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To whence shall we roll back the clock?
We joke about the glory years, the years when Things Were Better, which just so happen to coincide with people's younger years. You get me to say what years I would like to roll back the clock to and live, I would probably say somewhere around the 90s-late 00s. I am an outlier, as far as I know. Virtually no one I know would like to roll back the clock to spitting distance from two thousand and fucking-eight.
Back when the most lefty thing on the internet was a girl telling people that she didn't appreciate being propositioned for sex on an elevator. Pre-tiktok, the era of old forums. The iphone still a twinkle in Steve Jobs' eye. The era when Google and Microsoft weren't the undisputed emperors of your lives.
Actually, forget that. We all know there's nowhere to roll back to, we can only roll forward, embracing the aesthetics of what we imagined the past to be. I, for one, am glad that I am not eternally inundated with "WOW DAE PARENTS ARE BOOORIIINNG????" ads. You can pull my 70-lb tub of legos accumulated over more than twenty years out of my cold, dead hands, NSA. And it's probably true that in the next 30-40 years that democracy and republicanism-as-we-know it will no longer exist.
No seriously, whence come the true techno-king? Who are the contenders for the first immortal god-king of humanity. I joke in the phrasing, but it is not exactly an incorrect joke now, is it? It is very probable that we will have the first actual trillionaire human in the next thirty years. The first effectively-emperors of mankind.
The only reason companies don't do governance of humans is that they're shit at it, actually, and Democracy is surprisingly efficient over long timescales. But assume for the sake of thought experiment, that the singularity happens, and we have our first crowned god-emperor of humanity thanks to the creation of AGI. Who are our contenders?
Personally, I should expect them to:
As such, pick your top 5 most likely individuals to become humanity's first true techno-kings, and why. Do you have any you think are sleepers?
I'll hold back my top-fivers for a couple days or so.
As a social conservative, I don't want to turn back the clock, at least not to any point in my memory. There's been some meaningful backwards steps (gay marriage, the rising popularity of transgenderism, etc), but there's also been some positive developments that have gotten less attention.
Pornography is widely accessible on the internet yes, but a side effect of this is that there's much less economic incentive to pollute popular media with T&A. So it is a lot easier to actually raise kids without being bombarded by sexual imagery. These days the fact that Oppenheimer included a sex scene is notable, a couple of decades back that sort of thing was de rigueur.
Relatedly, teenage sex is declining. Partly this is because of competition from porn and porn is also bad, sure. But there's network effects. Horny teenage boys directing their sexual appetites towards real life girls creates social pressure and expectation for those otherwise wouldn't want to partake in such a sexualised culture. And of course, whatever the flaws of porn, at least it causes a lot less pregnancy out of wedlock than teenage sex does.
I think that AI porn will soon outcompete real pornstars for the most part. Again, that's a mixed blessing, but it has the benefit that girls will be less drawn financially to a lifestyle that is very damaging to them. The damage to the women involved is hardly the only problem with pornography, but it's a significant one and mitigation in that area is good.
Paedophilia is far less accepted and far more rigorously guarded against these days. It wasn't so long ago that a Michel Foucault could openly advocate for lowering the age of consent to 13 and stay in good standing (unsurprisingly he turned out to have been abusing boys much younger than that). It seems likely to me that whatever issues todays kids are growing up with, many fewer of them are having to deal with the particular trauma of sex abuse.
"Me Too" may have had its overreaches, but it's bad when women are sexually coerced in the workplace. It's bad when false accusations destroy an innocent man's life, but it's also bad when a woman is genuinely taken advantage of. The balance of type 1 errors to type 2 errors has shifted - and while I'm not sure it's worse to be a female victim than a falsely accused man, I would expect that the deterred male misconduct is much greater in frequency than the corresponding rise in female misconduct. Similarly, many jurisdictions have consciously made it easier to convict men for rape - and again, while this is a double edged sword, the fact that more bad guys are getting punished and others are being deterred from doing bad things is good. Additionally, the type of conduct that is not rape but may result in an increased likelihood of being accused of rape is conduct that I think is bad - so even if it sometimes gets punished unfairly harshly, I don't mind men being disincentivized from e.g. getting women drunk to make them more pliable.
Abortion continues to be prevalent and bad, but the overturning of Roe v Wade in America is a significant step in turning back the tide, and it has the potential to help create a new cultural reality. I firmly feel that there is a feedback effect where people who have abortions (or are involved with the decision to have one) end up more invested in ideologically supporting it. They subconsciously resist the idea that abortion is bad because they do not want to feel like they are bad people. And even though the left is eager to campaign on abortion rights and see it as a good issue for them, it's clearly not such a good issue that it will prevent the right from continuing to win elections. So I expect that strict abortion restrictions will be durable in large red states like Florida and Texas, and this will help create a polity of people who have grown up without the expectation of abortion always being an option, who have the personal experience of a pro-life regime to compare to rhetorical claims, and who are not invested in justifying the practice because of their own actions. Meanwhile the US will continue to get richer and richer and the economic difficulty of raising an unexpected child will become more and more manageable as a result, medical technology will get better and better, and careless sex will continue to become less common - all reducing the practical reasons for abortion supporters to prioritize the issue. There's a long, long way to go, but America is a country of great cultural influence and if the pro-life cause can ultimately win there, that belief in the protection of early life can spread across the world.
I'm sorry, what?!
Because modern movies suck so much, I'm actually steadily going through older ones, and the thing that stands out is how absent or toned down sex is.
I'll take shotgun weddings over kids becoming so neurotic and drained of vitality they don't even want to have sex.
The reason he remained in good standing wasn't because pedophilia was more accepted among average people, it was because it was more accepted among the elites, and quite frankly I see little evidence this has changed much. Saying that we're guarding against it more, therefore it is less likely too happen, is like saying "can you imagine how many burglaries there must have been in the past? people didn't even lock their doors back then!".
I disagree. Every once in a while someone shares a social media post with some woman complaining that while everyone is treating kindly and professionally, it never goes beyond that because no one wants to be seen as a "creep". I'd argue that friendship and camaraderie at workplaces is more common than sexual impropriety, so your chances of deterring good behavior are higher than deterring bad behavior. While I have a lot of sympathy for women having to fend off unwanted sexual advances, superiors trying to take advantage of them, etc., #MeToo and related memes had the effect of abolishing public spaces where you'll allowed to make a pass at someone. Unless you're Mormon and attend one of these weekly dance get-togethers, you either have to blatantly break the rules, and hope nobody minds, or use dating apps, which is it's own can of worms.
I can understand a true believer progressive that wants to drag me, kicking and screaming, into their glorious brave new world, but there's something especially insulting about being told to clap for progress tearing our communities down, by someone calling himself a social conservative.
How old? Certainly if you go back to classic movies from the 60s things are much tamer, and I'm hardly going to argue there's no further room for improvement. But I grew up in the 90s and I remember movies back then being pretty darn horny. Not to mention of course there were porn films on the top shelf at the video rental place, porn magazines on the rack at the service station, etc. It certainly feels to me that you're much less likely to encounter sexualized content without going looking for it.
And you accuse me of not being a real social conservative XD.
From my experience, kids these days don't seem "neurotic and drained of vitality". Maybe that's selection effects and the teenagers I see and interact with in meatspace are different from the average. Or maybe there's an observer effect and they act differently around the adults. But as far as I can tell the new generation seems full of life and vitality, and I feel like TikTok might be warping the world's perceptions of the teens as much or more than its warping the teens' perceptions of the world.
Do you think an equivalent person today could get away with arguing for lowering the age of consent to 13?
Unfortunately my reason for thinking that child sex abuse was more prevalent in the past is not based on the fact that people worried about it less. It's anecdotal, based on older peoples recollections and experiences. But since you contested the point, I went looking for actual data, and the best I was able to find paints a mixed picture.. We see an elevated rate from 1950-1980, a sharp reduction that bottoms out around 2000, and thereafter a worrying increase undoing about half of the previous reduction.
I have no idea if this is reflected in other western countries (the study is based on British data), how reliable the data is, or if the increasing trend continues past 2016 (the last year this paper has data for). But at the least it gives reason to be less rosy-eyed about the past, if also to be less optimistic about the future.
I really can't comment on the difficulties of dating, either past or present. I've only ever asked a woman out once and I now have three children with her.
I fancy there's a good chance I'm significantly more socially conservative than you - I'm just also more optimistic.
Anything up until the late 60's is the Hays Code era, so there was a hard limit on what they could show, but no I'm talking also talking about the 70's, 80's, and yes, even the 90's. That's not to say there was not a single movie that showed the act of sex in those eras, but there was a lot fewer of them to begin with, and even when they went there, they showed a lot less.
Yeah, me too. I invite you to rewatch some of them, and have another look at what passed for "pretty darn horny". The 90's is when they started pushing the boundaries, but it was still pretty damn tame by modern standards, even the ones explicitly marketed as "you get to see a titty in this one!".
That doesn't say much, when “sexualized content” you'd bump into those days was a sideboob or gyrating ass, “going looking for it” involved staying up late, and somehow turning on the TV without waking up your parents, or sneaking out someone else's porn stash, which itself was pretty tame, whereas now “going looking for it” is a 5 second search on your smartphone, and the material you get is hard-core porn routinely involving weird fetishes.
I think you hit the nail on the head that the disagreement is about pessimism, but if my assesment of the world is accurate, I think I can get away with calling you that.
I'm not going to fight you too hard on that. It might be a qustion of where, as I notice a difference between diffferent parts of Europe. Maybe all that sun you're getting down under is good for you.
Not quite, but we're not far off. There are pro-pedo orgs that the MSM is running cover for, though they have to hide behind “we're trying to help them so they won't abuse anyone” (even as they host chatrooms where adults can talk to minors), and I can't think of anyone quite as prominent as Foucault.
I also only had second-hand reports, but the gods of the Internet dropped this on my lap today.
I think that data comes from here. I can’t do any parsing on mobile, but authors discuss the results here and here.
I’m more interested in the surge in “met at work/as coworkers.” Presumably, that’s due to women actually entering the workforce postwar. Except it also couples tightly with “met through friends,” which I’d have expected to be a dominant force in old-school dating. Weren’t introductions to eligible ladies a staple of Victorian mores? What happened?
Other weird features: no inflection point after WWII. Generally low prevalence for “met in college.” The “met online” trend taking a nice pause in 2008 before resuming exactly as it left off.
Oh, and then there’s the fact that some couples claimed to meet online in 1981. Lizardman constant, or just the nerdiest of nerds?
"Neighbors", "through family", and "grade school" is taking a dip in favor of "friends", "bar", and "work". Looks like an artifact of people putting marriage off until later.
How do you want to see a post WWII inflection point, if the chart starts in the 50's?
What's weird about that?
Early adopters plateauing out, only to be hit by smartphones.
Sexting over the DARPANET must have been exhilarating in it's own way.
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