This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The gradual death of the open internet and ideological capture and where this all leads
One interesting thing you get to do when you get older is to take stock of your predictions, observe trends over a longer timespan and see if your mental models were actually worth their salt.
When I was growing up, I was at the very tail end of the people who still grew up with what I'd like to call a relatively "open" internet. Open in the sense that there was no Reddit, no walled gardens, the iPhone was young, Facebook was beginning to be a thing when I was in school.
Internet norms were very libertarian in most "serious" places, much more male, much more autistic. People thought that we'd have this open space forever where there are no central authoritarian rulers, censorship was mocked as technically impossible even with the Great Chinese Firewall having been a thing, the Arab spring was heralded as a prototype of internet-enabled uprising against authoritarian rulers, the whole thing was very much end-of-history-like. Things like the EFF and Richard Stallmann were relevant, nerds cared about open source, etc.
Then it all came crashing down. People began to concentrate on social media, on sites like Reddit. Network effects did their thing and centralised power and moderation. Eternal September became truly eternal. The word "echo chamber" became a thing. Smartphones meant tech literacy was no longer a prerequisite. The whole thing became politicised, with Trump, Cambridge Analytica, etc. Now everyone is a Russian, Chinese, Israeli shill. Nobody ultimately cares about privacy, censorship, speech norms, etc. that much. Stallmann got cancelled, I think the EFF and the various open source orgs are now all either into AI grifting or grievance stuff. It's gone or going away. I won't look at wrongthink when I have secure-boot enabled TPM-secured age verification built into my OS and sending all my wrongthink to the government.
It was fun while it was closed up. I am sure none of this is novel.
But the interesting thing is the further direction of travel.
Australia and Britain now have age-verification laws which require everyone to submit ID. I think some more authoritarian Asian countries (like South Korea) already have this for things like video games. It is also talked about to make things like VPNs illegal or harder to access in the UK (with the usual suspects pointing out that this puts the UK in company with countries like Russia and NK), the other non-US Anglosphere countries usually follow (seriously Australia/UK/Canada/NZ have a weird thing for paternalism). The sad thing is that this is bipartisan and nobody really opposes this. The evidence base for social media bans is actually quite thin so this will probably not even make the kids not miserable while entrenching ideological control
You can picture children being fed state-backed news from a young age now too, which I guess is Lindy in a way. Will probably entrench and accelerate existing biases and trends even further though. I don't expect "peak woke" to have been passed.
The big boogy-men of the Internet are incels, right wingers and Andrew Tate. Incel discourse is a personal bugbear of mine because it is completely detached from reality in the sense that even though even right-wingers come up with plenty of theories about supposed resentful incel violence, the people most likely to rape and murder women are actually the sex havers. But I digress.
So the governments come up with weird dystopian schemes of censoring and tracking this stuff while other kinds of probably actually harmful stuff (neurotic and mentally ill women amplifying their neuroses about men and society, viz. the "Angry Young Woman", race-grievance amplification, various untrue "tax the rich stuff" verging into blood libel and calls for assassinations) is left untouched, amplified or even supported. Moral panics are nothing new I suppose.
I am a very heavy user of LLMs. I talk to them basically all day at work at this point. Not everyone does, there are still plenty of people who don't use LLMs but younger people use them more than others. I imagine usership heavily skews intellectually as well, as a lot of the general population hates interacting with textual media. I imagine that in the coming years the censors and nudgers will also try to get a front-row seat to this as well, so when you ask for certain things you not only get a Reddit Markov Chain but one where all the "wrong" opinions have been RLFH'd out.
In the future when everyone outsources their thought processes to LLMs that presents a level of ideological centralisation Stalin could have only dreamt of. Should Amanda Askell et al. get to decide how everyone thinks? Maybe not in my opinion, but who knows what'll this stuff do to the kids.
This stuff is particularly pernicious in the non-US anglosphere. I think the EU is also thinking about OS/device-level censorship but in Germany a court struck down the social media ban idea for kids for now (with the argument being something like "kids are people", which is very Kantian and German-idealist in a way). I think California or something tried to force the Linux kernel to put this stuff in and right-wingers will jump on this just as left-wingers would, with different bugbears (porn for right-wingers, wrongthink for left-wingers). Not sure if the US will be a holdout or not. At least speech norms are a thing.
As someone who skews Libertarian, this is all a great disappointment, especially because I like being able to argue with smart people, even if they have viewpoints many consider despicable. I personally mostly just want to be left alone and not have goons sent to people's houses because of wrongthink. Do they still make the kids read Orwell? But I guess not only has the experiment of giving everyone a seat at the table to talk to each other failed spectacularly, it has also manifested a vector of ideological state control hitherto unparalleled that governments are now starting to seriously use. Who knows, maybe complaining about having to pay 50+% of my paycheck to Boomer UBI will be criminalised in 20 years. At least the Chinese are honest about this stuff and don't pretend to be into free speech.
IMO I feel like age verification is a motte. I 100% support young people having limited internet. Especially now that access is in your pocket and isn’t the family computer with lack of privacy.
The issue with age-verification is the linkage to adults real identities and societies broader desire for political control through thought control. You can’t do the good thing (8 year olds not able to watch bukkake) without also making it very easy for society to do the bad thing (universal thought police).
This seems to be a universal issue with modern technology. Nuclear energy having bombs or Self-Driving enabling government to control your cars.
Sure, I think young people should not have open access to the internet, but I'm also not willing to do what it takes to accomplish that.
It's the realm of progressives to ignore these kinds of trade-offs, and to focus obstinately on the thing they want while ignoring what it takes to get there.
Children's internet access can be mitigated without really invading privacy.
Better parental controls, phone bans in schools, and propaganda "the free internet is bad for children". I think those would get the most young people off the free internet for most of their youth, which is enough for significant improvement to society, even with a few (with negligent parents and/or ambition) still online.
Maybe it can be mitigated without invading privacy, but that's not the world we live in, and that's not what people are proposing, is it? What we're getting is full online ID for everyone.
Yes, the proposals are bad.
But I think it's easier to persuade with "age verification is fine, but this proposal is bad because it unnecessarily hurts privacy (and won't even work), here's a better one" than "age verification is bad".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Freedom over safety 100%. Don't 8 year olds have parents? How about their parents just not buy them a smart phone? Easy. Age verification is a complete abomination, it's not even a trojan horse, it's a trojan warship. It looks bad on the outside and everyone can tell what's inside.
Unlimited freedom is a hellish dystopian society. You could say it’s freedom for alcohol companies to target customers by identifying alcoholics by having mobile alcohol trucks setting up outside someone’s house offering the first drink for free at 9 am and ratcheting up temptation. Mobile phones can be like that.
Young children often don’t have great temptation control. I don’t think having shitty parents means that children should be offered vices at 8 year olds. There is always a temptation between freedom and security.
Unlimited freedom is a frontier society, which certainly isn't always safe, but I wouldn't describe it as hellish and dystopian.
It's dystopian to have the police knock on your door for complaining about being stabbed by a foreigner. It's just a violent death to be scalped by an Indian, and it's just normal exposure to die of hunger or cold.
More options
Context Copy link
Okay. Alcoholism is a genetic disease. I would rather they filter themselves out than make fit people live under tyranny. Although I would support keyhole solutions out of charity, I can't stand the parasitism of ruining everything for most people so that a sickly minority gets catered to.
Same logic here. Kids with bad parents have parents with bad genes. But they get their genes from their parents. No more taking from beautiful ones to provide protection from selection for the hässlich. I would support keyhole solutions out of noblesse oblige, but everyone showing their identity card to every website so neglectful people don't see a nude body when they are young is not that.
More options
Context Copy link
At the end of the day, there are only two positions -- "You can just do things" and "We live in a society". Each person has one or the other orientation (with most being the latter), and this determines their position on almost any regulation that doesn't go directly to their self-interest. It does not matter where on the freedom-to-tyranny scale society is at the moment.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
One fairly-recent thing is how obviously fake a lot of this is. There are a ton of accounts on X which will make inflammatory comments on US culture war stuff or wanting to tax wealth, often implying a personal stake... and said accounts turn out to be located in South Asia or Africa. I presume this is paid shit-stirring. Probably the shit-stirrers will smarten up and use apparently-American accounts, but for now the fakery is on display.
I think obviousness is the point, similar to obvious scams. Smart people already filter them, the vast majority who'd be influenced as intended are too stupid to notice or care. Then the less obvious trolls are harder to detect.
More options
Context Copy link
Did we ever find out if Double D Geopolitics was actually American?
Paid shit-stirring has been a thing since the Ancient Greeks. Back in those days, at least your drachma stayed in the local economy!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If you think bot accusations are bad now, imagine if the great firewall fell and 1 billion Chinese internet users suddenly inundated socials.
You mention how the barrier to entry corresponds to the degradation of the internet and I am reminded that someone pointed out that the popularization of "Dead Internet Theory" perfectly corresponds with the adoption of the internet by a huge number of Africans and Indians.
Part of the nature of libertarian wild west ethos is that it gravitates to places where there is no establishment yet. So don't waste your time in an established domain pining for the old days. Focus on new domains instead.
The US is obviously not a hold-out for freedom of information, as the USG would happily enforce IP law upon the world if it could (as orchestrated by the mouse). AI is a bit of a miracle in this regard because it came into existence faster than IP law could contain it.
Ironically the most "authoritarian" governements are some of the last bastions of hope for freedom in various fundamental domains: I'm thinking about the pricipled stand that Putin made with Snowden when a weaker country may have extradicted him (remember how few countries actually offered asylum to him (none in Europe btw)?), and China is really a darling when it comes to ignoring US ip law (ip law essentially being state-enforced artificial-scarcity on an inherently abundant medium), and it is former soviet territories that allow for true freedom of information via Anna's archive, Sci-hub, LibGen, etc.
The real libertarian frontier of AI is local open-weight models/paradigms(Hermes, OpenCode) which China is much more culturally-aligned with at the moment, at least for base models (I was about to say "GLM not withstanding" here until I checked and found out that Z.ai is indeed also a chinese company)
Many of these authoritarian policies emerging in California/Europe are partly an emulation of China. I have heard it said that China is the only government that took the internet seriously from its inception as a governed entity.
Even being somewhat libertatian-minded, I greatly admire the fact that Xi can label OnlyFans as socially-damaging "Western degeneracy" and wipe it in an instant from infecting China.
I tend to prefer using a decent LLM guide me through various textual analyses of literature that I have pulled from LibGen than have reddit-level arguments online. I think many young people are realizing that interactions with LLMs can often be more meaningful and healthier than an average interaction with strangers on any established forum in the World Wide Web.
I don't think Africans and Indians ruined the mainstream internet, I think it was "normies". The internet used to be dominated by autistic nerds like us, so it appealed to us; now we're the minority (like in real life), so it appeals to the majority.
You can still find communities which cater to autistic nerds, like this one. I think the answer is not censorship but gatekeeping. If California polices the internet, they won't police it how nerds want, they'll police it how (Californian) politicians and lobbyists want. Instead, on the free internet, one can create a community that excludes "normies" through culture, moderation, and as last resort invite-only.
The two problems I'm aware of are DDoS, but in practice CDNs like Cloudflare or Epik and bot-detectors like Anubis have defended so far; and doxxing, but most people want privacy for themselves, and many have worse skeletons in their closet than whatever you said, so that may be transient.
More options
Context Copy link
You're vastly overstating how strong the great firewall is and how hard it's policed. I spent a decent amount of time in China and plenty of upper-middle class Chinese have Instagram accounts and the like. They just tend to prefer their domestic equivalents since it interfaces better with their technology and how they see the world. If Chinese English literacy were higher you'd likely see more crossover, but the Firewall is less of a singular cause of divided internet than the language gap and China's internet having evolved into its own different shape during the period when the Firewall was more rigorously enforced.
Hell, there's jokes amongst a lot of Chinese netizens that Twitter is a porn app since that's 98% of what they use it for
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I would be more motivated to fight against this if bot-infestation was not such a massive issue on social media.
You say that many are accused of being "foreign shills" on social media, but is that really wrong? We already know how lopsided posting on reddit is (with 1% of users generating 40% of posts), and if you throw in some well funded astroturf campaign, you have basically replaced all intersting common dialogue with something entirely else.
I increasingly find social media so exhausting, there is so little room for actually exchanging ideas. Post are usually pushing an agenda, or increasingly just bots arguing with each other. Of course I dont actively support censorship or online ID-laws, but also do have less fucks to give.
How come you’re posting under a pseudonym and not your real name? This forum would not exist if all social medial had to be tied to real human users.
Given the number of people here who think this place exists to pump their substack numbers, it might still exist anyway.
I assume this is a typo for "Substack".
Thanks. Fixed
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You think digital ID will actually help to solve the issue? I don't really see how that would happen.
If every user is tied to a real-person ID, then that would be true for bots as well. Since there is a finite amount of ID's, it would be impossible to just spin up a new bot once one gets banned; At some point you run out of ID's to use.
Platforms will require europeans to do id verification where legally required, meanwhile bots based overseas will be unaffected.
That, I suppose, is an issue I did not consider.
I don't see much point if age verification is only implemented on a country by country basis. That way we still get the foreign interference and inflammatory trolls that just spin up a new account. The worst of both worlds really.
Although if the argument for it is mainly "we need to protect the children against Andrew Tate", then I could maybe see European governments doing it this way regardless.
The push for ID verification does seem to be happening in every western country at basically the same time though. So if it does go through, I have some hope that it will at least be a global thing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
At the cost of the chilling effect of the government being able to correlate your posts better. Mind you they already can probably for the vast majority of unsophisticated users so who knows, maybe it doesn't matter.
Sure, I agree that the surveillance aspect is a major point against ID verification, but the poster I responded to was asking how this would help combat bots.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Why do you think they'll snip bots though? They're pretty useful to the establishment.
Last I checked, most moderators were volunteers. Even Reddit, huge as it is, is still largely community driven. If a moderation team has an anti-bot stance, then I would expect the place run by that team to contain significantly less bots once ID-bans become available.
So you think the digital ID will be public for all to see, so volunteer moderators will be able to make decisions like thar? I doubt it, such a solution would cause massive chaos.
Moderators don't need to see the ID to ban it. Only the website does. Assuming ID is mandatory, then the website would have to be able to see it in order to verify the user is old enough. The moderators would send a request for the website to ban the ID of the user. The rest is automated.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It may not be wrong but it's also a bit of a thought-terminating cliché. Anyone who you disagree with is a pernicious putinbot or whatever. It's people discovering the island of quokkas that was the open internet and then poisoning the commons for marginal geopolitical gains. I am not saying this is to be fought, just observing.
I do feel like people overstate the Putinbot issue insofar as mainstream politics is concerned. I do feel like there's a lot more engagement farming than expected, though, or atleast the Karmelo Anthony trial is like the only time I've felt that Karmelo supporters can't really actually exist in sufficient population and ignorance as Twitter seems to indicate.
More options
Context Copy link
The problem is that even the people who are agreeing with me are bots! And now I cant even get any meaningful insight from them. I have tried to find out how significant the opposition to data centers are in Michigan for example (not just polling, but actual hard opposition that would make people change their support for a candidate). Obviously the anger is real, but how widespread, does it go beyond leftist for example? Will Whitmer support tank due to this (she is very pro data centers)
But it all drowns out in the bot wars between supporters of the 3 candidates in the senate dem primary who accuse each other of being jihadist or zionist shills. The governors race is obviously more important for this issue, but since that race has a clear front runner, there is much less discourse.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link