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As someone raised on the Left it's just hard to believe that history turns on whether some rich asshole makes the wrong tweet and then doubles down.
And yet...
Before Elon there was an attempt at mocking the Ts on TikTok around the hashtag "SuperStraight". It died when, you guessed it, TikTok just banned it.
It's hard to know. On the surface it looks like you just can't keep the discontent down forever. It clearly flared up even in the real world over big enough issues without Elon.
But what I think control of all of the media outlets does is allow you to stall until it's entrenched as a fait accompli. How many people went along with pronouns just to not get banned, for example? Nobody wants to admit they're a coward, so then it just becomes "oh, I just want to be polite". And now the rules of etiquette have changed.
I remember us having discussions about this on a sub I modded. We decided to let people do as they willed because it was relatively new to us. But if the admins had beat on us, we'd have folded and beat on the users and they'd have likely folded too. This happened later to supposedly skeptical subs like /r/stupidpol so all of their criticisms are constrained.
I've seen this happen with many inconvenient claims. Sometimes you just get silenced outright, post removed with no reason. Sometimes you get banned for "relevance" or not dotting some I (allegedly). Sometimes you get banned not because of your point (allegedly) but because of how you put it out there. Sometimes, on reddit, mods let you have your post and then post a stickied counter or warning, chilling the whole thing. Your enemies face no such impediments. By the time you figure out enough message discipline to get the point across you at best make a neutered argument if not an outdated one. Or you simply get banned for "inciting harassment" before then.
It's hard to build up a head of steam, a movement of normies willing to side with you if you have to be worrying about all of this. And the message to any normie is "this is not a big deal" or, even worse, "this is low status".
Scott Alexander had a number of posts examining how dissent is 'quashed' and then sublimates out into other behaviors that are 'safe' yet still demonstrate one's resistance to the overculture's norms... although usually in ways that do not threaten the overculture's dominance.
I guess that is the question. Even if Twitter is the venue through which the right is able to score wins, are they actually damaging the overculture in doing so, or is the overculture hurting itself via inter-factional squabbles over control of the reins of power? Reins that the right is nowhere near reaching but can pretend to make a play for as the left's grip loosens?
Hence why I think it makes more sense that the series of events (for convenience, limiting it to Post-Covid) that has shown cracks in the Cathedral's otherwise uniform facade has both made it harder for the left to quash dissent (since so much 'dissent' is now coming from their side!) and emboldened their opponents on the right and the populace at large.
You can given an honorable mention to "Lets Go Brandon" as a watershed moment of realization 'you can mock the king and get away with it.'
Finally, Travis Corcoran's Iron Catastrophe theory makes some sense of it too. They're running out of rhetorical 'fuel' and are increasingly reverting to raw power as a means of suppression, but that fuel burns hot and doesn't last so long.
This doesn't ring true to me at all. As bad as the culture war got, lese majeste was never much of an issue, the sacred cows were other things.
Did even the most brain-poisoned boomer in the depths of the worst of it ever feel like they couldn't freely mock Joe Biden? I don't recall any holding back before that moment, from people who weren't holding back after it. And I didn't get any impression that that played any particular part in a preference cascade freeing cowed silent people on the borderline from their bonds either.
At most, it gave already committed partisans a big single meme to regroup around and build some confidence and unity.
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