a sedentary lifestyle. Vitamin D deficiency when too little time is spent outside

I did say I granted you "worsening health from lack of physical activity".

Worse social skills and fewer friends

Not necessarily a negative in and of itself, except in the trivial sense whee spending your time on one hobby will prevent you from getting very good at another. If people prefer television - and/or online interaction - to having real-life friends, that might genuinely be what makes them happy! It's not the case that hanging out IRL is inherently preferable to watching TV and people only do otherwise because TV hacks the addiction centers in their brain, it all depends on the quality of television and the quality of friends. Lack of socialization might be a problem for society, but it's not inherently a problem for the individual.

being constantly bombarded with viral posts and articles that are often emotionally charged, leading to compassion fatigue

Well, I was mostly talking about fiction - TV binging, gaming, even reading novels or comics - as distinct from real-world-politics-oriented social media. That's what I took you to be talking about as per "losing your life to escapism"; I will more readily call doomscrolling an inherently negative experience, but it seems kind of the opposite of escapism.

Reading is a bit different from the others in that it is a useful and valuable real world skill in itself.

Sure, reading is a useful and valuable real world skill. It is also less addictive than watching content on a screen, as the reader generally has to pay attention and extent some amount of effort. Reading is not as mindless as watching TikTok or YouTube. There is also a bit of friction involved, as once you finish one book you have to put effort into finding a new one, and content is produced more slowly, so you don't get the same effect of never-ending scrolling that social media gives. Provided you stick to physical books that is.

But it seems to me that the mass production of fiction was the first step towards the entertainment landscape we see today. Compared to most activities, it is fairly passive, and when you have access to enough fiction, it is tempting to just spend all your free time reading, losing track of the real world in the process. As a means of easy escapism it can be harmful in similar ways to a smartphone with internet access, even if the amount of harm that reading causes is less.

You can make that complaint about any non-commercial activity. It's so generalised that it becomes useless.

Observation: Part of the objections to the emergence of "romantasy" is that it is addictive, low-consumption-effort smut and that the fanfiction world has put out a functionally infinite amount of it. And the objections around the way a certain type of woman relates to that sort of writing mirrors the way a certain type of man relates to video pornography. So I think reading isn't as far removed as it might first appear.

You seem to me to have a set of implicit standards about the Good which I'm not necessarily disagreeing with but would like to lay out in more detail when we are, ultimately, discussing banning things people like doing.

To me, you seem to be saying broadly:

  • Healthy-for-the-body things are hard and good for people
  • Socialising in the real world is hard and good for people.
  • 'Passive entertainment' is more fun than those things at least in the moment.
  • Therefore 'passive entertainment' must be banned or heavily restricted...
  • ...in order to encourage healthy activities and socialising.

As a former and still-occasional weirdo loner whose idea of paradise is still often a big library and a lifetime to spend in it, I guess my first question is whether you see inherent value in passive entertainment that needs to be traded off against health, instrumental goals, and long-term sources of satisfaction/happiness, and/or whether you are suspicious of passivity and consider strenuousness and discomfort as a moral good in and of itself?

I correlate a good life with a healthy mind and body. The healthier you are, the better your life is likely to be. I order to achieve good physical and mental health, there are certain needs which must be met. I will highlight three, that I believe the current state of entertainment interferes with:

  • Some amount of exercise. This helps both physical and mental health, but if you spend all your energy consuming, you are less likely to do physical activities.
  • Some amount of in-person socializing. Online communities can get you some of the way to feeling real belonging, but it is still not the same as being physically present with others.
  • Mental downtime where your mind is not occupied by other stuff and has time to process your emotions. While engaging with entertainment does not necessarily require much effort, it is highly stimulating, and if anything leads you to not think of anything but what you are consuming.

In your example of a paradise, I assume you also won't have to work. If so, you may not have these problems. You could spend 10 hours a day exploring your library, and still have ample time left to handle your needs. But when more than eight hours a day is spent on commuting and work, the equation changes. Even just four hours spent on the internet means you will likely have to make sacrifices elsewhere (sleep, socializing, exercise, and so on).

I don't consider strenuousness and discomfort as moral goods, but I do believe that some amount of adversity is probably necessary to live a good life. Consider an extreme example, where you have a button that you can press which floods your brain with pleassure hormones, for a short time making you feel intense bliss and removing any pain or negative emotions you may have. You do not build a tolerance, and there are no side effects in the classical sense. Only, pressing the button will at any time be the most pleasurable thing you could do. Let us also say that in this world, you can replace your job with pushing the button. So if you want, every push also transfers money into your bank account, which can be used to purchase whatever necessities you may need.

This sounds horrifying to me. Even though there is an argument to be made that a society of button pushers would be heaven on earth, I just can't buy that this would be good. So while discomfort is not itself a good thing, it is probably necessary in some amount.

Even just four hours spent on the internet means you will likely have to make sacrifices elsewhere

In my experience, the four hours of internet happens during the eight hours of work surprisingly often.

I don't like the paradigms of the discussion, but have trouble articulating why.

I just listened to the episode myself. He wasn't a great guest, nor did he go into the depth about 'screens' that the subject really merited. If you want that, Jonathan Haidt has done a million interviews.

But I think it's reasonable to use 'screens' as a substitute for 'increasingly addictive technology'. Even tiny, black and white TVs showing linear programming were powerful enough to begin the process of disengagement described in Bowling Alone. But massive, HD colour TVs with infinite TV and video games, plus smartphones with addictive apps and social media have supercharged it. I don't think it's too unreasonable to use 'screens' as shorthand for atomisation, digital addiction and social disengagement, even if something like podcasts and Spotify contributed.

I remain amused that I've lived long enough to see the zeitgeist shift from "poor communities are disadvantaged because they don't have computers and Internet access" --- see One Laptop Per Child as an example that people put real money behind to "fix" this --- to "poor communities are disadvantaged because they don't keep their kids off screens and the Internet". It's quite the vibe shift. And it only took a decade or so.

That said, I don't think kids should be given unfettered Internet access. I know what can happen: I was there, and the Internet was in many ways a less scary place back then. Although it's also where I learned a lot about the tech industry and programming and such.

Some of it is a general problem of the double-edge sword of (knowledge is) power. The Screen puts it all at your finger tips, any time, anywhere. How do we empower people to use this power for constructive purposes? More Khan Academy videos, less porn. Big picture stuff like that is easy, but I often find myself wondering about details like if another WWII history podcast is really the best use of my time. "I'm not wasting time Motteposting, I'm sharpening my witty and persuasive debating skills!" (X to doubt).

Has it shifted?

I personally see a lot more concerns about our communities, our kids. Maybe it’s metastasized, but the idea started out with parents.

I’m obviously biased: my cohort is old enough to have kids, but young enough that most of them aren’t in school. Peak iPad risk.

That said, I don't think kids should be given unfettered Internet access. I know what can happen: I was there, and the Internet was in many ways a less scary place back then.

Hmm, I'd argue the opposite. Sure, there's more bad stuff out there, but there's more ANY stuff out there, and the bad stuff is a much smaller percentage and guarded by things like "safe search" and browser/site warnings, so it's harder to stumble across inadvertently. In the old days it was trivial to just get trolled by somebody and end up at goatse or lemonparty or the Anarchist's Cookbook, and that was just the common stuff. I stumbled across hentai """porn""" that I'd shudder to even describe - I honestly don't think I would even know how to find stuff that fucked up, nowadays. It might not even exist outside of an Onion link.

Neuroplasticity, as you probably intuited, is basically the mechanism by which brains work at all. Reading rewires brains. Suffering rewires brains. Learning to juggle demonstrably changes cortical gray matter density in a way you can see on an MRI, and nobody is writing Substack posts about the demonic influence of juggling on children. When someone says "screens rewire brains," the word doing all the actual work is "rewires" in the pejorative sense, meaning "changes in bad ways that are hard to reverse," but that claim is being smuggled in without justification, under cover of a neuroscience fact that's technically true but completely uninformative. Everything that does anything to you rewires your brain. The question is whether the rewiring is bad, and repeating the neuroplasticity point louder doesn't answer that. It's actually worse than uninformative, because it makes the arguer sound scientific while doing no scientific work whatsoever. The neuroplasticity framing is rhetorical judo: it borrows the authority of neuroscience while gesturing vaguely at harm it has not actually demonstrated.

This matters because it makes the claim unfalsifiable in practice. If a child improves at chess from watching chess videos, that's also rewiring their brain, but presumably Davidson isn't worried about that one. The rewiring point can't distinguish between the two cases, so it isn't doing any of the work it's being credited with. What it's actually doing is priming the listener to accept that harm has been established before the argumentative heavy lifting has begun. I'd rather the harm be argued directly, at which point it would be subject to actual scrutiny, than laundered through the vocabulary of neuroscience.

"Screen time," while far from ideal as terminology, is also far from the worst offense around. The deeper problem is that the category is wildly underdetermined. It seems to matter enormously what the screen displays. A child who spends three hours reading Wikipedia articles about the Byzantine succession crisis, watching a documentary about migratory birds, and then video-calling their grandmother is doing something categorically different from one who has spent those three hours cycling through TikTok thirst traps and casino-mechanic reward loops dressed up as games. Lumping these together under "screens" and then asking whether "screen time" is harmful is a bit like asking whether "food time" is healthy. The answer will depend almost entirely on what food we're talking about, and the aggregate will tell you almost nothing useful.

The medium-is-the-message people have a point that the delivery mechanism shapes the experience in ways content alone doesn't capture. But even granting McLuhan more than he's usually owed, there is still an enormous variance in what screens deliver that gets erased the moment we start talking about "screens" as a unified phenomenon. Calling slot machines "levers" would be a more accurate description than calling all interactive digital media "screens," because at least all levers share the mechanical property of force multiplication. What screens share is a glowing rectangle that displays imagery, which is not doing much analytical work.

A lot of the older empirical literature was also methodologically shabby in ways that should give us pause before crediting its conclusions. Much of it was observational, relied heavily on self-report (or parent-report, which introduces its own distortions), lumped television with TikTok with WhatsApp with gaming with educational apps, and then asked whether the aggregate was good or bad. The effect sizes, when statistically significant at all, were in many cases embarrassingly small. Jean Twenge's widely-cited work was criticized by Andrew Przybylski and Amy Orben, who used the same datasets and found that the association between screen time and adolescent wellbeing was approximately the same magnitude as the association between wearing glasses and adolescent wellbeing. Spectacle-wearing doesn't cause depression; it's a proxy for other things. The same concern applies to screen time, which correlates with socioeconomic status, parenting style, pre-existing behavioral difficulties, and a hundred other things that are doing the actual causal work.

I'd say that it's not worth losing sleep over, except that the most robust and consistent negative findings deal with sleep, specifically that device use near bedtime disrupts both sleep onset and sleep quality, probably through a combination of blue-light effects on melatonin and the obvious fact that you can't scroll and sleep simultaneously. This is worth taking seriously precisely because it's one of the few findings that replicates, has a plausible mechanism, and shows an effect size large enough to matter. The irony, not lost on me, is that "no phones in the bedroom at bedtime" is not a very interesting or monetizable policy conclusion, so it gets lost in the noise of more dramatic claims about societal collapse. Good luck enforcing that for the kids, with how their parents embrace their phones.

Jonathan Haidt thinks children shouldn't be able to post on social media or have smartphone access, and there's something to this if we're being specific about the "posting photos of yourself" piece. The performative identity-construction that social media incentivizes does seem like a weird thing to encourage in adolescents who are in the middle of figuring out who they are, and there's a reasonable case that the particular feedback loops involved are nastier than equivalent analogue experiences of social humiliation, which at least fade from memory. But "no smartphones" as a category encompasses an enormous amount of genuinely useful functionality, and "no posting photos" is a much more targeted and defensible intervention than "no smartphone," which tends to be what people actually mean.

I'm also skeptical of enforcement mechanisms. Not because I think children's online safety doesn't matter, but because I don't trust that the rules will land where the advocates for them seem to expect. Age verification regimes tend to produce either security theater or comprehensive surveillance infrastructure, and comprehensive surveillance infrastructure does not stay narrowly targeted at protecting children for very long. The same legislative sessions that produce "think of the children" bills about social media often produce other bills I would find considerably more alarming. The willingness to build the infrastructure is the thing that should worry us, independent of the stated justification.

I should be honest about my personal stake in this, because it seems relevant. When I was a kid, my ADHD predominantly manifested as inattention. I was notorious for reading novels under the desk in class, reading while walking, compulsively reading every newspaper and the labels on shampoo bottles and the copyright page of books and anything else that had text on it. My parents were extremely conservative about digital affordances during my childhood and adolescence: no broadband internet connection, no smartphone, until late in my teens.

This did nothing good for me. You do not treat ADHD with sensory deprivation. I was not going to pay more attention in class because I didn't have a phone handy; I was just more likely to zone out and stare at a water stain on the ceiling and construct elaborate fantasies about the history of civilizations I'd invented. I was bored, in a persistent and grinding way that I now recognize as one of the more unpleasant features of the condition, and I'm genuinely grateful that advances in technology have made that particular flavor of boredom substantially more optional. ADHD medication improved my academics and my functioning in the world. Austerity did not. The restriction removed a coping mechanism without addressing the underlying issue.

I'm aware that my case doesn't generalize. Plenty of kids are not managing a neurological attention deficit when they're scrolling, they're just enjoying an entertainment product, and there's a reasonable question about whether that entertainment product is well-calibrated for their long-term flourishing. But I'm suspicious of framings that assume the counterfactual to device use is some kind of improving, wholesome activity, rather than the much more realistic counterfactual of staring at the wall, or in my case, reading the back of a cereal box for the fourteenth time.

I've watched a teenage relative of mine scroll through Instagram Reels, and it was not a pleasant experience. None of it was erudite. Most of it was AI-generated, and obviously so to anyone over twenty-five, though apparently not to her. The content was a kind of undifferentiated slurry of dumb pranks, "interesting" facts that were wrong, and videos that seemed designed less to convey anything than to fill attention with sensation. I wanted to say something. I didn't, because it wasn't my call and the headache of saying something would have outweighed the benefit. Also, she isn't a particulay bright kid, as hard as that is to say about your own kin. But I felt, for a moment, what the "screens are demonic" people feel, and I think I understand why they reach for that language.

(Don't get me started on an elderly great-uncle and his consumption of the most ludicrously fake AI-slop on YouTube. I did my best to inform him, but wise words only get you so far at that age.)

The problem is that "demonic" and "insane" and "evil" are not diagnostic, they're expressive. They communicate that the speaker has had a visceral negative reaction, which I also had. What they don't do is tell you anything useful about what the actual harm is, what causes it, how it might be addressed, or how to distinguish between the things that caused the visceral reaction and the much broader category of digital media that gets swept up in the resulting policy proposals. Louise Perry's instinct to distinguish between fairy tales on a screen and watching another child play on YouTube seems right to me, not because one is "screens" and the other isn't, but because they're different things doing different things to a child's attention and social cognition. That distinction is worth making carefully, and the "screens" framing makes it harder rather than easier.

If I were forced to endorse a population-wide intervention, it would be this: device manufacturers and online services should be required to provide genuinely functional parental controls, to be setup at the convenience of the person making the purchase. Not draconian age-restriction policies that produce surveillance infrastructure and don't actually work. Just real tools that let parents do what parents are supposed to do, which is make situated judgments about their specific kid, in their specific circumstances, with their specific needs, rather than relying on either blanket permissiveness or blanket prohibition. A child's use of electronics is something that should be monitored in conjunction with their behavior and academic performance, the same way you'd monitor anything else in their life that was potentially impacting them.

The people most confident that they know the right policy for all children are usually people who have identified a single dimension of risk, optimized hard against it, and are not tracking the costs of their proposed solution. The costs are real. Restriction has costs. Surveillance has costs. Boredom has costs. Social exclusion from peer networks that now largely operate digitally has costs. A child who can't participate in the group chat is not being protected from social life, they're being excluded from it, and that exclusion has downstream consequences that are unlikely to show up in studies asking whether "screen time" correlates with self-reported wellbeing.

Not to mention, that if childhood and adolescence is treated as a sort of preparatory phase for adult life: are the adults doing anything different? We live on our phones, there are few facets of modern living not mediated by transistors, light emitting diodes and the internet. And I think that's great: I have a device in my hands that, for about my weekly wage, allows access to nearly the sum total of human knowledge and the ability to interact with people across the globe with milliseconds of latency. I use it to learn more, say more, do more, and yes, entertain myself. If you can't manage to use such capabilities in an ennobling manner, I'm tempted to declare a skill-issue. Don't try and dictate terms for the rest of us, mind your own kids.

A child who spends three hours reading Wikipedia articles about the Byzantine succession crisis, watching a documentary about migratory birds, and then video-calling their grandmother is doing something categorically different from one who has spent those three hours cycling through TikTok thirst traps and casino-mechanic reward loops dressed up as games.

Who's to say grandma can't also be a thirst trap?

I'm not competent enough a psychiatrist to answer that question.

I think you might need to be a priest.

Sounds like a perfect time for “[awkward silence]”.

Who's to say grandma can't also be a thirst trap?

Cookies sate hunger, not thirst.

maybe I'd try reading Heidegger's Simulacrum and Simulation

I would also love to read that book! Maybe AI can write it someday...

Assuming you mean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, it's a great book, but it's also very theoretical and very much of its time, you're not going to get actionable insights from it. What I would recommend, from a Heideggerian perspective, is Matthew Crawford's book The World Beyond Your Head - Crawford is definitely the best writer on this stuff who makes the philosophy accessible, concrete, and practical. Then, if you want to connect that to more academic philosophy, check out Albert Borgmann's Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, which is an attempt to use Heidegger's theory of technology to interpret the situation of modern life.

Hah. It's only fair that you make it your life's goal to educate me on Heidegger (without asking for consent, though I probably would have given it anyway), you notice something attributed to Heidegger come up in conversation, and then, with dawning dismay, realize that it was a misattribution. I can imagine the disappointment! I relish in schadenfreude!

I would also love to read that book! Maybe AI can write it someday...

Just read Baudrillard's as if it were written by Heidegger, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote-style.

And thanks, I will add those two books to my reading pile to potentially one day get to.

300 Ways It Can Hurt to Be a Man

Hey all, longtime SSC and TheMotte lurker here. Some of you might know me from TPOT.

Some years ago I wrote a blogpost series about masculinity and manhood, and the many struggles these entail that frequently go unnoticed in contemporary discussions. I've recently given it a full do-over, collating the whole series into a pdf and epub that I think look pretty great. It's now available to download for free. There remain few spaces on the internet where something like this might find a proper audience, but I figure anyone who appreciated Scott's writings on the topic — especially Untitled, Radicalizing the Romanceless, and the like — might find my writings on the topic valuable.

The pitch:

Contemporary gender discourse has left many men unseen. On one end of the debate, there are feminists: a largely virtuous group of people who have regrettably failed to understand men as more than defect women, and who have neglected to include men in their humanizing frameworks. On the other end, there are men whose visions of masculinity remain primarily rooted in outdated and often harmful ideas, and whose attitudes towards women frequently leave much to be desired. The modern man is stuck in a quagmire. Where does he turn, who has listened to women's pain but now desires to integrate his own? New voices on gender are needed. It is my hope that in this book, empathetic men may find their voice.

It is not needed to contest who suffers more, and suffering is not the whole of masculinity; nevertheless, it is a part of it, and it deserves an uninterrupted space in which it may be witnessed: known, and moreover allowed. It is my hope that in this book, unloved men may take off their heart's armour and find their sanctuary.

Even in these polarized times, many women still seek to know men truly, and through this have seen that being male marks men more deeply than society has cared to make known. It is my hope that in this book, compassionate women may find their love reflected.

You may find the book for free here: https://elodes.gumroad.com/l/300ways. Feedback is welcome. Thank you for your interest.

Is your goal to practically persuade, or to say true things? Truth-wise, the pitch is frustrating to read. (I say this as someone who agrees with the spirit of what you're trying to do, and I don't want to discourage you from doing it.)

The most irritating thing is how you divide the discourse into two groups:

  • "feminists: a largely virtuous group"
  • men rooted in "harmful ideas" with bad attitudes towards women.

Is this a practical attempt to persuade feminists to read your book, where they otherwise would have no reason to; or is this something you genuinely believe? (Or some third option.) Because your presentation isn't true. Presenting one side as basically good, one side as basically bad, is incredibly frustrating because it doesn't correspond to reality. (I need a word that conveys the strength of "gaslighting" without implying it's deliberate or malicious. "Reckless mishandling of truth" or something.)

Idk if you have something like this on your list:

  • One way it hurts to be a man: society will happily launder any level of explicit, spiteful nastiness against you into "virtuous feminism". Meanwhile, the most compassionate, carefully-constructed call to make the world be a fraction less pointlessly nasty to men -- this will be laughed at, mocked, distorted, and labelled "misogyny".

Men do not feel "seen" when you tell them up front something like: "hey, the person saying 'kill all men' is fundamentally virtuous; but the people saying we should address your problems -- they're bad."

There are plenty of men (and women) making sober, rational, kind, decent, truthful arguments that society should be a bit less crap towards men. These people already get called misogynists by the "largely virtuous" group. I wish you'd represent these people fairly, seeing as you're basically trying to be one of them.

Assuming you're a man, you're also completely setting yourself up. To the extent your book fails to tightly comport with whatever popular feminism demands, you won't be cast as some kind of reasonable compromise "new voice on gender" -- you'll be lumped in with the people you label misogynists! Later, when someone like you writes their own book on this stuff, they'll characterise you as a man with "harmful ideas", whose attitudes towards women leave something to be desired. And that'll be really unfair, because it's not true of you. And it's not true of other people, either.

With that said: I basically agree with your underlying premise, and think it is good you've written this.

Seriously an excellent comment. Detailed and convincing, while showcasing a strong caring for the topic. Thanks for this.

I had a lot of trouble figuring out what framing to go with in my pitch. Ideally I wouldn't have had to write one, and the book's introduction would have sufficed; alas. I think maybe an alternative way to describe how I view the landscape here is that roughly speaking I really have seen primarily two groups talk on gender (with e.g. SA being a rare outlier outside of these groups). One of these groups is feminists, who certainly can get an awful rep sometime, and whose ideas, I agree, frequently end up being sufficiently harmful so as to make any right intention insufficiently moral on the whole. But I understand why they try to hold their beliefs, and I think they're frequently 'good' people in the sense that they care a lot about acting right, behaving well, listening to people, and so forth. Yes, there absolutely are also bad feminists; but there are many feminists too, including those I've known irl, who 'might yet be saved', and whose kindness and care I would like to have on my team. My ideal perfect-world goal would be for these people to read my arguments, be convinced by them, fix their own blindspots correspondingly, and come to my side. I think there is no way this will happen if I keep harping on about bad feminists who are bad.

There is a subtler point here, too, which is something like... This is a group of people who have come to their beliefs through trying to maximize how 'empathetic' they are, and they are thus unlikely to listen to any sort of criticism that marks them as bad, because 1) calling people bad isn't very empathetic, so probably the person doing so isn't worth listening to, and 2) they would feel misunderstood by someone who frames them as bad. Instead the approach I'm broadly trying to take here is to accept that empathy and kindness are to be optimized for — a belief I broadly share (though specifically it leads me broadly to conclude that being right is more important than being kind, because correctness builds trust builds cooperation builds many more opportunities for kindness, whereas kindness without truth builds mistrust builds dysfunctional communication builds frequent suffering) — and the book is an exercise in optimizing for kindness... for men. The byproduct here, which I leave somewhat implicit until the conclusion, where I make it much more explicit, is the ultimate belief that, yes, feminism has basically failed its own ideals, and I have now detailed the ways how it has failed and, in the process, directly specified an alternate movement that better upholds those same ideals.

(Edit: to clarify this further, and very compressed: I think feminism has the right ideas, but applies them so incompletely, they are indeed further from 'good' than non-feminists are. But the truth does not lie in non-feminism, nor in anti-feminism; the truth lies in post-feminism, where we apply feminist ideas to men and women alike, and earnestly grapple with whatever conflicting desires and narratives result from this. Thus even if I agree feminists are frequently immoral, they are also in some sense closer to becoming my allies, than people who disagree with feminism fundamentally, are. This is yet consistent with feminism being — I agree — in practice a net negative in much of the discourse.)

I agree moreover that feminism labels people misogynist far too quickly; nevertheless, the group of 'normal people' widely does not seem to say much on gender, instead broadly assuming that their ideas are so obviously true so as not to be worth stating. Certainly the vast majority of writing I've seen on gender has been from people who cared strongly about it one way or the other, and empirically for me, that has been primarily feminists or — sure — I wouldn't call them misogynists, and I don't; but I would say they frequently seem to have not integrated feminist ideas, by which I mean they frequently do not have even pre-emptive defenses against feminism and are stuck repeating traditional ideas. Even where those ideas are correct — and in the vast majority of cases I think they are! — it seems empirically the case that the traditional framework is vulnerable to get infected by feminist ideas; the solution, imho, is less "the traditional framework, but stronger!", and more "a new framework that has moved through feminism and has come out the other side, ready with well-defined arguments that guard against the more convincing-but-wrong parts of feminism."

This book is my attempt to create such a framework, by, regardless of anything else, seeing what all truths might dawn if we tried to treat men with the kindness feminism seeks to universalize for women.

(Edit: You say "There are plenty of men (and women) making sober, rational, kind, decent, truthful arguments that society should be a bit less crap towards men." I sincerely have come across very few such people throughout my years on the internet. Hence my framing! I would love to hear recommendations, essay links, etc. It saddens me a lot every day to believe that there are very few such people out there, so I'd be made genuinely happier if you were able to change my mind about this.)

Having said that, I'm well aware that many feminists live in such a closed-loop framework that it is easy for anyone to say "don't read Elodes, he has written misogynist things!" and then anyone who expresses they've read my writing will be met with "you read Elodes, even though you heard he's written misogynist things? you must be misogynist yourself!", the certainty of which response will certainly ensure many people will fail to read my actual words. Alas. Certain frameworks one must simply hope others will find their way out of. The only thing I can do is write my truth; certainly I despise being maliciously misunderstood, but past some point there is nothing I can do about it. Indeed, much of my introduction to the book is implicitly about how one must never find themselves in this kind of self-locking, disagreement-excluding framework-loop.

I hope this answers your question, and clarifies my views on the matter! I remain unsure what a better pitch might look like, since the above requires a lot of context and includes a lot of complex, incompletely-defined framings. If, having read this, you feel you'd know a better pitch, I'd be eager to hear it. Thanks again for your comment and for your interest.

Appreciate you handling the criticism so gracefully -- hope I wasn't too harsh.

I really have seen primarily two groups talk on gender (...) I understand why [feminists] try to hold their beliefs, and I think they're frequently 'good' people(...) there is no way [they will come to my side] if I keep harping on about bad feminists who are bad.

There's a spectrum here, right? I'm certainly not advocating for "harping on about bad feminists who are bad". Just note that, even in this paragraph, you volunteer that feminists are basically good -- your criticisms are that their ideas can be harmful, or that their reputation is bad -- without the same charity being given to the other "side."

If it's a dial from 1-10 (with 1 being "maximally whitewash group", and 10 being "harp on about bad group who are bad"), you come across as like a 3-4 for feminists and a 6-7 for people who advocate for not-hurting-men (it's telling that there isn't really a good label for this group). So you're not doing anything egregious! I'm advocating for equalising these dials around a 5, not turning the first to 10.

Because the issue is, basically:

  • Feminists, thanks to their institutional power, have to be courted and treated with kid gloves -- you have to be nice to them, because otherwise they won't read what you say. They've got a billion other places to go that will pretend to be critical or analytical or useful whilst also flattering them and telling them that feminism is stunning and brave. In the worst case, some of these people will meaningfully hurt you for not being sufficiently flattering.
  • The other group, having no institutional power whatsoever, do not have to be treated kindly or fairly. And dunking on them is a good way to demonstrate fealty to feminism.

This is a group of people who have come to their beliefs through trying to maximize how 'empathetic' they are, and they are thus unlikely to listen to any sort of criticism that marks them as bad.

I think you're slightly off. They're not maximising their empathy, their maximising their personal perception of their own empathy (+how others around them perceive their empathy). A person who says "all men are pigs", "kill all men", "fuck straight white men" (not a strawman; I have dated these women) is not actually empathetic. They are lazily optimising for being able to feel like a good person, not for actually being one.

But yes -- they won't listen to criticism that marks them as bad. This is a pretty universal trait. This is why I point out that you're doing something practical at the expense of truth. Again, you don't have to court any non-feminists, so you feel free to mark them as bad, because they don't have any power that's relevant to you.

But it's nothing to do with empathy.

the truth does not lie in non-feminism, nor in anti-feminism; the truth lies in post-feminism, where we apply feminist ideas to men and women alike

Extremely strong disagree.

This is giving infinitely flexible charity to a memeplex -- "feminism is too big to fail". The central bank of ideas should not be giving a bailout to an idea with this kind of performance. If you can transmute "feminism" into meaning any kind of idea, to the extent that "post-feminism" means "even more feminism", then what the heck are we doing with that word?

"Applying feminist ideas to men and women alike" isn't feminism. It's a different thing. It is opposed to feminism.

I notice that my own brand of gender egalitarianism -- which is either non-feminism or anti-feminism -- consistently gives kinder, more truthful, more humane answers than feminism generates. So I'm going to object to any process that decides that none of that matters, and we have to go with feminism anyway, regardless of what it actually does.

I wouldn't call them misogynists, and I don't; but I would say they frequently seem to have not integrated feminist ideas, by which I mean they frequently do not have even pre-emptive defenses against feminism and are stuck repeating traditional ideas

Do you have examples of "feminist ideas" that you could test me on?

Because I would generally view it as an extreme positive that someone hadn't "integrated" feminist ideas. In the same way I'd view it positively if they hadn't integrated Young Earth Creationism or phrenology. Some philosophies are just bad. It is good and correct to reject their framing and assumptions. These are fields of anti-knowledge; absorbing them makes you know less about the world.

You're certainly right that a lot of traditional frameworks lack the defences against, basically, virulent memeplexes. But these memeplexes don't win by overwhelming you in a one-on-one discussion! If they did, many of them could be easily defeated by spells like this: "Stop redefining words. Explain what you mean by X. Show me your sources for Y. No, don't change the subject onto Z. Predict exactly what W would mean..." These memeplexes don't win because people are unprepared to argue against them; they win by popularity contests like "Ewwww, you don't accept X? Don't you know that person Y, a misogynist, disagrees with X?"

I think you are overestimating the effectiveness of rationalist-type debate of ideas, vs how those ideas actually spread via social dynamics. (I don't like that this is the world we live in, but yeah.)

You say "There are plenty of men (and women) making sober, rational, kind, decent, truthful arguments that society should be a bit less crap towards men." I sincerely have come across very few such people throughout my years on the internet

I mean... you go on to perfectly answer your own point! I don't really have anything to add to it. Your analysis is correct. Feminism bullies any other kind of position out of the public square, so you don't see those arguments. Worse than that: if you can't discuss your own actually correct and kind positions in public, and can only discuss them with other heretics, you stand a good chance of being corrupted by nastier versions of the true position. Which then get used to justify further crackdown on the true and kind and good position.

Still, you know all these; and you know about Scott's post, and you know about yourself, and you know about me (to the extent that you believe I'm not a woman-hating chud). So you know these people exist, and you know the social dynamics that prevent them from being visible to you.

This book is my attempt to create such a framework, by, regardless of anything else, seeing what all truths might dawn if we tried to treat men with the kindness feminism seeks to universalize for women. (...) If, having read this, you feel you'd know a better pitch, I'd be eager to hear it.

Afraid I don't have a better one. I think the underlying goal, while noble and good and correct, is ultimately doomed. Because empirically:

  • If you want to get feminists to treat a man nicely, by far the easiest option is to convince them that the man is actually a woman.

Literally, it is far easier to convince the median feminist to break the very concept of words, than to get them to apply the "kindness" of feminism to men.

Still, I hope your book proves me wrong about this.

Hello, and welcome (perhaps) to the Motte.

Please familiarize yourself with the rules.

The caveats, disclaimers, inb4's and all the rest are impressive in their meticulousness. Same goes the '300' ways. I think that, whilst kind of autistic, it manages to speak in rhythm and terms that could easily reach a masculine minded woman. Which a lot of feminists are.

That being said, in a grander scheme of the old feminist/manosphere culture war, it's also just a very clever guideline for feminists to use as verbal cover to further chastise men for creating the patriarchy that harms women AND men. To that extent I'm not sure to where this work moves the needle.

I still see modern non-radical feminists trudge out long lists of half truths and outright lies about the plights of women and how unfair society is to them, punctuated by a much shorter list of how men die in wars and are homeless. This is a distinct change from the early internet feminist rhetoric that did not have the aforementioned punctuation, but any honest observer can tell that the feminist heart really isn't in it by the time they get to the mens issues. It's just an obvious inb4 to ward off the ghost of Warren Farrell and the likes. This fact invokes the broader question of why feminists have a hard time empathizing with men.

You are approaching the issue from a factual angle. They simply don't know enough about men and their experiences, so they can't see their pain. And how could they? They are not men, and most men aren't exactly advertising their emotional turmoil. From that perspective this book is theoretically perfect. Here is the list! But on the flipside, this blindside has been there for a while. So one could half jokingly wonder: Could the feminists not have asked?

This leads to the more pessimistic view of feminism. What's at the heart of feminism is ingroup bias. Ingroup bias felt by women for other women. Men are the outgroup. You don't empathize with the outgroup. Simple as.

From that perspective the book can at worst simply invoke cognitive dissonance. Like writing a book aimed at Christians to garner sympathy for the devil. But at best it can act as a sort of battering ram to knock down the fake reality of a radical feminist who has maybe spent too many college years engaging in performative man hating lesbianism.

At any rate, my personal critique of the position of the book and the modern state of 'masculinity' in the gender war is that it conforms to women, women's emotions, women's understanding of emotions and seeks to better men in a direction that conforms to womens conception of progress. In a crass 4chan post that I'll try to succinctly paraphrase in two sentences:

Never lift for women, and having sex with women is gay because pleasing women is gay.

That's an obvious hyperbole, but behind it is a kernel of truth. All men lift weights to look better to have better chances with women because they want to have sex with them. Working hard, flashy cars, big house, everything. In a word it's all peacocking. Men fighting other men to win the attention of floozy HOPS who are playing the same game against each other.

In such a world both sides of the gender war reach a similar conclusion, the only form of true love is gay. Because men/women aren't there to ruin it. But most men are rather repulsed by masculine homosexual activity, and the sexual boredom of lesbianism and repressed heterosexuality eventually kills the rebellious radfem lesbian that lives inside an otherwise surprisingly conservative young woman.

The only active players trying to work society out of this predicament are traditionalist religious types. They hold no real power or answers to any of the problems faced by the modern man and women other than hopes and prayers, and the insurmountable fact that if you wont overstep your own emotions and hangups regarding the opposite sex you will never have children and will grow old, bitter and finally extinct.

I'm not sure if there exist any gender reconciliation movements on the left outside of 'Not my Nigel', but the world could certainly use one. As I would prefer a government that could both reconcile the sex wars and not invade Iran.

Forcing specific fonts and colors in the EPUB file's CSS is a rather annoying practice. A technically-savvy reader can just comment out those lines in the CSS, but many readers are not technically savvy.

Do you have a similar mini-pitch for the actual (affirmative) message, what the book is actually supposed to accomplish, and offer as an alternative to the two poles creating a quagmire? You wrote a lot about the problems, but what's the solution, or perhaps the definition of 'good' masculinity? Or maybe it's not that kind of book. Is then the book just about the suffering of men and validating that, or perhaps poking the holes in the current paradigm so that an affirmative new paradigm can take root (later)?

Someone else has offered better criticism already. I'm not as nice.

Men don't bitch about their position. Bitching is unmanly. Neither men nor women like people who bitch. They may love bitching, but they don't like people who bitch. We all know men are suffering, so what? What is your purpose, writing this? Nobody cares about men's pain, not even other men. A man will tell you to suck it up and stop being a pussy; a woman will simply not care. She might pay lip service to caring though if there's social value to be scored in it, or if she is genuinely, not performatively empathetic.

You want it to be one way, but it's the other way. Nobody is seeking a guide to discover ways in which men are hurting. I think you know this, which is why it's free and not being sold for $12.99 on Amazon. To the feminists, you might as well be trying to advertise a book titled 300 Ways It Can Hurt to Be Wealthy.

edited to remove some heat

Okay, honestly I felt primed to dislike it, but ended up reading basically the whole thing (I skipped the second half of the disclaimers). And you know what? I thought it was valuable.

Certainly there were things that I disagreed with, contradicted other points to varying degrees from mild to significant, and I think I only spotted a small handful of typos and one or two spots where I think you meant to paste in something else (or were debating doing so), but didn't. BTW, if you want, typos I found: there's an "egrerious" instead of "egregious", "bannable offensives" instead of "offenses", extra "be" in "for women to be have", "(Greater Male Variability Hypothesis)" has parentheses for no reason, all should be findable with Ctrl-F. There's one other misspelling but I can't find it again.

I liked it more than I thought. For some of them, it was good to put a name on, and get some specificity for, a slippery concept. I'm not sure how much it might genuinely accomplish your goals. But I think it might be of use, maybe ironically, as a sort of softer intro to some men who aren't fully aware of the ways in which life can be unfair to them. Despite the inherent bias or risk of a gish gallop approach, of course, in a set of complaints like this. But even so, geez it is hard to avoid the temptation to make it into a comparison game. I know your whole deal is that it's fine to consider men's problems without dismissing those of women, however, on some level if things are unfair for both genders then it kind of implies that, well, that's just life and society, it's tough, rather than assess that there's something deeply wrong and eminently fixable.

A few that stood out: I think there truly isn't very much patience with teaching men to be better at their emotions and recognizing that they frankly just don't have enough experience with it, that's a good point. And worse get judged when they try to develop it clumsily. And yes, men really cannot demonstrate emotional extremes very easily, with no easy "default" setting, but some of that is so similar to women (e.g. you say confident but not arrogant, vulnerable but not burdensome: but see passive doormat vs, if too assertive, bitchy, and well dressed but not overly so vs being a slob or dressing for attention, women's style standards are universally higher) that it's hard not to say anything other than, well, there are a LOT of traits where moderation is desired, but the specifics can be very gender-specific. Can we really teach men to be better effectively though, without the input of women? The advice and criticism of women toward men especially in the emotional realm you seem to depict as flawed and harmful, so I'm not quite sure what you think the way forward is there.

I did not expect and was surprised to encounter an argument in favor of insults, bullying, and conflict among boys, but that's some food for thought I might come around to. The bigger picture about the importance and even necessity of probing boundaries though, that's true. More specifically in my life, I've been a substitute teacher a good number of times. Middle school is so interesting. Annoying quite often of course as well. I've heard anecdotally the male subs get more respect than the women do, though obviously I cannot test that. That's a bit of a sexist benefit, but it's definitely true that they are a bit starved for role models, and social media hasn't really helped in that regard. The flashy external stuff is popular and easily accessible, but the depth of character and deciding on your moral fiber, that usually requires some kind of extended proximity to someone you know and ideally can get advice from. Social media simply does not offer that. I should note here that despite the many ways in which school represses the natural inclinations of boys (as a sub, I do try to let things go a little bit more than most, but this can backfire pretty easily since boys are ALWAYS boundary testing at that age) it's statistically the case that far more girls find themselves lonely and socially isolated during school. Anyways, the upshot of this is that although in principle I agree that boys need a few more outlets or educational styles/opportunities catered to them, it's a really hard problem to solve. Because being loud IS annoying, if you let the kids throw things at each other they WILL and that's annoying to others too, tacitly allowing fights is a hard sell, etc.

I really liked the love vs respect paradigm, it is indeed true that while women can demand respect, and that's upheld as pretty great, men cannot demand love, and usually a lack is cast as a personal failure rather than a circumstance (or the fault of those around them being too cold). Although, it must be said, the lack of respect can also be pretty crushing to men. Still, the notion that women are inherently worth something, but a man must prove his worth, or affirmatively demonstrate they aren't evil, is pretty damaging when you get right down to it. I've seen that quite a lot, to be frank. Plus the bit about how men often feel rejected because of their personality, and this creates a major self-worth issue. And yes, the agentic expectations of men for men can frequently lead to self blame in virtually every area of life. Men need to learn to fail more gracefully. But they also need to know that failure does not actually affect inherent worth. Is that possible to consistently teach? Who knows! But loving family and religion tend to help at least a bit.

Along those lines I'd say that for some of these, I think you run a little counter to your goals in the sense that many are honestly a male-imposed standard on other males, and didn't really originate in feminism at all. Such as the teaching that men are to be judged primarily by their output, I'm sure some of it is rooted in various feminism-adjacent philosophies, but is bragging about a fast car really about the women it's supposed to attract? Not so much. Who is responsible for the weak market for strong male leads with emotional journeys? Uh, men. The primary audience and the directors and the writers, quite often enough. Etc.

I'm not quite sure where I was going with this, but those were my reactions. I was definitely moved by a few. More relevant to my life, I happen to not only be in the midst of some degree of personal struggle myself with purpose, lack of success, etc. but have a somewhat man-hating younger lesbian sister (of a more well-meaning yet nevertheless "women are better than men and that's not sexism" variety), and also a younger brother (though close in age) who decided a few months ago he wanted to be non-binary, they/them, and called by a different name too (a female one).

The latter is a culmination of a few things. He's (and I really can't think of him any other way than him, truth be told, although I'm more than willing to play the name and pronoun game) worn skirts to church just for reactions, experimented with painted nails and such, big into the indie music scene, and is now at school in Europe doing an avant garde music masters program. Over Christmas, when he made this known, it seemed to me that this was mostly rooted in masculinity having way too much baggage for him. That it was seen to be negative, the typically masculine traits were kind of bad, he felt a bit too effeminate for the label, etc. Declined to talk about what that meant sexually in any detail beyond a vague "pansexual" label (though I strongly suspect this does not in fact include men, gay or no). Feels a lot of animus towards his religious upbringing too, so that's a factor - but you know what? Sure, my mom's cried a fair amount over it. But our parents have been nothing but supportive or at least, understanding and respectful, trying to focus on the love being unconditional kind of thing. Frankly, I think this really frustrated him, as it's way easier to make villains.

I'm not sure when or if we'll ever broach the subject again soon (I do feel a bit lost about it overall) but it might be possible that some of these points could be a springboard for discussion with one or both of them. I'm pretty curious at least whether my brother would identify with some of the "feminine man" parts or not, at least.

Roughly one and a half years after first reading about it here and elsewhere I decided to finally binge-watch the 3-part Netflix miniseries about the infamous Woodstock ‘99 festival, released as episodes of the Trainwreck documentary series. I guess I’m lazy like that, or there are hard limits to my curiosity. Anyway, as I’ve commented on it here before, I did read and hear commentaries about this documentary and the one released earlier by HBO on the same subject, and based on these I assumed that I’ll be seeing some another tiresome woke Netflix slop about toxic masculinity and nu-metal being horrible and cringe. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised but also found that the rather little amount of woke commentary in the series seemed to be included in a rather ham-fisted and clumsy way.

To first address what was probably driving the dismissals/accusations about the series being woke propaganda slop: the topics of sexual harassment and assault are regularly brought up in it, which is understandable as this was eliciting much of the negative media focus on the festival. Based on the series there were three interconnected phenomena that were routinely taking place. One: women in the crowd flashing their tits, usually while being drunk or drugged, and prompting guys standing nearby to grab and grope them. Also, women who stage-dived were often groped all over. Three: as nudity was completely normalized from the beginning, which I imagine had much to do with the extreme heat, there were many cases of naked or semi-naked, similarly drunk or drugged women stumbling around and then getting surrounded by sleazy guys, usually also drunk or drugged, who also went on to grope them.

Plus there were rapes taking place, usually in tents and vehicles as mentioned by two interviewees, with a featured news segment mentioning 4 such cases being reported to the police. All this is mentioned in passing, except for one probable case of statutory rape which happened in a commandeered vehicle inside the rave hangar. I say 'probable' because the witness who described it said the otherwise blacked-out girl looked underage and it seemed like some guy just finished boning her, but he wasn’t sure. It also bears mentioning the context, namely that naked chicks were getting boned left and right in the dark next to the walls inside the hangar.

To finally move on to the culture war angle: there are two female interviewees relatively extensively commenting on the subject; one is a black former MTV reporter who curiously claims that the MeToo phenomenon was sparked by incidents and sexist behaviors such as these and a former attendee who was 14 at the time of the festival who said she’s just thankful that these behaviors are no longer considered acceptable.

I watched this and thought MeToo was obviously driven by multiple things, but I’m sure average drunk dudes groping drunk naked girls on festivals is definitely not one of them. Also, how do you then explain the 18-year time gap between the two? As someone of some experience at rock and metal festivals I also wondered: surely these behaviors cannot be said to be normal and acceptable during music festivals. What I think is fair to say is that they were routinely occurring on these particular festival, and that social and cultural factors that are peculiar to the late ‘90s were at play.

For example, widespread nudity was not the norm at the original festival, at least nowhere near to that extent, as far as I know, as evidenced by the many pieces of archive footage also included in this miniseries. Only by the late ‘90s did social licentiousness reach such an average level that such behaviors were normalized. Girls flashing their tits during music shows (and/or getting drugged on Ecstasy) is another expression of this, and I don’t think this was considered normal until the ascendance of nu-metal and rave, with both genres dominating Woodstock ’99. But still, it’s not like groping and touching was seen as a routine pastime during every similar festival in those times, I guess.

To mention some other things:

Curiously no member of Limp Bizkit was interviewed even though many Millennials apparently scapegoated them for the entire, well, trainwreck. Their former manager, on the other hand, was featured and he predictably denied any allegations, and it didn’t appear to me that the show’s narrative was trying to contradict him. However, it appears to be clear that him and the RHCP are responsible for cluelessly inflaming an already agitated and destructive crowd even further when an orgy of vandalism was already poised to break out, their only excuse being the organizers clearly not communicating effectively their request to help tame things down. On that note, no member of RHCP was interviewed either.

The incompetence on display on the part of the organizers is just hilarious, especially in included news segments of the bosses giving press conferences. A complete and delusional denial of the reality on the ground, one rosy and baseless statement after the other, refusing to take responsibility and shifting blame to a small number of evildoer attendees even on the morning after the disaster already happened. The mayor of the host town also came across as a complete dunce during those events, putting on an optimistic façade and actually having the temerity to even openly invite the organizers to return and put on another festival sometime later, doing all this at a point where everything already went to literally shit and things were to fall apart completely in a few hours.

While not openly naming late-stage capitalism as a culprit, the documentary creator clearly consider it to be the main culprit, and for a good reason, I think. Despite all the bullshit and pretense of doing everything to honor the great legacy of the original Woodstock, the overriding objective was to make maximum profit, driven by the bad example of Woodstock ’94 not turning any profit at all, and this went hand in hand with cutting to the bare minimum the budget for any services, facilities, staff and security, while at the same time banning the attendees from even bringing their own drinking water on site.

the great legacy of the original Woodstock

Where three people died, eight women miscarried, and the logistics were so badly planned that the organisers had to appeal to local farms to provide food and water?

I still don't understand why Woodstock occupies such a vaunted stature in the American imagination. "Hendrix played 'The Star-Spangled Banner', but he made it all, like, distorted and stuff. Far out." Okay?

Boomer Lore, basically.

They had some great music, that much is true.

Woodstock was a last big hurrah before reality set in. The Altamont free concert where some Hells Angels killed a concertgoer (and a bunch of other stuff) happened a mere 4 months later.

So they go from genuinely believing that free love, free drugs, and free music had the power to change and fix the world, to eventually facing down the fact that all of those things had some major downsides.

I understand that the Altamont free concert is widely understood to have served as the death knell of the optimism of the 1960s hippie movement. But I genuinely don't understand why Woodstock hadn't already accomplished that. Three people died. I appreciate that three people dying from negligence is less dramatic than one person being stabbed to death: but still, what kind of exchange rate is this?

Huh: in addition to the lone stabbing at Altamont, there were also three accidental deaths I hadn't heard about. The hope was that Altamont would be the "Woodstock of the West". I guess they got what they wanted, and then some.

Well the original Woodstock had the benefit of there being a Documentary crew on site and, in the final cut, basically valorized the entire thing rather than focusing on the controversies or failings.

And I'm sure most people formed good memories of it in retrospect.

Woodstock was planned for 50,000 people and ten times that number showed up. There were a couple accidental deaths, but no violence, despite the fact that security was woefully inadequate on paper. The myth was that a half million well-meaning people could overcome hardships like bad weather and traffic nightmares and still have a good time. Altamont was completely different from the beginning, with fights breaking out throughout the show. One of the biggest problems was that the stage was only about 3 feet off the ground, and there was a crush of people trying to climb on it throughout the show. The Hell's Angels they hired (for $500 in beer) to protect the stage area were drunk and unqualified, so there were constant scuffles in front of the stage. Even before Meredith Hunter was killed, the atmosphere was so bad that the Grateful Dead noped out. That this only happened a few months after Woodstock meant that the juxtaposition was fresh in people's minds, and it was easy to paint Altamont as the end of an era. It didn't help that across the pond, the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival was beset with similar problems.

I don't know what I expected, "black man stabbed to death at 60's music festeval," to look like, but this didn't dissapoint.

It's like a Family Guy sketch.

I'm not sure that three people dying is unusual for a supposed attendance of 400,000 people over the course of three days.

The annual death rate for 25-29 year olds in the United States in 2023 was 1.24 per 1000. Source.

((1.24 expected deaths / 1000 people) / 365 days) * 400000 people * 3 days = 4.07671232877 expected deaths.

The actual attendance might have been smaller than 400,000, the average age different, etc. And the math might be simplistic. But this gives an idea of the math, at least.

As for the vaunted stature in the American imagination...

I'm a big fan of the music of that time period and I find that other people who are interested in that time period usually don't put much emphasis on Woodstock. It was just one of many famous music events from back then. Woodstock is more commonly made central by narratives that try to capture the 1960s in a really quick synopsis. It has become an easy stand-in for the 1960s, so if you want to refer to that time period you can just show a couple seconds of Woodstock footage, same as how if you want to really quickly refer to the early 1940s you can just show a couple of seconds of footage of Hitler giving a speech.

I think many of us have seen such history synopses on television. It goes something like this: couple of seconds of Elvis dancing, then JFK assassination footage, then the Beatles landing in the US clip, then a couple of seconds of Woodstock, then some footage of Nixon, then the Sex Pistols doing "Anarchy in the U.K.".

Some of the music performed at Woodstock is really good but I think that most of the musicians who performed at Woodstock played better on other occasions. I think that Hendrix's Woodstock performance is overall not very good. From that show, I like Woodstock Improvisation more than Star Spangled Banner, although it is sloppy.

I think Hendrix was best in the studio. I like his studio Star Spangled Banner much more than the Woodstock one. 1983... (A Merman I Should Turn to Be) is fantastic.

I'm not sure that three people dying is unusual for a supposed attendance of 400,000 people over the course of three days.

The annual death rate for 25-29 year olds in the United States in 2023 was 1.24 per 1000. Source.

((1.24 expected deaths / 1000 people) / 365 days) * 400000 people * 3 days = 4.07671232877 expected deaths.

The actual attendance might have been smaller than 400,000, the average age different, etc. And the math might be simplistic. But this gives an idea of the math, at least.

But that only invites further questions. 400k people attended Woodstock, with three deaths (and between 4-8 miscarriages) in three days: it's universally remembered as a festival built on free love, hope and optimism. 300k people attended the Altamont Free Concert, with four deaths in one day (including one killing in self-defense): it's universally remembered as a uniquely horrific event, the decisive end to the hope and optimism of the 60s hippie movement. When people talk about how awful Altamont was, are they really claiming that it was (going by your maths) four times more lethal than expected, and one-third more lethal than Woodstock? From the way people talk about these two events, that's not remotely the impression I get.

Another metric: Woodstock '69 had a fatality rate of 0.75/100k, while Altamont's was 1.33/100k. I just have a hard time reconciling the disparate reputations these two events hold in the popular imagination.

Altamont didn't have a tremendously large number of deaths for such a large event, but it was violent in a way that Woodstock, from what I've read at least (I like the music of the time period but am not an expert on these festivals), was not.

It was alleged, though disputed, that some bands and/or managers arranged for the Hells Angels to provide security for the performers. It true, it was a very bad idea. The Hells Angels were unpredictable and violent, which should have been known at the time. Hunter Thompson's book about them, which described them as being close to dangerous wild animals despite the author's heavy counterculture sympathies, had already been out for 2 years at that point.

There were multiple reports of Hells Angels getting into violent melees with the crowd even before the murder of Meredith Hunter. A Hells Angel even punched a musician, Marty Balin.

In another incident, Mick Jagger, singer for the Rolling Stones, was punched by an unknown assailant when he arrived at the venue.

To add to the narrative, Rolling Stone magazine, which back then was actually influential among the youth, wrote a story soon after the festival that described it as a disaster.

It's also possible that the fact that the race of Meredith Hunter played a role, given the racial tensions of the time period and the fact that the youth counterculture was generally looked to with hope that it would help to resolve these tensions.

I think that the actual violence of the event combined with the journalistic coverage and the desire for simplistic, broad-brush-stroke narratives ("end of an era!", "counterculture dream turns dark!") to give the event its narrative resonance.

I can’t imagine that they score the same on overall level of violence.

More importantly for public perception, though, none of the Woodstock deaths happened in the front row. On camera.

Also, not one recorded case of either murder or rape in Woodstock.

I think it’s obvious. Of the three recorded deaths at Woodstock, one was a simple accident (you shouldn’t fall asleep on a hayfield where tractors move around) and two were drug overdoses. Compared to this, there were 742 recorded nonlethal overdoses according to Wikipedia. I imagine any jurisdiction in the US affected by the opioid epidemic (more or less all of them?) would be rather happy to produce such a ratio in their police reports. There was not one recorded murder or rape. Compared to this, hired security stabbed a man to death in Altamont, which is a significant difference. (The other three recorded cases of death were due to mundane accidents.)

This reminds me of something I forgot to mention: one attendee did die during Woodstock '99. Interestingly this is not even mentioned once throughout the 3-part series.

I would imagine those 1.24/1000 deaths are dominated by traffic accidents and, secondarily, fatal overdoses. It’s not like 1.24/1000 25-29 year olds are just dropping dead at random.

I think traffic accidents and fatal overdoses are pretty common causes of death at music festivals.

Fair point.

It’s worth noting that in my bubble, Woodstock is just some people doing drugs in a desert, including among the elderly.

Edit: it shows how much importance we put on it to not know it was held at a different location from burning man. I don't understand why 'some losers did drugs at a concert' is famous.

desert

Not a word I associate with upstate New York, usually, although I'll admit I've never been to Woodstock.

Comparisons with modern Burning Man in Nevada probably aren't that far out of line, though.

It actually took place on the area of a dairy farm.

Yep. Gemini AI amusingly positively compares the "mud" from the original Woodstock with the "mud" from Woodstock '99, claiming the latter was contaminated with port-a-potty overflow. Well, I'm sure it was, but not only did the original Woodstock have the same problem, even without that the "mud" was probably 40% cowshit.

As @VoxelVexillologist notes, Upstate NY isn't a desert; it was famously a mudpit in the original and 1994 and 1999.

I still don't understand why Woodstock occupies such a vaunted stature in the American imagination.

The stuff around Woodstock is "good ol days" type remembering by Boomers (including by plenty who weren't there) about how great their early 20s were (basically an Onion headline about some guy remembering how great and trouble-free the world used to be, which just happened to be when he was 22). It got cemented by a hagiographic documentary released in March 1970. If you watch the original with none of the later extras, it looks like a 3day party with amazing music.

In hindsight, it was easy to paint as the highwater mark of the 60s. Altamont was December 1969. The Manson murders were summer 1969 but the trial didn't start until summer 1970 (which is amazingly fast by modern murder trial standards). Not hard to pull them together into a death of the 60s montage.

I like pointing out that the summer of love was 1967, and there were already people calling BS on the whole thing at that point. Also worth noting that HST claimed the highwater mark was SF in the mid-60s, not anything about Woodstock.

I remember hearing in another documentary that later about 20 million Americans claimed to have been there...LOL. There was also a running joke among hippies: if you say you remember being there, you're lying.

Yeah that's basically what I've come to think about it. This NYT article about its history. Basically, it was a muddy, disgusting mess, that mostly became famous because of a very carefully edited movie about it that came out a year later. The iconic Jimmy Hendrix performance was actually the last act, a day after it was supposed to end, and most of the crowd had already left. They had no no bathrooms, limited water, lots of rain, and 800 drug overdoses.

Was it less violent than the 99 version? .. maybe? The music at least was less angry. And there's less evidence of violence. But my suspicion is that there was actually a ton of sexual assault at the original event, it just didn't get recorded because there were a lot fewer cameras back then and everyone was high. Those 60s hippies were nasty, and there's lots of other disturbing accounts of their bad behavior.

basically an Onion headline about some guy remembering how great and trouble-free the world used to be

https://theonion.com/area-man-always-nostalgic-for-four-years-ago-1819566584/

The Manson murders were summer 1969

🎶 Those were the best days of my life 🎵

I see that others already gave detailed answers. I’d add a couple of things. Michael Lang, the organizer of the original festival was also an organizer of Woodstock ’99, and probably (the documentary doesn’t go into detail about this particular aspect) had a big role in promoting the event as them paying homage to the original after 30 years, resurrecting the old spirit of peace and harmony, bringing people together and basically providing the same great experience. It was the BS they kept repeating even as the disaster unfolded, in order to conceal what a naked money grab it was actually supposed to be.

You and I will probably never understand Woodstock because neither of us are liberal US Boomers (I presume) nor were we there. With regards to its cultural legacy, the deaths and miscarriages don’t matter one bit. It was surely the one defining, uniting life experience for hundreds of thousands, taking place before their illusions and ideals were forever shattered.

late-stage capitalism

I've been aware of this phrase for years, mostly from Reddit. Is there a canonical definition, however? I say this with genuine curiosity / bewilderment. Capitalism, to my mind, is an economic condition reality bounded by certain conditions. I didn't know (and I am dubious) about there being a temporal aspect to it.

Woodstock '99 is one of my first memories from transitioning from childhood to adolescent. One of my siblings wanted to go to it but there was no way my parents would allow it. When all of the MTC reporting came out, the focus then (that is, 1999/2000) was on how bad it was for all of the fans. Mostly, the focus was on heat, water, food, and shelter inadequacies. There were definitely reports of the sexual assaults, however, they did not take center stage. My thinking is that even MTV back in those innocent (lulz) days of 1999 didn't want to dwell on such heavy issues. I could be wrong.

There was zero "woke" angle and zero "this was particularly bad for the female attendees in general." I think there's something revealing about that. As "progressive" as MTV has always been, they, up until the Great Awokening, still believed in gender roles within the context of popular music. Rock Star dudes, of course, banged groupies. Pop Idols (Spears, Aguliera, Etc.) would make dancey-dance songs and then mix in some power ballads about being dumped. Boy Bands would do dancey-dancey almost without exception and the tween girls would swoon but Boy Bands definitely would not bang them. The details don't really matter. The point is that there were assumed "roles" (even within this progressive media outlet) and different actions were permissible - or not - based on which role a person occupied.

I don't think that's the case anymore. Part of the great awokening was a homogenization in all directions. Rock Stars can't be drunk messes who bang groupies anymore. That's toxic masculinity. At the same time, Teen Pop Idols can be weirdo hypersexual entities (thinking of Sabrina Carpenter here). And everyone can (should?) have some sort of "my mental health struggles" part of the biography ready to go at anytime. It's all so authoritarian.

I've been aware of this phrase for years, mostly from Reddit. Is there a canonical definition, however? I say this with genuine curiosity / bewilderment. Capitalism, to my mind, is an economic condition bounded by certain conditions. I didn't know (and I am dubious) about there being a temporal aspect to it.

The people who use the phrase use it in the way you would say "late-stage cancer". You can infer what they think of capitalism from that. It's usually college-age people or redditors who used that kind of phrasing initially, though it's become common enough that you see it pop up elsewhere from people who don't necessarily hate capitalism (often in the way capitalism is blamed for the excesses of consumerism). In general, it expresses that capitalism is unsustainable and that the thing that's called an example of late-stage capitalism is an example of how a dying capitalist system will break down and fail, or of how capitalism ends up killing its host.

people who use the phrase use it in the way you would say "late-stage cancer"

Or if they want to make a more historical point: they use it in the way you'd say "Late Republic", the period of the Roman Rebublic that was characterized by civil wars, mass slavery / slave rebellions and internal instability.

Same result, really.

Or the Late Empire, alternatively.

True. Historians also differentiate Early and Late Antiquity or Early and Late Feudalism. I guess one can also speak of Mature/Peak Antiquity/Feudalism if we want to divide eras even further. The existence of any economic system is conditional and conditions are necessarily subject to change, which means no system can continue indefinitely, and nor can cancer.

Is there a canonical definition, however? I say this with genuine curiosity / bewilderment. Capitalism, to my mind, is an economic condition bounded by certain conditions. I didn't know (and I am dubious) about there being a temporal aspect to it.

I think its just a rhetorical trick to suggest that the transition from Capitalism to something else is nigh, and all the weird, distasteful, negative aspects of society right now are therefore proof that we're near the end.

And maybe, by continually suggesting this, actually encourage behaviors that bring the transition about?

"Late" as a temporal stage can only be defined in relation to the actual end of a thing, right? If the end is indefinite, it is incoherent to identify something as 'late' prior to it actually ending/resetting.

Not like anyone is going to call them on their missed prediction if we're still doing Capitalism in 30-300 years.

“Late” can be used like “mature,” I think. Stable in its development. Perhaps ossified or stagnant, even.

I agree that most people using the term are more interested in prophesying the end of capitalist systems. They’ve been doing so since before Marx himself. He framed it as “tendency of rate of profit to fall”; under that metric, “late stage” would mean “relatively low rate of profit.”

'Late' can also mean 'recent' or 'current'; viz. the War of Southern Treason being called 'the late unpleasantness'.

I've been aware of this phrase for years, mostly from Reddit. Is there a canonical definition, however? I say this with genuine curiosity / bewilderment. Capitalism, to my mind, is an economic condition bounded by certain conditions. I didn't know (and I am dubious) about there being a temporal aspect to it.

No idea about a canonical definition but it makes sense to me that forms of social organisation have a life cycle similar to e.g. tech like Google Search.

  1. you start with enthusiasm and success (loads of people use google search, it suddenly renders the internet legible, it's great).
  2. expansion (everyone has an indexable website, search results are really good).
  3. an increasing number of problems as parasites, middlemen, activists, bureaucrats etc. figure out all the places that they can hijack the system (SEO appears and swiftly becomes mandatory to get any traction, Google increasingly stacks the deck towards large and favoured organisations, the map becomes the territory all over).
  4. eventually the whole system collapses under the weight of enshittification / all the edge cases it's responsible for supporting / parasitic load etc.

So for capitalism:

  1. you have a massive initial expansion of activity as corps come into being, positive sum investment and economic activity become possible, LLCs make it possible to invest without risking prison.
  2. companies make loads of stuff people want, poverty drops hugely etc.
  3. increasingly most of our (remaining and new) problems start being caused by companies b/c they're everywhere. Quarterly reports stop being a useful indicator of company health and start being the lodestar that guides all investment/hiring decision. Mergers and private equity vandals turn great companies into skin suits. Stock market arbitrage starts being far more lucrative than making things and selling them to people who want to buy them. 'You are here'.
  4. Theoretically, all of these problems finally cause capitalist economies to slowly become so decrepit, futile, ineffectual and malicious to the humans caught up in them that it sparks revolution / takeover by healthy societies with different social arrangements / evolution towards a new model.

I've been aware of this phrase for years, mostly from Reddit. Is there a canonical definition, however? I say this with genuine curiosity / bewilderment. Capitalism, to my mind, is an economic condition bounded by certain conditions. I didn't know (and I am dubious) about there being a temporal aspect to it

"Werner Sombart, who used the phrase Spätkapitalismus (literally "late capitalism") in his 1902 work Der moderne Kapitalismus. Sombart was developing a stage-theory of capitalism, arguing that the system passed through distinct historical phases: early, high, and late. His framework was descriptive and evolutionary, not necessarily apocalyptic."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_capitalism

In the 21st century era of the global Internet, mobile telephones and artificial intelligence, the idea of "late capitalism" is again used in left-wing political discussions about the decadence, degeneration, absurdities and ironies of contemporary business culture, often with the suggestion that capitalism is now getting near the end of its existence (or is already being transformed into a post-capitalism of some sort)

The gist of it is that it's a shibboleth and a cue to boo the outgroup on command.

If there's anything someone dislikes about modern consumerism or globalization, it's a convenient brush to paint with. Gentrification? Late stage capitalism. Rent too damn high? Late stage capitalism. Netflix enshittified its offerings? Late stage capitalism.

The unresolved questions were: "late" in what sense? In comparison to what? How do we know? What could possibly replace capitalism? The liberal economist Paul Krugman stated in 2018 that:

"I've had several interviews lately in which I was asked whether capitalism had reached a dead end, and needed to be replaced with something else. I'm never sure what the interviewers have in mind; neither, I suspect, do they."

in his 1902 work Der moderne Kapitalismus

Looks like it only made it into the third volume? So the term is "only" a little over 100 years old now, and the "stage" it purports to describe is only a little over 110 years old.

To be fair, Sombart describes the previous two "stages" as being about 150 years long each, so maybe he wouldn't have thought we're quite due for the end of his last one yet?

I'm never sure what the interviewers have in mind; neither, I suspect, do they.

If you ask for details, the short-term plan usually boils down to some form of palace economy, with the interviewers imagining themselves among the decision-makers inside the (in this case metaphorical) palace rather than among the decision-targets outside. The long-term plan in theory is for their wonderful planning to allow everyone to flourish and thereby become some sort of New Soviet Man, who will simply make correct and selfless decisions himself and thus allow the decision-makers to return back to their labors. In practice for some reason the long-term never seems to come.

In this regard it serves exactly the same social function as "neoliberalism" once did.

I think it's obvious that the phrase "neoliberalism" was invented in order to differentiate the liberal economic policies as they existed before and after the emergence and implementation of Keynesianism.

Not really. Basically there are two neoliberalisms:

  • Alexander Rüsotw's attempt to rejuvenate the classical liberal movement in the wake of the growing popularity of state intervention during the Great Depression
  • The leftists definitionless boogeyman, that anything bad can be attributed to, but which, if anything, has been used to describe the policies following the fall of Keynesianism, not it's emergence.

I know what the word originally meant. I'm referring to how it is often used by left-leaning pundits e.g. this article in the Guardian which blames neoliberalism for pretty much anything the author doesn't like about the modern world, from environmental devastation to loneliness to anorexia.

Fair enough. My point is that the "neo-" part has a more concrete and agreed-upon definition than the "late-" part.

No argument here.

Adding this for further context:

The development of capitalism is divided into three stages.[6] The first volume of Der moderne Kapitalismus published in 1902, deals with proto-capitalism, the origins and transition to capitalism from feudalism,[7] and the period he called early capitalism – Frühkapitalismus – which ended before the Industrial Revolution.[8] In his second volume, which he published in 1916, he described the period that began c. 1760, as high capitalism – Hochkapitalismus.[9] The last book, published in 1927, treats conditions in the 20th century. He called this stage late capitalism – Spätkapitalismus, which began with World War I.[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Sombart#Middle_career_and_sociology

In somewhat comical fashion, Wikipedia authors examined Sombart himself and drew similar biographical conclusions:

As a young man, Sombart was a socialist who associated with Marxist intellectuals and the German Social Democratic Party. Friedrich Engels praised Sombart's review of the first edition of Marx's Das Kapital Vol. 3 in 1894, and sent him a letter.[9] As a mature academic who became well known for his own sociological writings, Sombart had a sympathetically critical attitude to the ideas of Karl Marx — seeking to criticize, modify and elaborate Marx's insights, while disavowing Marxist doctrinairism and dogmatism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_capitalism#Initial_use_of_the_term

“Late Stage Capitalism” is a reference to Marx’s statement about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in capitalist economies. All the twenty-dollar bills get picked up and everyone starts scumming the margins for tiny increases in efficiency.

The growth of tipping culture in the US, as much as I dislike it outside of specific traditions, does feel like a negative sign for capitalism: "you can just ask people if they want to pay more, and sometimes they do!" Whole careers have been built around Patreon and pay-if/what-you-want models.

On the other hand, this feels less Marx ("from each according to their ability") and more Banksian post-scarcity: "from each according to 'eh, why not?'".

If only!

When only some people tip, they get to play a little prisoner’s dilemma. Those who pay the surcharge reduce the cost of labor to the employer, and thus the cost to any free riders. In turn, the non-tippers benefit themselves (and harm the employee) more than they inconvenience the employer.

From each according to “how much do I want to be (seen as) an asshole, today?”

Those who pay the surcharge reduce the cost of labor to the employer...

Heh, I recently got to answer a tip prompt on a credit card reader from a sole proprietor.

From each according to “how much do I want to be (seen as) an asshole, today?”

There is certainly an element of this, especially IRL. But there are also examples like Andreas Kling writing much of SerenityOS and the Ladybird browser while paying rent with donations for BSD-licensed software.

This was probably something built into the software and not something deliberately chosen by the business.

Eh, no, not at all. Virtually all of these POS systems let the business choose exactly what appears on them. Now, there DO exist defaults that some owners will use, but customization is the norm.

When only some people tip, they get to play a little prisoner’s dilemma.

That's interesting, because I see a slightly different prisoner's dilemma. If I tip in advance, I'm paying a modest premium to get better service than everyone else; to reduce the chance of anyone adulterating my food/drink, etc. But if everyone tips in advance, employers reduce hourly wages and we're all back to square one. And I don't get better service. It would be great if customers could coordinate and agree never to tip, but as with most prisoner's dilemmas that is difficult.

So basically, I see the tippers as the defectors while the non-tippers are the cooperators.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone tip in advance.

But if that were the case, yeah, it’s a race to the bottom the other way.

The "opportunity" to tip in advance is all over coffee shops, and in more and more quick take-out places (ice cream parlor, etc). You order your drink, they punch it into their tablet kiosk, then flip it around to you and it asks how much you want to tip before you swipe your credit card. It's pretty awkward to tap "other amount" and enter "0". I've seen on the internet (i.e. no idea if true) baristas saying they'll spit in drinks where they don't get tipped.

Oh. Oh, duh. Yeah, I didn’t even think of that as advance. To me, it’s the end of the interaction.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone tip in advance.

As guy mentioned, it's getting pretty common. I find it pretty offensive when (1) I am being asked for a tip before the service has been performed; and (2) all the person is doing is handing me something over a counter.

Nevertheless, I sometimes tip in advance in hopes of getting better service. For example if the person is preparing a mixed drink and therefore has discretion over how much effort (and alcohol) to put into my order.

DoorDashing is like that, tipping an advance. You do it as an incentive to give great service, not as a confirmation of great service given. Predictably I'll leave a generous tip but they won't come to the door, wanting me to go out to a parking lot (I usually order only when at a motel) and forget things.

For delivery apps like that, it's effectively a bidding system. Drivers see the estimated payout for a trip that includes the advance tip amount, so they are a lot more likely to take a trip with a decent tip. $0 tip trips sit in the queue getting rejected until a driver takes it because it's convenient or they are desperate. Worst case, if it sits for long enough, the app will increase the driver payment by a bit until someone takes it. So it's really not ensuring good service, just faster service.

I think there are principled reasons to cut down on tipping besides the first order effects (more money for the non-tipper). Just as there are principled reasons to avoid burning fossil fuels, the first order effects are great (my flat gets warm, my car goes places), but the cumulative effects of everyone doing so are bad (climate change). Or giving Kevin a better grade for his paper.

For tipping, the obvious effect is that it shifts the supply-demand-equilibrium for waiters to lower wages, up to the point where a waiter makes as much as before. So in effect, all you have changed in giving the customer veto rights over 60% of their compensation. Personally, I do not favor a view of the service industry as freelancers whose job is to make people happy so that they get paid.

It’s negative because of the misuse of social pressure to extract the tips. It’s not just “do it if you feel like it.” In many cases, the person finds himself or herself in public or with friends while the waiter hands over or spins the iPad with the tip already filled in, then the person is forced to either go along (and add another 15-20% to the total bill) or publicly choose to not tip. To me, the issue is less tipping itself and more the coercive approach taken where im pressured by the knowledge that other people see what im doing (often including the waiter himself) thus making it less of a free will gesture and more of a pay or be a jerk gesture.

What is weird is that we are in an era of spectacular profits: the rate has risen significantly, not fallen, due to the Schumpeterian heroism of the tech industry. Okishio has won over Marx.

There's also a kind of schizoid relationship people have with the rate of profit. When people object to capitalism, their anger is usually at excess profits, not companies ruthlessly competing away each other's margins; whatever grumbles about airline leg room there are, it's not what's driving any political anti-capitalism. But if we take Marx seriously, exploding profits is, if not outright impossible, then at least a sign of capitalism's strength, with its end state moving proportionately further into the future.

When people object to capitalism, their anger is usually at excess profits, not companies ruthlessly competing away each other's margins; whatever grumbles about airline leg room there are, it's not what's driving any political anti-capitalism.

I think this is the wrong way round. People say and think it’s excess profits but actually it’s excess competition.

It’s always dangerous to psychoanalyse one’s opponents but I think the train of thought is roughly:

  1. I seem to be paying more and more (or at least the same) for less and less. Air France used to give two suitcases for free, now I have to pay considerable markup on each of them. (I also get in-flight WiFi now but I have to pay for that and people are more sensitive to loss than gain).
  2. Companies are still making profits and there are lots of billionaires around the place. (Not actually making their money in the same business but people don’t notice this.)
  3. Therefore these billionaires must be getting rich by stealing the money that used to go into nice services for decent prices. They’re certainly not getting their money by making services better!

When people actually feel like they’re getting a great bargain and new cool stuff, they don’t usually mind the creators getting rich. If anything a lot of people support them as an 'our team' kind of thing - look at the way people felt about Palmer Luckey when he invented modern VR, or Anthropic.

I’d prefer not to start discussing something here that is only tangentially related to this miniseries, nor am I an economist or a redditor for that matter, but if you wish to discuss late-stage capitalism in general on this site, I’ll be happy to take part. To keep this comment concise I’d make the following argument.

In early-stage capitalism: the concentration of capital is yet of a low level, some natural resources are still untapped and not depleted, some markets are still unclaimed and unexplored, the low-hanging fruit is generally yet not picked, market forces did not yet eat away at social norms and cultural traditions (fertility rates and family formation rates are still high, and labor is plentiful), the environment is not yet poisoned and contaminated all over. In late-stage capitalism, none of that is true anymore.

In late-stage capitalism, none of that is true anymore.

"Late stage capitalism" is phrase born of Marxist revolutionary optimism/wishful thinking.

"Keep fighting, comrades! The clock is ticking, the bourgeois pig system is crumbling! The masses are waking up, the revolution is just around the corner! Trust the forces of history!"

No one wants to imagine that we are still in early stage of capitalism, and communism will finally win sometime in the 40th millenium.

I think there's really two ways to think about Marxism: one is the obvious motivation of his works. But secondly, I think Marx did a lot to establish a sort of almost historical framework for the economic and political progression of human progress that others have adopted in various forms.

Plainly, Marx was wrong about the precise progression of political and economic realities. He was maybe wrong about treating class as a distinct and supremely strong force, or at least, it's complicated. But I think he was right in the general sense that (excessive, internal) financialization is a very strong, and probably harmful, force. And, again in a general sense, the idea that maybe this system of 'capitalism' is inherently in a state of almost entropic decline, where production runs into natural limits and the insatiated demand growth often distorts into rent-seeking and monopolization, is a pretty interesting one.

I definitely agree that he was wrong about things magically reversing and becoming better as the natural and inevitable result of the system's evolution. However, you can still use the term "late stage capitalism" if you buy the narrative about the trajectory of things, even if you (maybe strongly!) disagree about what happens in the "next stage". And in fact, it seems to me that at least in America, communism (under the lens of: let's seize things for the lower class and take it for ourselves, and redistribute it centrally) is 100% dead in the water. A kind of semi-democratic socialism however (let's seize some of the things, especially from the rich, and then distribute it centrally - and it's okay because we outnumber them) is very much alive. I do consider those different things, and the latter is what even young idiots (many of whom might defend communism reflexively) really want, even if they aren't able to articulate it very well. They don't actually want communism, not when you ask them straight. And really, they aren't even all that revolutionary in a classic sense, even if they say they want to burn down the system: by revealed preference they simply don't.

And really, they aren't even all that revolutionary in a classic sense, even if they say they want to burn down the system: by revealed preference they simply don't.

Revolution needs revolutionary situation - historically it was incompetent, internally split and massively discredited ruling class, unpopular (and losing) war, economic collapse thrusting the masses into desperate poverty.

Fortunately, we are in 2026, not in 1917 and no such things can happen today.

I've been aware of this phrase for years, mostly from Reddit. Is there a canonical definition, however? I say this with genuine curiosity / bewilderment. Capitalism, to my mind, is an economic condition bounded by certain conditions. I didn't know (and I am dubious) about there being a temporal aspect to it.

I read a note a few weeks ago that pointed out that describing something as "late stage" only really makes sense retrospectively, or for a phenomenon which has a predictable end state (e.g. the last few weeks of pregnancy are "late stage pregnancy"). Describing our current economic condition as "late stage capitalism" carries more than a whiff of wishful thinking. Indeed, I predict that capitalism will survive all of the people currently using the phrase.

A few years ago I used to see stickers for some Irish socialist party dotted around Dublin, prominently featuring a quote attributed to noted Irish socialist James Connolly, which said something along the lines of "the time for reforming the capitalist system has passed. It must be destroyed." When I searched for the exact wording a few months ago I was unable to find it, so he may not even have said it at all. In any case, I'm sure you've guessed the punchline: Connolly died 110 years ago, and a far greater proportion of the human race lives under capitalist economies than communist/socialist ones than did in his lifetime. Turns out the old girl had plenty of life in her yet.

I read a note a few weeks ago that pointed out that describing something as "late stage" only really makes sense retrospectively, or for a phenomenon which has a predictable end state (e.g. the last few weeks of pregnancy are "late stage pregnancy"). Describing our current economic condition as "late stage capitalism" carries more than a whiff of wishful thinking. Indeed, I predict that capitalism will survive all of the people currently using the phrase.

Perhaps this is unfairly charitable of me, but I prefer to read the phrase as "capitalism of late", that is to say, it means "recent capitalism" rather than "capitalism near the end of its life".

Probably most people who use it are indulging in wishful thinking, and have hopes of some sort of imminent economic reorganisation, not to say revolution, but the word 'late' by itself can be read in a less ridiculous way.

You can still be dedicated communist while believing that communism will win in far, distant future. It is hard, but not impossible.

warning: obscure nerd lore incoming

The canonical example is classic of Soviet science fiction, Andromeda by Ivan Yefremov.

Context: Soviet science fiction during Stalin's time was bound by "close limit" rule.

No daydreaming, no wild space fantasies churned by capitalist hacks as opiate for the working class, just describe scientific and technological breakthroughs that are coming in the near future.

Usual plot was: In 1946, heroic Soviet polar explorer gets lost and freezes solid in the arctic ice. Later, in communist future, he is discovered, thawed and revived into full health, and his old friends (in their young and vigorous 120's) get him into flying car and show him the wonderful communist world of 2026.

Andromeda is not like this.

It is utopian communist future, that happens to be far future. Geologic scale future, when all that is left from our civilization is black radioactive layer in the strata (and some mysterious artifacts).

It is clear why such work was problematic, even during the post-Stalin thaw when big K himself promised victory of communism in 1980.

As others in the thread have noted, the specific phrase "late stage" is reminiscent of "late stage cancer". I think people who use it in the absolute rather than the relative sense are thinking of it this way, and therefore, are not hopefuls looking forward to a revolution, but doomers who anticipate that runaway capitalism will literally kill the planet - or at least Civilization As We Know It - in the foreseeable future.

According to Wikiquote this seems to be the quote you are looking for:

The day has passed for patching up the capitalist system; it must go. And in the work of abolishing it the Catholic and the Protestant, the Catholic and the Jew, the Catholic and the Freethinker, the Catholic and the Buddhist, the Catholic and the Mahometan will co-operate together, knowing no rivalry but the rivalry of endeavour toward an end beneficial to all. For, as we have said elsewhere, socialism is neither Protestant nor Catholic, Christian nor Freethinker, Buddhist, Mahometan, nor Jew; it is only Human. We of the socialist working class realise that as we suffer together we must work together that we may enjoy together. We reject the firebrand of capitalist warfare and offer you the olive leaf of brotherhood and justice to and for all.

These are actually the closing words of a pamphlet he wrote in 1910 as a response to the anti-socialist lectures of some priest. Well...technically speaking we cannot say if he was correct or incorrect. Four years later the entire world had an opportunity to learn what the firebrand of capitalist warfare is in its true form, and he argued that only a globally united working class can possibly prevent that disaster. I guess that may be true in retrospect.

MeToo was probably a mix of cohort effects and the effects of technology. It used laws which existed in the 90s, but was bolstered by the internet's power to bring together women to make accusations against men all at once. It also relied on an ample supply of feminists, which the MeToo generation supplied more sufficiently than previous generations. Debauchery at Woodstock 2 would have been way harder to prosecute than today because nobody had smart phones. Most people probably didn't even have cell phones. There are few to no recordings of what went on, nobody got "their rapist's" snapchat and exchanged instant messages, police might struggle to prove an accused man even attended, without the easy investigative tool of phone location records.

As a side note, the evidence produced by mobile phones is fascinating to me. Some time in the last 10-20 years, it became nearly impossible to get away with murder or any other serious crime. The main exception being situations involving some gang-banger in the ghetto and law enforcement doesn't particularly care.

As a side note, the evidence produced by mobile phones is fascinating to me. Some time in the last 10-20 years, it became nearly impossible to get away with murder or any other serious crime.

Not really, at least in the US.

The main exception being situations involving some gang-banger in the ghetto and law enforcement doesn't particularly care.

In the hood, you do not get away with anything for long. Friends of the deceased usually know well who did it, and prefer to deal with the perpetrator (and his friends) themselves. This is how old American self sufficient spirit looks like.

"Perfect murders" in classic detective stories style would be:

1/Victim dead, death recorded as due to natural cause, accident or suicide, no murder case opened.

2/Victim went missing, no missing case opened because, well, no one missed the victim.

How many of such cases are here is impossible to estimate.

Not really, at least in the US.

I'm open to evidence against my claim, but the cite you provide doesn't say WHICH homicides are remaining unsolved.

In the hood, you do not get away with anything for long.

So your claim is that the 58% figure quoted in your article consists mainly of homicides outside the "hood"?

The figure consists of homicides solved by formal white man's law, as opposed to ghetto street law.

How many people really get away with murder in such sense that they face no adverse consequences in their lifetime (excluding guilty conscience, if applicable) is unknown and unknowable.

The figure consists of homicides solved by formal white man's law, as opposed to ghetto street law.

So it sounds like you agree that, outside of the "ghetto," for the most part homicides get solved. Is that right?

How many people really get away with murder in such sense that they face no adverse consequences in their lifetime (excluding guilty conscience, if applicable) is unknown and unknowable.

But we can set an upper bound on it, agreed?

I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice, but I am rather sure that people who kill others in busy streets are doing it wrong (tm). Basically, if your murder plan involves 'and then members of the public will start to point their phones in my direction and film my actions', your murder plan is not very good.

I think the main difference is that you used to get away with behavior which was not so much worse than everything else what was going on. In the middle of a riot, it is unlikely that everyone will stop doing what they are doing and watch you in horror as you torch a car. Today, chances are you will still be caught on camera and identified after the act (depending on how aligned you were with the tribe currently in power, of course).

Excellent comment. Now I desperately want to read @quiet_NaN’s “You’re Doing It Wrong: How to Kill Correctly And With Style”.

How to Kill Correctly And With Style

Well, it depends where you are.

For example, if you live in drug infested town or neighborhood where deaths by overdose are common, just invite the prospective victim to shoot drugs with you, and inject him with lethal dose of fent.

Just another overdose, just another number in the grim tally. How many of these numbers are really unfortunate accidents, and how many are suicides or murders? No one knows, no one will ever care.

Actually happened to a friend of a friend 30 years ago. A cartel tried to bump him off, figuring a tourist overdosing on the other side of town would be a good distraction ahead of a drugs sweep. They just hadn't realised that he was already a heroin addict with heroic tolerance for the stuff - he woke up two days later none the worse for wear.

De Quincey may have gotten there first.

Of course, we must bear in mind that most murderers are impulsive dummies.

Yes, (solved) murders are overwhelmingly low IQ phenomenon.

Is it because smart people are more moral, or because the perk of being smart is ability to find out easier solution to your problems than murder?

The drive by’s and burglaries gone wrong murders which go unsolved were also not committed by Einstein. Statistically Dr Moriarty’s murders were all committed against cheating spouses or something where you don’t need Sherlock to figure it out. Dumb, impulsive people kill more randomly, because they are dumb and impulsive.

Interesting. I was at the first Coachella that same year. It had a somewhat more electronic music focus than Woodstock 99, with one tent entirely curated by Warp Records. There was far, far less debauchery than apparently what went on at Woodstock. The composition of attendees was more hipster-y and presumably UMC, which explains some of that. I recall two guys from San Luis Obispo who helped procure Autechre for the festival.


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