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Crowstep  8mo ago (theintrinsicperspective.com)   2639 thread views

What the heck happened in 2012?

theintrinsicperspective.com

Submission statement:

Erik Hoel argues that 2012 was a cultural inflection point. Just as 1968 signalled the peak of the 1960s cultural revolution that would set the stage for the next few decades of social change, 2012 represents the beginning of the (spoiler) smartphone era and a new round of social change.

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2012 is around the time that pop culture should have started experiencing a backlash to all of the progressive cultural victories that accumulated from the 20 or so years preceding it. Instead, that natural rightward energy was suppressed by what we now call DEI officers. And so we ended up with a literal astroturfed culture where no one is interested in what the cultural elites are selling, on a message level, but they keep doubling down on their own path.

Yeah I too saw this take on Twitter ;)

But I want to push back a little bit. For sure, "wokeness" does have a lot of official support and literal commissars in American HR departments. But it also has lots of genuine grass-roots support. As in, people who congregate on Reddit and Twitter and devote their lives to this "extremism" in varying degrees.

I'm sorry but someone who transitions and spends their time and money on an ideological crusades with very good results is a strong opponent. It's an insane level of fanaticism and commitment. I would wager this is an important factor that explains why wokeness is winning. And crucially for my argument, it's grass-roots support from actual true-believers, not a gerontocratic elite pushing unpopular views in a top-down manner.

If you like video games and talking about them online, your world has basically been taken over by these people. You want to talk about game X? How about instead of that we talk about the private life of a VA in that game that once said something transphobic. How about instead of that we talk about LGBTQA+ representation in the game. How about ------.

This happens IRL too. In a group of N friends, most people don't care about the woke stuff. But that one friend who does can decide to push that perspective. What are the others gonna do? They don't really care, and this one friend seems to really care. Through his tone and the very fact of what he's saying he has made it clear that he's willing to enter conflicts about this. So, he's unlikely to get any pushback. People aren't "beaten into submission by commissars" always, sometimes they're just too passive and don't want to upset the social dynamic, so the fanatics get the final say.

Taleb talks about this quite a bit in "Skin in the game". I am not sure I entirely agree with him on all conclusions (mainly that everything is doomed and intolerant minority always wins), but there is certainly a good point in noticing this dynamic.

This strategy worked really well for a long time. If you're were disappointed with overzealous moderation on reddit, where would you go in 2012? Voat? 4chan? It made the wide brush they used, seem to make sense... Because most people on reddit were reasonable and the people on the other platforms seemed so bad.

But as this kept happening, the alternatives got less toxic because more reasonable kept getting pushed out (creating demand) and the bar for what gets you banned got lower and lower. Now, people who got very used to having a lot of control of discourse (and never had to confront being wrong) are losing their grip; Which causes them to double down on the things that are pushing people away. At a certain points, the normies see what's going on and start to pretend they never went along with it, to begin with.

I also have friends that have worked in games media back then. Once they started getting invited to the cool parties (look at E3 back then), they immediately threw all those dirty gamers under the bus.

Why dont the MAGAts win then?

MAGAts

Don't do that. You've been warned before, so 3-day ban.

Because what most of them really wants is to just grill in peace. CW is not what they really want to do, it's something they feel compelled to do by the external pressure and events.

It takes awhile to build the common knowledge necessary for proper prosecution of a culture war.

That too. What we see now on the Left is the fruits of work which has started almost a century ago and intensified about 50 years ago. Maybe in another 50 years the right will develop their own CW capabilities comparable with those of the left.

I disagree on 'taken over' by these people.

I do not care at all for gaming journalism. I ignore them entirely. I don't follow gaming news but 100% there are decent, non-woke popular critics posting video reviews on YouTube with reasonable discussions in replies.

Woke ruins a lot of games and wastes money, but there's a literal infinity of quality games out there...

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