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A lot of the examples you mention, besides the “you hear about it and then convince yourself you have it,” mechanism, seem to go further and have communities dedicated to actively spreading the condition and making sure people who have the condition keep having it. This often seems to be exacerbated by the architecture of modern social discourse: Victims of the disease congregate online and can wall themselves off from opposing viewpoints, meanwhile there’s kind of a “recruiting” community (e.g., /r/egg_irl) which sources new members. Illnesses whose communities build these recruiting hubs are more successful in spreading. Some are even so successful that the hijack public institutions.
These are literal meme (in the old sense of a self-replicating idea) mental viruses that compete and thrive in the 21st century social lattice. Put that way it seems like no surprise whatsoever that societies with less developed communication infrastructure have a lower prevalence of these diseases.
I guess the question is how to minimize the effect of these on a population. Is there some kind of immunizing treatment? Alternatively does the same mechanism that tends to make “real” illnesses become less severe also exist here?
I wonder if a society with much more restrictive communication like China has less of this. I would support “internet mask wearing” to combat this but at least in the west I’m pretty sure the people in control of making these decisions already have the disease.
At least to some types of people, those communities are extremely dangerous. I fell for the old 'me_irl' memes of old during a few years when I spend a lot of time at home due to illness. I've never really been one to be tricked into believing things when speaking to people in the real world, however those kind of reddit communities manages to warp my mind a lot. Despite never even commenting. Some combination of being tired, agreeable and a bit neurotic?
I see so many people in real life everyday suffering from similar things and I just want to shake them and tell them to throw the phone away. But I don't know how. I wonder what will be said in the future about this time period.
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I don't think it's possible to have nothing occupy the memetic vacuum of social media, perhaps we can fill it useful identity memes instead? I'd suggest traditional ones like maternal or paternal but I'm not necessarily against modern versions so long as they're healthy. We destroyed the traditional gender roles people fit into and replaced their with nothing. To paraphrase a meme on /r/theschism, one person's cage is another's frame to build on. If given no frame many people will poorly build something themselves and it won't be as tested as ones we've lived with for all of human history.
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I’ll go with the boring classical libertarian answer and say that the answer to free speech is more free speech.
Encouraging a culture in which people are able to freely and publicly criticize these memes would cause them to lose a lot of their contagious force. Becoming trans would be a lot less appealing if the average reaction in polite society was “uh, you know that you’re still a dude, right?” instead of “please tell me your preferred pronouns so I can affirm your identity”.
I think we have seen the consequence of that. The free marketplace of ideas ends up just like the free market. With government interventions, monopolies and all the other fun stuff.
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I am not sure I see how it follows from allowing more speech to the median reaction to trans people being to deny their identity. My impression is most people (myself included) who affirm trans people's identities do so for reasons other than fear of social censure. I am not trans myself but it is also my impression there is no lack of media or content which they can be exposed to that denies their preferred identity, often including quite popular and mainstream publications depending on their location.
Any culture that exists gets identified. Once it has been identified it can be mocked. Once it gets mocked those who stand on the outside of that process will steer away from it and look for new cultures that have not been identified yet and are therefor free of mockery. Until we repeat the cycle.
Emo, scene, hipster, goth, metal head, jock, nerd, car guy, metrosexual or whatever other 'culture' that exists within a population.
Now imagine if we had enshrined some of the cultures with an inordinate amount of media and political power. Being emo is actually a medically recognized thing. There are special news stories every week about the emo suicide rate and how emo kids are bullied in school and how that is a giant social problem and how society as a whole has to come together and fix these issues that afflict this very special group. There are support groups and specific institutions and outlets dedicated to the group specifically.
How about instead of media mocking the whole emo thing as being a phase for insecure teenage girls who lack personality and are looking for attention and an excuse to use excessive amounts of make up whilst pretending their PMS is chronic suicidal ideation, we rather make laws that outlaw such verbiage.
Regardless of anything else, I'm sure being emo would still exist today if it had been sanctified in victimary discourse instead of having been mocked. Let alone if it was a pathway to some form of power or social capital.
Now, I think there are reasons outside of all of this that contribute much more to the survivability of LGBTQ stuff compared to things like being emo. But I do think it's an important element. If the words to describe what you see are removed from your brain, all attempts to discuss it will be in vain.
It does, I see dozens of these kids every day. It's like 2007 all over again, except they use vapes and smartphones rather than rollies and Nokias.
In Western news media, emos, goths, juggalos etc. are presented in at best a neutral light and at worst a very negative one, and yet all three still exist in some capacity. Some subcultures can apparently withstand decades of mockery and belittlement and survive. There might even be an oppositional component, where being mocked by the mainstream causes people to dig deeper into their subculture more than they would have otherwise.
I don't know if it's the same. It might be the 'next generation of the neurotype' for a lack of a better term, but when I think of emo I think of things like this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=GaNFqd5eTX0 or this https://youtube.com/watch?v=s1o8WpTXfCY
Where the group identity itself is known as being something more than just a fashion trend, where there is an obvious ingroup and outgroup dynamic going on. Where you distinguish yourself as being something through your expression, i.e. makeup and clothing, and are recognized as being different by other groups.
But maybe it is the same where you live, I would not know.
I understand, and I see teenagers dressed exactly like that every day. Granted, it was in remission for a few years, but now it's back with a vengeance.
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Maybe it is my cultural milieu but my impression is basically every culture you list ("Emo, scene, hipster, goth, metal head, jock, nerd, car guy, metrosexual") all still exist. I think it is likely some marginal people who may have become members of those groups didn't because of that mockery, but my impression is certainly not that these cultures are totally failing to attract new members. Searching for things like "#goth" or "#emo" on TikTok bring up videos with collectively billions of views. Most of those videos seem, at a glance, to be people in the appropriate subculture rather than being mocked as well. It is also not clear to me that "being trans" is more like "being goth" or "being emo" as compared to "being gay."
You are reading into 'existing' too literally. The 'look' still exists, but emo as an identity exists today the same way being trans existed in 2001. In other words it's people putting on a costume in isolation. Outside of that every culture I listed still exists and I never said they didn't.
What's the difference? As groups there's no distinction. Gays have always existed but not as a group like we see today.
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One plausible mechanism I could see is that those other reasons are often downstream from forms of social censure. The social milieu I inhabit is almost exclusively people who affirm trans people's identities, out of a genuine belief that the affirmation is the right thing to do. And that genuine belief is formed in an environment in which the idea that anything other than such affirmation could be acceptable is censured harshly. As you write, media that put forth such an idea isn't in short supply, but such things only exist in this environment as objects of derision, a target of a Two Minute Hate at best. As such, I think if such censure didn't exist and people were left free to argue that sometimes affirmation might not be the only acceptable thing, then fewer people would genuinely believe that it's the only acceptable thing, and a higher proportion of people would respond with the "uh, you know that you’re still a dude, right?" instead of "please tell me your preferred pronouns so I can affirm your identity."
No idea if the numbers would shift enough to make the former the average reaction, though. Given the massive incentive for preference falsification in this subject, I'm not sure it's possible to make any meaningful estimates.
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Post-traumatic stress disorder
Anxiety
Depression
Gender dysphoria
Chronic pain
I mean, my first impulse would be to remove them from the K-12 curriculum, but that's just me. I don't buy into this learned helplessness. The federal government should not be actively propagating mental illnesses, at a minimum. After this most basic of steps has been taken, we can agonize over echo chambers and misinformation on the internet.
Edit: Jeeze, I really fucked up the formatting on that list, apologies, but I can't seem to find a way to make it work.
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I think there is also a question of determining which memes are harmful, which on the edges is fuzzier than it sounds. There are plenty of positive memes (the notions of democratic governance and enlightenment liberalism come to mind), and some negative ones like suicide clusters are pretty universally seen as harmful -- barring a crowd of unironic nihilists out there. But the more nuanced memes tend to draw disagreement, often becoming fodder for the Kulturkampf. Is organized religion a harmful meme? Personally, not in most cases, but many arguments to the contrary have been made earnestly.
Even if there were a mechanism for minimizing memes (beyond the simple "countermeme harder" which just raises the temperature), I'd be concerned about exactly what you'd choose to target with it.
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