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Notes -
Yesterday marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Harambe.
The White House has remarked on the occasion.
How much credence do you put on the idea that Harambe represented an actual sea change in American culture? At the time, it felt like a joke, but in hindsight, it feels like the first time that internet memeing bled over into real space. A lot of the people making jokes about a gorilla ended up making jokes about a former real estate developer and steak salesman that propelled him into the public eye. Was Harambe a watershed event, or just one where look back and project meaning?
I do remember the Harambe incident from my Lived Experience.
It was pretty funny. When it was unclear with plausible deniability as to the identity of the child and parents—thus it was assumed by default that the child and parents were white, possibly out of hopium—there was much raging that a Karen's carelessness and White Privilege led to a member of an endangered species being shot to death. Then, it inconveniently emerged that the child and parents were black, and from there a seething retreat and sudden silence were had.
No charges against the mother over the incident, naturally.
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10 years? Man, time flies. Dicks out, everyone. Ladies of the motte, you'll have to improvise something. I have faith in you.
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Was it a big Culture War issue? It doesn't seem like it, since the White House remark and leftists I know are pro Harambe. If not, I don't consider it part of the Big Shift: the Internet's slow descent from mainstream light-heartedness into meanness and negativity.
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Harambe is definitely a real 'canon event' for a certain generation of people.
All major events after that point have felt very 'unreal' and usually gets twisted to someone's agenda right away.
It is also one of the last times we had a major cultural event that virtually everyone, of every ideology, agreed on the valence of, and didn't turn political. Everyone agreed the death of the gorilla was tragic and likely unneeded, a result of human irresponsibility.
It didn't trigger a gender discourse (although the "dicks out for Harambe" meme got people some errant looks), it wasn't co-opted as a weapon against political opponents, there were no racial undertones, it was just half-sincere meming about a low-level tragedy. I can't off the top of my head think of any recent events like this which weren't immediately converted to culture war fodder.
I dunno if that gorilla was cosmically important, but as a marker of the boundary between one cultural era into another, it works extremely well.
The only other event I'd offer as a marker of passing from one epoch to the other, also from 2016, was Alphago beating Lee Sedol. That one actually DID portend a massive sea change, and if I had been a bit smarter/braver/wealthier around that time, I could have made a lot of money placing bets on future AI development.
By comparison, there is no way I know of anyone could have traded on the death of Harambe to make a real profit.
You might have lost a lot of that money. Almost none of the tech used in AlphaGo lead to LLMs and it produced a frenzy of research and startups that mostly looked in the wrong direction. I guess RL for behaviour tuning made it in.
The obvious investment in response to AlphaGo would have been Google. So, although you'd have lucked into it, 10xing your investment over ten years isn't terrible. Maybe you'd also have seen that a fleet of TPUs were used for training and made the jump from that to Nvidia.
I guess the main learning would have to have been "you can convert massive compute into narrow but superhuman performance" and speculated that it could be successfully extended to human language by AIAYN, published the next year.
Yes, I think the ‘bitter lesson’ is the other thing that came out of this, but AlphaGo’s intelligence didn’t generalise to simultaneously learning even a single other game.
Finding that sufficient data could lead to expertise in massively distributed domains came as a huge shock to me, professionally, and completely destroyed my notion of how intelligence could work.
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I think that's the heart of what I've been wondering. 2015 - 2017 was a wild ride. Things definitely aren't the same anymore. If it happened today, I can't help but imagine that the aftermath would be far more polarized and ugly than it was at the time.
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Not much. Weird to see the White House remark on it, even if it's only on Xitter. I don't really remember much bleed over into reality.
I think Kony 2012 is the first event I remember as internet mass hysteria where people acted like a freakout on the internet would somehow change real-life conditions on another continent.
It's interesting you mention Kony 2012. It rgas always felt to me like something broke in the world around 2010 - 2013. I can't exactly nail down what it was, the Kony phenomenon definitely comes to mind when I consider it. It was the first time I ever saw social media drive consensus in my social group to such an extent. In some ways, it felt like the prototype of ${CURRENT_THING} activism. It didn't matter that you had never heard about it yesterday - you had to have an opinion on it right now.
Maybe we owe the Mayan Calendar people an apology....
(What does 'rgas' mean? I couldn't find any relevant results....)
Probably a "fat-finger" typo of 'has' on a phone.
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I think what Kony and Harambe did was mark the rise of the social media based reaction to news as the primary way people interacted with the news. Before that, they might talk about the news on social media, but the news came from other sources like CNN or local news. Harambe and Kony started online and were talked about online. It was the beginning of everyone being able to be sort of not only journalists but commentators, and that they not only could but should influence the outcome of the story.
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It was the latest incarnation of Eternal September.
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Never heard of it, for what that’s worth.
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