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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24209 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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There is some discussion below about the game Mixtape, and the suspicion that it AI was used to some extent. I haven't played video games in a long time, and what I know about them could fit on the head of a pin, but as a 90s kid I became intrigued by the nostalgia that this game was supposedly aiming at, and how the producers supposedly got it all wrong, so I naturally did a little research to see what the big deal was. One of the comments below points out that in games like Red Dead Redemption a murderous outlaw wouldn't dare also be a racist, and while political sentiments might be the most obvious and ham-fisted examples of this, there's a larger trend of assigning contemporary values to historical eras. In the case of Red Dead Redemption I'd argue that this is more forgivable, as the further back one goes in history the less source material one has. After all, nobody who remembers the 1890s is alive today to tell you what you got wrong, so one can be forgiven for making some assumptions out of necessity.

But there are plenty of people who remember the '90s. If we narrow in on the specific demographic and assume that the game takes place some time in June 1995, there are about 3 million people who would have been graduating high school and are alive today to talk about it. But even there you run into problems, because the people from the Class of 1995 most willing to talk about their high school experience are the ones most likely to idealize it. Most contemporary reminiscences of 1995 are from the kind of hipster journalists who want to make it sound like they were cooler than they actually were, and thus use their current selves as stand-ins for their high school ones. I don't want to suggest that these people are lying about the past, simply that there is a tendency to emphasize that which has stood the test of time and conforms to contemporary tastes. The problem arises when people who were born too late to experience an era become influenced by contemporary ideas about what made that era cool and assume that the coolness that they perceive was typical. And it compounds further when this false nostalgia includes a dash of contemporary coolness for good measure.

The first time I noticed this in my adult life was when Vaporwave took off in the early 2010s. As a meditation on the nature of nostalgia it's not without interest, but as a representation of the aesthetic of 1992 it's absurd. The visuals suited the style fine, as the millennial memory of the era is as influenced as much by worn out VHS tapes as actual experience. But the music had more to do with creating a nostalgic mood than it did with evoking anything that was being played on the radio between 1987 and 1998. The movement's canonical song, "Lisa Frank 420 / Modern Computing" by Macintosh Plus, was nothing more than a slowed down and chopped up remix of Diana Ross's "It's Your Move". More original works in the genre can be described as synthwave with a heavy dose of smooth jazz. The tunes are enjoyable enough, but the insistence of pairing them with found VHS footage of home videos and toy commercials is puzzling, since the sound is more 80s than 90s.

Given the right context, this isn't a mortal sin. One of the watershed moments in vaporwave's development was the discovery and upload of tape reel of K-Mart muzak from 1988, and the subsequent uploads of cassettes from later years. The visuals often included shots of store interiors or clips taken from commercials. To the extent that vaporwave sought to evoke nostalgia, it was an oddly specific nostalgia for a certain kind of consumer capitalism. And even that's an unusual choice, since the period we're supposed to be nostalgic for sits on the divide between two very different eras—the more traditional, jingle-based make your product look like loads of fun on one side and the more detached, ironic style of turning the commercial into a work of art that can be appreciated on its own terms on the other. Just look at beer commercials; the ads of the early 90s showed men at pools surrounded by beautiful women in bikinis, clearly trying to impart an association of the product with parties and the opposite sex. By the middle of the decade they had frogs in a swamp each croaking out one syllable of the brand name. What this was supposed to say about Budweiser was anyone's guess, but it's one of the most iconic commercials of the era.

This all makes sense when you consider that Macintosh Plus and many of the other top vaporwave practitioners weren't born until the early 90s. Their earliest memories would not have been until the end of the era they were trying to evoke, and their nostalgia was largely for an imagined world based on the detritus of the era that ended up on the internet. It's ultimately a lie, but it's a lie in the same sense that all nostalgia is a lie. Because if vaporwave did give an accurate impression of what life was like in 1992, that wouldn't necessarily be a good thing. There wasn't much better about 1992 as compared to today, and quite a bit was worse. More importantly, 1992 doesn't exist as a discrete entity that you can visit. I remember 1992, and at the time there was nothing more exciting about it than there is about 2026. If you were to visit 1992 as a tourist, you would be aware of that fact and unable to experience things as you remember. But if you were to visit 1992 while not conscious that it wasn't the current year, then there would be nothing interesting about it; it would just be normal. And no, I'm not nostalgic for my childhood either. It was great, mind you, but people forget that when you're a kid all you want is to be older. Every minor decision is made by your parents: Who your friends are, what time you go to bed, what you have for dinner, what you can watch on television, how you spend your Saturdays. Yes, I remember retail outlets in the early 90s. I distinctly remember standing for what seemed like hours as my mother looked at every article of clothing in the store, and when the women's department was finally exhausted she moved on to babies because of some relative's kid, and at that point I was begging to go to domestics, or, preferably, home. If I go back to 1992 I do not want to spend it in a K-Mart.

Which brings us to Mixtape. It was almost certainly created by people who are too young to recall the era they're trying to evoke, because anyone old enough would have been well into their 40s by the time of the game's development. Much has been made of the whole "using a pencil to rewind a tape" thing, and while nobody would have done that just to rewind it, there was a use case. If the player mangled your tape, which wasn't an uncommon occurrence, you would usually use a pencil to wind it back up once you got it disentangled from the player. But that's beside the point, because the idea of a mixtape as something that you give as a gift to that special someone has more to do with our contemporary interpretation of 90s culture than to actual 90s culture. I don't want to suggest that the practice never happened. But it certainly wasn't widespread. Mixtapes were mostly something you made for yourself, either because few cars had CD players or because you were taping off the radio.

The thing people don't realize is that music was expensive in the '90s, and less popular acts were hard to find, especially outside of major metro areas. I can tell you that in 1997 the going rate for a CD at Music Oasis was $15, which is $30 in today's money per the CPI, more when you take into consideration that the average teenager in those days was more likely to make under $5/hour than today's teenager is likely to make more than 10. I looked through a lot of CD binders in my time, and most people only had like 15 CDs, and people who were really into music might have had about 20. If you were relying on your own collection for material, the well would have dried up fast, especially considering that most people only bought CDs for the hits. Most mixtapes per se were things that you made for yourself, either by borrowing from friends or taping off the radio. To the extent that most people made mixtapes for other people, they were likely to just record the whole album, or record the good songs from their CDs without regard for the running order.

The idea that mixtapes were curated items derives from the movie High Fidelity. Except in the film, the characters who are obsessed with mixtapes are music geeks who work in a record store. They aren't representative of the general public, let alone high school kids. To the extent that they existed they were, like mall music, not something that most people thought much about. John Cusack's monologue at the end of the film is notable because it's unusual. But beyond the overstated relevance of mixtapes, the game fails for its overreverence for the 80s.

I took a peek at the soundtrack, and it mostly consists of either stuff from the 80s or indie stuff from the 90s that wasn't popular. This can't be stated strongly enough, but nothing about the 80s was considered cool in the 90s. The entire decade was seen as anathema to any modern sensibilities. The divide in commercials was representative of a larger cultural shift, whereby grunge swept everything else away. By 1995, alternative rock had become mainstream to the point that anything from the previous decade sounded incredibly dated. The idea that high schoolers in 1995 would listen to Devo would have seemed laughable. The idea that they would listen to Joy Division or the Jesus and Mary Chain would have seemed puzzling, because most teenagers wouldn't have even heard of either of those bands. Their stuff was technically available, but in a city like Pittsburgh you would have had to go to a place like Dave's Music Mine on the South Side to find anything like that. A typical National Record Mart in the mall was unlikely to have it, and if they did, you would pay top dollar for it. A discount place like Music Oasis or K-Mart? Forget about it. Even in the 2000s I was having trouble finding classics like The Band's Music from Big Pink in normal CD stores; kids who were into non-mainstream music had to go into the city to find it.

The idea that anyone would discuss their favorite 80s movie is equally absurd. First, nobody really thought of 80s movies as a distinct category. A more accurate description would have been asking about movies shown on cable ad nauseum. And the only 80s movies with any purchase among high school kids at the time would have been kids stuff like the Goonies or ET, or maybe comedies like Ghostbusters. Nobody was discussing something as obviously dated as Aliens. And nobody was certainly seeking out movies from the 80s as an exercise in nostalgia. The same people may tell you now about what they liked in the 80s, but that's with 30 years of perspective. High school kids trying to be cool aren't sitting around talking about what they liked when they were 8. In the early 2000s I certainly wasn't having debates about the best 90s movies.

When all that changes for most people is college. It's only then, once you're out of the coolness rat race, that you get over yourself and start getting nostalgic over your childhood. My own college experience was a bit different, because the 90s didn't feel like they had ended yet culturally, and the 80s were starting to lose their stigma. But nonetheless, that's when most people widen their cultural horizons and realize how cloistered their earlier lives had been, and it's easy for us to look back at our lives and assume that those are the same people we were in high school. And when someone younger consults an LLM, they're bound to get a distilled, distorted version of whatever our collective memory tells us the past was like. And when we don't rely on those distillations, it isn't much better, because we put too much stock in what we ignored, and end up with vaporwave. What can be done about this? Detailed research is one possibility, but even that may be hopeless. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

Which games have good characters, really? I mean really good character writing.

The very best narrative games, like Red Dead 2, have a very good sense of place and some good vaguely natural sounding dialogue. They play with the viewer or player’s emotions a little. They can generate pathos. Some games have a few good jokes, a few good cutscenes, a few neat moments.

But the writing and character development of these is still pretty mediocre. The best we can do is either “I’m dying and I’m sad about it” (RDR2, Cyberpunk) or “I’m a sad dad” (Last of Us, God of War). We can also do “I put references to political science 101 in my game” (Disco Elysium). I don’t think I can name a single game with great writing. I can name games with decent, maybe even good writing that I enjoyed, but I’ve enjoyed far too much slop in my time to believe that’s an indicator of actual quality.

Perfect Tides and its sequel.

If you don't at least think the protagonist is well-written, who (from some other media) would you consider a well-written character?

Which games have good characters, really? I mean really good character writing.

The original Marathon had great writing.

You've already made this point several times on The Motte. But what's your benchmark? Can you name a single movie with great writing that you can point at and say, "this is what I want video game writing to be like"? Or a single song with great writing?

I am deliberately not asking about books because video games are a mixed medium. Books are pure written word, and thus cannot be held to the same standard as works where writing is just one part of the whole.

If you’d like to make fun of my bad taste I’m happy to name a bunch of examples any time. But to me I think the Ebert thing, of judging a movie by its intentions, is mostly what I mean. Is there a game for kids as well written as Toy Story 2? I don’t think Mario Galaxy or Lego Batman really compare. Is there an all-ages action adventure that has the self-propelled scale and rhythm of a Star Wars 5 or Raiders of the Lost Ark? Uncharted 2 is closer to an Uwe Boll movie than it is to them. Is there a major VN or ‘episodic story’ game that has the romantic depth and natural dialogue of a Before Sunset, that so captures the feeling of falling in love? ‘Life is Strange’ really isn’t in the same universe, let alone the same league. Is there a Mafia game that comes close, even fractionally, to Goodfellas, let alone The Godfather? And these are just big Hollywood movies.

I'm not sure what your criterion for "good character writing" is, even with those examples, but I've long found Ico to be one of the best-written stories ever, in terms of everything, including dialogue. But it's essentially a fairy tale with the writing complexity of "See Spot Run," where you can probably count the number of lines that come out of each character's mouth in both hands (and if not, then both hands and feet).

As a side note: do not ever read the "Castle in the Mist" novelization. It is truly awful. It's about 400 pages long, and I got like 100 pages in before giving up - by that point, Ico hadn't even gotten into the castle (this happens in the first cutscene of the game, which lasts like 5 minutes or less), with extensive backstory written about Ico's village and its leaders and the larger society in which they existed. All irrelevant details for the actual story of Ico. Ico's "novelization" really should have been a picture book with, again, the complexity of "See Spot Run."

GTAV is like if Heat was directed by Michael Bay

Not rafa, but:

Amish Paradise comes to mind.

(Also at least 5-10% of Vysotsky’s repertoire should qualify. «Расстрел горного эха» is a gold standard for writing alone.)

Silent Hill 2 etches a surprisingly nuanced and complex portrayal of a grieving widower, touching on some of the ugly realities of watching one's spouse slowly succumb to illness that even unvarnished warts-and-all literary fiction avoids confronting. While it's at it, the game includes a secondary character who is a victim of repeated incestuous rape as a child and succeeds in making them seem believable, sympathetic and three-dimensional.

Spec Ops: The Line depicts a well-meaning protagonist with admirable goals, whose monomaniacal stubbornness, refusal to take responsibility for his actions (indeed, refusal to even acknowledge the consequences of his actions) and steadily declining mental acuity combine to make him progressively more unlikeable and loathsome. The lead writer described him as a tragic hero whose fatal flaw is his inability to reconcile the disparity between the man he would like to be and the man he really is. Even if you don't buy into the meta aspects of the game's presentation, Walker is a masterclass in writing a character who is believeable and unlikeable, while still retaining the player's sympathy.

KOTOR was pretty fun — would’ve made a good movie.

Did you just casually spoil the main story in those first two games? Ever heard of spoiler tags?

I spoiled the premise of a 6 and an 8 year old game, in the sense that both of those ‘reveals’ happen in perhaps the first quarter of the games.

Hmm.. Almost anything Chris Avellone has touched comes to mind.

Ever play Myst 3?

The thing people don't realize is that music was expensive in the '90s, and less popular acts were hard to find, especially outside of major metro areas.

I know that I grew up under a rock by late '90s/early '00s standards (rural Alabama) but I had no idea that Metallica had an album other than the Black Album until 2006. Before then I didn't have access to high speed internet/a decent PC so I pretty much listened to whatever my father did (so, a lot of Eminem and System of a Down), with my contribution to the family's music collection being Kid Rock's Devil Without a Cause and Cocky. My sister bought more CDs but it was late 90s boy bands and then stuff like Pink and Avril Lavigne.

On that note, as a Gulf War baby I don't have much for 90s nostalgia. Okay, I remember Space Jam, but otherwise I remember the late 90s at best, movies like Blue Streak and Chill Factor. If I were to be nostalgic for a time it's more mid-aughts than the 90s, stuff like 2 Fast 2 Furious and Grand Theft Auto Vice City and San Andreas, the height of the Playstation 2 era.

I know that I grew up under a rock by late '90s/early '00s standards (rural Alabama) but I had no idea that Metallica had an album other than the Black Album until 2006.

It is best if you think of the Black Album as the last album of Metallica anyway.

Nah, the Black Album was a total sellout. ...And Justice for All would have been good except you can't hear any bass. The last good Metallica album was Master of Puppets /s

I am not sure why the /s ... after the black album Metallica have 1 good song and it is a cover of Thin Lizzy.

I have to agree with @dailydogma, the game looks like it was made by what used to be called Tumblr SJWs. I always wonder who buys these as the Switch store seems to have a lot of them.

Regarding mixtapes, as someone born at the end of the 80s, they were something the previous generation did. I remember my parents using cassette tapes throughout the 90s, and carrying around those (in hindsight, ridiculous looking) cassette tape binders, but I don't think I ever made one. But then! I remembered that I did actually do essentially the same thing. I was interested in J-Pop and Mandopop as a kid but had no access to either in my rural American town. I probably burned a dozen CDs with Winny- and Kazaa-sourced MP3s. I remember carefully arranging the tracks for maximum impact.

I guess streaming has killed that experience. There's simply too much music available, all the time, anywhere. It's cheap, it's casually consumable.

As a person who was not an American teenager in the 1990s, this game looks like completely overrated trash. First off, it's not a game, it's a 2 hour cut scene. They should have made it be a corny coming of age movie. The plot is completely boring. The aesthetics are ugly and look trans (1). The characters look like SSRI addicted 2010s university Marxist vegan polyamorists with mystery ancestry, not 1990s European-American teenagers.

Clannad is a better slice-of-life high school „ video game“ by a mile, the United States just cannot compete when it comes to that genre because it's too narcissistic about all of its obnoxious peculiarities: it's terrible music, its terrible politics, its ugly aesthetics, its inferior culture.

That it got straight 10/10s means the review companies are being suffocated by 45 year old American liberals. Does that sound like meritocracy to you? Are they really the best people to review video games?

  1. inb4 gaslighting me over this, the creator's past works include this trans flag pastel piece featuring a boy wearing lipstick. The creator doesn't look like he's on the estrogen but he's definitely appealing to the gender people crowd with his aesthetics.

Eh, its definitely liberal trash coded but its more nostalgiagooning for an idealized high school experience than Modern Audience politicking. The main objection to mixtape I can see is the 10/10 by IGN, which as an institution has become a punching bag for everything wrong with games journalism mainly because IGN was THE first source for digital games information back in the early 2010s so its downfall sticks. As a game and narrative mixtape isn't 'fuck white people' as much as some weird 2020s midlife crisis financially strapped lib arts majors idea of what the idealized 90s he knows of but never really experienced was like. There were mixtapes, friends, awkward but real moments, and thats the stuff of a coming of age movie redux, not a videogame, which is where the major objection really comes from. That the base subject matter is also pretty insipid is just the stevia maraschino cherry on top of the soggy biscuit.

While I agree that it looks like trash, I would question the label "overrated", seeing as practically all commentary I've seen on it firsthand comes to the same conclusion. I guess "overrated" begs the question "overrated by who". "Gaming journalists"? Uh, okay; are there any real people with that opinion?

Even post-gamergate, the culture that gaming journalists belong to still has fairly disproportionate influence over what games are made and what they are made of, despite that culture being obviously disconnected from the culture and preferences of the actual people who buy and play video games. Mixtape getting a bunch of 10/10s from gaming journalism outlets is probably a sign that we have more games with its aesthetics to look forward to.

Over on X, someone pointed out that they bought perpetual rights to all the songs involved, and this would cost a fortune. Meaning there's a lot of money behind the game. So those 10/10s may simply be purchased (as is traditional).

It's made my Larry Ellison's daughter. There's huge money behind it.

I'm sure they sprung for the "ultra premium ad package" for the major sites.

Technically, it's only published by Larry Ellison's daughter.

"The Studio is Owned by a Nepobaby"

This is false, and the true version of this claim is kind of a nothingburger.

Megan Ellison is the daughter of Larry Ellison, Oracle co-founder and once the richest person in the world, according to the Financial Times. In 2016, Megan founded the game publisher Annapurna Interactive.

Since then, the company has published many successful indie games, such as Stray, Outer Wilds, and What Remains of Edith Finch, developed respectively by BlueTwelve, Mobius Digital, and Giant Sparrow. Annapurna doesn't own any of those studios. In fact, the publisher doesn't own any game studios as subsidiaries.

Mixtape was developed by Beethoven & Dinosaur, founded by musician Johny Galvatron, and published by Annapurna. So the studio isn't owned by a nepobaby. However, it's true that the game was funded by one. But so were all the other games published by Annapurna Interactive, and if you enjoy indie games, chances are you have enjoyed a game that was published by them.

Yeah, and nepobabies funding the arts, entertainment and other stuff is the other half of raison d'etre of the capitalism: after you get rich doing profitable business, you can do whatever you want with your money, including giving it all to your kids so that they can fund obscure non-profitable computer games they want to see. The main available alternative of "non-profitable arts are only funded by bureaucratic committees" won't guarantee any better results.

There is so little of "better" arts because the finance bros and other medium-to-super rich [1] have a revealed preference of complaining about modern art on Xitter rather than patronizing the arts they supposedly like. One deci-billionaire or a network of few dozen deca-millionaires could plausibly kickstart a whole artistic movement just with their wallets.

[1] edit. postscriptum. Given the replies this message receive, let me rephrase:

the finance bros and other medium-to-super rich who ostensibly care about bad state of contemporary aesthetics have a revealed preference of complaining about modern art on Xitter rather than patronizing the arts they supposedly like.

There is so little of "better" arts because the finance bros and other medium-to-super rich have a revealed preference of complaining about modern art on Xitter rather than patronizing the arts they supposedly like.

Who claims finance bros have any sort of taste for "better" arts?

There is so little of "better" arts because the finance bros and other medium-to-super rich have a revealed preference of complaining about modern art on Xitter rather than patronizing the arts they supposedly like.

I think it's the finance bros and suchlike who are funding a lot the bad contemporary art. Deutsche Bank in particular has made "we fund edgy contemporary art" into part of its corporate identity. Drexel was the founding sponsor of the Turner Prize. Saatchi and Saatchi were not finance bros, but a lot of finance bros showed up at their art parties.

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Tbf What Remains of Edith Finch is really good.

I don't know if it would have cost a fortune, at least not compared to what they already paid. I don't think they bought all the rights, just that they paid a little extra to use the songs in the game indefinitely and not for five years or whatever. I doubt the agreement even would allow them to use the songs in another game.

Source

In an interview with Kotaku, creative director Johnny Galvatron explained that developer Beethoven and Dinosaur spent that little bit extra moolah to license all of the songs in perpetuity. That means, presuming the heat death of the universe doesn't happen first, Mixtape will be available to purchase indefinitely. Publisher Annapurna also made it clear on Bwitter that those saying the game would be delisted because of licensing issues "was a lie", so that puts a pretty firm cap on that one.

One important lesson in storytelling is that it's a story and being compelling and interesting is typically more important than actual accuracy. Accuracy can help ground the setting, but it's not the only detail and sometimes it can even backfire if audiences have a misconception about the past (which they often do) like for instance basically everything you know about the Vikings outfits is made up. Likewise much of the cultural understanding about pirates came from Treasure Island, not real world pirates. Audiences can actually get upset about a story not being realistic because the author was too accurate and didn't fit their misunderstanding. This happened with the TV show Rome where their colorful outfits were seen as unrealistic by many viewers despite apparently being the most historically accurate part of it.

Same thing can happen with language as our vocabulary changes over time. You aren't going to hear "He was a silly, awful, and gay man who regularly engages in intercourse" to mean "He was a harmless, inspiring and happy man who regularly partakes in social conversations" in a period piece because that sounds stupid nowadays and would take the audience out of immersion even if they could figure out what was actually being said and didn't take it as an insulting remark being made.

The problem with Mixtape isn't that they made a historical mistake (although it does hurt more that the mistake is actually obvious to the nostalgia audience they're pandering to) because if the story or gameplay was meaningfully compelling then it would just be a funny little thing that people joked about and it'd get patched out. The problem with Mixtape is that it's dogshit. The characters are unlikeable douches with no character growth and the storytelling is just nostalgiabait garbage. The whole thing with rewinding wrong is just indicative of how little care and passion actually seems to have been put into this "passion piece" where they didn't even bother to get the main thing in any detail.

Kind of a waste of words from all sides, tbh; the problem with Mixtape isn't that it lies about the past, the problem with Mixtape is that it's a shit videogame.

The only reason anyone took notice was because it got 10/10s from the usual suspects, and because gamers simply can't handle when someone is wrong about a videogame and/or when websites make shit up for clicks or to give attention to a game that involves their friends and family or social causes they like, it became the drama du jour for people with too much time and not enough employment.

Audiences can actually get upset about a story not being realistic because the author was too accurate and didn't fit their misunderstanding.

My favorite example of this is older movies where they put hoofbeat foley over scenes where people are riding horses through a sandy desert. Hooves don't make that sound on sand, but people got uncomfortable watching scenes where the audio cue wasn't there.

TV Tropes has a list of examples. The creators of Gladiator originally intended to depict the gladiators doing celebrity endorsements for products, but worried that audiences would find this silly and anachronistic, even it's historically accurate and well-documented.

No they didn't. Most gladiators were slaves. Gladiators did appear on products, but, specific named gladiators are unlikely, and they didn't get money from them.

Of course this reference is just something someone says on the Internet, but so is the original one.

I think there's wires crossed a bit since AFAIK Charioteers were the Roman Athletes that essentially managed to best ape the modern celebrity landscape.

The creators of Gladiator originally intended to depict the gladiators doing celebrity endorsements for products, but worried that audiences would find this silly and anachronistic, even it's historically accurate and well-documented.

Wait what? Say more about this?

I don't know about product endorsements, but in Latin class in highschool, I recall translating some text from actual Roman times that described some specific gladiator as causing women to swoon or get weak in the knees or somesuch (probably some different idiom that I'm not remembering now), and our teacher explaining that top gladiators were legitimate celebrities. I never followed up on it to confirm with independent research, but product endorsements would seem in line with that.

Yeah. I was scratching my head reading this too.

Regarding vaporwave, I think you are missing that it is not supposed to be nostalgia for the general 90s/00s but nostalgia for the computing of the era. This was when computing was still primarily by and for 50 year old suits working in drop-ceiling cubicles at IBM or some insurance company, plus their occasional tone-deaf attempts at reaching out to wider markets. Ads for Bryce, Lotus 1-2-3 and "I'm a PC", not Budweiser. Visions of the future for stodgy professional adults already half buried with the past. Smooth jazz and elevator music is a lot closer to the soundscape of those types of lives than, I don't know, Kylie Minogue.

Movies... my experience of that era was in Germany, but older movies were definitely a separate category that was widely enjoyed and discussed, in part due to the nature of cable TV. When one of the major channels ran an old James Bond, this was an event (sometimes even announced by an ad campaign in public transport or the like), and half the kids in my class could be expected to have watched it with their parents or at least taped it on VCR to watch later.

I largely missed the MC era (though I once took a carpool ride with two chain-smoking punk students who played their techno mixtape for the whole 5 hours), but people definitely shared burned CDs and later preloaded MP3 players with those they were trying to hit on?

I’m sure a big draw towards vaporware is nostalgia for the old Internet.

it is not supposed to be nostalgia for the general 90s/00s but nostalgia for the computing of the era. This was when computing was still primarily by and for 50 year old suits working in drop-ceiling cubicles at IBM or some insurance company, plus their occasional tone-deaf attempts at reaching out to wider markets.

Lolwhut?

That might describe the early to mid 80s but in the early 90s nearly every one of the people in my upper elementary school class had a computer at home and gaming was usually one of the main uses. By the mid to late 90s every desk job was computerized and IBM and insurance companies were known mostly for being particularly stuffy.

The BLS has an interesting piece on household computer ownership in the 1990s broken down by education level and race. The overall rate went from 15% in 1990 to 35% in 1997, but households headed by a college graduate went from 23% to 56%. It didn't take long for it to become a majority though - that was around the year 2000.

I don't think this was usual. My father got a computer in 1997 or so and it was a big deal as a professional to have a PC.

I could see having a PC or Mac being a big deal in 1987 but to get one in the family only in 1997 would have been either intentional ludditism (typically by old people), a rare Amiga holdout or a major outlier here (likely due to never recovering from getting laid off during the early 90s recession). The question in 1997 was whether you already had dialup internet or were only planning on getting it soonish. If someone had suggested then that "computers were just for 50 year old suits in IBM and insurance companies", they would have been laughed at by the normies.

1997 is around when we got our first computer. We were kinda poor. Plenty of other families I knew from school didn't have one either. They didn't truly become a normal household appliance until the early 00s.

Just to add my own piece to this, my family never got a home computer till 2001 for my birthday. I remember cause 9/11 happened two weeks later. I think you're the one thats atypical. Although I did grow up in a poor rural area. Maybe you grew up in a big city and thats why you think everyone had a computer in the 90s?

to be fair, 4bpp wrote

Movies... my experience of that era was in Germany

Is there any other explanation needed? DW.com reported in 2025 how Germany has difficulties get past the fax machine. And in 1990s Germany wasn't even that much an outlier. Here is OECD paper "Access to and Use of Information Technologies at Home" from 1997. According to Table 5.1, percentage of households equipped with personal computer was <30% in all countries presented in the table, except for Denmark (32%). France, Spain and Japan were barely above 10% in 1995. In the same year, Swedish average computer ownership was 27.6%, and only the very upper education cohort (2+ years of university or more) broke above 50%. For a Swede with any other educational background, it was more common not to have a computer at home than have one.

Sounds like that kids in your upper elementary school class had quite young and educated parental background? (Or perhaps you didn't notice the kids without computers? My parents were below-median income, when I grew old enough to realize that, I became very hesitant to invite classmates over to visit because I had much less cool stuff to show, there wasn't cool things to do, and the apartment was small.)

When I searched "90s PC ad", this and this were the first two non-Apple hits (both dorky cyberspace digital nature CG), followed by this (office stuff). Are you sure it was not your experience that was atypical?

The TV ads were stuffy garbage but it's not like consumers cared about those. Those ads were aimed at companies (and particularly managers) due to a 486 still costing a small fortune in 1992 and showing typical "manager pie chart" on the screen. There's a reason Apple made this campaign to poke fun at the corporate PC ad aesthetic.

And yes, I'm very sure my experience was typical for the era. If anything, I personally was lagging behind my peers with us only getting a computer in 1990 (money was somewhat tight with my mom being a single mother with three kids). When I started high school in the mid 90s, I distinctly recall all the teachers going out of their way to say "For gods sake, please write your home essays on a computer instead of by hand" (which stuck in my mind because our bitchy upper elementary school Finnish teacher liked to claim "You'll need to write everything with cursive in high school" which turned out to be the exact opposite of the truth). Computing was ubiquituous but the TV ads and similar "official" media representation lagged behind the situation on the ground. In 1994 when I had finally saved enough money to buy a decent computer of my own (a 486sx with a whopping 4 MB of ram - far from what would have been high end at the time), a school acquaitance practically begged me to play dialup Doom multiplayer with him and he was the very opposite of any sort of computer nerd (I had to walk him through the modem setup on the phone).

The problem with basically all the -wave "genres" (except new wave which looked to the future instead of to a fake past) is that they get the timeline wildly incorrect and mix and match made up fake "memories", assumptions from a bunch of hand drawn magazine cover art and only bits and pieces of what was the historical reality of the purported eras.

The problem with basically all the -wave "genres"

These are only problems if you consider these neowave genres to be historical preservation museums, which they aren't (the original music still exists for that). They're mashup/remix genres; the problems you describe are actually features.

I would agree with that except the fans of said genres themselves make the claim that they're "retro" to those decades when that is very obviously not the case. One such claim is right here in this thread. More commonly this happens with synthwave where people always claim it's "back to the 80s" when the actual 80s were nothing like that either in vibe, compositions, arrangements or sounds (the only thing "80s" about synthwave is the drum sounds and the visuals which harken to a very specific subset of 80s cover art).

Tangentially related, I once read someone arguing that artistic nostalgia moves in twenty-year cycles, as writers, directors etc. grow up and make artworks either set in or heavily reminiscent of the time period in which they grew up. This phenomenon is best illustrated by the music video for "Buddy Holly" by Weezer, directed by Spike Jonze, which uses trick photography to make it look like the band is performing in an episode of Happy Days. That is, it's a video from the 1990s which is a nostalgic throwback to a sitcom from the 1970s, which sitcom was itself a nostalgic throwback to the 1950s in which it is set.

True to form, various films and TV shows from the 2000s had a nostalgic 80s setting (e.g. Donnie Darko, set in October 1988: writer-director Richard Kelly explained that he decided to base the setting on his own childhood rather than setting his coming-of-age story in the present day and getting the teenage slang and cultural references wrong). The British synth-pop duo La Roux made a name for themselves in the late 2000s with a sound that knowingly called back to the synth-pop of Eurhythmics and Depeche Mode.

But I feel like we've been stuck in a bit of an 80s nostalgia rut for a long time. A full decade after Donnie Darko, Drive starring Ryan Gosling received praise for its soundtrack full of modern electronic songs knowingly calling back to 80s synth-pop, and graphic design choices aping Risky Business. Four years later, Stranger Things came out on Netflix, with its exaggerated and heightened portrayal of the 1980s of Steven Spielberg. In 2020, The Weeknd attracted critical adulation for mixing up his pop-R&B sound with an album incorporating retro 80s synth tones and drum machines. And that's not even touching on video games, wherein you could spend a lifetime playing nothing but the retraux 8-bit shovelware clogging up Steam mimicking the look and sound of NES and SNES games, and never run out of titles. One reason you can tell that the 80s nostalgia trend has outstayed its welcome is because it's being practised by artists who have no nostalgic attachment to the 1980s of their own childhood because they hadn't been born yet: The Weeknd was born in 1990.

In 2026, there is absolutely nothing new or surprising about movies, TV shows or music knowingly incorporating the aesthetics of the 1980s: it amounted to flogging a dead horse a full decade ago. But creators seem strangely reluctant to progress to the next phase, wherein 90s nostalgia reigns supreme for a generation, or at least for a decade. (The only medium proving an exception to this trend is video games, in which 8-bit RPGs and platformers have belatedly given way to so-called "boomer shooters" and survival horror titles mimicking the graphics of the original Silent Hill on the PS1.)

And I suspect this is illustrative of a certain kind of cultural stagnation. For most of the twentieth century, a combination of cultural shifts and technological developments meant that the music of one decade sounded completely different from that of a decade prior. A pop song from 1955 sounds nothing like one from 1945, likewise for 1965, 1975 and so on. But by the 90s, the pace of change had slowed to the point that the era no longer felt especially distinct from the one following. A pop song from 1985 sounds completely different from a pop song from 1995, but a pop song from 2005 doesn't sound that different from a pop song from 1995. The 1980s are hence the last decade with a distinct aesthetic which you can knowingly mimic in a way that feels different from the present day: since then we've been trapped in the Eternal 90s/00s. Announcing that your album is a consciously nostalgic throwback to the sound of the 1990s hence comes off as oxymoronic, like announcing that it's a consciously nostalgic throwback to 2026.

This hypothesis also explains why, as mentioned above, video games are the only medium doing the 90s nostalgia thing, and why I think it's unlikely we'll see a trend of 00s nostalgia in video games any time soon. The 1990s were the last decade in which graphics looked meaningfully distinct from those of the decade following. I'm not claiming that the AAA graphics of 2026 look identical to those of 2004, but it's been a case of slow incremental marginal improvement, wholly unlike the quantum-leap sensation of going from Half-Life to Half-Life 2. I think the days of being awed when a new video game achieves a heretofore-thought-impossible level of graphical fidelity are decisively over.

This phenomenon is best illustrated by the music video for "Buddy Holly" by Weezer, directed by Spike Jonze, which uses trick photography to make it look like the band is performing in an episode of Happy Days. That is, it's a video from the 1990s which is a nostalgic throwback to a sitcom from the 1970s, which sitcom was itself a nostalgic throwback to the 1950s in which it is set.

I always thought the canonical example was Grease, in which everything except the cars was a giveaway that the film was made in the 1970s and not the 1950s in which it was set.

Grease (both its original stage production and film adaptation) and Happy Days are both prominent examples of the wave of fifties nostalgia that swept the US during the 1970s. I chose the "Buddy Holly" music video to illustrate that the effect is cyclical: 90s looking back fondly on media from the 70s which was itself looking back fondly on the 50s.

If we're talking about nostalgia in music, hip-hop has been nostalgic about the 90s since about 1999.

While it's niche enough for not everyone to know you don't need to do much digging to see it. Part of this is just the rediscovery and popularization of strange underground 90s stuff like Texas chopped & screwed tapes or Memphis underground, part of it is redoing the most popular G-funk and boom bap styles from L.A and New York.

Mid 90s saw the term old school start to pick up in usage to refer to anything from the 1980s right the way up to the early 90s.

I feel like it's mostly a cohort size effect. In the 90s and 00s, bankable nostalgia was mostly about the 50s and 60s, because boomers were the ones indulging in it. Now, millenials are a growing demographic indulging in nostalgia, and the era that boomers, gen-x and millenials could all compromise on was the 80s, boomers were taking power over from their own parents, gen x was in its teen years and some millenials were kids.

As boomers die, I feel the late 90s and early 00s are going to have their time in the limelight. I'm less sure about the 10s. Like the 70s it felt like a transitional decade few people are going to be nostalgic for.

Both "60's nostalgia" and "80's nostalgia" involve a lot of nostalgia for works released in years beginning 197. Both the Rolling Stones and disco peaked in the calendar 1970's, for example.

I am somewhat convinced that an under-discussed part of this is that post-internet, it’s hard to have nostalgic feelings for media as it’s always right there. I could go down my teenage media rabbit holes rather easily. I can binge Saved by the Bell and Nirvana today in 2026. It’s available on YouTube, streaming services and streaming radio. How can I get nostalgic enough to want to see something that captures the vibe of those things, when I can just watch the shows and listen to the music and not miss it.

But I feel like we've been stuck in a bit of an 80s nostalgic rut for a long time.

I read somewhere that Stranger Things could only have been set in the 1980s, because the 'kids on bikes having an adventure' only works if the kids are allowed outside. The decline does seem to have happened a bit later than that, but the principle is correct.

The idea that high schoolers in 1995 would listen to Devo would have seemed laughable.

I went to three high schools in two different states during the 90s, and "Whip It" was something I'd hear in the parking lot every week. The only thing that had as much staying power was Limp Bizkit.

Christ that really brings back some memories. That was either widespread or you and I might have been roughly in the same state locale.

Rural mid Atlantic?

Nope. Coastal city boy here who was more inland.

[Did mixtapes ever exist?]

Hmm, while I am probably too young to have made mixtapes on cassette tapes, it is absolutely the case that people made lots of mixtapes for each other on CDs in the mp3 and CD-burning heyday. Perhaps this is to your point that music was incredibly expensive prior to being forced down by mp3 pirating (we can call it what it was while also acknowledging that the labels and artists deserved it). But I am pretty willing to take media's word that music nerds made each other mixtapes back in the day. What is kind of funny is that I do not really think people make playlists for each other today; it seems like it has gotten too cheap! (Though maybe I am too old now. What does happen is my wife texts me 20 different songs instead of making a playlist like I beg her to!)

On The Jesus and Mary Chain, I think it is quite possible to have been exposed to them via college radio (I still discover obscure things via college radio) or even a relatively alternative, err, alternative station. JMC has a few very melodic songs that could easily have been championed by DJs or older siblings.

In my experience of the 90's "I made you a mixtape/burned CD" would have been kind of wierd and overly personal. "I made one for all of us to listen to in the car", OTOH, was normal and exciting.

And FWIW, I remember my goth friends in the late 90's early 2000's talking about Joy Division, which I think I have still never listened to in any capacity.

If you're talking about '99 onward it was an entirely different situation as Napster made a whole world of music available that hadn't been accessible before, and the internet made music discovery a lot easier. I had heard of Joy Division in the '90s, but only because as a music nerd I had a bunch of record review guides (which are sitting on a bookshelf behind me as I type this). I had no particular interest in them, but trying to find well-reviewd records from major bands was a chore because you were at the mercy of what the record store had in stock. Floor space was limited, and they had to stock CDs and cassettes, so they were only going to carry what they could sell, which meant mostly new releases and compilations. It seems odd to think about now, but as someone who was a huge Beatles fan I don't recall any record store having all their studio albums in stock at the same time, even after the surge in interest generated by the Anthology documentary. The Anthology compilations, which are collections of unreleased material that nobody cares about any more, were always well-stocked, on the other hand. What people liked was largely defined by what was available, and unless there was some big cultural change, catalog releases that didn't sell well to begin with weren't likely to be available outside of special order, which was usually limited to independent shops in urban areas that high school kids didn't shop at.

If you're talking about '99 onward it was an entirely different situation as Napster made a whole world of music available that hadn't been accessible before, and the internet made music discovery a lot easier.

Yeah, I went through adolescence right during that transition. There was a kind of an awkward midpoint where downloaded songs were very common, but only a few people I knew had a proper CD burner, so having all that newly accessible music in a portable format (or for anything other than computer speakers) was somewhat more special. This was especially relevant as we started getting cars.

Surely you've heard "Love Will Tear Us Apart".

I've heard it once, and it's simply a terrible song when performed by a single-note-range vocalist. This version is miles better than the original.

For that heresy, I will tie you to a chair and force you to listen to the eight-minute extended remix of Vienna, you heathen!

Well if original Joy Division isn't good enough for you, how about when they became New Order?

After giving it 30s, I can confidently say I have never heard that song in my life.

I'm genuinely surprised.

Kids these days, eh?

Growing up in the 90s, I recall some of my friends sharing tapes with recordings of songs from the radio and CDs with each other. But what I don't recognize is people calling them "mixtapes." That was something you might share specifically with your boy-/girlfriend as a way to convey your affection, and the exact specific order mattered. Tapes you shared with friends were just tapes that had songs on them, because merely having the song available for play - even with the delay it takes to rewind/fast forward the tape to the specific track - was something very valuable.

I don't remember anyone in the 90s making tapes for their boyfriend or girlfriend, just people occasionally making tapes for friends, but the order never mattering. If you had a CD with three really good songs on it you wanted to include you'd just put them one after the other and then go to the next CD. Like you said, just having a copy of the song was the point, because music was expensive. "Mixtape" is a term from hip hop that got appropriated for the phenomenon after people stopped buying cassettes. Even in High Fidelity, they're called compilation tapes, but most people didn't call them anything. When we first got a car with a tape deck in it circa 1995 my mom borrowed a bunch of my uncle's CDs and made a tape that she proceeded to play in the car ad nauseum for the next several years. We always called it "The Tape". I remember getting sick of it and finding another tape that my other uncle had made her from stuff dubbed of of albums in the '80s, and we called it "The Other Tape".

Yeah I didn't grow up with cassettes but my parents had a large collection. My mom in particular had a bunch of mixtapes that people had given her in the 80s and 90s

I remember the dual sided cassette tapes being brought out from storage for Christmas holiday songs when I was very young. And needing to rewind them too. Hard to believe time goes by so fast.

The idea that anyone would discuss their favorite 80s movie is equally absurd. First, nobody really thought of 80s movies as a distinct category. A more accurate description would have been asking about movies shown on cable ad nauseum. And the only 80s movies with any purchase among high school kids at the time would have been kids stuff like the Goonies or ET, or maybe comedies like Ghostbusters. Nobody was discussing something as obviously dated as Aliens. And nobody was certainly seeking out movies from the 80s as an exercise in nostalgia.

I was a kid in the 80s and I remember thinking about 80s movies as a distinct category in the 90s. I'd imprinted on the specifically 80s thing where movies had a central scifi or supernatural premise, took it reasonably seriously and had plenty of practical special effects. Aliens and Blade Runner were ten years old but they still had huge cultural cachet, as did the Star Wars movies with the newest one being from 1983. I remember wondering what happened to 80s moviemaking and why new movies in the 90s didn't feel the same anymore. I still feel like there were clear inflection points in movies around 1980 (maybe because Star Wars introduced the scifi blockbuster concept) and then again around 1990 (maybe CGI effects changed the aesthetics and cheap direct-to-video stuff started eating the market of the expensive tentpole films?)

I recall literally discussing about our favorite 80s action movies with my friends as a teenager in the mid 90s. The transition to 90s wasn’t super abrupt but Terminator 2 clearly started to look and feel different compared movies made in the mid 80s.

90's action was definitely different from 80's action. Think Nicolas Cage or Jean Claude Van Damme as an Action Hero compared to Stallone or Schwarzenegger.

While 80's action was Big Muscles, Big Guns, Big Boobs, 90's was a lot more stylised. Political correctness had barely begun to seep in thankfully.

Political correctness had barely begun to seep in thankfully.

And political correctness was almost universally seen as a bad thing by younger people as something out of touch moral guardians were trying to impose to remove everything fun.

How did we lose these moral antibodies? Best I can think of is that they adapted to the busybodies from the right, which were more church/establishment coded, than the left-flavored ones we have now.

We didn't lose them. 2010s wokeness won against considerable opposition, including opposition from other forms of leftism. (2016 Bernie was the less-woke candidate). The question is "Why did 2010s wokeness overcome the antibodies when 1990s PC couldn't?"

There are a few obvious stories (and I have no idea what the relevant contributions are):

  • It really was academia. 1990s PC lost in most places, but they won in certain parts of the academy, and used their academic platform to indoctrinate a future generation of elites.
  • The Sailer/Hannania theory - long-term culture change caused by the normalisation of anti-discrimination compliance activity in universities and workplaces. People in leadership roles in the 1990s had grown up in a world where anti-discrimination law was new and felt like an outside imposition. Power leadership roles in the 2010s had grown up in a world where of course it was illegal to mistreat members of protected groups.
  • The people who should hold the line on far-left idiocy (namely the establishment centre-left) can't because Hilary Clinton goes full wokestupid in the course of attacking Bernie from the left on cultural issues in 2016.
  • Social media made everyone dumber and more susceptible to bad ideas. It also enabled a new type of pile-on, where a random small business can find itself on the receiving end of several thousand requests to fire an employee. Jon Ronson published So You've Been Publicly Shamed in 2015 and about half the shamings he is talking about are social media pileons on randos whose unwoke behaviour went viral.

The question is "Why did 2010s wokeness overcome the antibodies when 1990s PC couldn't?"

Policy Starvation.

Politics runs on hope. "Hope" was the theme that won Obama the White House. People organize politically because they hope to secure better outcomes; having so organized, if those better outcomes are not secured, obviously the previous political organization didn't work and you need to try something else. Blues expected things to improve significantly when Obama replaced Bush in 2008. Six years later in 2014, it was pretty obvious that the current set of Progressive policies weren't delivering sufficient progress, and so Blues collectively pushed for more radical policies.

Feminism and race were two of the most prominent drivers of Social Justice as an ascendant ideology, and both seem like strong examples of policy starvation. There was a really good article I would dearly like to relocate that talked about the detente established around the turn of the century between blacks and whites, wherein Whites would help improve conditions for Blacks, and Blacks would stop calling Whites racist. Well, what do you do when, after a decade or more of this, conditions for Blacks haven't measurably improved? Likewise for women: previous waves of feminism rewrote the social contract between the sexes on a purely consent-based framework, and yet lots and lots of women still feel like they're being violated. The only category for violation their model recognizes is of consent, and so they model the problem as a rape epidemic, and frame their new policies to match.

In both cases, Social Justice went the way it did because people found that their current policies couldn't sustain hope in a better future, and so turned to more radical alternatives. I guess I'd say that this bolsters rather than replaces the stories you listed.

  • The Academy probably was not aiming for 2014 Social Justice specifically, but policy starvation forced them to abandon left-neoliberalism in favor of something more radical.
  • Anti-discrimination law didn't work. Outcomes for Blacks remained quite bad. Therefore, it became a floor rather than a ceiling, and policy starvation forced those concerned to aim for something more radical.
  • The establishment center-left couldn't hold the line because their credibility was already burned; they'd been ruling for at least the last six years; you can't promise hope and change when your government and its consequences are why people are hoping for change.
  • Social Media offered what appeared to be new (and more radical!) methods for solving problems: national-level mob action, for one obvious one. These methods hadn't yet been discredited, so people could hope in them.

Of these, it seems to me that Social Media is the closest to being a genuinely novel development rather than an incremental evolution of what came before. Smartphones and related technology radically reshaped the media ecosystem in a very short period of time, and in a way that heavily favored upstarts and rabble-rousers and heavily disadvantaged the establishment.

1990s PC didn’t really ‘lose’. It experienced a backlash from just after the LA riots (which, occurring in a big, wealthy, progressive city that was the home of the entertainment industry, turned off many white liberals from the most radical proposals of that age), the OJ trial, and the extremely high levels of violent crime in the early 1990s (this is an underappreciated reason; white liberals were far more likely to be mugged in NYC in 1992 than they were in 2014) that lasted through to around 2001.

After that 9/11 froze the nascent culture war into a weird stasis that lasted for a few years where you had a surge in Bush II era symbolic patriotism, Dixie chicks cancellation and so on. Then the housing crisis, Obama election and great recession took a lot of oxygen out of the culture war for a while and it took until 2012/13/14 for things to heat up again. The actual original backlash was in the 70s to early 80s at the end of the civil rights era when courts blocked things like quota-based affirmative action (in 1977 I think).

I think this is a reasonable comment. My mis-spent youth as a student politician gave me a front-row seat for the flippening around 2000 (I think the 1999 "Battle of Seattle" WTO protests was the turning point) when over the space of about two years being an activist on PC issues suddenly became cringe and all the cool kids were protesting about green or economic issues. You can definitely make the case that the people pushing 1990's PC were never beaten, they just got bored. If that is true, it follows that when there was another flippening in the early 2010's (I see the failure of Occupy as the turning point) and social justice activism became cool again they were just able to pick up from where they left off.

A thought I had over a decade ago is that my generation (elder millennial) grew up with the notion "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross" being fed to us so consistently and ubiquitously that the notion that it could come while burning the American flag and destroying the cross never even accidentally crossed our minds. Thing is, of course, we were also force fed the idea of challenging power structures and rebelling against the hegemon, which would necessarily involve challenging such notions that we grew up swimming in, and it used to confuse me why so many people seemed not only to refuse to take this obvious step but to be downright hostile to it.

Political correctness had barely begun to seep in thankfully.

When the remake of Friday the 13th came out years back, a few friends and I wanted to go watch it in theaters. The movie wasn’t that great but there were multiple points where the audience went wild at the violence and nudity in it and it made us laugh, because it all felt like we were giving the finger to all the new releases down the hall which were too “puritanical” of the politically correct flavor, when the atmosphere still felt that “being offensive” and edgy wasn’t occasionally permissible. I remember all of us kept talking about that after we got out. It was a refreshing feeling we all had.

I felt that way with "Joker" in 2019

To be fair to Mixtape, I understand that the protagonist is a huge music nerd, and the game is about her last day in her hometown before driving across the country to give her mixtape to some music producer to try to get a job. As someone who had even less interest in music in the 90s than I do now, I don't know how much that would make her knowledge of obscure and 80s bands more justifiable, though. The point that no teenager in the 90s had nostalgia for the 80s strikes me as very very true, though.

With respect to the rewinding a tape via pencil scene, one important aspect of it is that she specifically spins the wrong hole to rewind the tape. One doesn't need to have first-hand experience to know this: basic understanding of physics should tell anyone that you have to spin the reel that has less tape around it, and spin it such it "pulls" the exposed part of the tape towards that side. In the game, she sticks the pencil into the one that has more tape, somehow "pushing" the tape into the other reel instead of out of the cassette, as would actually happen. Perhaps it's a bug that will be patched, but it's fascinating to me that this obvious physical error got through. Reminds me of the Wonder Woman film where she blatantly doesn't protect her feet while rushing some foxholes during WW1.

In the case of Red Dead Redemption I'd argue that this is more forgivable, as the further back one goes in history the less source material one has. After all, nobody who remembers the 1890s is alive today to tell you what you got wrong, so one can be forgiven for making some assumptions out of necessity.

This is insane. Where the 2020s medium-left person's values sit is an incredibly unusual spot across the breadth of human history which has been facilitated by a ton of technology, cultural meshing and deliberate massaging towards that spot. This is like saying that there should be a Prius in Red Dead Redemption 2 since nobody in the first-hand historical record explicitly said 'there were no economical cars in this era'

Actually, it would be awesome if there was a Prius in RDR2…

I have just the game for you!

Whoa. You aren’t lying. I am… definitely going to try this!

Don't get your hopes up. That project has been in limbo for a long time now

It's ultimately a lie, but it's a lie in the same sense that all nostalgia is a lie.

Be careful not to prove too much here. If all nostalgia is just based on one's subjectively biased viewpoint and is never grounded in anything objective, then that would imply that nothing ever gets objectively worse for anyone. But that can't be true. Sometimes the past actually was just better.

There's something about vaporwave that's deeply resonant for me. I was a small child in the 90s, but I do still have a number of distinct memories of those years.

I do think that vaporwave captures something essential about the dreamlike quality of those years (as I experienced them). You might naturally respond with, well, all of your experiences are a bit more dreamlike when you're a small child. And you'd be right. Although, if we want to analyze things in terms of "objective material conditions", the 80s and 90s presented a very brief and very unique window when consumer computing technology was becoming widely available, but technology (and the world at large) hadn't yet been thoroughly demystified by the infinite free information we have available on wikipedia/youtube/LLMs/etc. The computer was like a portal to another dimension, filled with bright promises of the future; there could be anything in there. If the kids on the playground told you that you could unlock Mew in Pokemon RBY, and you didn't have internet at home, you really had no way of knowing if they were telling the truth or not except for just exploring the game yourself. Part of what vaporwave is trying to evoke is the early mystique and promises of consumer technology, and the failure of those utopian promises to materialize.

As you were intimating, part of what vaporwave is trying to accomplish is to get you to construct your own nostalgic relationship to the past, rather than simply accurately presenting the 90s as they actually were. Listening to Floral Shoppe alone in your room? Kind of whatever. Listening to Floral Shoppe while walking around the dead mall 20 minutes down the street from the house where you grew up, where you used to spend so much time with your parents when you were little, virtually the only person in the whole building in the waning hours of a Saturday evening in August, a once vibrant shopping center full of families and children, now almost abandoned, every shop boarded up except for the GNC which is the final holdout? One of the most ethereal and otherworldly experiences I've ever had.

Anemoia: “nostalgia for a time or a place one has never known”

I used to think this concept was incoherent, and yet listening to Holst's "Jupiter" makes me feel patriotic for a planet I've never set foot on and never will (because one physically cannot "set foot" on it).

Because one of the themes from Jupiter is used as the tune for the British patriotic hymn I Vow to Thee, my Country, it makes me feel patriotic for Britain and not Jupiter. But Holst didn't intend that use and his daughter (who was also a composer) said that the well-known secondary use ruined the original meaning of Jupiter.

Also known as: what listening to city pop will trigger in you.

Sometimes the past actually was just better.

There's something about vaporwave that's deeply resonant for me. I was a small child in the 90s, but I do still have a number of distinct memories of those years.

I basically only listen to polular music from the very late 70s to 1990 or so. The catch: I only started doing so in my early 30s. I didn't really listen to music seriously until in my late teens at which point I started with metal and then classic rock and prog from the late 60s / early 70s. If the "we get stuck to what was popular when we were teens / young adults" actually applied, I'd be listening to completely different music than what actually I listen to.

Anything made after 1990 is tainted by either what they now call r'n'b (aka ”urban contemporary”), rap / hiphop or grunge influences or is generic shitty pop or EDM slop and I’ve always detested all of those. I can take any number of pop hits (as in actual ”pop” genre, not just pop rock) from the 80s like Madonna, Michael Jackson, A-Ha, Duran Duran, Phil Collins etc and they still sound massively better than any pop music made since. I’ll even take what would now be considered ”B-list artists” like Bananarama any day over any modern popular music.

There may be a tendency, in such reviews (and I know less about games I suspect than you even claim to know) is that we are captured/limited by our own experiences of the era. I received (and gave away) many mixtapes in the early nineties. You'd write clever titles on the sticker and click out the tab so it couldn't be accidentally erased. I received some really good ones that introduced me to music to which I wouldn't normally have been exposed. You used a pencil also if the tape was particularly stiff or tightly wound, for whatever reason. It wasn't cool. It was just something you did. I can't comment on how 90s teens would have acted as I was mid to late twenties in the 90s. I generally agree with your larger point that film and media people don't get eras right when it's trivially easy to triangulate actual human perspectives of people who lived through them. Don't get me started on how the South is represented (or southern accents).

I actually would like to get you started on how the South is represented. I'm pretty unfamiliar with the culture down there, so I imagine it would be interesting to hear your thoughts.

I'll try to make an effort post at some point, thanks for the interest.

I'm not George, but the accent thing drives me nuts. I've lived all over the south, but the one that infused my speech patterns during the language forming part of my childhood was the Kentucky/Tennessee/West Virginia Appalachian accent.

It's distinct from the lowland accent that you hear in Eastern Virginia, which is itself somewhat distinct from what you hear in Georgia (and Atlanta has its own thing going on). Louisiana has two distinct accents (the northern one sounds more like Alabama). Western Kentucky and Tennessee sound different than the Eastern half.

Despite all that, the only one you ever really see portrayed in the media is an abominable blend of Georgia and West Kentucky. It doesn't make sense. It's like blending a Boston accent and a Brooklyn accent into one voice for a character who was born and raised in West Covina.

I've previously posted on the Motte about the Swedish state-funded Investigative Committee For a Future with Children (Swed. Utredningen för en framtid med barn) with instructions to look into the recent decline in fertility and suggest solutions to the problem. The fourth report dropped a few weeks back, this time focusing on involuntary childlessness and infertility: “Involuntary childlessness: prevalence, causes, treatment and consequences” As before, here's a link in case you know Swedish or want to use an AI to give you the uptake. https://framtidmedbarn.se/rapport/nr-4-ofrivillig-barnloshet-forekomst-orsaker-behandling-och-konsekvenser/

In contrast to the other three reports previously released, this one actually got some major government attention, and shorly after it was made public an extra investment into fertility treatments was announced. That's all well and good, and I'm sure it will help suffering couples – but I am also increasingly worried that the committee is losing the thread. These last two reports (the previous of which focused on economic differences between different family formations) have deftly dodged all the bigger questions at play in this crisis. Biologically-related infertility is obviously an exceedingly small cause of declining fertility, and in any serious discussion it must be pretty far down the list of priorities. I get the feeling this particular issue is getting a whole report's worth of attention not because it's key to a solution, but because it's conveninent and doesn't involve questioning anyone's life choices by wrestling with difficult and dangerous questions.

One of the difficult and dangerous questions I've wrestled with recently is a particular form of dissonance. It might surprise a few of you, but Sweden actually has an extensive Total Defense Duty (yes, literal translation) technically applicable to all Swedish citizens between the age of 16 and 70. Everyone and their grandma really is expected to make significant sacrifices, perhaps even give their lives, in the event of war. In the information pamphlet the government regularly sends out to facilitate crisis-preparation there's a classic mantra (in the more literal Sanskrit meaning of that noun, man-tra, i.e. support or instrument for the mind) that I think has been included since centuries back – alla uppgifter om att motståndet ska upphöra är falska – all reports that resistance is to cease are false. Liberty or death. Noble stuff!

Yet the most central part of ensuring the continued existence of a sovereign Swedish state, i.e. the creation of a new generation of Swedes, is apparently not even a moral, let alone a legal, duty on the part of the citizen? Everyone is expected to die fighting the Russians, but it's wholly acceptable to make choices whose aggregate consequences ends with Sweden going the way of the Dodo? That old Goldfinger-line pops into my head. "You expect me to have children?" "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!" Really, what is the point of this gung-ho never-surrender sentiment, and for that matter all the increases in defence spending in Europe, if we're just going to allow death to conquer us all from within? There are ideas here which should be connected, yet they seem to lie strewn all about in disorder in a way that's both frustrating and disheartening to see.

Apart from that, I'm also not entirely sure unreservedly making it even easier to postpone getting children is truly the right way to approach this problem. Unpopular though it might be among certain cohorts to point out, the solution to declining fertility reasonably also should somehow involve convincing women to have children while they're still young; not enabling every pregnancy to be geriatric.

In short, the material focus in the debate is starting to worry me. I hope that the next reports will be a bit meatier and tackle the larger cultural and ideological questions at play.

Everyone is expected to die fighting the Russians, but it's wholly acceptable to make choices whose aggregate consequences ends with Sweden going the way of the Dodo?

Would everybody do it, though? I think it's a very open question if your average Swede would risk his life vs. either leave or accept life under Russian occupation. The Ukrainian experience shows that quite a lot of men would say "no". I can't blame them; as an American I would keep my head down and/or flee were I in their shoes.

Apart from that, I'm also not entirely sure unreservedly making it even easier to postpone getting children is truly the right way to approach this problem. Unpopular though it might be among certain cohorts to point out, the solution to declining fertility reasonably also should somehow involve convincing women to have children while they're still young; not enabling every pregnancy to be geriatric.

Yeah, a similar thought occurred to me. If it becomes possible to delay parenthood further, perhaps a lot of women will do so, and Sweden is back in the same boat except with a higher percentage of people with Schizophrenia, Autism, etc. Israel is pretty good about supporting fertility treatments, but that's combined with a strong pro-natalist zeitgeist.

Sweden actually has an extensive Total Defense Duty (yes, literal translation) technically applicable to all Swedish citizens between the age of 16 and 70

I strongly suspect that in this case "technically" means "we are going to pretend that the duty applies equally to men and women but in reality everyone knows that if there were an actual Russian invasion, women wouldn't seriously be expected to take up arms. Feminism would go right out the window, at least until the invasion was repelled. Then we would insist that women were the unsung heroes of the resistance."

In the case of government policy regarding fertility, I think it's important to keep this in mind. Because it's difficult to solve these issues without imposing burdens on women. And western governments, being intensely gynocentric, don't like to impose burdens on women.

In contrast to the other three reports previously released, this one actually got some major government attention, and shorly after it was made public an extra investment into fertility treatments was announced.

This is consistent with gynocentrism.

Sweden legitimately has a high percentage of women in the military.

Then they'll have a high percentage of soldiers who drop out when the fighting starts.

My last infantry regiment had a couple hundred women in support roles, we got orders for deployment, and in the four months between orders and deployment we lost a few dozen men and all but one woman. The men had to pretend to be gay or suicidal. The women mostly just got pregnant. You've never seen a baby boom like a military base with deployment looming. You've never seen an abortion boom like a military base the week after the unit deployed.

Only Big Red, a staff sergeant in the motor pool, deployed with us. And she was more of a man than most of us.

Sweden legitimately has a high percentage of women in the military.

According to Wikipedia, 23% of conscripts are female. I wonder how many of those are serving in front line combat roles. And of those, if an actual shooting war broke out, I wonder how many would decide it's a good time to get pregnant.

I think part of the reason is this: It's easy to imagine the supposed Russian threat. It is very unlikely that Sweden would fight Russia any time in the forseeable future, but pretty much anyone in Sweden over the age of 7 or so could imagine a war against Russia, and of course the idea of a war with Russia became much easier to imagine about 4 years ago than it had been before. Fertility rates, on the other hand, are something that only a small fraction of people think about. I don't think I have ever, in my entire life, heard anyone discuss fertility rates "in real life", outside the Internet. Personal fertility, sure, or the fertility of friends and family members. But not fertility rates. That's a topic the discussion of which is mostly confined to certain government circles and to certain usually right-leaning online spaces.

I don't think I have ever, in my entire life, heard anyone discuss fertility rates "in real life", outside the Internet.

Interesting, is this in the US? In Europe in general, but especially in France and Germany, the "demographic transition" has been a permanent fixture in the media and in public discourse for at least 30 years. I have childhood memories of seeing inverted age pyramids in newspapers.

Understandably, since the fertility rate (or "children per family", the more palatable euphemism) has cratered earlier here, and the financial scheme behind their social systems is reliant on young workers. Which means they are even more fucked than all the other countries with low fertility, so at least they are aware of the problem.

This is in the US. That is interesting, I did not know that Europe might have more discussion of the topic coming from "ordinary people".

I'd say it's more in terms of the strain on the pension system, the lack of enough nurses for old people etc. It's more framed as the aging society, and it's the justification for more immigration and there is also hope that robots will help in elderly care. The framing is not really about ending up with too few ethnically [German/French/Swedish/...] people in the long run, but the medium-term practicalities of the age pyramid imbalance. If you frame it in those ethnic terms, it's fringe and a no-no in real life in Western Europe too.

You’re right up my wheelhouse here and there’s too many issues to pick from in Sweden’s case.

Swedish women don’t want many kids because they say it restricts their freedom. It’s taken for granted that children are born when it’s most convenient for one’s career. In the middle class that usually means between 30-35 (which is old for that kind of thing). But the political elite women’s interest are allied with politically elite men’s interest. Nobody there ever discusses the concept of national “duties,” in this way. You simply won’t see it. In Germany 30% of all women are childless. For those with university degrees it’s 40%. Similar attitudes you find in the west. Not many people remember when Macron in France said, “Show me a well educated woman who has decided to have 7, or 8 or 9 children.”

The only real way the TFR problem has been approached offers two solutions: immigration or the Hungary policy. Back in the 30’s and 40’s Gunnar and Alva Myrdal talked about the birth rate even then because it had sharply fallen off as a result of the Great Depression. That was the foundation of the “Folkhemmet,” where preferential loans, subsidized housing, free healthcare and meals, etc., came into play. When their ideas actually got implemented the birth rate went from 1.8 to 2.7 in 10 years.

In Hungary, they follow similar policies. Hungarian parents who have multiple children to become eligible to receive mortgages with no interest by having at least three. If you have four or more, you’re exempt from paying income tax for life. You can also get a grant of eight thousand euros to buy a car but only if it has more than seven seats. In total it’s resulted in something like a 25% increase in children being born. Still below 2.1, but a reversal of the current trend.

You had members of the Swedish left-wing attacking Orban and calling his policies “offensive” and comparing it to Nazi Germany (predictably). You had Annika Strandhall (who’s the Swedish minister of social security) calling it right out of the 1930’s. But anyone of Orban’s stripe should be happy to accept the criticism. He’s a supporter of democracy as is most of his cohort. He’s not a supporter of ‘liberal’ democracy. Annika apparently doesn’t understand that in Hungary and Poland, their political leaders are appointed in general elections.

If I ever meet my relatives over there I want to ask them why in the hell they seem so desperate to emulate the worst aspects of American society? They’ve currently got a massive case of Shitlib Syndrome that’s only metastasizing.

He’s a supporter of democracy as is most of his cohort. He’s not a supporter of ‘liberal’ democracy. Annika apparently doesn’t understand that in Hungary and Poland, their political leaders are appointed in general elections.

Orban was a corrupt, out of touch wannabe autocrat who lost the election in a landslide despite having control over all the mainstream media. Don’t let the culture war stuff fool you, it was just a distraction so that he and his cronies could rob the country blind. He didn’t care about Hungary at all and was happy for the country to stagnate, suffer economically and to cause a brain drain due to his policies, so long as he was in power.

Orban was a corrupt, out of touch wannabe autocrat who lost the election in a landslide despite having control over all the mainstream media. Don’t let the culture war stuff fool you, it was just a distraction so that he and his cronies could rob the country blind. He didn’t care about Hungary at all and was happy for the country to stagnate, suffer economically and to cause a brain drain due to his policies, so long as he was in power.

You are basically just describing the Harris campaign. Not that wild.

This is low effort culture warring. Don't do this.

  • Avoid low-effort participation.
  • Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.

If you are going to make this sort of comparison defend it or explain it.

I don't think it's an accurate comparison though. Orban, with all his faults, was the leader of his campaign and his domain. Harris was an obvious (and quite ridiculous) figurehead to allow The Machine to operate in the same way it already operated under Biden, where nobody is responsible for anything and things just happen. I am not sure which one is worse - authoritarian rule by an energetic kleptocrat or a by an amorphous anonymous blob - but I don't think they are the same thing.

despite having control over all the mainstream media.

Most Hungarians below ~50 or so, like in the rest of the (western) world, are now getting their news from social media, but certainly from online new portals as opposed to traditional mainstream media. Orbán took over a lot of the traditional media, like the county-level (online) newspapers, the public media obviously, but these mainly reach the old generation, pensioners. He did try to, and in some sense managed to, take over the most read news portal Index.hu, but basically when the transfer of ownership happened, the whole staff resigned and then promptly made a competitor Telex.hu, which is by now the second most popular behind Index.hu. And there are other online portals, many professional youtube channels who are against Orbán.

Orbán did try to manufacture social media influencers in a topdown way, this was called Megafon, where they basically received central messaging from the government, they were trained how to produce social media content etc, but it was very fake and weak. Then in the campaign they started the "Fight Club" which was about teaching Orbán-supporters to get into comment fights on Facebook to defend the government. Orbán made a WhatsApp group then a Facebook group for this, and he literally sent a list of topics to comment about, for some time every morning (to tens of thousands of group members, so it was not some super secret thing). Then they made the "Digital Civic Circles", which was basically "Fight Club"-light, basically thematic Facebook groups with some celebrities headlining them, but it was still about receiving a centrally crafted message and lists of Facebook post links that you were supposed to like and put comments on.

Orbán was basically begging people to just spend 10 minutes on this per day, even if this digital world is foreign to many supporters (they are mostly pensioners and rural people). Orbán himself still uses a dumbphone and works on printed paper with pen, and generally hates technology. So him pushing for this shows how much he noticed the problem.

All this to say, nowadays it's not so easy to control the media.

I think you have a pretty unbalanced and prejudiced view of him in totality. I’ve paid pretty close attention to him from all sides.

In the end, how did Hungary fare under his rule, when compared with the regional countries, like Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Romania, Croatia, Slovenia? It doesn't seem that he had much of an effect in the direction you're saying. Those other similar, post-communist countries also didn't get flooded with migrants, I don't think there is much higher levels of wokeness in those other countries, however you'd measure it. Hungary has certainly no higher religiosity or churchgoing numbers, and no real tangible "conservatism" compared to those. The tangible effects are the highest food price inflation in the EU, the steepest rise of housing prices, very low economic growth numbers etc. both in comparison with regional and with overall EU countries. And as we saw, fertility is also back to baseline levels.

Orbán is just a great salesman and managed to sell this idea of the big antiwoke fighter to the MAGA people. In the net effect it's showbusiness, marketing, billboard propaganda etc. He's also a master of moving the party strategically in the political coordinate system. From the 90s onwards he has strategically shifted the party position several times. The latest one since around 2014 was aimed at pushing out the 20% strong extreme right Jobbik by shifting towards the far right. Jobbik seriously felt the danger, as their traditional topics were suddenly "stolen" from them and used by the government. So Jobbik shifted into the center, and eventually teamed up with the liberals. This move led to a break in Jobbik, and the radicals went on to found Our Homeland, which is still in parliament at about 5-6% support level. You can read plenty of critiques about Orbán's governing by Our Homeland party, they are quite dissatisfied with him, despite being also right-wing (though Our Homeland also had to find a new niche, and they've been focusing on globalist conspiracies, WEF, BlackRock, antivax etc).

How is it inaccurate to call him a corrupt kleptocrat? He didn’t lose the election over culture war issues, he was exposed by a conservative politician. How do you think him and his associates got so rich?

Now if you’re saying that the corruption was worth it, that’s a different argument. I suppose that’s how Americans currently defend the Trump circle’s insider trading, market manipulation and cronyism?

In Hungary, they follow similar policies. Hungarian parents who have multiple children to become eligible to receive mortgages with no interest by having at least three. If you have four or more, you’re exempt from paying income tax for life. You can also get a grant of eight thousand euros to buy a car but only if it has more than seven seats. In total it’s resulted in something like a 25% increase in children being born. Still below 2.1, but a reversal of the current trend.

The online right likes to repeat this, but it was a temporary effect and by 2025 Hungary's TFR dropped back to 1.31, which is lower than Sweden's 1.43.

Around 1991, it was around 1.87, then sharply fell to 1.28 in the economic turmoil of the system change, floating around 1.3, reaching a new low in 2011 with 1.23. Then as the economy started to recover and also with the measures you mention, it went up gradually to 1.61 in 2021, from which it sharply declined with the aftermath of the covid recession and then the Ukraine war's economic effects. Another possible reason is that people brought their plans forward, and simply had children earlier to get the money, leading to a frontloading of the numbers that would have been coming a few years later, leading to this sharp drop.

Regarding marriage rates, there was a sharp decline after the system change also. The number of marriages per nonmarried men was 47 in 1990 (36 for women), and it steadily dropped to a low of 17.0 / 13.7 by 2012, when Orbán's policies and the recovering economy managed to reverse the trend, reaching 33.4 / 28.1 in 2021, but the economic downturn also affected this and now it's back at 21.6 / 18.6, which matches both 2006 and 2015, but it's still only about half of 1990.

So the communists apparently did a much better job of this. And that wasn't though nationalist race-conscious rhetoric nor a stay at home tradwife lifestyle advocacy. Women had jobs, this was no 1950s Americana. But people saw things as more stable, homes were much more affordable, there was less anxiety around jobs and the basic life pattern was laid out and clear, while alternatives to it were not really promoted or thought about.

The issue is that today, if a country is held back based on economic problems, the economic improvements wouldn't lead to a steady reversal either, because then not only does having children become easier but it also becomes easier and more affordable and available to do other, more immediately fun things, like traveling, living an entertaining leasure life of going to concerts, nice bars and restaurants.

Now that Orban is ousted, it is to be seen what direction those policies take, since the winning Tisza party is a conglomerate of many ideologies. The liberals will push for what they see as non-discrimination of the childless, and they emphasize how these conditions limit women's autonomy, e.g. if you divorce, you have to pay back those credits, same as if you don't end up having the children you "promised" in order to access those funds (unless you get a doctor's paper about infertility - adoption is also accepted), you can always find some sympathetic stories about this. The center-right part of Tisza is probably satisfied with the programs. The less-talked-about undercurrent of the debate is how to target functioning families instead of mostly Roma people who will have many children for the welfare money and then live in terrible conditions. Orbán did it by framing most of the programs as tax cuts or as credit where you had to prove employment, no criminal record etc. as conditions, as opposed to simple welfare for the number of kids. The left typically criticises this as discriminatory against the poor and the Roma, and as helping only the already relatively well-to-do middle class.

So far this is in the program of the new governing party:

By 2035, we will halt population decline, and we will set the goal that from 2050 onward, Hungary’s population will once again grow above ten million.

  • To stop and reverse population decline, we are preparing a comprehensive program that will encourage Hungarians living and working abroad to return home, improve the health status of our citizens and increase life expectancy, while also encouraging childbearing.
  • The main components of the detailed program aimed at achieving a demographic turnaround are:
    • supporting the return of 200,000 Hungarians living abroad through the “Your Homeland Awaits!” program;
    • increasing life expectancy at birth to 80 years;
    • significantly increasing the number of births by expanding family support measures, improving the healthcare and education systems, and ensuring better access to fertility treatments.
  • The details of the program elements will be elaborated in the policy areas of economic development, healthcare, family policy, and women’s equal opportunities.

This doesn't seem very effective. The 200k Hungarians working in Western Europe won't turn things around in a country of 9.5m for sure. Increasing life expectancy will make the pensions system even more strained. Healthcare and education aren't really the things holding back people from having kids. And as we see in Scandinavia, more women's equality, even if good for other reasons, certainly isn't a measure that contributes to increased fertility, so it doesn't make sense to list in this section.

My prediction is that Hungary will inevitably converge and keep with Western Europe in these macro trends, because it's no longer isolated like under communism. Hungarians are tapped into the same memes, cultural products like movies and music and messaging as the rest of Europe. It's the same social media trends, young people know English, travel more often, take exchange semesters abroad etc. You can't have your little oasis that would work on an entirely different basis.

Yeah, I had a feeling someone was going to bring this up. I’m aware of most of what you’ve said here. My point more generally is that the push in this direction helps to keep things on the right track; but by itself it still proves to be inadequate when you project it out to where it should be. I’ve written on TM elsewhere why the approach the communists took proved to be more effective, but nobody should want to return the draconian type of policy regime that brought them that solution. The approach Tisza is taking is the wrong path and won’t go far enough, but at least Fidesz was on the right track.

Monetary incentives can bring up TFR a bit but not enough to get to replacement. Ultimately, raising 3+ children (without the children becoming criminals or prostitutes) needs to take center focus as a great achievement and honored by everyone is society. Local government officials should be hosting award ceremonies for elderly women who raised functioning children into adulthood. Something equivalent to medals in the military, like limited edition rings and other jewelry. Recognition of women's reproductive achievements is somehow nonexistent, at least in the US.

If I ever meet my relatives over there I want to ask them why in the hell they seem so desperate to emulate the worst aspects of American society?

Let me know how it goes, but I doubt you'll get more than a bewildered look. European libs see themselves as entirely opposed to American culture, even as they make their way to a BLM march in a > 99% white country.

even as they make their way to a BLM march in a > 99% white country.

BLM in Continental Europe was a single-digit number of people per country until it became an excuse for ignoring COVID lockdowns in summer 2020. After lockdowns were relaxed, it went back to being a single-digit number of people per country. BLM in the UK was less pathetic, but not by much. BLM in Australia was an Aboriginal-rights movement that was only nominally connected to BLM in the US.

Grassroots movements adapt themselves to local conditions - on both sides of the political fence. The culture war in Western Europe has Muslim immigrants as the n*****s, not black people.

until it became an excuse for ignoring COVID lockdowns in summer 2020

And how is it, pray tell, that this particular protest, and not any other homegrown cause, if European liberals aren't adopting the worst parts of American culture?

A single digit number of people or a single digit percentage? Because a single digit percentage is a huge amount, but on the other hand having the number of people be 9 or less seems excessively small.

They're entirely opposed to "Red Tribe, called America".

In practice yes, but they don't think there's a good kind of American, that they're imitating, even though they clearly are. That's the contradiction.

But BLM itself kind of sees itself as going against "that kind of" America. When European libs are opposed to "America" they are against the bald-headed-eagle, flag waving, monster truck and pickup truck riding gun obsessed fat rednecks who eat cheap burgers all the time and shop at walmart in a mobility scooter. BLM in Europe is seen as a revolt against that racist America. There is no contradiction.

But BLM itself kind of sees itself as going against "that kind of" America.

There isn't really a good kind of American to European libs, and BLM and all forms of wokeness was originally seen as weird and alien. There was even a common "it's just a couple of crazy kids on college campuses"-esque cope, that wokeness is just an American thing, and will never be relevant in Europe.

If they did believe that there's good Americans as well as bad, than the question would make some sense. They would recognize the parts of culture he's talking about as American, and as being imported, and they could justify it, but I'm pretty sure they ,think it's homegrown by now.

BLM in Europe is seen as a revolt against that racist America.

Nope, the criticism was also applied to European cultures, often in ways that make absolutely no sense. For example they apply anti-collonialist critique to Ireland, or try to claim that the descendants of Eastern European peasants, who just barely got out of communism, somehow inherited "white privilege".

If they did believe that there's good Americans as well as bad, than the question would make some sense. They would recognize the parts of culture he's talking about as American, and as being imported, and they could justify it, but I'm pretty sure they ,think it's homegrown by now.

To a considerable extent, it is homegrown. BLM was run by people claiming to be "trained marxists". Social Justice draws heavily on the theory of Continental Philosophers, and the "Internationalist" faction in American politics has always looked up to Europe for inspiration and social proof of their ideological project. And sure, it goes both ways, to the point that Europeans pick up American memes that on a first analysis make no sense in their context.

Is the WEF an American or a European project? I would argue that assigning it to either is a category error, but if forced, I would say European. In my view, the Enlightenment was from the start a European project, and Anglo-American participation is an outlier, albeit a significant one, but the distinction arguably elides more than it reveals. Organs like the WEF are part of a distinct, cohesive, long term socio-political construct, and that construct observably transcends national boundaries.

To a considerable extent, it is homegrown. BLM was run by people claiming to be "trained marxists". Social Justice draws heavily on the theory of Continental Philosophers, and the "Internationalist" faction in American politics has always looked up to Europe for inspiration and social proof of their ideological project.

Ok, sure I was being a bit reductive, and the whole thing was a bit of back-and-forth. You can even go further and point out that the specific people who kicked off the Social Justice movement in the US were airlifted out of Europe after the war. OTOH, Europeans could point out that we kept them locked up in their ivory towers, and they never amounted to much while they were under our custody. America truly turned out to be the land of opportunity, in a very ironic way. By the time these ideas made their way back to Europe, even the old-school Marxists cried out in horror.

Is the WEF an American or a European project? I would argue that assigning it to either is a category error, but if forced, I would say European

I agree, but even though there's overlap, the WEF is a different beast than the SocJus project. It's a totalitarian dictatorship wearing a smiley face mask, it doesn't get more European than that. SocJus is incidental to it, and they'll continue their project, even if it becomes completely discredited.

Are you from the US? I think Americans often have a distorted view of how Europeans view them, especially if they base this mostly on online stuff like Reddit. The recent animus towards the US is to a large extent about Trump, and there is certainly some longer term undercurrent even during Obama etc that the US is a bit cheap, overly capitalistic, materialistic, everything for sale, everything measured in money, lot of displays of religion, whatnot, but Europeans still follow and consume American cultural products overwhelmingly, often more than domestic ones. European universities are eager to copy the American academic fads (coastal, blue tribe). They might grumble about some aspects, but those are pretty much the same aspects that American blue tribers grumble about.

Nope, the criticism was also applied to European cultures, often in ways that make absolutely no sense. For example they apply anti-collonialist critique to Ireland, or try to claim that the descendants of Eastern European peasants, who just barely got out of communism, somehow inherited "white privilege".

Yes, but this is the "we're all living in America", fish in water thing. They just see this stuff being the current thing in Hollywood, Oscars, etc. You may underestimate how much Europeans live in an American-defined media environment.

Are you from the US?

Nope, European through and through.

but Europeans still follow and consume American cultural products overwhelmingly, often more than domestic ones. European universities are eager to copy the American academic fads (coastal, blue tribe).

I agree with this, I think this is the mechanism for what I'm describing, but in my experience Europeans don't tend to admit there are American cultural trends that are worth following. It just happens, precisely because of the "fish in water" thing.

Because of this, I believe that if Tretiak asked "why are you adopting the worst parts of American culture" he'd just be met with bewildered denial that any part of American culture is being adopted.

There are probably some who don't consume it directly, but through local intermediaries who make TikToks in their local language etc. It becomes a discussion topic and the third and fourth degree viewers are not aware of the origin (for BLM it's more concrete, but other woke topics it can seem blurry if it's organic European post-WW2 equality and justice development vs import from America). But even those that are, they just see it as global universal culture, not specifically American.

It's like asking European Taylor Swift fans why they are obsessing over an American celebrity. It's just a bewildering question. It's not like they predecided to obsess over an American. They just consume media, and they liked this celebrity and it's just very organic and obvious and just happens. Like the way in movies aliens always land near LA but certainly somewhere in the US. People are just used to international trendsetting happening in the US. I guess we are in agreement, I'm just elaborating. BLM was just put in front of people at a time when everyone was on their phones during covid. They didn't wake up one day saying "let's follow some American trends, I wonder what trends are going on there and which ones are worth following and which ones aren't". It's just shown to them and they have an emotional reaction to it that this is wrong and has to change and they can feel part of a movement of a morally right cause etc. American or not didn't factor into that chain of reasoning/emotion.

The other thing is that they may even deny there is a trend. It's not a trend. It's just being a decent human being. There is no such thing as woke, etc. etc.

It's like asking European Taylor Swift fans why they are obsessing over an American celebrity. It's just a bewildering question.

I disagree with this part. It's perfectly normal to bring up a question like that, and it's likely to produce ponderous murmurs about how we should invest more in our own, and not rely on Americans so much. It's not even limited to pop culture, you do this with literally anything, including industry and online platforms.

They just consume media, and they liked this celebrity and it's just very organic

And this as well. There was nothing organic about the spread of wokeness. Not in America, not in Europe. It relied on the suppression of opposing views on one hand, and it's own imposition through government institutions on the other, as well as entryism into critical private institutions.

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Which is kind of strange because the word is they don’t really see my aunts and uncles as “American” in that way, but fellow Scandinavians who live in the US. I sometimes wonder who’s going to fall first between Sweden and Germany.

The fourth report dropped a few weeks back, this time focusing on involuntary childlessness and infertility

I'm not very certain on this, but I understood that involuntary childlessness is a smaller factor in overall TFR declines than the reduction in the number of kids in each family. IOW, the problem is not the number of 0s.

I asked an LLM (also not a great marker of certainty) as well:

62% of the decline is driven by smaller family sizes among parents (fewer progressions to second, third, or fourth children).

38% of the decline is driven by an increase in lifetime childlessness (more people ending their reproductive years with zero children).

Unpopular though it might be among certain cohorts to point out, the solution to declining fertility reasonably also should somehow involve convincing women to have children while they're still young; not enabling every pregnancy to be geriatric.

Indeed, and that's why focusing on the childless is less productive. We should be focusing on getting the 1-kid families to 2, the 2s to 3 and so forth. One important factor there is making sure they start while they still have time.

Indeed, and that's why focusing on the childless is less productive. We should be focusing on getting the 1-kid families to 2, the 2s to 3 and so forth. One important factor there is making sure they start while they still have time.

This probably also works better in an evolutionary sense. "Forcing" people to have kids who would prefer not to and are dragging their feet, selects for a population that is statistically of a certain heritable temperament, who will pass on this type of psychological and personality profile and then the next generation will again prefer not to have kids on their own. But if you promote increased number of children for those who already self-select to having at least one child, they are more likely to be family oriented and also growing up with more siblings (or any at all) will also likely promote having children of their own.

Yet the most central part of ensuring the continued existence of a sovereign Swedish state, i.e. the creation of a new generation of Swedes, is apparently not even a moral, let alone a legal, duty on the part of the citizen? Everyone is expected to die fighting the Russians, but it's wholly acceptable to make choices whose aggregate consequences ends with Sweden going the way of the Dodo? That old Goldfinger-line pops into my head. "You expect me to have children?" "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!" Really, what is the point of this gung-ho never-surrender sentiment, and for that matter all the increases in defence spending in Europe, if we're just going to allow death to conquer us all from within? There are ideas here which should be connected, yet they seem to lie strewn all about in disorder in a way that's both frustrating and disheartening to see.

So I was listening to Gad Saad on Joe Rogan recently, not really haven't heard about anything he's done since probably 2018 or so. And he's laying out his thesis about a parasitic idea. This thing you see that causes such a strong emotional reaction, it overrides your entire brain and even your survival instinct, and your priorities, even your identity, is replaced. And by example, he brings up Queers for Palestine. Joe, seemingly entirely missing the point, just rebuts "Yeah, but what if they've seen the images coming out of Gaza that are so upsetting, they feel irresistibly compelled to be angry about it and protest it?" With much sympathy for this perspective. Yes Joe, that is precisely the "parasitic idea" infection vector being described, thank you for participating. And he goes on missing the point for another 90 minutes or so.

But I digress. Everything about this national behavior sounds like a country hijacked by a civilization scale parasite. The country possesses zero survival instinct, even to propagate itself into another generation. And yet it happily throws it's blood and treasure away on... what exactly? Ukraine also committing suicide, but faster? Giving all the land to Africans faster? It's absolutely baffling.

It's a shame one way or another billions will die before either the parasite wins, or the parasite is exterminated with gigadeaths of collateral damage.

I think this is exactly what is happening.

For most of human history, the selection of cultural memes and biological genes has been more or less aligned. The most successful cultures were those that produced high birthrates, because creating more people was the best way for cultural memes to propagate themselves. Horizontal transmission of cultural memes between separate lineages was relatively rare; most cultural replacements were accompanied by population replacements. In this environment, cultural memes and genes were more or less symbiotic, and what was good for one was good for the other (with the exception of some edge cases).

Over the last couple of hundred years, with the development of mass communication technology, the alignment of memes and genes has been breaking down. Today the most successful memes are those that transmit horizontally using technology, and so the selection pressures have shifted. The memes are becoming parasitic, because they no longer need their host to reproduce. In fact, the host spending time and resources trying to complete its life cycle is now directly opposed to the fitness of the memes, and so arresting development of its host in such a way that renders it literally or functionally infertile is now being selected for. These hosts then have nothing to live for except spreading the parasitic memes, and those memes then outproduce the older more symbiotic memes.

We have no psychological immune system adapted for this. It's too novel, too powerful. It's like we're North Americans being exposed to European colonist diseases for the first time. However, this cannot go on forever. The parasitic memes are burning through hosts, and the remaining hosts are being selected for resistance to the parasites. The psychological immune system is beginning to take shape, but the process is too slow.

Over the last couple of hundred years, with the development of mass communication technology, the alignment of memes and genes has been breaking down. Today the most successful memes are those that transmit horizontally using technology, and so the selection pressures have shifted. The memes are becoming parasitic, because they no longer need their host to reproduce. In fact, the host spending time and resources trying to complete its life cycle is now directly opposed to the fitness of the memes, and so arresting development of its host in such a way that renders it literally or functionally infertile is now being selected for. These hosts then have nothing to live for except spreading the parasitic memes, and those memes then outproduce the older more symbiotic memes.

I've argued in the past that this could be a potential candidate for the Great Filter; that any civilization that develops radio — and thus could potentially be detected over interstellar distances — is quickly devoured by parasitic memes and collapses. Add that an industrial revolution is a once-per-planet event… (at best; another Great Filter candidate I like to propose is getting your planet's Carboniferous Period just right.)

Ukraine also committing suicide, but faster?

Ukraine is being killed, not committing suicide.

Ukraine was having a fertility crisis even before the war.

If I'm in an MMA match, and I'm put in an armbar, and I don't tap, did the guy I'm fighting break my arm, or did I make him break my arm?

What if NATO is on the sidelines yelling at me that I can still win this thing?

It's like you're in an MMA match, and the guy you're fighting is going to kill you if you lose (but he's going to walk away regardless).

Is there any belief by any serious thinker that this is a war of genocide?

Ukraine gets to choose between being Russia's puppet state and being used as a buffer between it and NATO, or being NATOs puppet state and filled with Africans. Such is the fate of minor nations. There will almost certainly be more Ukrainians in three generations under Russian dominion than NATO. Unless you stretch the definition of Ukrainian to mean anyone on Ukranian soil, but then what was the point of keeping Russians out if you can just change the meaning of words and suddenly everyone is Ukranian?

Is there any belief by any serious thinker that this is a war of genocide?

Yes. Numerous Russians, including Vladimir Putin and Aleksandr Dugin, have said that one of the goals of the war is the elimination of Ukrainian nationhood as an idea and making the Ukrainians understand that they are actually "little Russians". Dugin at least is a serious thinker, and this qualifies as genocide under the standard definition.

By that definition the America I grew up in has been genocided.

Which I do actually believe, but I'd appreciate if an ounce of worry for Ukraine was spared for the remnants of my peoples.

How do you figure it for a genocide? In almost any reasonable measure, both Russians and Ukrainians are Orthodox Christian Slavs. They’re probably as close as something like England and Australia or Canada. If England wants to end the idea of Australia, that may be terrible for all kids of reasons, but it would be hard to make one Anglosphere country invading another into a genocide simply because they’re ethnically the same. If you took DNA from random individuals from both countries, telling them apart is probably difficult. At least in Gaza, you can likely find enough difference between a Palestinian and Israeli to bolster the claim that it’s at least plausible as a genocide.

In the current year, there is a Ukrainian nation. If Putin succeeds in his political goal, there will not be. That is the meaning of the word "genocide". That you think there shouldn't be a Ukrainian nation is irrelevant, given that there clearly is - people don't fight this well for non-existent nations.

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There is no evidence that the west wants to fill Ukraine with Africans. Indeed, western European countries might quite reasonably believe that dumping Africans in Ukraine will just cause them to migrate from Ukraine to western European countries that are actually wealthier than Africa.

Is there any belief by any serious thinker that this is a war of genocide?

  1. We are supposed to treat seriously claims of "white genocide" because white people in the west can't breed. However, when Russia deports ukranian children and bans the ukranian language the G-word is totally unfitting.

  2. Very few wars are fought with the explicit aim of putting a bullet in the head of every citizen. Nevertheless, wars short of that can be existential for the state.

NATOs puppet state and filled with Africans.

Interesting. And Ukraine was being filled with Africans between 2013 and 2022, right? And e.g. Poland (also a nato puppet if there ever was one) is also filled with Africans?

Poland (also a nato puppet if there ever was one) is also filled with Africans?

South Asians, and at a somewhat slower pace than the wokest countries in NATO, but yes.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Indian population of Poland is around 0.09%. Perhaps some sophistry can turn this into "filled", but I'm not impressed.

When responding, please keep in mind that Russia is 10%-15% Muslim.

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Do you apply that kind of thinking to all areas of life, including yours? That your enemies are blameless if they carry out the threats you did not submit to?

For an example with a very different valence, if somebody doesn't pay their taxes and they eventually end up in court and they refuse to settle in court, they eventually end up in prison. It wouldn't be usual to cheer them on and say, "Keep fighting! Don't let the bastards get you! Never give in to pressure!".

EDIT: since people are taking this to be an enthusiastic support of Russia's behaviour, my point was that "if you refuse to tap out under pressure, you're going to get hurt" and "you're not at fault for refusing to give into threats" are both pretty context-dependent. I should probably have been less gnomic but I have other things on my mind.

What if the person you're discussing has paid all their taxes? Do you still encourage them to pay again and again and again or do you encourage them to fight the case? That is Ukraine.

People are taking my example far too literally. I wasn't saying 'Ukraine trying to fight the Russians is like refusing to pay your taxes', I was trying to demonstrate to @sun_the_second that whether you should tap out in response to pressure, and whether you should blame people for forcefully subjugating resistance, can't be a universal principle you can decide once-and-for-all and base your entire life around.

Of course, one is expected to pay one's taxes every year :P

Likening the invasion of a sovereign nation to ordinary law enforcement seems incredibly bad faith. It is more like if a gang was trying to force you to join it under threat of stealing your belongings and killing you if you refuse. Depending on how you expect them to treat you should you accept, "Keep fighting!" is not unreasonable here. Especially if you have already managed to keep them at a stalemate for four years and the terms for surrender boil down to "give us all your stuff".

My point is that, as the libertarians like to say, there is not a huge difference between the government saying 'we will lock you in a box if you don't give us the money we've decided you owe us, even if you disagree' and a gang saying they want your stuff and they'll hurt you if you refuse.

It can simultaneously be the case that:

  • the justice of a demand is heavily debated, especially between demander and demandee
  • refusing will have predictably bad consequences

And the result is therefore some mixture of:

  • refusing to give in is morally foolish or reckless, given the way it affects those who depend on you
  • refusing to give in is morally noble and brave, given the way it discourages demands towards others

which varies case by case.

Ultimately context and viewpoint are doing 90% of the work here. Neither 'be reasonable!' nor 'always stick to your guns (metaphorically), son' are reliable ways of thinking that you can apply to all areas of life.

An MMA match consists of two willing participants. Ukraine never wanted war with Russia.

It depends on exactly who you mean by "Ukraine." There is literally footage of Zelensky telling Azov commanders to stop shelling Donbass before the war, and they basically laugh in his face and tell him to go jump in a lake.

The Ukrainian people voted for peace, yes, but their vote doesn’t really matter: what matters is whether the US State Department decides to pipeline weapons to the subgroups that do, and they did.

Please link me to this footage.

You're definitely right its a bad analogy.

But that just makes the realpolitik of the situation much clearer. No ref stoppage is imminent.

I don't think the theory of a civilization scale parasite is necessary. There is a simpler explanation: the vast majority of people simply don't see falling fertility rates as a problem. It's not that people would naturally see it as a problem but a memetic parasite is blinding them. It's that people generally don't see it as a problem unless something brings it to their attention. The vast majority of people have never have paid any attention to social-level fertility rates at all. People 1000 years ago had large numbers of kids because of very local and immediate factors: basically, the poor needed kids for labor and as a form of welfare in old age, the rich could afford to have a bunch of kids and then not work much to take care of them (servants could do it), contraception was primitive, women viewed having kids as more central to their identity than they do now, and so on. People were having many kids because of these immediate local factors, not out of a personal interest in their society's overall fertility. When you take people's basic disinterest in overall fertility rates and then remove the factors that previously kept fertility high, the fertility rate drops. The removal of the factors that had previously kept fertility rates high was not caused by some singular memetic parasite. It was caused by several separate things: technological change that reduced the importance of physical human labor, improvements in contraception, the feminist movement. Now of course, these things are related: the technological changes also helped to enable feminism to begin with, improvements in contraception were partly motivated by a feminist-leaning desire to help women, and so on. But to think of them all as being part of one social contagion is, I think, going too far. It overly compresses the actual complexity of the historical phenomena into one supposed dimension.

Now, one could certainly argue that there exists a widespread ideology that helps to make it harder for people to tackle the problem even once they begin to think of it as a problem. One can call it "leftism", or whatever. But even if one removed this ideology, that does not mean that people would automatically start to think of falling fertility rates as a problem. That's a separate thing. The "survival instinct" that you mention does not activate until and unless the problem becomes very visible. And we are not yet at that point. So falling fertility rates fall into the same class of problems as climate change: the vast majority of people do not have any sort of inherent tendency to pay attention to the problem. They only begin to pay attention to it either after individuals and groups put significant efforts, on a massive scale, into "raising awareness" of the problem, or after the problem has begun to create such obvious negative consequences that even the average person notices it.

Or rather: the parasite is not on us, but on the egregore we call "self-perpetuating stable society". Not even a parasite, really, but rather a failure of a few super-human memetic organs.

I don't think the theory of a civilization scale parasite is necessary. There is a simpler explanation: the vast majority of people simply don't see falling fertility rates as a problem.

It isn't sufficient either, if the parasite is anything to do with the culture wars. Fertility in first-world Asia crashes long before the western culture wars reach them. The parasite has to be something that existed in 1970s Japan.

I think there was a lot more emphasis on children by the entire culture in the past. Businesses and public places were designed to be much friendlier to children. Restaurants would have coloring sheets and crayons and little table puzzles for the kids. Sporting events were cheap enough that it wasn’t weird to see lots of kids running around the ballpark with parents. Parks had playgrounds. For that matter, people in general were much more okay with kids around in public, understanding of kids perhaps being mischievous or crabby in public without blaming parents for not having their kids behaving like little adults. Kids are now a burden, they cannot be allowed out of sight — even in their own yards. They are only allowed in public if they’re behaving perfectly, not being curious, not being bored, definitely not being crabby. Going on to entertainment, you really don’t have music and TV outside of specific streaming services that are geared to kids.

This is not my experience of my (recently gentrified, ethnically mixed) neighbourhood of London. Cheap chain restaurants absolutely have kids' menus with puzzles and colouring sheets on the back. Parks have more playgrounds than they used to. (I am aware that London is exceptional among top-tier cities in terms of the number and quality of our modern playgrounds). And the solidarity among parents that people with prestigious platforms talk about in the past tense still exists on the ground. When my autistic sons sperg out in public, I get sympathetic responses rather than judgemental ones.

Is that how things are where you live? I haven't noticed any of those things, for the most part.

  • Child friendly restaurants - check (conversely, parents did not go to upscale romantic restaurants with their young children in the past, either)
  • Can I take my kids to a cheap townie baseball game? Yes. There's still a pizza and baseball ticket reading program for kids too.
  • Do most of the parks around here have playgrounds? Sure. Or they can climb on boulders, which is also fine. Or they can wade in a stream or river, likewise perfectly fine.
  • Do people smile at the kids in public, and ignore them when they're throwing a fit? Mostly, yes.
  • Can my kids legally play in my yard without me? Yes, though for the toddler, it should probably be in the fenced part of the yard, and not in the canyon or the driveway. Or at least, it would be actually negligent to let a toddler play there.
  • Is there enough kid-centric entertainment? Yes! Good grief! Yes, of course there is enough entertainment for them, that's why everyone's been complaining about "iPad kids" these past several years.

Not that there aren't ways the culture is less child friendly than in some other times and places. The lack of friends within walking distance is a genuine concern.

the poor needed kids for labor

has anyone quantified this? What is "make even" age for a child, and how does it count considering that more than half of them die before 10 years? I think non-existing contraception is most factor here.

It used to be conventional wisdom that a child growing up on a farm and doing a usual share of the work had repaid their parents by the time they turned 15.

assuming zero mortality?

Breakeven age for child labor is quite low if your first one or two children are daughters, they become mini maids with household chores and help raise more children. My own mother raised her four brothers while my grandmother worked to supplement my grandfathers income.

It was a bit unfair for my mother though, she was and is highly domestic without much education. She took care of my grandparents in their old age. My uncles all had their post graduate professional education paid for and have highly lucrative careers. But it's not as if they contribute to my mother's financial security despite her partial parental role.

I'm not going to get into the whole cultural debate around declining TFR or putative causes. I am painfully pragmatic, and what I intend to demonstrate is that there is a technological solution to the problem (the best kind of solution, mwah):

A country as wealthy as Sweden can circumvent the dysgenic concerns raised by @sleepyegg through embryo selection. The primary costs are the IVF itself, which should be in the realm of affordability for the middle class and above (who suffer disproportionately from reduced TFR). If not, I think any sane government should be willing to spend enormous sums of money to prevent population collapse.

You can screen for a lot of things, including strong proxies for health/mutational load. The screening itself is a trivial fraction of the cost compared to the egg extraction, freezing and IVF, and as mentioned it's the IVF that's the costly part.

Further, implantation success rates are remarkably stable even for older women. It's the age of the ova itself that matters, someone using eggs they harvested at 25 when they're in their late 30s is way more likely to succeed (for a given number of cycles) than that person using recently harvested eggs.

In other words, the uterus can handle things just fine for a very long time. The eggs continue to degrade the longer they stay in the ovary. You're already born with all the eggs you'll ever have if you're a woman, or as man, though that depends on when you last went to the supermarket. The success rate for implantation or the dysgenic effects of mutational load on the viability or overall health of the eggs/children increase precipitously once you're in your 30s. It's no coincidence that the risk of Down syndrome shoots up with increasing maternal age around that time.

The problem is, of course, that few governments have crossed the minimum sanity threshold to do these things. The fruit couldn't hang much lower without already being in the dirt.

Recommended reading:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dxffBxGqt2eidxwRR/the-optimal-age-to-freeze-eggs-is-19

As a matter of fact, I would strongly recommend everything GeneSmith has ever written on the topic. I'd trust him to smith my genes, or those of my children.

I am painfully pragmatic, and what I intend to demonstrate is that there is a technological solution to the problem (the best kind of solution, mwah):

Have you read Dune? It makes a compelling case that's the opposite of true. Maybe people who are so bad that they won't reproduce until 35 should just stop existing. Why save them with technology invented for them? What's the point?

Have you read Dune? It makes a compelling case that's the opposite of true.

The Logical Fallacy of Generalization from Fictional Evidence

You know what, maybe we shouldn't have invented treatments for malaria, chemotherapy for aggressive cancers, ozempic for the obesity epidemic. Maybe reducing infant-and-child mortality rates from the ~50% they hovered around for most of human history to the rounding error they are today was deeply misguided. Maybe doctors should all retire en masse and society should return to the state of nature, however we're defining that this Sunday.

If you disagree, then I think the arguments for trying to fix demographic collapse write themselves. If you don't, then we're not going to get anywhere.

The Logical Fallacy of Generalization from Fictional Evidence

Apologies for that, I was trying to speak to the audience. More seriously, it's not that Dune is empirical evidence, but that the author's underlying reasoning for Butlerian Jihad being good is itself a philosophical case for what I am arguing. My own case for it, without reference to fiction and with reference to real science, would lead me to write a book about dynastic aristocracies with supermen who control technology instead of letting technology control them.

You know what, maybe we shouldn't have invented treatments for malaria, chemotherapy for aggressive cancers, ozempic for the obesity epidemic. Maybe reducing infant-and-child mortality rates from the ~50% they hovered around for most of human history to the rounding error they are today was deeply misguided. Maybe doctors should all retire en masse and society should return to the state of nature, however we're defining that this Sunday.

We spend way too much on healthcare and it really doesn't improve human happiness much. These medicines have pros and cons. You seem to fixate on the pros without acknowledging any cons. Why is that?

In some cases the pros outweight the cons. You rush to cases where most people would say that's that case. I don't disagree that much. I would probably say that some chemotherapies are actually scams and I would like to think I would be one of the patients who follows through on that and just dies earlier instead of having a wretched 6 to 12 month life extension. Others are life-savers and cures. It depends on the type of cancer. In the case of malaria, the impact of the cure and its widespread free distribution depends on what you think about a billion subsaharan Africans existing. Can't get anywhere negative on that topic with normies because it is impolite thought crime. The one downside of ozempic is that obesity was a mark of shame for people with terrible self-control, but I think that tattoos and other vices neatly fill the obesity void, so I see it as a positive on net.

Ultimately with these technologies, you must judge the life-form they help and weigh the externalities of that life form against the costs of the aid. Yes, this is so mean to do, because everyone is exactly the same and equal and equally valuable and so on, unless you want to be impolite. But is truth always polite? Anyway, IVF is extremely expensive and basically works to perpetuate people who barely want to reproduce. That attitude correlates positively with other negative behaviors that punish those around them as well. The babies it makes are sicker on average. Why should we have more sick people who hate family life at such a high cost? Who does that benefit? I'm not seeing it pass the pros and cons audit.

My own case for it, without reference to fiction and with reference to real science, would lead me to write a book about dynastic aristocracies with supermen who control technology instead of letting technology control them.

I wish to note that I put serious weight on an oligarchic future where a few elites control AGI, and thus the rest of us. I am far more skeptical of genetic engineering being the primary driver behind the creation of a permanent underclass, for the same reason that cars went from being something that were the playthings of the rich to available to most. Everything I've described has gotten cheaper over time, often drastically so.

We spend way too much on healthcare and it really doesn't improve human happiness much. These medicines have pros and cons. You seem to fixate on the pros without acknowledging any cons. Why is that?

This is more reflective of your unfamiliarity with me. I mean that without insult. I've written on exactly that topic at length, multiple times, over years. I have very long effort-posts on the importance of using metrics like QALY/DALY and cost-benefit/cost-utility when it comes to dictating policy on medical care. If that weren't true, that would be a fair critique, but this is one of the rare occasions where I genuinely can't afford to be as thorough as I'd desire. I am not writing a policy white paper, I am crunched for time because of exams, and in all honesty, I shouldn't even be here in the first place. I have not pretended to have done a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis here, but I have linked to the work of people who have.

But considering my own output:

https://www.themotte.org/post/2899/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/359026?context=8#context

I'll run the numbers on grandma, even if I already know the answer. A $300,000 treatment (roughly £240,000) for a 60% chance at two months (0.16 years) of very low-quality life (let's generously say 0.2 QALYs) results in a cost per QALY that is astronomically high. The answer from the system is a clear, predictable no. Conversely, a treatment with the same price tag for a teenager that offers a high chance of fifty more years of healthy life would be approved without a second thought. The system is explicitly utilitarian. It prioritizes maximizing the total amount of healthy life across the population. It can and will spend millions on a child, but it will counsel a family against a futile and painful intervention for a demented octogenarian. This isn't some big secret either. I have had such discussions with dozens of families, and not a single one has had a problem with it, or withdrawn their relative to go elsewhere, as they are at full liberty to do.

For those who find this calculus unsettling (I do not know why the standard approach to handling scarce resources unsettles anyone) the system provides an escape hatch. The existence of the NHS does not preclude private medicine. The wealthy, or anyone with good private insurance, can opt out of the public queue and pay for the treatment the state has denied. You can, in effect, disagree with the state’s valuation of a life year and substitute your own. The state provides a robust, free baseline for ninety-nine percent of situations, while allowing a private market for those who want more. A similar model exists in India, a country with far fewer resources than the United States (citation available on request) which manages to provide basic care for free while supporting a thriving private sector.

In other words, I am the last person who you should accuse of not considering the diminishing returns to further healthcare expenditure. Also, note that diminishing returns are not the same thing as no returns, let alone negative returns. If you have a billion dollars and want to spend all of it on care that has a negligible chance of healing you, be my guest. I'm more concerned with public policy and public funds.

I am also a transhumanist, so I want medical technology to get even cheaper (which it mostly has), alongside society getting wealthier. The expected result is that we end up with cheaper, better treatments, and can provide them to more people. Be it privately or through public funding.

Anyway, IVF is extremely expensive and basically works to perpetuate people who barely want to reproduce. That attitude correlates positively with other negative behaviors that punish those around them as well. The babies it makes are sicker on average. Why should we have more sick people who hate family life at such a high cost? Who does that benefit? I'm not seeing it pass the pros and cons audit.

There is very, very good reason that I advocated for embryo selection above and beyond subsidized IVF. Consider that that cuts down the majority of your arguments at the knee. The "sicker IVF babies" finding is largely driven by maternal age, multiple-embryo transfers (now declining as standard practice), and underlying parental subfertility rather than the IVF procedure itself. You can't accuse me of not acknowledging that, when I have already offered a solution.

I also do not particularly care about whether people "barely want to reproduce", as long as the answer is more yes than it is no. I'm not a gynaecologist, but in general, if someone tells me that they want children, I support them. Even if it would be easy to scold them for being irrational or indecisive and making things harder for themselves. In psychiatry, it's all too common for depressed people to not want to be helped, because depression strongly correlates with reduced self-esteem and a sense of being unworthy of care. Many people show up in front of me who just care enough to get out of bed and see a psychiatrist. I treat them nonetheless, and I am happy doing so.

The IVF population is overwhelmingly composed of couples who want children intensely (often more than the median fertile couple) and whose biology has betrayed them, and that conflating them with "people who barely want to reproduce" is incorrect.

Humans are fallible, non-omniscient and imperfectly rational actors, and society should make some concession to those unfortunate facts.

If you disagree with this on moral grounds, be my guest. I am on Scott's side, in the sense that Society is fixed, Biology is mutable.

If you disagree with this on moral grounds, be my guest. I am on Scott's side, in the sense that Society is fixed, Biology is mutable.

Society is biology, so this is not literally true. Although changing the biology of 300 million people is much harder than changing the biology of one. And if you can change the biology of one cooperatively, you might be able to do the same for 300 million people, but if you need to change 300 million people uncooperatively, that's going to have a big, probably unreachable cost.

It's not that I think these people can be effectively bullied into reproducing earlier, if anything them failing to replace themselves is better. Because what they do is unnatural, it both costs a lot of money to fix, and it comes off as extremely ugly to other people. I believe their lives are unhappy and that it is wrong to delay reproduction to 35. In the meantime I would enjoy it if a government of people who think like me lower the status those who live that lifestyle through the trumpeting the virtues of reproducing naturally at the appropriate age. I also think the late-reproducing people have a ton of negative externalities on the rest. of us and as they fail to replace themselves those externalities will fade and all of the well-adapted people will be happier and wealthier.

I mean, I expect that selection pressure will eventually result in a return to normal or historical TFRs, if only because the high fecundity populations replace the ones who act like pandas in captivity.

I also think the late-reproducing people have a ton of negative externalities on the rest. of us and as they fail to replace themselves those externalities will fade and all of the well-adapted people will be happier and wealthier.

I am somewhat perplexed by how you, after telling me that I haven't done a basic cost-benefit analysis, happen to casually gloss over the rather catastrophic near to medium term economic and societal damage of societies with far more old people than children, or drastic population decline as projected.... in pretty much every developed country. And many developing ones.

I don't lose sleep over this, because I expect technological interventions like AGI+robotics, artificial wombs etc to reduce or eliminate the current coupling between population growth/composition and the stability of national economies. I genuinely don't think we're going to need humans for their physical or cognitive labor in a decade or change, possible less. It's the same reason I don't worry particularly hard about the worst case projections for global warming, if it gets that bad, someone is going to burn a billion dollars of sulphur or inject it into the stratosphere. Inertia only goes so far.

You do not seem as optimistic, nor even as open to technological solutions, and I do not see how you can reasonably claim that your distaste for nudging or assisting the sub-fertile into having more children (by any means) can compensate for decaying infrastructure or potential collapse in a generation or two. If it's business as usual with no major technological breakthroughs and serious social engineering (or even just the widespread adoption of the suggestions I've endorsed), I don't see how you account for the disaster that represents.

@self_made_human where does your optimism for near term AGI come from? I am practically ignorant of AI, but my totally uneducated impression is that it is unlikely to happen within the next 10 years. I would prefer to be wrong, though.

You mentioned in other comments on educational savings for children that you were somewhat certain in would happen within 5 years. Knowing you, you must have some sources you find reliable on AGI progress. Again, from my uneducated view it seems like promises of AI / AGI is merely slick marketing to separate wealthy investors from their money.

The most impactful part of AI on my life so far is the elimination of customer facing jobs on the phone, who have been replaced with AI chatbots which can never fix the unique problems I need addressed. I end up waiting longer to speak to a real person to get the work or chore done.

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I am somewhat perplexed by how you, after telling me that I haven't done a basic cost-benefit analysis, happen to casually gloss over the rather catastrophic near to medium term economic and societal damage of societies with far more old people than children, or drastic population decline as projected.... in pretty much every developed country. And many developing ones.

The solution to this is redistributing from the old to the young. He who does not work shall not eat. Easy.

I genuinely don't think we're going to need humans for their physical or cognitive labor in a decade or change, possible less.

That would be awesome. Can we design ourselves to be extremely beautiful, moral, and intelligent after that? Considering we will no longer will need the lower classes.

If it's business as usual with no major technological breakthroughs and serious social engineering (or even just the widespread adoption of the suggestions I've endorsed), I don't see how you account for the disaster that represents.

I think the people who made the disaster, so the old generation at that time, should suffer the consequences of their behavior. They are being told how to be good, by several voices at the moment, and they are not listening at all. That is wrong, and I'm fine with it if they pay the price. They deserve it.

I do think there are some technological solutions, but many of them have nothing to do with pregnancy. From my perspective as a stay at home dad and parent of 3, in a neighborhood full of kids, I think most parents are accurately estimating the number of kids they can have and then having that many kids.

Shout-out to @HereAndGone2's post below pointing out the difficulties involved in potential surgery options. Throwing out surgery options feels easy, but actually going through with it is generally scary.

I'll go through the list of blockers and how I think Tech is impacting them:

  1. Conception. I've known plenty of couples that have fertility problems. There does however seem to be some kind of "breaking the seal" effect. Where a woman gets pregnant once and then it is much easier to conceive after that. Its stopped very few that I know of. Mostly it slows them down on having an initial kid. Tech - is being used to alleviate this problem already. Don't think you get much delta out of increased tech.
  2. Pregnancy. It absolutely sucks for some women. Worst case scenario its as bad as going through Chemo. Nausea and vomiting in 1st trimester is likely, lingering effects less likely. 3rd trimester is physical discomfort and limited mobility. For working women this means burning a bunch of PTO or sick leave before the baby even arrives. Typically pregnancies seem to be the same level of struggle across multiple kids for one woman. So if you have one really shitty pregancy experience, its likely gonna happen again for other kids. Tech - limited in this area, dangerous to do medical experiments on women with children. Having babies via pods or external wombs is like far future tech that could help a lot.
  3. Birth. As they get older it gets more and more dangerous to have kids. Modern medicine does a hell of a job of keeping them alive, but its still scary as hell for everyone remotely involved. My wife lost one of her childhood friends when she was giving birth (some kind of infection that killed the mother and child). I have multiple friends where the mother had to be taken in for emergency C-sections for various complications. Having kids younger is maybe safer in the sense that having major surgery while younger is safer. But having major surgery is still a base level of dangerous and scary. Tech - already heavily deployed in this area. Modern medicine is really a miracle. We are probably close to maxed out on this.
  4. Transportation. Car seats are a hassle. The number you can fit in a car is way less than the total seats. Lots of cars claim three seats per middle/back row. Only two car seats can fit in a row, even in very large American cars. Car seats as contraception is a known issue. Tech - is decent on this but its mostly a regulatory issue. Car designs are limited by safety concerns. Car seats are required.
  5. 0-6 months child care. Baby is not very mobile. Is very dependent on caregivers for everything. Feeding, clothing, diapers, etc. Tech - mostly still primitive here. Plenty of parents and adults enjoy this part of raising a baby so there aren't really attempts to automate it away. The main difficulty is that it is a 24hr job. A humanoid robot nanny might be really effective here at minimum just to turn it into a 16 hour job instead of 24. Price of them would have to come way down, and safety would be a massive concern.
  6. 0.5 - 3 years child care. Kid is mobile, still in diapers for most or all of this time. Will start communicating, but communication is not super useful. Tech - this is where things get interesting. I think the biggest innovation in recent years has been remote work. This is a good age where you can set the kid down in a play area they can have fun with toys and entertain themselves to some extent (or sibilings around the same age can entertain each other). They need periodic supervision and help with meals and diapers. Some work can get done in those periods, maybe half as much as an unencumbered adult. But we aren't well setup to have employees doing 4 hours of money work in an 8 hour time period. Or you burn out the parent and have them do 8hr of money work and 8hr of parenting work in a 16 hour period. The latter is a hurdle and leads to less kids, the former is not generally available. Cheaper gadgets and devices that can entertain the kids helps a little. Cheaper and easier meal prep helps.
  7. 4-6 years child care. Out of diapers, more independant, but also with growing social needs. pre-school and day care costs a lot of money Tech - mostly still primitive here. Some help from internet stuff that has made coordination and finding childcare for this age easier. AI humanoid robots that could serve as guardians would be helpful. But there is also a significant contingent of adults that like kids in this age range. Mostly women of course, but certainly enough of them that the wages for this job have been driven into the dirt.
  8. Older kid transportation. Kids start having a bunch of activities all over the place that they need to get to. With more kids they are also in more locations. I spend some activity days driving for 2 hours. Nothing is more than 10 miles away from my house. Traffic is not great, but even if it was gone that might only shave off thirty minutes. Tech - 19th century tech, the solution is just drive everywhere. Self driving cars might help, but usually a parent still need to accompany the kids up into the mid teens. Possibly some version of vr tech might help here (so they don't have to go anywhere and can do activities at home). But so would having larger homes.
  9. Bureaucracy and existing. Just having your kid exist on paper is a challenge. Adults have this challenge too. Things to sign up for, accounts to manage, healthcare signup stuff, etc. If you love filling out forms this is great, for everyone else it sucks. Tech online signup has made a lot of life way easier, but its also made it easier for everyone to expect more information, more release forms etc etc. LLM AI agents seem like they might be a solution, but I think it will be the same as the internet, they won't lower the burden on the parents, they will just make organizations more comfortable asking for more stuff up until the burden on the parents is similar.
  10. Everything and everyone else. This list is getting too long, but this is really important. Parents are a subset of everyone. If you make life easier for everyone you also make it easier for parents. Especially when there are time savings. tech - Delivery services are great. Grocery delivery is amazing. Online shopping is super easy. Remote work reducing commutes has been awesome.

I'll just end with the general observation that if you give parents more money but there aren't areas where they can trade money for more time then the money doesn't help them. As a single person you might think of money as the incentive in and of itself. But the calculations change a bit when you are a parent. Money is fully a means to an end. The ends being providing childcare, and enjoying your children. Technology that allows for that tradeoff is good. Technology that cheapens that tradeoff rate is great. Technology that adds a new time burden as part of the rat race or through regulation is terrible.

its likely gonna happen again for other kids. Tech - limited in this area, dangerous to do medical experiments on women with children.

Is that really the case? I could see all kind of medical devices that would help, for example, implantable devices to support the pelvic floor. There's always that feminist argument that medications are not sufficiently tested on women. Probably because there is too much variability on hormonal profiles and so on, but with AI-enabled calculation power, it shouldn't be such a huge burden to take into account.

It's dangerous? So are oil fields, roofs, or highways. It's dangerous to the fetus? Not a concern when it's a woman's choice.

Perhaps we need some strong legislation and cash-in-hand to enable more widespread research into these issues. If the government was putting as much money into solving 'pregnancy is uncomfortable' as they do blowing up enemies of Israel, we'd have solutions.

Alternatively, if we want to get around this whole thing, we could just have a more painful culture. Get rid of probation or even detention in schools and replace them with cannings and lashings. If we want to get extreme, we could beat fornication, abortion and contraception out of people, but even without that, having experienced some physical pain and gotten over it would help young women get over the concept that childbirth is painful.

The human body is not really meant to be cut open. We have figured out ways to do it that minimize harm and damage, but the risk doesn't go away. Roll the dice enough and eventually some bad luck arises and someone dies or gets a life altering injury.

Doctors don't want to kill people, insurance companies and hospitals don't want to get sued, patients don't want to die or be disfigured. It's generally in everyone's interest to minimize the number of major surgeries or at least only do them when the danger of not doing them is greater.

An implantable pelvic floor device sounds exactly like the kind of thing that fails a risk reward test for surgery.

A government that overrides all the other people involved in the situation and says "do it anyway" is not going to be popular for saying that. If it's a democracy, they are likely to be replaced.

A government that overrides all the other people involved in the situation and says "do it anyway" is not going to be popular for saying that. If it's a democracy, they are likely to be replaced.

Just apply such media control that this can all be hand-waved away. It's 2020+6, this is a well-known playbook.

There's always that feminist argument that medications are not sufficiently tested on women. Probably because there is too much variability on hormonal profiles and so on

More likely that if the woman later gets pregnant, or turns out to be pregnant despite you not allowing pregnant women in your study, the child, who signed no waivers, has an unlimited right to sue.

Perhaps it's time for a total and complete shutdown of family law and birth-related regulations until our country's representatives can figure out what's going on.

Blue tribe just need a strong Dr Fauci-like leader and the usual media campaign to spin it into a world-ending emergency to exempt the relevant corporations from legal consequences. Shouldn't be a big deal, barely an inconvenience. 'We need bodies for Russia/China/Iran/...'

Your objections seem maximally hand wavey 'yeah just massively alter society to fit this new goal, democrats did it back during covid'

Collapsing birthrates are a much bigger problem than covid. You're the one who cares about democracy, presumably. You should use the available tools of democracy to further goals that allow democracy to exist in the future. I for one am fine with democracy-skeptical high-birth-rates minorities taking over the future.

Where did I say I care about democracy?

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Seems unworkable because while the process and technology is sound, the main barrier is individual lack of planning. Suppose you made IVF 100% subsidized and free, you still have to convince young women to undergo an invasive surgical procedure. Many women would probably delay it until it was too late to be worth doing. Countries like Israel which make heavy use of IVF have religious-cultural-social pressure for young women to bear children, so the women are more likely to freeze their eggs early.

Still, there would be some takers for free or partially subsidized IVF. Just need to convince the voting public it is worth the cost, a benefit for future generations that will not generate direct benefits for them.

Suppose you made IVF 100% subsidized and free, you still have to convince young women to undergo an invasive surgical procedure.

Young women, the demographic known to be particularly fond of cosmetic surgery? Hmm..

The easiest answer is to bribe pay them. I expect plenty of takers if it's a $10k one-off, with heavy government encouragement.

As far as I can tell, my proposal involves less demanding all-encompassing public propaganda or government intervention than any alternative I can name. Is it a perfect solution? Of course not, but praying away cratering TFRs might be cheap and also wouldn't work.

The easiest answer is to bribe pay them. I expect plenty of takers if it's a $10k one-off, with heavy government encouragement.

Guys, have you ever spoken to any women about how many kids they want to have, if they want to have kids, and why don't they want ten kids like their grandmothers' generation?

Any of you men who are not circumcised, would you get circumcised for $10k? Remembering, before you go "yeah sure why not?" that there is an anti-circumcision movement and plenty of men who are even going through expensive surgery to restore the foreskin (or at least an ersatz one) because of the perceived disadvantages?

Would you undergo circumcision for any money if it was a repeated operation?

It's not just "pay 24 year old Mandii to have a baby", it's that women even today still will be responsible for the majority of the childcare on top of looking after the house and holding down a job (even a part-time job). Men will be dissatisfied if their wife isn't feeling ready for as much sex after having a baby. Men will leave because "you pay more attention to the kids than me". This isn't simply "blame men for being selfish", it's complicated problems of intimacy, biology, societal structures, and the rest of it.

Put yourself into those shoes: you are now the person who goes back to work after maternity leave (only now we're saying paternity leave). You have a young baby to take care of, and to arrange that they are being taken care of while you work. If there's any problems, you are the one gets the phone call at work to sort it out. You are the one doing the lion's share of the child-minding and housework, even if your spouse is sympathetic and helpful. If you have a couple of kids, you are the one managing schedules around parent-teacher meetings, birthdays, extracurricular activities, taking time off to bring them to the dentist/doctor, whose salary is going towards paying childcare. Oh, and your partner still expects intimacy on a regular basis and will leave if they feel neglected. Do you think your current life and job as the man of the house can change around to accommodate all that? Would you change around to accommodate all that?

Try imagining being a mother and see how much of that life you want to devote to having four kids, when you could be "one and done" or even none, or put it off till you're forty and established in life.

Plenty of young women want children though. They just postpone it as they want to focus their early and mid twenties on partying, travelling, and education. Only to realise too late that finding a lover worth starting a family with is much harder than expected and can easily take years. Suddenly they find themselves in their mid thirties where pregnancy and childbirth is much more risky and their fertility lowers year by year.

I imagine this is the group @self_made_human is trying to cater to. Pay them to freeze their eggs while they are still young, so that they are more likely to still be able to get pregnant once they feel ready to start a family.

Considering that children is something they actually want, and supposing that this makes it significantly more likely, I could easily imagine that a lot of young women would actually be okay with this.

Then, when they have daughters, they can tell them about the experience, and this is how civilizations goes through various phases.

Guys, have you ever spoken to any women about how many kids they want to have, if they want to have kids, and why don't they want ten kids like their grandmothers' generation?

Why yes, I've had this conversation with my serious partners. The answer ranged between 0 and 3, with the modal value being 2.

Would you undergo circumcision for any money if it was a repeated operation?

Any money? Like, how much money we talking about here? I'd do it for $250k, maybe even $100k. Hell, if they were pretty reasonable and made sure I was well anesthesized, I'd do for it much less. Presuming the foreskin grew back, and this isn't just the equivalent of removing my dick with a cheese grater. I would charge at least a few hundred million dollars for that.

Sadly this must remain a hypothetical, since I was circumcised for medical reasons, and I didn't even get paid for it.

The biggest problem with the rest of your arguments is that they're emotive/rhetorical, not numerate or quantitative.

Men will leave because "you pay more attention to the kids than me".

How many men? How often? Ballpark figures, even? Because lurid anecdotes are not a good argument.

At the end of the day, I'm a weak policy pro-natalist. I do not make it a general point of going around ordering women to have kids. I think the government should encourage people to have more kids, for a form of encouragement that is closer to an anti-smoking campaign than it is to a breeding camp. Personally? I simply wouldn't marry a lady who didn't want to have kids, and I am perfectly willing to make the sacrifices necessary to support them. No hypocrisy here.

Well, I'd vote for $10k subsidies, but good luck to any politican who tries to get the public behind it. There would probably be serious opposition from women too old to benefit from it, and it would be reframed as a form of neo-patriarchal enslavement of wombs.

if it's a $10k one-off, with heavy government encouragement.

It's no longer a technological solution and has become a social and political problem, so you're kind of back where you began.

Why not cut out the middleman and pay them $10k for their first baby, no IVF required? Or $10k for each baby born before whatever cut-off age where IVF becomes relevant. There's a few dials you can adjust there and it seems like less government involvement and propaganda required than adding in the IVF step.

It's not paying for having a baby, it's the necessity to pay for childcare after the birth. Even when the child gets to be five years old, now they're going to school. Someone has to arrange to pick them up and bring them to the childminder after school, when both parents are working full-time jobs, until Mommy and Daddy get home.

There's a lot of expenses, and even more juggling around of schedules, to taking care of children unless you're full-time home-maker, and being a full-time home-maker is both low-status and only feasible if the main breadwinner is making huge money.

The average male wage in the USA is around $1k/wk, a perfectly doable household income for four people. People just don't prioritize having/being a homemaker as much. I'm given to understand that Scandi tax structures brutally penalize households for having adults outside of formal employment and so SAHMs straight up don't exist there as deliberate policy choice, regardless of partner income(but that much higher percentages of women work part time).

BTW, subsidizing childcare has very limited to nil effects on birthrates, although it does increase the labour force participation of mothers. This suggests that childcare costs do not feature strongly in decisions of whether or not to have kids.

I wish to note that my proposal is not mutually exclusive with anything you've said.

What differentiates $10k for egg-harvesting from a direct reward for natality?

  1. It particularly helps the middle class and UMC, who are the most likely to postpone fertility till it falls off a cliff.
  2. You get the eggs in hand, and the demographic that is most likely to experience severe hindsight regret gets optionality later.
  3. An actual child is much more inconvenient to produce. My recollection is there's strong empirical evidence that comparable cash awards for actual child birth have barely done anything at all, though I don't have the time to go digging right now. Exams.

So the real target for my proposal are people who want kids, but have a tendency to postpone things till it's way too late. At that point, having eggs preserved (preferably from way earlier) would be an absolute godsend. To contrast, if they wanted to get the $10k for the child then, it's far more likely that it's too late. That's true regardless of how badly they want the kids.

The benefit of the wider embryo-selection policy is that avoids or minimizes dysgenic effects. Even if $10k means a lot more to the poor, you can still screen and select for the higher quality potential children. Conveniently, the same markers that promise general good health also correlate positively with IQ. Follow the LW link for a better exploration of that point. You don't even need to do the politically difficult thing of actively selecting for IQ, you can just say you want healthier kids (by pretty standard definitions of health) and get IQ points as a happy little accident.

And even if there's no embryo selection? Well, at least we have good eggs for the IVF. That should make a difference. There's plenty of other things you could reasonably try, but I'm not writing a policy whitepaper here.

My recollection is there's strong empirical evidence that comparable cash awards for actual child birth have barely done anything at all, though I don't have the time to go digging right now

I honestly think this makes sense. There very much seems to be a fantasy where you can spend most of your 20s partying, travelling, and getting educated, and postpone children to later. Having a child early significantly interferes with your freedom to do whatever you want when you are young. In other words, the fantasy of extending your adolescence for as long as possible is worth much more than the state is willing to pay you to have a kid. $10k surely wouldn't cut it. You would need life-altering amounts of money to convince the average 21-year old middle class woman to give it up and pursue a family instead.

The state could pay for every expense associated with child rearing, from diapers to education to the sports they play in their free time. And young people would likely still not consider themselves ready to have kids.

Agree that fertility issues are a tiny part of modern birthrate woes, and probably a big chunk of those fertility issues have solutions more like 'wear boxers instead of briefs' and 'stop having the woman of the house clean out the litterbox' rather than expensive medical treatments. But- and I don't like IVF- modern states are political will limited, they're not money limited. Moar fertility treatments(and literally, I've spoken to people who had five children as soon as a doctor visited their home to figure out why they couldn't have kids. The answer? Preventive antibiotics from a cat born illness. Fertility treatments have some role) are likely to be more effective because they might actually happen. Sweden is a wealthy society which can throw money at healthcare very easily, but which can't encourage marrying your partner or having many children very easily, that's simply not done.

I do think the fertility crisis is still percolating towards the mainstream, and there are potential grandparents who still interpret potential overpopulation in Africa as the same thing as potential overpopulation for them. Also, there are still a bunch of millennials who think they have to be basically perfect, watch their kids constantly, play constantly, never lose their tempers, and so on in order to parent well. Propaganda against these viewpoints have barely been tried so far. It's mostly just a bunch of online rightists talking about it. The culture at large hasn't even stuck its toe in he discourse with fake babies and home ec at high schools, they're currently still below even the 90s in terms of acknowledging teenage girls might eventually become mothers.

I mean this is definitely not the US; what are Sweden's parenting norms? I know it's illegal to hit your kids there, and they genuinely helicopter parent less. I've heard that, like the rest of the nordics, there Are Issues with CPS. But what does the average Swede think they need in order to have kids?

From my PoV what the average Swede thinks they need in order to have kids is full time employment (which in many/most cases means a finished degree/post graduate degree as well) and being established in their respective careers for both parents and owning a sufficiently large home, likely a house, in a sufficiently decent area (IE. Not one with a ton of crime) and obviously a longterm relationship.

This means that you at the earliest would look at having children at about age 25. Many do not finish their degrees by that age, for many reasons, and housing is unaffordable in major metropolitan regions which pushes that date back significantly.

If you're in Stockholm this likely means you're only going to be ready at some point in your early thirties, unless you get a lot of money from your parents, assuming you have a longterm partner that is. This tracks relatively well with the age of first time mothers.

If people could choose freely I think people would have their first kid in their late 20s on average.

As for parenting norms i believe things are far more relaxed than what they seem to be in the US, that I have insight into anyway (coastal "elite"). Kids are out playing on their own all the time, both in urban and suburban areas. Parents aren't expected to arrange and drive their kids to playdates much beyond starting school. What is expected, at least for the middle class (but I assume for everyone but the lumpen proles), is to have your kids attend various kinds of activities like soccer and drive your kids to practice and games.

I personally never felt like the expectations placed on parents were that excessive. I think my parents generation had it worse with parental neuroticism and radical belief in tabula rasaism. Then again, that might be more my parents and where I grew up than a general thing.

To me the issue is the time it takes for people's lives to get started, which is a combination of too much education and too expensive housing. I refuse to believe that the price of housing increasing in real terms by some 500-600% the last 30 years had nothing to do with delayed family formation.

Most of the parents I talk to in Sweden seem to spend a lot (but not literally all) of their free time on their kids. Driving them to and from friends, sports, hobbies, helping with homework, cooking, etc. Many who have 2 kids have noted that they would have absolutely no clue how they would find time for a 3rd, even if they wanted one.

Sure, kids take a lot of work but my point was that it still seems better than in the US, with kids being more "self sufficient" earlier.

Many who have 2 kids have noted that they would have absolutely no clue how they would find time for a 3rd, even if they wanted one.

This is not something I've personally heard. The most common reason I encounter among other parents is that they feel like they've had the whole kid experience with two kids and feel 'done'.

The most common reason for having a third (or more) seems to be if people had the first two of the same gender and they want one of the gender they didn't have yet.

Sure, I hear they have better maternity leave than the US. I've also heard that Japan has been at least beginning to ask their people to form families.

On the ground in Japan, it seems like very little has changed in the last half decade. The child birth payment was raised slightly (an extra 10k yen I think, but that's one off and goes to medical bills) and the income restriction on childrearing money from the national government was removed, so even middle class people now get gubmint cheese for having kids. But all the structural problems -- long work hour culture (premium Friday was a failure), resistance to raising salaries for high performers, fixing zoning and real estate laws so that people can buy land for housing, breaking up the construction cartels so that people can build on their land without submitting to mortgage debt slavery, fixing the interest rate and letting zombie companies staffed by doddering boomers collapse so that banks are willing to lend money for small business expansion and so that the yen will strengthen -- none of that stuff is even being considered at all.

Solving infertility by supporting aging couples probably leads to increased genetic flaws in the general population over time. A sort of procrastination of dealing with the issue directly.

Whatever solution to bring up young women's fertility will involve older women policing the behavior of younger women, through a combination of carrots and sticks. It's the only way any religions or subcultures maintain high TFR.

Whatever solution to bring up young women's fertility will involve older women policing the behavior of younger women

What about young men? Because in the tradwife discussion on here in another thread, it's taken for granted that young men want to play the field and don't want to settle down to a life of boring monogamy age twenty-three or twenty-five.

So unless the young women are having babies outside wedlock - and you guys will criticise them for that - it relies on making young men get married and having kids as early as the young women.

Oh, but marry off the twenty-two year old girls to thirty-five/forty-five year old men, like the old days? Okay. Those guys are going to be virgins until marriage too, because the kind of responsible, faithful, and self-controlled girls you all want to be future wives (no risk of her cucking you with Chad and putting a cuckoo in the nest for beta loser to raise!) will not have sex with them before marriage. So the teen boys are going to have to wait until they're thirty to have sex with that boring life of monogamy.

How do we think this works out? Hang on, here we go again with prostitution, and the good old double standard roars back into life.

Men don't want a wife and kids until they've had their fun, but nobody considers that nature and the evolutionary drive to reproduce is as strong in young women and that's why we get the unhappy effects of "but he swore he'd marry me, now I'm pregnant and single".

First off, in traditional peasant societies both sexes married younger than that; for the peasantry these were mostly actual teenagers marrying twenty something or occasionally very early thirties men, the very large age gaps tended to be mostly elites with second marriages(either polygamous or serially monogamous). In old school urban societies it was more likely to be early twenties woman/late twenties men(who, yes, visited prostitutes before marriage). The twenty two year old and forty five year old has never been normal.

Secondly, hell yeah police young men. We know how to do that. Young men respond to incentives a lot more legibly, and the bottom quintile dropping out of the marriage market is A-OK to most reckonings. Men marrying in the near-term post college years is not some sort of rarity, although it may be passe in the liberal elite. It's quite common in red America.

but marry off the twenty-two year old girls to thirty-five/forty-five year old men, like the old days?

I can't think of any old day where the usual marriage structure had a median age gap between 13 and 23 years or a median age of male marriage between 35 and 45.

Not uncommon to have age gaps due to maternal mortality in childbirth with premodern medical care. Also common in polygamous societies where multiple wives were common. Any situation where virgin fertile women are in high demand but limited supply results in a older husband age because the woman usually prefers the wealthier man other factors being equal.

How do we think this works out?

Could always go for the Ancient Greek route: recreational bisexuality as the norm for young men until it's time for them to settle down and produce heirs?

The older women end up policing the young men too, but they don't need to try hard if the young women are already bought-in to the system. All young men want to play the field, few are capable of actually doing so. Historically, most men are satisfied with marrying while young into an exclusive monogamous relationship if it means sacrificing the ability to play a field that they probably would have failed at anyway. If the young women are willing to settle down early, expect the men to line up to make themselves eligible bachelors.

Nobody expects the older bachelors to remain virgins. Some will probably seek out prostitutes, yes, but men will do that no matter what unless they feel guilt or shame from the constraints of religion or culture. From a TFR perspective, it doesn't matter much if the young husband is 20 or 35. There will be substantial competition for eligible bachelorettes. Some of the teen boys will have to wait until they are 35 to be seen as better suitors, but the onus is on the teen boys to improve themselves quickly to avoid waiting too long, and men generally respond well to that kind of incentive.

As for the womanizers abandoning pregnant young mothers, we already come down pretty hard on that with child support. Part of young women's education will be the emphasis on no sex until marriage, as that is her primary leverage during courtship. Once married, a woman's rights to shared marital assets and income is much more secure, as it already is today.

Do fresh eggs in old women develop more closely to fresh eggs in young women or expired eggs in old women? The former seems more likely to me, though I've not looked into it. Genetic risks especially.

No, there are no fresh eggs in old women. Women are born with all the eggs they will have for their entire lifetime, they are just released slowly after puberty until menopause. This is why our conversation is about young women freezing their eggs to preserve their quality so they can use IVF to fertilize them later.

Biologically-related infertility is obviously an exceedingly small cause of declining fertility, and in any serious discussion it must be pretty far down the list of priorities.

I disagree. Age-related infertility is a major cause of couples with children having fewer children than they wanted after starting too late, and "couples with children not being able to have as many children as they wanted" is about half the fertility decline.

Unfortunately, "mum too old" is one of the harder fertility problems to fix with IVF.

is one of the harder fertility problems to fix with IVF.

actually, trivial if eggs are frozen when they are young

From "The Struggle to Conceive with Frozen Eggs":

Brigitte Adams caused a sensation four years ago when she appeared on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek under the headline, “Freeze your eggs, Free your career.” She was single and blond, a Vassar graduate who spoke fluent Italian, and was working in tech marketing for a number of prestigious companies. Her story was one of empowerment, how a new fertility procedure was giving women more choices, as the magazine noted provocatively, “in the quest to have it all.”

Adams remembers feeling a wonderful sense of freedom after she froze her eggs in her late 30s, despite the $19,000 cost. Her plan was to work a few more years, find a great guy to marry and still have a house full of her own children.

Things didn’t turn out the way she hoped.

In early 2017, with her 45th birthday looming and no sign of Mr. Right, she decided to start a family on her own. She excitedly unfroze the 11 eggs she had stored and selected a sperm donor.

Two eggs failed to survive the thawing process. Three more failed to fertilize. That left six embryos, of which five appeared to be abnormal. The last one was implanted in her uterus. On the morning of March 7, she got the devastating news that it, too, had failed.

Adams was not pregnant, and her chances of carrying her genetic child had just dropped to near zero. She remembers screaming like “a wild animal,” throwing books, papers, her laptop — and collapsing to the ground.

“It was one of the worst days of my life. There were so many emotions. I was sad. I was angry. I was ashamed,” she said. “I questioned, ‘Why me?’ ‘What did I do wrong?’ ”

This egg-freezing meme needs to die.

This is like as far out on the right side of the bell curve you can go for 'maximum self-imposed difficulty' by freezing late thirties and trying to implant mid forties

froze her eggs in her late 30s

This cannot have helped. I wonder how her story would have changed, if she'd done it at 20?

We've trapped ourselves. We've made ourselves into societies where women spend years being artificially sterile, from at least the legal age of consent for sexual activity though increasingly below that, until they're 'ready' to have children. That can be in late thirties to early forties.

And after fifteen to twenty years of training the body not to get pregnant, now we expect it to change back on command? Very much more difficult.

You want more babies? Seriously? Then vote to repeal abortion. No exceptions (because pro-choice set will try and drive a coach-and-four through any exceptions and any limits). Good luck with that, liberal men raised to believe it's a human right.

how does any 20-year-old pay for storage fees? there's real logistical and economic considerations at play here even if biology only reserves it's kudos for the youngest candidates

And if they don't die, they need to change. The doctors know the stats, at the very least they could/should be frank with their patients.

A friend of mine was told during her first consult with the IVF clinic that a chance of success at "high confidence" would require a number of eggs equal to her age at implantation - so to prepare for 3 rounds of egg retrievals at the bare minimum, and as soon as possible. She got unlucky, and the first round only retrieved about 4, so the number of cycles was immediately upped. When she asked if they couldn't try those 4 first before cycling again, she was advised to not waste time and get the inventory as young/soon as possible, and to expect more setbacks.

Sounds like this lady did a single (more successful) retrieval cycle, and nobody showed her the math.

I think at this point artificial wombs, genetically engineered babies, AI making human labour obsolete, or even radical life extension and making geriatrics physically 20 year old again, are all vastly more realistic than any social engineering attempt at making the fertility rate go above 2.0 long term.

Or, cultures that restrict women will simply become more numerous and vital than those that don't. Robots And artificial wombs can't stave off civilizational exhaustion. Houellebecq's Submission is a more likely future.

Why? Secular Israelis and red tribe America(which is not based and trad barefoot and pregnant fundies) both manage replacement fertility through social engineering. Your solutions sound like science fiction, yes, but they also sound like a continuation of the trends that lead to below replacement fertility to begin with- they make kids 'less than the default'.

From what I looked up, secular Israeli women had a fertility rate of 2.0 in 2020, projected to decreased to 1.7 in 2030.

And the most democrat counties in the US have 1.3 children per woman vs 1.76 for the most republican.


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