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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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Imagine if the Cocoa Cola company had responded to the New Coke debacle with a bunch of attack ads implying their customers were just idiots with bad taste. Or if Johnson & Johnson had responded to the Chicago Tylenol killings with a series of bus ads that read “Tylenol: It’s perfectly safe, you’re just a fucking pussy”

Imagine if you grew up all your life surrounded by people who browbeat each other into certain political/ideological positions through calling them bigoted. Imagine if your entire political/ideological ecosystem of figuring out truth and values is structured around this sort of behavior. Imagine if your entire social media ecosystem is structured around shutting up people that you dislike, while creating just the right amount of space for disagreement to convince you that you're seeing arguments that challenge your beliefs and values without actually challenging your beliefs and values, and you see the people who control the social media companies reinforcing and strengthening this sandbox more and more.

You just might start thinking that this strategy would work when selling products to a mainstream audience. In fact, you might think that you'd be utterly foolish not to use this strategy.