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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.
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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.
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