roche
1mo ago
About a week ago, I read some of the Old Testament for the first time since childhood. One idea which stuck out to me is that if you took this setting and removed God from the equation, none of this would make sense. I'm not talking about blatantly mystical things like the Great Flood or Eden, but rather the full world in which the Old Testament takes place -- a world of constant cruelty set against the endless desert sands and mysterious starry skies, and ancient genealogies with white-beareded men who appear as old as the world itself. Maybe God didn't strike down Sodom and Gomorrah, but city-wide destruction and mass rape and incest were evidently common in the ancient world, and you can feel this need to rationalize the ancient world and make it less tragic is a very strong theme in the Old Testament. Without God, it's something like a living nightmare.
When life gets really bad, we open up to religion in surprising ways. Best analogy is like... we're all houses built on shitty foundations. Sometimes a storm comes and chips at our eaves, but we repair it and we're fine. It's not until your entire house tumbles down that you can replace the foundation for a better one. Religion generally takes hold in moments of immense weakness, and makes us far stronger for the remainder of life. Zoomer tradcaths really are just larping because they haven't had that moment yet. It can only be a LARP until that happens, IMO. Faith isn't really irrational so much as sub-rational.
roche
2mo ago
This place is still a paradise compared to /r/ssc which has become Quora. ACX comments are looking rough too. I looked up to these people? Yeah, it's bad.
But another thing: You've grown. Communities don't grow, but individuals can. There's a chance you've absorbed whatever lessons TheMotte had to teach, and you're in a class full of students waiting for a new teacher. Stagnation is the fate of all adults, and like illness the best we can do is delay it. We are all destined to become boring, vegetative adults unless we have some process of continuous, lifelong self-transformation. Don't ask why TheMotte is failing to meet your needs. Ask how you're failing to meet your own needs, and then find a new teacher.
roche
1mo ago
4chan felt that way once, but those times are long gone. 10+ years ago, each board had a community feel, and the centralizing factor is that everyone was just a nerd with an unusually deep interest in the topic of the board. On /v/, you had guys obsessed with Yume Nikki and E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy and Godhand. On /mu/, you had guys digging through labels to find obscure bands. /lit/ helped popularize eccentrics like Nick Land. At some point, the boards lost this exploratory, communal spirit, and modern 4chan just talks about whatever media product is the most advertised. Old 4chan had this sort of 90's mentality where they worshiped authenticity, weirdness, and indulged in old stuff, but on modern 4chan all those values are pretty much gone.
Waxing poetic about some old site is lame, but it really did have a positive influence on a lot of people. It was a sort of special place, nothing with that combination of optimism and passion is really around nowadays.
Sure it happened. What country would this not happen in, when the entire foundation of their world view is rocked? When you go from dominating your half of the planet, and viewing your emperor as a literal god, to becoming an economic vassal state of foreign powers and everything you believed in was violently flushed down the toilet? I can't imagine any scenario or any culture where this goes smoothly.
The fact it only took 25 years for all conflict to die off is amazing. There's no residual fighting, no scars left over from the transition, no one really cares about American military bases or the treaty or communism anymore. It didn't involve some enormous deal-with-the-devil style compromise cough Korea cough to lift them back up. They had the perfect opportunity to go apeshit and tear up the country for their beliefs, but it simply didn't happen. When Mishima committed suicide in 1970, he was laughed at for his extremism like he was Chris-chan. Bear in mind, this man was a teenager when Kamikaze pilots were killing themselves for the emperor. His extremism is nothing like a Civil War LARPer trying to revive the confederacy -- it's like a guy born in Alabama in 1845, waxing poetic about the Antebellum era, and getting laughed out of the room by Reconstruction-era southerners. Japan's entire world view collapsed and they moved on like it was no big deal. 25 years is amazing.
Since 2020, I've been lurking Japanese websites regularly. Easily the biggest contrast between the English and Japanese net is the total lack of any real CW or political energy over there. Japanese people hardly vote, they don't follow politics, and if Marx is brought up they'll discuss him calmly from a historical/economic perspective rather than an ideological one. There's a palpable sense that Japanese are somehow immune to the Culture War -- that it's just fundamentally never going to happen, barring a World War II-style shakeup, and even then I seriously doubt it.
So why are they immune to the CW? The keyword is society. Japanese people (and other Asians) have a fundamentally different relationship with their society compared to Westerners. Over there, "society" is basically a sprawling, abstract, ephemeral organism that's almost like a father figure. You may not always like his authority, you definitely don't understand him, but if you listen to his rules and obey his commands, you will probably be happy. You'll be safe, you'll have clean streets, a wife, a career, expendable income, medical care, good food! Society is -extremely- stable, so virtually all risk is removed. Trust in society, and you'll be happy. Disrespect society, and you'll be shamed on national TV.
Western society -- especially America -- is the opposite. As authority is stripped away from the social body and granted to the individual, society loses its ability to fix norms and values, and so every individual is left to determine his own truth rather than inheriting some default opinion from above. The more atomized and individualist a society is, the smaller the corpus of collective knowledge/belief gets, and the more pressure is placed on each person to find an answer themselves. This is why even in Scandinavia, CW potential is much lower because they're collectivists, despite being very developed, terminally online, and fluent in English. For CW to become truly big in Scandinavia, their collectivist culture would have to decay.
I don't really think the average person wants a Culture War. They just have this void in their lives -- no social organism they can feel proud contributing to, no God that brings purpose to their life, and 2008 butchered any remaining Y2K optimism with an axe. Seems natural that mass political utopianism is the move.
roche
1mo ago
I predict that for most casual games, there should be an obvious solution: fill the game with bots.
They're already filled with bots. The AI sucks though.
Games like Overwatch 2 are fairly punishing to "toxic" players, and they'll deliver a million slaps on the wrist + an eventual account ban, but this fails to solve the human organization problem here, which is: Assholes deserve to play games too. I don't want to play baseball with someone I hate, but he should still have the freedom to play baseball in his own way -- just with someone who's not me.
Overwatch, League of Legends, CS2, none of these games understand this. They're trying to enforce a universal standard of politeness onto online games, which is ridiculous, because for some people mic spamming and shouting slurs is why it's fun. Society should not be telling us, "If you can't have fun in the exact way I tell you to, you're not allowed to have fun."
CS2 has something called "Trust factor", which is an invisible metric that determines how likely you are to cheat. Matchmaking sorts players by trust factor, so if you have a low trust factor, you're getting a game full of cheaters. The question is -- why don't we do this with "toxic" players? Instead of banning them for using the gamer word, just lower their niceness score and match them into the in-game equivalent of 4chan. We created this problem with algorithms, so let's solve it with them too.
roche
3mo ago
The members of the stack are chosen specifically because (1) they were discriminated in the past, and (2) attitudes toward them have changed. Politically they make an effective bludgeon because insulting them makes conservatives look terrible. There's definitely support in some circles for autists, like on college campuses and discord circles, and these are the same groups genuinely worrying about ageism, ableism, and so on. It has no utility in politics because conservatives lack a reputation for treating autists poorly (even though they do, like most people). It would be nice if universal equality was the actual driving force in progressive politics but it's really not.
roche
1mo ago
Let's Talk About Us
"The Motte is not intended, nor is it fit, to Do Something."
Interesting comment chain.
This place as a nest of civil discussion ironically does more than any heated reactionary flame could. I'm waiting for more people to wake up to the fact these emotional spasms against progressivism never work -- they just swing the pendulum back even harder, so now you've got the guards and camera watching you like you're Hannibal Lecter. You know raw power isn't going to cut it, you know every site is monitored, so what's even the point? At best, you sacrifice your one good asset to win a single battle, and lose the war.
They say Great Man Theory is bullshit; I doubt it. Napoleon wanted to become Alexander, so he lived and breathed strategy. He constantly read, and in conversation he'd ask people to rank generals all the time and compare their merits, memorizing all the famous battles. When you're trying to turn the tide of history, that's what it takes: analysis. You need to understand people, institutions, and ideas. Most importantly: Why progressivism? "Propaganda" is not the answer; it can only play on desires that are already there. The point is only when you understand why this stuff appeals to the average Joe and Jane is there any hope for you, because only then can you begin to conceive of its replacement. Not to exhort anyone to try and become the next Napoleon, that's probably impossible. Just saying, that's the only real point of optimism (among other total ass pull scenarios, this still ranks pretty high).
roche
1mo ago
We're in the "blood-sucking leeches" stage of psychiatry. The fact people are surprised whenever ancient chinese medicines or leeches work is funny, because of course they work. The recipes in Bald's Leechbook actually work -- were our ancestors were too dumb to notice patterns? The problem is they didn't know why. All knowledge reduces to probability, and the chance that an antidepressant works is around 10-20%. So our concept of depression is wrong. More accurately, it doesn't make sense. Like the "humors", it fails to explain anything, it's a non-sequitur.
There is a "real" psychiatry buried somewhere under this fake mess, or at least an improved set of models that works more consistently. The good psychs have put effort into this. But I am regularly surprised to see very smart psychs who are content with this system. It's they who should be leading the charge to improve, but they've accepted this paradigm of long-term patients with a 10+ year mental illness being failed by the system, they just shrug. "Tough luck!"
roche
25d ago
From April 14th to April 20th, I quit using social media, forums, and any sort of online discussion space to see what would happen. The result is... nothing. Just a sense of under-stimulation which gave a nice opportunity to try out some hobbies. Ultimately when I have some energy, I'm gonna do chores or socialize or art, and social media is just for "dead time" when you run out of energy. It seems common sense that social media affects us a lot, but honestly I'm not so sure.
roche
1mo ago
Is there a reading of this that doesn't involve intentional spite on some level? Someone involved here surely knew what they were doing
roche
3mo ago
What are some of the most wildly original premises you've encountered in fiction? I love Cube (1999) because damn what a cool idea, even though the filmmakers screwed up and the puzzle is confirmed impossible to solve.
Does anyone else here have random, fledgling thoughts on the culture that are too vague for the CW thread? Maybe we should have a thread for them.
(This post is almost definitely too long for here, my bad)
Like today, I was on Youtube and ended up watching video diaries from Japan. Out of nowhere, this 5-second clip of a girl spreading butter on toast sparks something in my brain, and fuses together an enormous amount of things into one simple realization: Being a kid in Japan must be absolutely incredible. Of course it's amazing everywhere, but in Japan it's simply better.
To explain why, I want to set up a quick and dirty dichotomy: Active and passive. These are roughly your classic A- and B-Type personalities. The A-Type is energetic, strong-willed, risk-prone, grabs life by the horns, and tries to wrangle reality into becoming what he wants. Your B-Type is lethargic, unambitious, risk-averse, and will only make drastic moves in the face of extreme pressure. Internal vs. External locus of control, you've all heard this before.
Generally, childhood sucks for the active kids and it's amazing for the passive kids. The active kid is always moaning about how everyone talks down to him, he can't buy liquor, too young for gym, too young to drive, etc. The passive kid meanwhile never really complains about this stuff. He'll sit in his room playing Grand Theft Auto and be stimulated out of his mind, in total bliss. What he doesn't realize is this is potentially the peak of his life. Once he reaches adulthood, the days of carefree living are over, and yet he doesn't care for anything "adult" so his quality of life simply declines. The active kid though may become an entrepreneur, or an athlete, or what-have-you. Could he totally crash and burn pursuing whatever dream he has? Yeah. But at least he has a chance to peak.
Japan is interesting. It's a nation with powerful impetus towards living a passive life, having no dreams, and joining some company. And yet ironically, this passive lifestyle is somehow or another going to hell. Job security? Dwindling. Family? Good luck. Home ownership? You're stuck in some cramped box in a metropolis. To say nothing of the economy! Japanese people treat aging like a 100% death sentence, because for their life path it simply is, man. What does an old man possibly have to look forward to in that scheme? Playing pachinko all day?
It's happening here too. 30-somethings who watch anime all day; no wife, no cool hobby, not even a dog. These guys are either going to evolve into active men or they're going to be absolutely crushed by the next few decades. "They should get a job." They already have jobs -- that's the point. Living like their parents did simply doesn't work anymore. There is, unironically, no happy normal anymore. To be happy in 2024, you need to be a shark. In 2002, this joke was great because obviously you can just be a normal dude. Now? The minimum for "comfy and secure" is getting a tech job, which is borderline shark behavior. C'est la vie.
P.S. I posit some kind of axis whereby societies trim down on our freedoms to the benefit of a "passive" lifestyle, e.g. "nanny state", but that none of this matters if the bedrock for a passive (read: trad) lifestyle is dead and gone, and your nation's men just sit indoors and watch anime all the time.
roche
1mo ago
What's your take on dopamine detox?
Everyone's got a story about how they read so much back in the 90's/00's. But they pick up a book now, and... it's just not entertaining. We all know we can dopamine detox and make reading enjoyable again, but the corollary is quitting the hyper-stimulating activities everyone does nowadays. No TikTok, no Twitter, no mindlessly playing games while listening to podcasts. You'll be (roughly) just as stimulated after detoxing, but you'll be disconnected from the root of modern culture. Your opinions on culture will be less accurate because you're simply out of touch, like boomers reading newspapers.
OTOH, dopamine detox has huge benefits. Your mind isn't constantly bombarded with stimulation, so you can perceive subtleties and "flavor" in art more, like when you remove sugar from coffee. You perceive the world in a slower, calmer, more rational, interconnected way. You're around people less, so when you meet people IRL you're much friendlier and happy to see them. There is probably some balance to the dopamine situation, but it's hard to spot, so we mostly stimulate ourselves as hard as possible from FOMO, scared of falling behind the world.
roche
2mo ago
For most people, the question "What would fulfill me?" is simple; only the "how" is the challenge. Most men just want a woman, while a smaller contingent want wealth, fame, power, community, faith, or some mix of these. For virtually everyone, the template is already there for what to do, and life is simply a matter of meeting the standard. You like engineering, so you become an engineer, etc.
Currently I'm in my mid-20s, and I've stagnated heavily because none of the paths feel right. There is no person, past or present, who inspires me to follow in his footsteps and to do the same actions. Instead it's like I'm pulled far away toward some distant star, to something particular no one has done before. And no matter how confusing or inconvenient this is, it's the only way I can find fulfillment.
Oddly, this seems common with people interested in the Classics (they're also always misanthropes). Not just guys like Montaigne or Nietzsche, but even the blogger TLP who produced shockingly original work at the height of his powers. Their styles are so unique that we can't imagine their work emerged from anything other than a deeply felt, internally consistent drive. They're also all writers. At 6 years old, I decided I'd become a writer, but this dream died years later when I found all existing styles unsatisfying. Now I think I'm coming around to it. When drunk, I pace around in circles rapidly and then sit at my PC and type up a storm. Overall I'm a mediocre writer, but in rare moods everything flows out beautifully. Perhaps I'll find that star soon. I sure hope so.
roche
2mo ago
Do we have any humanities-brained fellows here?
In Rationalist groups, I feel like an odd duck. My passions are philosophy and the arts -- especially moral philosophy -- but I see them coexisting side-by-side with the intellectual world in a sort-of symbiotic, 19th century German way. This is a rare attitude among humanities-brains though. There's a weird, depressing tendency of the humanities towards absolute self-exile now. As if studying the humanities means adopting a milquetoast belief in "human nature" divorced from any serious biological or psychological context. You must accept as axiom that literature is important, even though this literature has no tangible message to give, no way to prove its importance; the Western Canon matters but no one knows why. Undeniably, books would be an amazing way to make sense of this confusing age we live in, but that requires admitting the sciences actually matter, which is an awful blow to the ego.
Okay, I didn't mean to rant. This is my way of saying, damn I wish I'd gotten into the sciences sooner. This is a topic that has 0 exposure, but the way we segregate our intellectual disciplines is, IMO, very damaging. When everyone engaged with a thing has the same thinking style, and interacts with it in the same way, blind spots form. Maybe we need some organic amount of cross-pollination to keep things healthy.
roche
3mo ago
Have any of you noticed the "Lookism" trend gaining in prominence? Motte is likely mid 20s at youngest, but apparently an insane emphasis on looks for both men and women is now standard among Late Gen-Z. Terms like "canthal tilt" and maxillo-squillo-I-don't-fucking-know have flown out of 19th century physiognomy handbooks and into TikTok feeds. High schoolers apparently use words like mogging and looksmaxxing now on a regular basis. The youth are approaching S. Korea-levels of fixation on bone placement, skin quality, eye-squintiness and height.
Two thoughts:
(1) Getting older is weird. Seeing tiny little currents that flowed beneath the surface in your own adolescence blow up to become tidal waves years later. It's like how the beatniks presaged the hippies, or like how the late-80s Seattle scene probably felt when grunge blew up. Another current example is the increased popularity of specific anime like Nichijou, Lucky Star, and S.E. Lain among late Gen-Z. These shows always had an audience, but the fact they're so popular now seems to mean something. Baton-passing is guaranteed with any popular-enough media, but increased popularity for an old thing tells you something about the new generation. Maybe it's trite and mundane, but it will always tells you something.
(2) This is awful. Morality aside, you could pick any trait of yours from a hat, and it would be more open to modification than your looks. By that same token, even attractive people aren't happy with their looks. It's all fun and games up until around 25, then it's a real fight to preserve what you have -- new exercise routines, new clothing, new cosmetics. You spend years cultivating your outward self and neglecting your inward self, so when you "hit the wall" it's a double tragedy because you have little else to offer the world. Many beautiful women struggle through this process and have their ego shattered, but come out the other side as excellent people as Ben Franklin points out. If guys are getting in on this too, I honestly see it as a generation-wide tragedy. This is a giant arrow pointing away from what actually matters in life, it only benefits 20% of people, it's long-term untenable for 100% of people, and it's happened before. Perhaps genetic engineering should take us in the other direction instead -- so that no one is too attractive, and instead of mewing and bone-smashing we'd be cultivating virtue and writing proofs. Or we can stop acting like jackasses and realize looks are a small part of life. That works too.
Any idea what might have been going on?
You reached the threshold to enter a positive feedback loop. You explained this yourself:
And things are starting to compound. The fact that I can get dates with desirable women is doing wonders for my confidence and self-esteem, which makes me more willing to put myself out there in other ways, which I expect will make me more attractive which will lead to more dating success, and so on.
The moment of lucidity comes down to pure luck, e.g. your gut microbiome temporarily aligning in just the right way. You were probably close to this threshold for a long time and never realized it, but that's super common. A lot of people in dire straits are a hair's breadth away from some positive feedback loop that would fix their lives, but they don't know how to pass the threshold. That's not to blame them; you need a period of initial success to enter the loop, which can be extremely hard to come across.
roche
1mo ago
I do wonder if part of the nightmare that is modern courtship stems from wildly incompatible personality types getting involved.
If you lived in a village of people very similar to you, it seems far more likely you'd find a great match.
roche
2mo ago
A more interesting theoretical question would be: are people always lazy and incompetent at the same rate, across all times and places? Or is it possible to organize society and culture in such a way that people are less likely to reach for the lazy option of copy and pasting ChatGPT output into their peer-reviewed journal articles; either because structural incentives are no longer aligned that way, or because it offends their own internal sense of moral decency.
As a teenager, I was a massive unkempt slob with zero shame until I took an interest in girls. Once I developed a crush on some girl, I'd look back in horror at my habits (wearing the same sweat pants every day, having a shitty diet), and tried to clean up my act 100% even in private where my actions are invisible. By nature, humans are highly-efficient pleasure seeking machines, and the only thing that meaningfully interrupts this behavior is some kind of ideal. We can gloat that American scientists probably engage in LLM bullshit less than Chinese scientists, but the Americans aren't far from doing it either. If Americans aren't forming cheating circles like the Chinese, it's not because we're above it so much as we're amateurs at cheating while the Chinese are masters at it.
That seems like the sort of thing that could only be explained if the population had vastly different genetics compared to contemporary America, or a vastly different culture; unless there are "material conditions" that I'm simply not appreciating here.
Like most conflicts, it was framed in terms of ideals. Secular moderners don't really have ideals, so we struggle to imagine going to war over anything, really. Conversely if you've got a heightened sense of morality, anything is worth fighting over, and some men like Cicero or Boethius stick to their guns for an entire lifetime and pay the price. The founding fathers modeled themselves after these men, "Give me liberty or give me death", and it worked. Ideals are the only thing that fully override the comfort-seeking monkey brain, so if you want a nation of honest men, you have to make them genuinely value honesty.
roche
3mo ago
Yeah, '97. There's a great video that breaks down why, the gist is the way the cubes move makes no sense.
roche
1mo ago
Keeping on those placebos afterwards is somewhere between neutral if they otherwise keep their behavior the same, to severely negative if they e.g. think prayer is more powerful than medicine
It seems like you've never been around an intelligent religious person before. "Thinking prayer is more powerful than medicine" is not a problem that comes up. These people are essentially like you and me, except they have resolute moral standards and a shocking tolerance for hardship. Call it a placebo all you want, but don't allow yourself to forget: The crucial part of the "placebo" is that it actually works.
roche
1mo ago
You're touching on a concept that was summed up nicely in Beiser's Weltschmerz -- the problem of evil. The fact is, from a materialist lens all suffering is inexcusable. All discomfort is tragedy. When something bad happens in 20XX, we consider it a suboptimal move like we're chess engines analyzing life and trying to build the perfect path. The result is ennui. A game developer once said, "Give players the means, and they will optimize the fun out of the game". The same applies to life. Your favorite art was influenced by experiences that were almost certainly terrible. There is no Lord of the Rings without the second World War, yet if any of us were asked, "Does LOTR justify the war? Does Remarque justify the war?" none of us could answer in the affirmative. We bemoan the artificiality of the current world, but when presented with opportunities to really experience adventure, us conscientious adults shirk back in fear.
Look, the secular world view doesn't have to be this way. But when you place "comfort" as your guiding star, that's what happens. You become a chess player. You are a Hamlet in a world fashioned by Quixotes. You sit, you stand, you stare at your watch. There is nothing else to do. Hamlet is apparently terrified of death, yet he does nothing the entire play but make droll, apathetic remarks to people he doesn't care about. Is such an existence really worth protecting? Even before the old king's death, do you really imagine he lived well? No. Death was never the issue for him. Hamlet is terrified of life.
The one good thing Hamlet ever did was forced on him by complete chance. The real Hamlets of the world never have that moment. Parenthood is the one test of our ability to value something beyond ourselves. It's 2024, and everyone is failing. We're all Hamlets, and the world is dying.
I've noticed an increasing amount of chatter from both sides about dropping out of society -- to build a homestead, or to buy a house in some foreign, isolated part of the planet. Of course, "I want to live rural!" guys have been around for years, and actually living rural in 2024 is a pretty raw deal for most. But it's telling so many have made the leap from, "I want to live small", to "I want to live completely alone (with spouse/kid/dog)". I'm sure much of this springs from a genuine love for sustainable living, the quiet life, the country and all of its joys. But the vibe I get is a subtle rising tide of misanthropy, of decreasing faith in the common man possibly regardless of one's leaning. As someone else put it,
My question is: Have you noticed this too? Maybe my circle's blowing this out of proportion, but maybe not.
If so, what's going on here?
I've got a personal theory for what's happening. See, I'm not much of a gamer, but I play two games regularly: Fortnite and PUBG. Really they're just for stimulation while I chill out and listen to music/podcasts, but something pretty damn annoying happens almost every time. I'll be relaxing in-game, looking for loot at a calm pace, when some absolute beast of a player flies in out of nowhere and shreds my health before I can blink. Every time it feels like bullshit because I'm not even trying to compete at that level. All multiplayer games have separate queues for "casual" and "ranked", but inescapably there's a handful of sweat lords who've memorized the meta, who know exactly where the best guns and vehicles are, who throw their weight around in casual games and ruin the experience for everyone else.
And when this happens, my natural reaction isn't "This game's matchmaking has failed", it's "I'm tired of these dickheads, I should play single player games instead". In other words, this is an organizational failure. Humans are naturally excellent at organizing themselves into the right groups -- you throw hundreds of kids into the same school, and very quickly the correct circles will form. There's bound to be a lot of kids with nothing in common, but this is obvious to both parties, so they simply avoid interaction. All groups are autonomous and self-organized, and it works really well.
Online groups in 2024 are algorithm-organized. The internet has taken on a kind of 1800s-Manchester-factory-worker housing feel where everyone's crammed into the same tiny spaces despite our differences. We are now constantly aware of how the other half lives, what they are saying. It's like your teacher forcing you to let the annoying kid play kickball with your group, to sit at your lunch table, etc. Going online feels abrasive in a way it really didn't back then. In 2009 you'd hop on some forum and it felt exactly like hanging out with friends, a 100% positive and chill experience. Going online now is like hanging out with everybody. Sometimes it's good, but a lot of the time it sucks. I don't want to know what the guys I hated in high school think of politics, or movies, or anything. But now I'm going to hear it, over and over and over.
Maybe I'm nostalgic, right? 2009 was a long time ago, I was basically a kid...
But probably not. Because I have a solid point of comparison: I understand Japanese, and spend a ton of time on the Japanese web. What inspired this post is actually a single website, which is 5channel. It's the largest anonymous bulletin board on earth, but more accurately it's a collection of around 1000 bulletin boards with virtually zero moderation. You can post wherever you want, say whatever you want, and... it works. Not because the Japanese are polite or something -- they can get wild -- but because if you just let humans organize themselves, things work out. This echoes my own time as an internet moderator, where I first believed that I could shape the board through my actions, but later realized the board's quality was beyond my control, it's an autonomous process that you have little say in.
I pay $4 a month to post on 5channel. I've made hundreds of posts there, and yet no one's realized I'm a white foreigner. Despite the language barrier, I post there because it's sorta like the English web was back in 2009. There's none of the bullshit, it's a site for nerds to make dumb jokes and chat about nerd stuff. When I browse reddit or twitter or 4chan, there's a lingering unpleasant feeling, but when I go to 5ch it's just dumb fun. It's exactly like the net I grew up with. You compare the two, and the English web just feels... sick.
I'm 100% ready to believe this pessimism in the air comes from our inability to self-organize. We are locked in with people we do not like 24/7, reading their crappy opinions, we can't just splinter off and make a new community and so we live with a slight psychological chip on our shoulder but we're not sure why. What's funny is my narcissistic tendencies fade the more I use 5channel. When you're stuck around people that challenge your identity all the time, you get defensive and sorta retreat back into yourself. But when you're around people who aren't going to constantly irritate you or challenge who you are, you start to relax and open up. You may even turn into a bit of an optimist. Conversely, it's this constant feeling of "Someone's gonna try and screw with me" that sorta defines how English web feels now, why everyone's so antsy and defensive and unwilling to let their irony shield down.
Human groups are naturally pretty small. In nature, whenever any major divide happens, tribes just split off and go separate ways. Being forced into a semi-permanent state of clash really can't be good for us, despite how "normal" this has become.
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