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 -
A Week On The Worst Coast
It was late morning on a weekday in Seattle, ostensibly one of America's wealthiest major cities and home to an impressive number of globally significant businesses. It was February, but the weather was a comfortable fifty degrees, and it was not raining. I had arrived the previous night from the airport, but as I drew the curtains of the Fairmont (the city's status as a 'Tier 2' North American metropolis in our internal booking system meant the Four Seasons was, alas, out of budget) I noticed something strange. The city was dense, there were cars on the roads, we were surrounded by office buildings which seemed, despite covid, to at least have some tenants, but the streets were almost devoid of pedestrians. Seattle was empty.
I decided to visit the city's major tourist attraction,
the first Starbucks storePike Place Market. The concierge furnished me with the name of a (British themed, amusingly) breakfast place there. Apple Maps said it was a ten-minute walk through the center of downtown, past the art museum and various office towers. The city did not look apocalyptic from above, at least from the Fairmont. It seemed tranquil. But again, foot traffic was eerily light for a major downtown on a weekday morning. Within a minute of my departure a grubby white woman, quite young, ambled-shambled-ran past me, mumbling about something. She was completely naked except for a short tail of toilet paper hanging out of her. This was rare even for Manhattan hobos in broad daylight, at least beyond the usual places. Around another corner a tall black fellow wearing an old bicycle helmet, neon vest and torn sweatpants starting walking up to me. I prepared myself for a quick exit across the street into the symphony orchestra, but he was actually quite polite and asked, shakily, if I might have any money. He was polite and I was apparently still a little freaked out after the naked lady, so I gave him the $10 I had in my pocket. He bowed, walked away, then muttered loudly some slur about 'fucking white people', which seemed uncalled for after what I'd done for him (perhaps he knew I was Jewish?).I continued walking. Three men and a woman in heavy winter coats were engaged in what seemed like haggling over a drugs purchase, or maybe they were just shooting the shit while they shot the shit. Another group of hobos had set up what seemed like a slightly longer-term presence just outside the headquarters of Zillow, which according to Google has never returned to its Seattle offices (though they still seem to own the lease). At this point, after several minutes of walking through downtown Seattle on a weekday mid-morning, I had not encountered a single normal pedestrian. Not a student. Not an office worker in a quarter zip. Not a #girlboss with a coffee in her hand shouting into her AirPods. The city had been ceded.
I expertly dodged a homeless guy wearing what looked like a girl's tank top and board shorts literally foaming at the mouth while gyrating and staggering wildly by the Four Seasons, then arrived by the waterfront. Here there were people, but they were construction workers in great numbers working on some kind of public works project by the park. One stepped over a homeless man lying on the street as if he wasn't there, or rather as if he was some kind of immovable feature of civic life, like a fire hydrant. I arrived at the cafe. The girl serving me told a group of Amazon corporate employees visiting from India ahead of me that they had reduced hours recently, first closing for one day a week, then two, now three or four. There were no longer enough customers to justify opening seven days a week. I ate, then walked past the 'first Starbucks' around the corner. Online tourist guides say you need to get there first thing in the morning or you'll wait for hours, but when I arrived there was no queue (you got me, Brits) at all.
Outside, construction workers continued their labor renovating some part of the market. A hobo shambled next to his cart outside the giant neon Public Market sign and shouted at some tourists who ran into the Target next door. Two brawny construction workers stood by and shrugged. I decided to follow the tourists. The Target had a detachment of a half dozen cops inside of it (I counted). Real police, not security. Given that the Seattle PD has only 940 officers, this amounted to 0.6% of the entire city's police force guarding a single Target outlet. I felt honored. Every single shelf in the cosmetics section was a locked cabinet. I paid, left and decided to head to the Nordstrom flagship store for some shopping, resolving to Uber back to the hotel if I bought anything. Along the way, I passed a city whose commercial life seemed in terminal decline. Empty storefront after empty storefront. Even the big luxury apartment buildings with sea views had huge 'for rent' banners draped across them. In 2016, Seattle had 16 homicides. In 2023, it had 73.
The route was a big mistake. The way from the market to Nordstrom had me turn at 3rd and Pine, home, as I would later find out, to "Crackdonald's". Hopefully you find this generally amusing, but I'll be honest, this part was scary. Among other things I got shouted at, someone tried to grab my (cheap) bag, a woman who was completely out of it stumbled into me, collapsed, then got up. I should have turned around but stupidly continued walking past the (unbelievably still open for business lol) McDonald's when a city employee in some kind of uniform grabbed my wrist and guided me through, then said I didn't look like I was from here and should avoid this intersection at night. I entered Nordstrom, which I assume only remains in business for corporate headquarters reasons, because there were almost no customers inside. The hobos were visible from Chanel, where I was ultimately reminded of the absurd markup European luxury brands charge Americans; the sales assistant sent two security guys from the store to wait with me on the empty sidewalk for my Uber.
On the five minute drive back, I marvelled again at the seemingly extraordinary amount of construction work the city was pursuing downtown. Widening sidewalks, planting trees, resurfacing streets, everywhere the logo of the Downtown Seattle Association and its key partners (Amazon and so on) was visible. A lone open ice cream store sought new workers at $27 an hour, an annual wage 50% higher than the median income in Britain. It was clear that Seattle was a very rich city. Yet it was also clear that it was a lawless shithole, abandoned by all but the hardiest pedestrians for point-to-point car transfers. And even then, they seemingly increasingly avoided the urban core. This is what marks the biggest difference between Seattle and places like Johannesburg; there, in the poor and violent downtown, one can see that the material situation is dire. There is no money. In Seattle, there was money. This was a choice, one unprompted (seemingly) by any major political change as occurred in South Africa. It seemed, inexplicably, as if this was what these wealthy and otherwise productive citizens had chosen for their city, clear-eyed and uncompelled, even as they invested billions in civic improvement most of them would never be able to use. Why were they doing this building? Did they not realize that the reason downtown was doing less well than it has been was not a lack of tree cover in summer or sidewalks that were too narrow for throngs of pedestrians to traffic them simultaneously, but a rather more immediate and pressing issue?
At the same time, it was hard not to participate in a general sense of despair at this pretty and useful city of 800,000 held hostage by, perhaps, a couple thousand psychotic homeless addicts. These were not well armed young men of the kind who create so much trouble in Rio, or in Caracas, or in the worse parts of Mexico. They were big, dumb, lumbering addicts, or skinny little things, out of their minds. They probably weren't going to shoot back, at least not accurately. And it was not lost on me that, in a different kind of society, the small corps of policemen in the Target alone, equipped with enough materiel, could have in a few hours dealt with the issue permanently. It was hard not to want them to, though it wasn't and isn't my call to make.
In the afternoon we went with some of our clients to eat at the University Village, an outdoor mall and dining complex near the city center. As they did in Johannesburg in Sandton, the productive class had built here an enclave, a kind of urban Disneyland guarded by a large cohort of ever-present security staff. But there is a crucial difference between the two: South Africa's transformation, for better or worse, was imposed upon it by the world. Seattle's was enacted by its own people.
The concierge at the hotel said Portland was even worse.
My work almost never brings me home to America (and my family all live on the East Coast), so in my morbid curiosity I jumped at the chance to see for myself how bad things had gotten since 2020. Downtown Los Angeles was a shithole, but it apparently has been since they built the highways (except for that brief 2015-2017 golden age) and I assume they'll try to clean it temporarily for the Olympics. San Francisco, which I had been expecting to be in the condition Fox News promised me, was slightly better than I expected, I must admit. Not that it wasn't a dump, because it was, but it didn't really appear worse than it was before 2020. SF was (laughably) considered a "Tier 1" city (and had a weirdly cheap Four Seasons), so I stayed in the FS by Union Square, famous for shithole status and close proximity to the Tenderloin. Honestly, there were a lot of normal people walking around during the daytime and even in the evening they still outnumbered the hobos. The financial district seemed fine enough, and in general the hobo problem, while worse than Manhattan, was no worse than Boston was late last year, and I thought Boston was still liveable, probably. The signs of decline were around us in the closed businesses and empty offices, but it was Singapore compared to Seattle. The food in San Francisco has seen big declines, though, we ate at well-reviewed / recommended places and what had once been one of the great food cities in the world seems to have lost all its good cooks in the last few years.
More than anything else, though, the trip underscored just how much of a farce the extreme urban decline of West Coast cities has been. Other countries have real problems. When their cities become hellholes, it's because their economies have collapsed, or because they've been taken over by extremely well-organized criminal gangs funded with cartel money in a nation too poor to pay for honest police, or because they're locked in years-long siege situations with militarized gendarmerie, or because they recently imported millions of people from cultures that hate them and don't care about their rules. But on the West Coast the shithole city problem wasn't the fault of any of those things, not even mass immigration (certainly not of the legal kind, although honestly very few of the hobos appeared to be Latino). Nor was it a grand act of clear-headed sadomasochism, amusing as that would be, because I can't really say most of the people I met there were happy about what had happened.
No, in America, the great cities of the West Coast had been destroyed because, like a prison warden deciding one day to become an inmate for no reason at all, their inhabitants had voted to legalize crime and - in so doing - to be held voluntarily, collectively hostage by the dregs of humanity their cities both produced and attracted from elsewhere in the country, bussed to California for the mild climate and pathologically altruistic host population. That the problem could be solved almost immediately by a competent government (even without resorting to the most extreme methods) was perhaps, in fact, the point. Perhaps you are supposed to take the BART with the filth every day, supposed to step over the needles, supposed to fear for your safety every time you walk around after dark, supposed to know just how easily this could be fixed at almost no cost and effort and yet watch powerlessly as it never happens and things just keep getting worse for no real reason at all.
Unrelated side point: holy hell were there an insanely high number of transwomen on the West Coast. I encountered more in that week than I have in my entire life. Two unrelated baristas at two different coffee places in the same morning were both transwomen, then so was the receptionist at the office we visited a half hour later. Wild. I now understand where all the very online trans people actually live.
Your point about being held hostage by a relatively small number is so spot on and is what drives me the most nuts about the homeless situation. There really are not that many problem homeless people out there as a % of the population. If we could just figure out a solution for the very worst hundred to a thousand that would make a massive difference.
The solution is institutionalizing the indigent homeless population. Not all of them, not the outlier hobo wandering-workers, the homeless who are principally unable to work. The state running such institutions, or paying for private administration, does open the door to abuses. One is financial, with taxpayer money footing the bill they're incentivizing bad actors who will profit in their delivery of a poor service. Bigger is employment, hiring caring or at least competent staff who aren't sociopaths, something we see facilities in the US failing at pretty regularly. Still, some significant number of the homeless should be institutionalized because they need a level of hard support the church and private charity is no longer equipped to handle, and really it's the domain of the state anyway.
I'm not the first to bring this up, but I don't think I've seen anyone explain why it will be possible in our generation. Changing political sentiment will help, it'll probably be necessary so that people who shouldn't be on the streets stay off them, but technology in that of the human automata, the simulacra, will be the lever. By 2035, wide-production probably 2040, simulacra will exist that are capable of acting as orderlies in healthcare settings. Some successor to GPT or whatever, after direction from the human overseer they are accountable to, will run their scheduling, their pathing, their tasks, the conversing with and monitoring of patients that they can then provide to those human physicians and overseers.
These simulacra will be perfect orderlies: they don't need to sleep, they don't need to fear (in once high-risk settings) a patient sneaking something sharp to shiv them, they won't make mistakes, or they will but certainly fewer by-the-day and more minor than humans make. Patients meanwhile won't have to be afraid of simulacra verbally abusing them or stealing from them or beating them or raping them or killing them. They won't have to fear and suffer from the petty tyrannies of spite, or even just a bad interaction as the brunt of annoyance on a bad day. With time, simulacra will be integral to the delivery of an undeviatingly high standard of care.
I've always assumed Japan will use them first because of their inverse population pyramid. Lots of old people, not enough people to care for them: okay, robots. The success, the quality, the savings, these will see varyingly immediate success and that will spread. Private healthcare in the US first, but there will be policymakers who will be aware of the applications of simulacra in facilities like psychiatric institutions. When it is a guarantee those institutions' patients will be free from the debasing of their humanity (beyond that from being institutionalized) the philosophic argument against becomes very difficult, and then financials get their say. Massive savings for effectiveness in care humans will quickly be incapable of providing, at least in multi-patient environments, will be the big push.
You don't think a determined crazy patient, or bunch of them, couldn't wreck a robot orderly? At the very least knock it over on the ground so it can't get up?
Oh yeah, definitely private healthcare providers will be very interested in that. Problem is, once we have robot health workers on the grounds of cost, big institutions for the dregs of society - be they government or private run - will be nasty places. Cheap foodstuffs, lack of anything like education and stimulation, cheapest of everything from clothes to bedding to all the things you need to run a facility, pack in as many as possible, and not even the chance of a human worker who might be sympathetic to one person or help them or whistle blow, because it's all done by robots who won't deviate from their programming. And we the public won't care, because it will be the dregs, the criminals, the junkies, the hopelessly crazy. Do it cheap, why waste our tax money? Already public services are not of good repute, so I understand - nobody wants to end up in the state home because it's cheap, untrained labour and terrible conditions and nobody cares.
I don't object to locking up the hopelessly crazy, but you can't just shove them into crates and feed them on crushed bugs.
The nice nursing homes and hospitals and asylums may have robot workers, but they'll also have the presence of humans on the staff for interacting with the patients and nice living conditions, as long as the family can pay through the nose for all that.
From "The Ball and the Cross", about special cells in a modern, model lunatic asylum:
Determined patients could break a robot, but it's just a robot. Better that than maiming or killing a human. As for the humans currently working in those environments, some are in places where they have a prudent fear of injury or death and I'm sure that informs their interactions with some patients. Simulacras won't fear anything, so their interactions won't be tinged by fear.
More than 90% of labor will be automated in our lifetime. Simulacra will improve, the human facsimile will become seamless and their fine articulation and strength will first match and then permanently exceed humans, or at least those non-cybernetically-augmented. They will be tremendously cost-superior as their minimum effort in work will be better than many humans giving their utmost. So while fears of institutions being black pits for the dregs is valid today, in 30 years a largely simulacra-staffed institution will have patients receiving a higher standard of care than what premium specialized multi-patient care facilities deliver right now.
Some homeless need the hard support of institutions right now. The problem I have with mass institutionalizing advocacy today is I don't trust such institutions to not become abyssal places bereft of human dignity. The government could probably run a non-terrible pilot, but it would be a handful of the homeless and so not solve anything, but run in mass, and especially if turned to privatization, they will become hellish. And some might say, these people are already making cities hellish; they might argue their lives are already hellish, a warm place to sleep, food, and the removal of narcotics would be better; or they might argue the institutions would be hellish because such people inhabit them. To all of these, yeah maybe. But if the perception is these places are worse than prison there will be powerful opposition from the lowest of the individual homeless who fights at being sent, up to well-funded, organized actors working against it.
With the mass automation of labor and comparable-in-impact breakthroughs in other industries, costs of many products will spiral downward. Inflation is a motherfucker but things will either stabilize by the end of the decade or the country will start burning. I choose to believe the former will happen. The robots will look like humans, they sound like humans, they will feel like humans. The reason it will work so well when it's implemented is because that obstacle of "this thing isn't human" will be brief; we can't help but humanize that which isn't human. Look at the affinity for animals. The simulacra will be capable, they will be pleasant, they will remember everything but not hold to particular memories in spite for later cruelty. They will just be better. Not in the transcendent, infinite worth of the human, but as the continued demonstration of the spirit of man in improving the human condition. They are the next great step. On a long enough timeline, a healthy capitalism will compete itself into being socialism. Costs will be so cheap, quality will be so high, so many industries will just cease to exist as some breakthrough renders them entirely obsolete. Food, healthcare and pharma, energy, housing and construction, clothing, entertainment, automation comes for it all. Eventually these institutions will be able to provide what the patients need at the highest quality for a pittance of what it once cost and this is why I know I will eventually support such measures.
I don't see dregs being shoved in capsules and fed bugs. I see the indigent being, yes forcefully, put in institutions where not their wants but their true needs are addressed. Where they eat good food, where they have good rooms, where they have access to education and entertainment, where they receive the medical care they need. Where they have interactions with simulacra that are in the meaningful sense absolutely real, real relationships with simulacra who might be programmed to care but do it so well the patients feel truly cared for, which they will be.
It's utopian, so it's naive and dumb. What future is the alternative? Throw them all in a pit? Might as well send vans around for them to be shot and taken to crematoriums. I know that's reductive, there's an adequate middle ground, but why stop at hoping for a solution that's only adequate? The technology for the best swiftly approaches, why not hope for it in everything? I don't ascribe an unreasonable negativity to you, the concerns you raise of terrible conditions are entirely valid, and if that were the proposal or what ended up actually happening after the ostensibly good proposal, I'd oppose them. But at a certain point in the endless march of technological progress it will take more effort to poorly deliver such a service, it will take actual malice rather than simple avarice, because the avaricious option will so fortunately be the best option for the patients.
...Do you remember the optimism of the early internet? The realization that what we had here was a truly transformative technology with the potential to penetrate into every aspect of our lives and our society, and that seemed to be very near to entirely positive in its effects? The internet was my go-to example to make the case for techno-optimism as late as 2014.
And look at it now. That's your answer: because humans will always, always, always human. You can see the bright future just over the horizon, and the sad part is it might not even be a mirage, but there's still something cheaper, nastier, easier and more available just around the next corner, and the people around you are going to go for that instead, because that's what humans do.
Hasn't it been? Online commerce has improved the lives of millions of citizens. I can call my family in different places around the world with full video capability. I can remotely attend weddings and funerals ,that I never would have been able to before. I can debate with people all around the world. And I can access hundreds of thousands of words written on just about any topic I want from best Dungeons and Dragons feats for a Rogue to how to cook an Olive Garden style deep fried lasagna to web novels spanning millions of words, or how to best fix a shelving unit or replace a bulb in my car. I can download 3d printing specs for gaming terrain or miniatures.
Any business can now scale customers with a cheap website and I can order trinkets from a shop in California that I would never have seen otherwise. I can watch and listen to pretty much any music I want to and then read about the background of the album. I can play video games with unparalleled speed and connectivity and help my nephew tame sheep in Minecraft while being able to see him giggle.
I can submit test results to my doctor without having to call them or go in to the office, then he can create and fill a prescription for me at a pharmacy of my choosing, who will then email or text me when it is ready. When I switch dentists they email copies of my charts to my new dentist who has them immediately. I can carry out many of the functions of the DMV online and I can do the same for many government agencies.
I can research people I am about to meet in a professional context and I can check out the boys my daughter wants to date. Right now I can have an AI write me code that has a good chance of working to do all kinds of random things. Or create images for my roleplay characters or backstories. I can stalk prices of plane tickets over time to buy at the best time rather having to call and check or go to a travel agent. I can check reviews of hundreds of restaurants and make and cancel reservations much more quickly than ever before. I can use web chats to deal with issues that would have required a phone call or a physical visit before.
The sheer amount of time that the internet saves me in routine tasks compared to the olden days is astonishing.
If you had offered all that to 80s computer geek me, I would have bitten both your hands off to have it! And I can do most of it from a tiny handheld computer!
Sure the internet has negatives as well, but I would say the positives outweigh them significantly. I would suggest for most people in the West the internet is much more positive than negative.
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
More options
Context Copy link