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 -
Vibe-Changes and the Still-Misunderstood Freedom of the Press
Some headlines have formed around Biden's Farewell Address and his invocation of the phrase "tech-industrial complex". From the speech:
For those of us who are old enough, this typifies a yuge vibe change from the "90s consensus" that tech is magic, that it's a democratizing force, that it can only do good in the world, and that the only thing that can possibly stop the progress of history toward utopia would be if government even put one single iota of regulation on it. Of course, this is not a vibe change that happened overnight. A lot has happened over the years. Insane proliferation of technology and connected devices, colossal increases in number of users and usage rates, displacement and reorientation of entire industries. With that came the shift from "Web 1.0" to "Web 2.0", and folks can debate whether "Web 3.0" has crashed and burned ten feet off the launchpad or whether it's still just slowly picking up steam. With the rise of bitcoin making it easy to cash out on internet crime, there are probably only a few ideological holdouts who still think that it cannot possibly be touched or that code is law or whatever.
So, glossing over mountains of events that have happened in the past 20+ years, what are the President's biggest concerns?
I'll start with AI, only to quickly drop it. No one here needs a retread of those debates, which are all too familiar. I'll only call attention to the same point as above - the vibe is completely opposed to a complete hands off, let it be what it be, surely it will be a good democratizing force vibe. Almost no one thinks that AI code is law, that if, say, a public university RLHF'ed their way into getting a bot to discriminate against white people or conservatives or whatever, then that's just how the world is and that nothing can be done, hands off the tech. The AI doomers are only an extreme example of how completely antiquated the old view is.
Similarly, for the main event, the President is very concerned about the core function of "information technology", which is to convey information. Make no mistake, this is a broadside on the core conception of what this stuff does, and it cannot be easily excised in some way. It is an acknowledgement that there can be power in tech, and to many, where there is power, there is something to be seized.
One of those industries that holds significant power and which has been disrupted and displaced several times in history is the press. The press, itself, was a disruptive technology, significantly affecting the old ways of scrolls, papyrus, stone carvings, etc. We've seen the rise of radio and television before the internet. With that, I would like to once again claim that this view of freedom of the press gets the history entirely backwards:
So therein lies the contradiction. One cannot simply leave the entire internet alone; extorting someone via IP is not conceptually different than doing so by voice. But gobs and gobs of the core purpose of the internet is to simply convey information, as one would have in the past by going to the local printer and then handing out pamphlets. It seems that people really want to break this centuries old consensus, just like how the 90s consensus has crumbled. What's messed up about it is that they want to break that consensus in the name of that consensus. It's as if since no one seems to remember what a physical printing press is, you can just call whatever you want "the free press", and no one will bat an eye.
Is there a steelman? Possibly. The President talked about editing, facts, and lies. Perhaps one can just slightly tweak his speech to say, "Libel law is crumbling," and that fixes the glitch. Indeed, it would be conceptually coherent this way, but who's going to raise their hand to sign up for that? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? The nightmare of trying to wade through concepts of "misinformation", "disinformation", "malinformation", etc. is too scary, and the well is too poisoned to have any hope of bipartisan agreement to bring libel law up to the task of the internet. In fact, even just this morning, I listened to the oral argument from a case that was in the Supreme Court on Tuesday, where the entire issue was the fine-grained distinction between a "false statement" and one that is "misleading but not false". These arguments happen, probably have to happen sometimes, but are, for the most part, relatively rare. Anyone who wants to Make Libel Law Great Again in order to "fix" the internet has a monumental task in front of them. I don't know how they'd do it. The only thing I know is that continuing to propagate the misinformation that this is about "the free press" is going to occasionally cause me to write a far-too-long, far-too-annoyed comment.
I was, in my younger years, a true believer in the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace as laid down by John Perry Barlow.
Of course, I didn't know until much later that even then there were people who disagreed very strongly with him and essentially knew deep in their bones that the internet would only facilitate larger organs of control. Two of the most infamous hackers of their generation, Acid Phreak and Phiber Optik of legendary MOD/Legion of Doom fame proceeded to prove this by doxing John Perry Barlow and extracting his credit information.
John Perry Barlow referred to them, in his own words, as "little nihilists":
They met in real life and came away mutually more peaceful for it, but time has proven Acid and Phiber more correct than John Barlow. The Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace now seems dated and pitifully naive in a world where governments openly use the internet to enact increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks on each other while gating off the series of tubes as befits them, and the right to be forgotten is sold online as a service.
More options
Context Copy link
I was given Yuaval Noah Harari's book Nexus as a gift. It's quite relevant.
You can tell that a certain faction of 'Elite Human Capital' are working hard to find justifications for clampdowns on information. He constantly re-emphasises that truth is not necessarily as useful for creating and preserving social order as fiction, that naively propagating freedom of information can be a breeding ground for dangerous ideas. He apportions a good chunk of blame for Myanmar having a civil war on Facebook algorithms which strikes me as a gross simplification. He says that democratic means can achieve evil ends - Hitler was voted in. And maybe if the commies had modern AI technology it would be possible to run an economy centrally and thus achieve global totalitarianism. The answer to preserving our Correct Social Values of anti-racism, feminism and liberal democracy is unclear, who knows how to do it or what compromises will be made, Yuval says. But it is key to identify that freedom of speech and information is increasingly becoming unhelpful in this new environment and should not be a core value. There should be a conversation between people to achieve democratic governance but somehow the conversation needs to be managed to prevent bad outcomes by law and various institutional mechanisms. Managed Democracy.
I wouldn't mischaracterize the book as being invalid, it's more along the lines of 'here is a perfectly valid argument for why I (and people like me) should have more power and you should have less' which may indeed be perfectly valid but is still somewhat dubious, given the interests of those making the argument.
The Facebook blame for Myanmar sounds a lot like the justification for Trump and Christian Nationalists and MAGA gaining support via social media. It couldn’t possibly be that people were choosing crime-think when given freedom to choose, it must be the algorithm (and you better change it to support the neoliberal ideology or else) or Russia (who somehow manages to look and sound like ordinary white Americans dissatisfied with The Narrative) or literally anything other than “they don’t like us”.
The problem is that you can’t use an algorithm to push things that are not happening. Nor can you get support for ideas that are not at least latently relevant and popular in the base of users. I don’t believe for a second that you could use the algorithm to push Americans to start pushing Buddhist Nationalism— Theres no organic support for that, as few Americans are Buddhist or interested in becoming Buddhist, and even among those who are, there’s no support for the idea of Buddhists controlling the government. There is support for Christianity and Christian Nationalism in America that comes from the bottom up. It’s existed for a while. The entire Pro Life movement was predicated on the idea that God forbids abortion and that Christians should do what they can to end it because God forbids it and God is above government. Opposition to gay rights, while not as successful (so far) runs along the same lines — God forbids it, so we must oppose it. Immigration opposition is likewise organic. If the general public was happy about immigration you simply cannot spread anti-immigrant sentiment among the public. But people see the results so when it pops up on social media, they agree with it.
Meanwhile, on Tumblr, I'm seeing left-wing people arguing the other side: that plenty of American voters quite simply did choose crime-think when given freedom to choose… and therefore those people are evil Nazis, and those who cannot be forcefully "reeducated" are beyond reaching and must be removed from society (and, most likely, removed from life).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I know this is a pet peeve of yours, but I think the you're misportraying what happened. The vibe shift you describe - where people went from thinking that tech, the internet, whatever, is essentially self-regulating, and any power that would rise would end up being organically balanced out by a new power that would meet it, to thinking that government regulation might be necessary to keep things balanced, and prevent one power from taking over - did take place to some extent, I'm an example of it, but this is not what you're seeing here.
What you're seeing here is people confident that a certain set of rules will guarantee their perpetual victory, suddenly realizing their enemies can adapt, and use these rules to score a win as well. The same happened with the idea of freedom of speech, the moment it turned out it turned out that establishment ideas lose badly in an environment of free discourse. It's no coincidence that the 90's vibe was still alive and well during the Arab Spring, and only started shifting after Trump I and Brexit. Internet crime seems like nothing more than an obvious excuse for what they actually want to do - control political discourse.
I’m not convinced that’s a contradiction. The view that tech was good and would make life better was predicated on a bunch of liberal assumptions.
1). That humans in their state of nature were naturally libertines, naturally good, free from hate anger and so on. This is now demonstrated to be false. Give humans free speech and they’ll use it to control other people, to scam and cheat and rent seek, and preach hate and division. Thus the internet essentially ended up doing the opposite of what the liberals thought it would do.
2). That the neoliberal consensus of the WWII era had won decisively enough that it could hold up when people were allowed to choose freely and advocate for their own ideas. It turns out that, when allowed such freedoms, the neoliberal consensus is mostly popular as a luxury belief system rather than as deeply rooted convictions. Things like LGBT+ might be tolerable in very small doses, but they aren’t things that most people actually want normalized. Likewise, while people might diversity in abstract, but will often pay a fair premium to avoid the consequences of diversity.
3). For whatever reason, tge liberals tended to assume that not only were the computer science nerds on their side, but that they would continue to be on their side. It’s not pretty clear that most people in tech are firm capitalists, don’t like corporate telling them what to think, and reject culture war scolding pretty much.
I'm not sure I can make a better case that it's a contradiction, than you just did.
3) is fair enough, just a particular faction going after an ex-ally turned rival.
But with 2) we're already touching on a contradiction. Liberalism is supposed to be about self-determination of people under it. Diversity is not it's explicitly stated terminal goal, so if people are rejecting it, you're not suppose to take away rights that you supposedly consider fundamental.
1) Demolishes liberalism entirely. If communists say "central planning did the opposite of what we thought we would, all hail the free market", they're no longer communist. If you limited your criticism to the particular technology of the internet, it might be salvageable, but if the problem stems from faulty assumptions on human nature, what is there left of liberalism?
I mean I’m not disagreeing. I think especially in its modern and postmodern forms liberalism has failed nearly as completely as communism has. And as the contradictions become more obvious, the need to reassert control over the public is going to get much worse. We’re in the stage of the fall of liberal democratic politics in which the results of elections are being declared “threats to democracy.” Or where our freedom of speech is so sacred that we’re going to demand the cancellation of people for crime-think, labeling of hate-facts as misinformation or disinformation, and people are considered militant nationalists for positions that their grandparents took for granted.
Is that a stage of liberalism? Because I thought it was liberalism being skinsuited by authoritarianism due to the three generation effect (in case it has a proper name, I mean where the first generation needs something so they build it fit for purpose, the second generation maintains it but doesn't need it, and they care about it only in the sense of shutting their parents up, and the third generation has never seen the problem it fixed, don't understand it and throws it away).
Repression tends to be a stage in the history of any doomed movement. Once it becomes clear that the ideology itself is failing, those who want to keep the movement alive tend to use repressive tactics and authoritarian techniques to keep the system hobbling along for as long as possible. Which is about what’s happening here.
But the same happened in the decline of other movements as well.
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
I didn't dwell on it. Perhaps I should have. I didn't want to let my mind veer too heavily into the mire of the pure power games. I only briefly touched on it:
So, yes, to some... perhaps even "many", as I put it, it is purely a matter of exerting partisan power. I was shooting for more of a steelman. An "even if you actually care about the things you're saying..." and remarking on how even then, they can't even get basic terminology right and would instead find themselves in a mire. So perhaps you have made un-Straussian what might have been the Straussian reading of my comment.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This isn’t just a Biden vibe shift. Yes, liberals are very concerned about misinformation. But conservatives are very concerned about things on social media too! This is a total vibe shift, people are mad about the effects of social media across the spectrum- just different ones.
A bunch of red states blocked porn sites(kinda). The federal government tried to pressure social media into censoring opponents of the party in power. Everyone wants more regulations.
More options
Context Copy link
The "centuries old consensus" was a useful fiction that is exposed by relatively free propagation of information via the internet.
The current consensus was formulated during a period in history in which everyone got their information from the same set of sources, they were reading the same newspaper watching the same one-of-four news channels. They all ate the same name-brands of food. But the "consensus" only existed because of the information propagated by the collective sources of information... that is the root of propaganda, to propagate.
Biden is absolutely correct that a Liberal consensus, or really any other sort of consensus for that matter, is only possible with organizing the propagation of information and the internet is an existential threat to that capability. Of course Biden's nonsense that the "people must govern" has never been the case, and neither is it the case that the "consensus" that existed through the 90s was formulated by people freely buying printing presses and reaching agreements through rational argumentation on core philosophical questions. That didn't happen, it's a fiction used to give legitimacy to power.
The post-WWII consensus is not centuries old, and it was not created through agreement after rational debate, it was created through culture war and the top-down organization and propagation of information. The internet threatens this order. AI, on the other hand, presents the government a solution to also tame the internet to be a tool for this purpose, as originally conceived. Blast the whole world with nothing except the Truth of our Consensus...
They align the values of the AI according to their "values" and biases and identity and ethnic agendas, and then the AI enforces that agenda onto the stream of information. That's the ultimate objective, it's not about "free press" in any sense at all.
Which ethnicity?
It's an SS post, he always means Jews when he goes on about ethnicities doing bad things.
Is he wrong?
There's a motte and bailey on the subject - on the one hand it's perfectly true that Jews often do things in the interests of Jews. Everybody occasionally does things in the interests of groups to which they belong, so it's utterly unsurprising that, for instance, Jews tend to be quite pro-Israel, or that Jews are more committed to fighting anti-semitism than non Jews, or that Jews are more invested in Holocause remembrance.
On the other hand, what SS usually argues goes a long way beyond that, to the point of holding that Jews are a uniquely diabolical race of manipulators who infiltrate and control other societies.
The practical upshot, I would argue, is that you should automatically disregard anything that SS says that involves Jews, and because practically everything he posts is about Jews, that means you should ignore most of what he says full stop. I realise that sounds pretty harsh, but he is a very focused poster.
Wow! Where did he get this idea, where did it originate? Are there any Jewish texts that talk about manipulating non-Jewish societies, or that Jews should seek to control them?
No, I understand, thank you.
Yes, I've read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Or do you mean some other text?
More options
Context Copy link
None of this JAQing off. Speak plainly. You were specifically warned about this quite recently--and on the exact same subject.
Three day ban, this time.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not really here to argue for or against his point. I'm just saying, that's his schtick.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I happen to think that 1791 is indeed "centuries old".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Can you elaborate? What do you think the doomer position is?
Eliezer "Melt the GPUs and
NukeConventionally Bomb Chinese Data Centers" Yudkowsky thinks AI will literally end life on earth.Right. But what's the new consensus? That AIs will take all our jobs, including the police and military, and we'll all live happily off UBI while contributing nothing, and no one's ever going to take our stuff away?
More options
Context Copy link
Re-read the article. He did not advocate nuking rogue datacenters. He advocated conventional airstrikes even if the datacenter was located inside a nuclear power like China and even if doing so therefore carried some risk of nuclear war. And even that was in the context of an international agreement to stop AI research, because there is no point in destroying Chinese datacenters if your own datacenters are forging full-steam ahead. It doesn't matter who builds the AI, we are all going to die.
In the spirit of accuracy I will edit my comment.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I would shorthand it as, "If we don't heavily regulate this tech, possibly to the point of completely smothering it in the cradle, it won't just be bad; it'll destroy us."
Got it. But what's the new, non-outdated consensus?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
it makes sense for Biden to be complaining about fact checking disappearing when the executive under his control tried to coerce social media into using fact checking to remove content that was critical or contradicted his government's policies. hopefully this position gets some criticism because he is essentially complaining elon and zuck have taken his toys away.
More options
Context Copy link
That was the vibe in the 90s if you were young, sure. The boomers, in my recollection, spent a fair amount of time during that period being suspicious of the whole tech book - not only in the sense of predicting disappointments and bubbles (including the ones that actually happened) but seeing the free online expression etc. as a path of dangers for their kids, filled with drugs and child porn and extremists trying to recruit them. (Quite as many of those who were kids in the 90s now see the Internet for their kids, of course). And the discussions about the dangers of corporate control and monopolization are nothing new either, or have people already forgotten the Microsoft antitrust saga?
I'm sure there were some people who were suspicious, but for many years, they just lost. Some folks embody the prevailing perspective in folks like Ira Magaziner (a few examples). It resulted in policies and even laws like Section 230. It was chipped away at in many ways, some good recounting here. It really was a thing, with hopes of both domestic and foreign benefits; Peter Singer said:
Lots of people, even boomers like Magaziner (born one year after Donald Trump), thought it was a panacea that could basically not be touched.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link