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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   16087 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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Seeing all of these progressives turn into luddites in this instance, and free speech advocates after the Musk journalist bans in another, I think it's fair to say that there are no principles. There is no political theory of friend/enemy anymore. It's a law. And anyone who pretends to, in any instance, be above that law or exist outside its scope is just, through the act, a self described moron.

I get that abstract principles are having a tough time right now, I'm curious what goes into identifying friend vs. enemy. It's certainly not as simple as demographics, so it's not like we've gone directly from principles to its crudest opposite.

I want to say something like egregore-fueled "essences" or something. Resistance to AI art can be tied to a tech bro "essence" of some kind, which actually does make it somewhat demographically-informed. But at any time a good tech bro may be identified, because it's short-term politically useful. That time-dependent aspect is linked to the egregore dimension.

My two theories:

-the fine arts are extremely Blue Tribe-coded, and as such any assault on their priviliges or status is presumptively a Red-Tribe action.(even when it's pretty clearly a Grey tribe thing)

-the fine arts are (more weakly) female-coded, and as such any assault on their priviliges or status is inherently anti-feminist.

Either way, 'this means war'.

My priors are that porn artists are a mostly progressive crowd that is disproportionately involved in doing the grunt work of prog activism, thus they’re paying back the favor.

You would be surprised about that. The ones who actually produce and get popular are more likely to be apolitical or moderately conservative. There's zero tolerance for prog crap in any artist chat I've been in, because they've all faced the "how dare you, attention all mutuals, yikes!" thing.

The fakers and hangers-on in public discords are all progs, of course, because they're the kind of people who hang out on discord as a lifestyle.

How do you mean by "disproportionately involved in doing the grunt work of progressive activism"? Hentai Foundry users don't strike me as the type to organize phone-call campaigns or canvass neighborhoods. The most they do is put pronouns in their Twitter bios, draw futa dragons, and as of recently, rail against AI art. I'd be an idiot to not recognize the general power that art can have over people, but I'm not seeing how Morrigan Aensland fanart actually gets you to "Drag Time Story Hour" or whatever, outside of "shifting the Overton Window by way of re-coloring the semi-conscious social noosphere through art."

How do you mean by "disproportionately involved in doing the grunt work of progressive activism"? Hentai Foundry users don't strike me as the type to organize phone-call campaigns or canvass neighborhoods.

But they do strike me as the sort of people who would join a twitter mob, and show up to "drag queen story hour" or a black bloc protest.

Seems like lots of the people organizing no-platforming campaigns, doxxing, and running DOS attacks support themselves by drawing porn.

To try and address both you and Hlynka in one go, I'll say that I'm not aware of evidence/don't have the perception that there is significant overlap between activists and porn artists. I would assume maybe 20% of porn artists moonlight as activists (or, inversely, are activists who moonlight in NSFW art). I'd put the threshold for a strong overlap at at least 60%.

That’s fair, and I will register that if what @Bernd is saying is true, then it is simply that I don’t know how to tell the fakers and hangers on from the producers.

It could be there's very different cliques, and I have a very narrow view of the scene; I only know one furry artist, and he's a dissident.

Also possible. I’m not discounting either possibility.

Wow, is hentai foundry still a thing? I haven't heard of anyone using it in years.

It's maybe not as active as it might have once been, but ever since Tumblr banned porn, well...

Bit of a stretch to make this a target for ranting about progressive hypocrisy.

With that logic you might as well sneer against progressives being against a literal Doomsday Device. "Oh it's just a little progress and science (and it is), why do you hate it?" Or wonder why don't conservatives want to conserve literally everything that ever existed.

You could just as easily say

  • "Progressives are the party of labor unions, of course they'd support the interests of established creators."

  • "AI art is exactly the kind of capitalist infringement on creative spaces that inspired [insert any counterculture movement here]"

  • "The deep-seated progressive distrust of technocratic solutions has led them to insist on keeping humans in the loop."

  • Counterpart to the above, "Human involvement is a natural offshoot of the progressive desire for a commissar class."

  • Or my personal objection, "Just because they're whining on Twitter doesn't mean they were ideological progressives in the first place!"

These are interesting subjects for political analysis, and they are worthy of comparison. Each begins from a different slice of the big-tent term "progressives."

The OP elides such a step. He has implied a specific categorization, one antithetical to "luddites," and labeled it "progressives." This is assuming the conclusion. Whatever his reasons, we miss out on the interesting discussion and skip straight to the booing.

I’ll definitely agree that “twitter cancel mob goes after Stripe” has historically been very left-aligned. It’s really hard to imagine KS or Patreon adopting an explicitly conservative or reactionary stance—partly because they would certainly be faced with mass progressive outrage.

Further, anyone still using Twitter for coordination at this point is less likely to be a vocal conservative. Source, if anyone needs it. So a priori, this particular mob is probably mostly Democrats, at least.

My original objection is probably wrong; it would be better to say I don’t think these are particularly ideological at all. If they were, I’d expect to see different language, different appeals. Instead I get the impression that it’s horny solidarity boring financial incentives. I recognize this is a weak no-true-Scotsman!

Instead I get the impression that it’s horny solidarity.

I largely agree with you, but I think it's less horny solidarity and more recognition that sexy art sells. AI drying up the demand for erotic commissions is likely to hit the discretionary spending parts of a lot of amateur artists' budgets pretty hard, to say nothing of the income streams of third-party sites whose business model is acting as an intermediary between those artists and their clientele.

luddites

Have some sympathy for the Luddites! You've got to remember the context: it was the early 1810s. There was the technological unemployment, which always sucks. But there were lots of exacerbating factors. Britain was engaged in a wild spending binge, driving heavy inflation. And more than that, it was embroiled in an expensive, elective war in Eastern Europe, causing a supply shock that spiked prices of essential commodities (i.e. food) at the worst possible time. Obviously people are going to be pissed in that situation.

Britain was engaged in a wild spending binge, driving heavy inflation. And more than that, it was embroiled in an expensive, elective war in Eastern Europe, causing a supply shock that spiked prices of essential commodities (i.e. food) at the worst possible time. Obviously people are going to be pissed in that situation.

I laughed.

The writers of this season of reality must be bigger hacks than the people making Star Wars content now, if they have to re-tread that kind of plotline.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

I don't think the analogy actually holds (people were literally struggling to buy flour in Britain), but it speaks to the broader situation. When the economy is bad, people lash out.

I'm not unsympathetic to them. I'm unsympathetic to the people who would have, prior to this event, gloated about luddites being regressive or reactionary and used the term as a pejorative. This class of rainbow people who cheered on automation and censorship right up until those things were turned on them.

I understand the Luddites, change sucks sometimes. Uncertainty definitely sucks.

Being forced into a change, while being uncertain about what happens on the other end is perhaps worst of all. Technology tends to do that.

But it becomes obvious that most of the complaints about technological change are self-serving in the extreme, without much regard for the so called 'greater good.' It's not as if anyone is taking away their actual artistic talent, or their body of work, or the adoration of their accumulated fans.

Just so happens that they may have to retrain into a field that isn't as legible to AI, or adapt to a world where AI exists and find new ways to compete. It's not pleasant.

My point is more about you've got to look at the broader economic trends. Technological change, including in the textile industry, was rapid in the UK for decades. Why in particular were people rioting in those years (~1810-1815) in particular? It had to do with inflation and commodity prices.

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