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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   36422 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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there are certain subjects where I fear that if I deviate too much from the party line, I will be cast out into the outer depths before I even begin.

Richard Hanania is a good counterexample here. I don’t particularly like the guy (not least for his one-time soft plagiarism of me, but that’s a tangent) and I’m not a central member of his audience, but he spends a great deal of time and effort writing essays that castigate and rebuff people who do particularly like him and who want to be central members of his audience. He is a Problematic writer who constantly and openly decries the pathologies of the Problematic, spending more effort than plenty of leftists chronicling all the ways conservatives go wrong, and pulling no punches when doing so. Not just that. He doesn’t touch third rails, he bear-hugs them, and his audience only grows as a result.

And that makes him Interesting, and so I read what he has to say, and sometimes I learn things.

The primary thing a public-facing writer needs is to be Interesting. Forget tribes, forget cancelation, forget whatever: deviations make someone Interesting, and the Freddie deBoers of the world flourish while a thousand cut-and-paste Breadtubers with impeccable production value and assembly-line opinions drown in the kiddie pool before anyone cares who they are.

Oh, and the fiercest partisans? They won’t forget a single thing you say against them, and they’ll bring it up as part of the chattering Discourse around you if you get big enough, but that won’t stop them from loudly amplifying everything you say that expresses their worldview eloquently enough. Most people don’t pay attention to most things most of the time; they notice people when convenient and forget about them otherwise.

In particular, for all its faults the online right ecosystem is higher-variance than the online left, defined more by shared opposition than shared values. They’re used to envisioning themselves as a cloud of heretics, and while they can and will scream bloody murder at you for committing heresy against their particular orthodoxies, they cannot precisely kick you out and will not stop listening unless you are Dull.

Out of the loop: How did Hanania plagiarize you?

It's a bit petty and I haven't talked about it here to my recollection, but basically: when he ran a survey of his fanbase, he copied the format and many of the questions I used to survey r/themotte, repeating a number of items verbatim and copying much of my presentation of the results down to specific color choices. That's totally fine in my book—I'm glad he was impressed enough to use it, and it's a fun format that I think should spread—but when sharing the results of the survey, he first requested someone make an imitation of my results table, then removed all mention of my initial table after someone had copied it. You can see the archive here, where it links my work, with no mention of it in the live version.

Technically he did attribute my original when he was asking the questions, but it left a bit of a bitter taste for me when he edited any attribution out of the results page itself, and when I reached out asking about it, he first replied by saying that he didn't know what I was talking about, then went radio silent. It's not the sort of thing I'm interested in making a huge fuss over, but it did leave the lingering impression that his disagreeable approach is more than just an affect and that he can be a genuinely unpleasant person on an interpersonal level.

Wait, Richard Hanania is Motte-adjacent enough to have seen your survey somehow and think it was useful to him? Interesting.

I don't know about the motte but he was definitely on SSC back in the day.

Yeah. His description was a bit odd ("I found an image online of a survey in which SlateStarCodex fans rated various things"), so it's hard to tell just what sort of proximity we're looking at, but definitely some sort of Motte-adjacency.

I appreciate this post and your sentiment of encouragement. And indeed, Hanania is someone I had in mind who is anathema to a lot of people on the hard-right, partially for exactly the reasons that you outline.

My concerns here are primarily about the need for cross-promotion - the need to appear on the YouTube/Bitchute/etc. channels of other content creators, to get retweeted and looped into Twitter dialogues, to have your work linked to in other writers’ Substack pieces, etc. As you mentioned, the online Right is a Very Big Tent, and that means that there are a number of different “factions” or “silos” who don’t actually interface much across boundaries, except to snark and hurl invective. Given my opinions about race especially, but also about other topics such as religion, I’m naturally a terrible fit for the “tradcon” tribe, and would be a far more successful participant in more harder-edged circles, where guys like Hanania have no traction and are largely treated as a joke. I’m not saying that this corner of the right doesn’t tolerate gadflies of any stripe, but there are definitely certain topics that seem to be so inflammatory that if you say the wrong thing about them, you’re now one of the guys that people tweet about being a “crypto-Jew” or “confirmed homosexual” or “subversive” or “cuck”.

Right now, I’m still in the stage of figuring out, “What are the areas of discussion where I not only have something Interesting to say, but also care enough about them to be comfortable standing by my opinions even if I’m taking a significant amount of criticism and am risking alienating a significant amount of people?” Hell, maybe it’s the sort of thing that you just need to discover as you go, by being as authentic as possible at all times and being willing to own whatever shit you step in as a result. I wish I could believe that, but the patterns I unfortunately observe in the particular corners of the right wherein I mostly dwell suggest that right now the cool thing is to purity-spiral and compete to be the most glib and hardcore about every issue at all times.

Honestly, talk to @KulakRevolt. You can aspire to be a scene player fitting into one of the silos, or you can just do interesting enough things that you catch the attention of a lot of silos and build your own specific audience, cross-promoting and jumping between scenes as you see fit. Kulak twittermaxxed and grabbed the attention of everyone from Scott Alexander and Tyler Cowen to Scott Adams and Jordan Peterson in short order. By the time you're at the stage where people tweet about you being a homosexual crypto-Jew, you've already won. If they care enough to slot you into a role in their mind, they care enough to pay attention when the people they like notice something you say. Let them tweet. The people they read will still link you whenever you say interesting enough things about the things they care about.

I dunno. I think basically anyone honest will alienate large swathes of people in their natural circles at times, but that's when you find out which ones are interesting and which are simply tiresome. Heaven knows I've done and said enough to alienate plenty, and as my profile grows I can't imagine that pace of alienation will slow down, but you don't want to be an ideological foot soldier, and interesting people don't want to hear only from ideological foot soldiers.

This was a very encouraging post and I appreciate it!

or you can just do interesting enough things that you catch the attention of a lot of silos and build your own specific audience

Ah, the Shoe0nHead Gambit. Seems to work as far as I can tell, but is probably hard to pull off.

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