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Notes -
I do miss that old internet culture.
It sounds like this guy was, weirdly, ahead of the game in a lot of ways. He realized that the internet was important as a source of serious information, when most other people were just using it to goof around. He was willing to stand up and be a public figure, writing everything under his real name. Pretty common now on substack and celebrity twitter, but very rare back then. And he was willing to fight for all the causes that have became left-wing staples, completely avoiding the libertarian flavor of the earlier internet days.
If he hadn't wasted so much time and effort on that stupid RationalWiki site (I had no idea it was mostly all just one guy writing it), he'd probably be a famous influencer or political pundit now.
To clarify, it definitely wasn't mostly just him writing it! RationalWiki has a lot of prolific editors; he's just the Twitter frontman, the sysadmin, and in many ways the one who sets the cultural tone.
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