It’s been pointed out recently that the topics discussed in the Culture War thread have gotten a bit repetitive. While I do think the Motte has a good spread on intellectual discussion, I’m always pushing for a wider range (dare I say diversity?) of viewpoints and topics in the CW thread.
I was a lurker for years, and I know that the barrier between having a thought and writing a top level comment in the CW thread can loom large indeed. Luckily I’m fresh out of inspiration, and would love to hear thoughts from folks about effortposts they want to write but haven’t gotten around to.
This of course applies to regulars who post frequently as well - share any and all topics you wish were discussed in the CW thread!
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
Two from my endless pile. Both labor intensive so who knows when, if ever, I'll get around to them:
Globalization, Fragility, and Monoculture - Basically, an exploration of the idea that modern economic conditions facilitate economies of scale in which commodity production and distribution is highly centralized, for reasons of cost i.e. the huge percentage of the worlds semiconducturs traditionally manufactured in Taiwan. This also facilitates standardization of design in these products. The analogy in the natural world would be the ability of certain species, hyper-optimized to fill a certain ecological niche, to flourish and crowd out potential competitors. This is well and good until something happens to disrupt the status quo; the product or organism that was perfectly adapted to one set of conditions is often too specialized to adapt when those conditions change. None of these ideas are terribly new of course. Since Covid, lots of people have been thinking about the idea that globalization is pretty fragile. Both John Robb in the security sphere and Nicholas Nassim Taleb have arguably been preaching similar ideas long before they started to enter mainstream currency. The issue, I think, is that the mono-cultural model tends to be very profitable in the short-to-medium term. Hyper-specialization is what allows for explosive growth, which is what hordes of slavering venture capitalists and would-be venture capitalists are always seeking. Not sure anyone has addressed the explicit tradeoff between growth and security/systemic diversity and the compromises that we may be forced to make on that front in a generation or two.
A tale of two elites - Arguably since the end of the civil war, the United States has largely been run by people associated with political and financial centers of power in the Northeast of the country. Broadly speaking, they tend to have similar educational (Ivy League) and professional backgrounds (often lawyers, academics, or some other wordcel-esque job), and place a great deal of emphasis on technocratic credentialism. The emergence of silicon valley as a possible rival center of power, with its own culture, norms, and ideals could set conditions for a major change. Again, hardly an original idea, but not one I've seen explored in depth to my own satisfaction
Neat ideas. Your first post is complementary to one I have been kicking around on the consolidation cycle. Most of us have lived to see the consolidation of social media/internet forums and all the CW- topics that spawns but the general process happens in many areas (manufacturing, farming, urbanization, etc. )
the post would be examine how technology changes the dynamics of the consolidation cycle. The idea is that the distribution of entities (as a function of size) generally follows a power law and that when a technology comes around that reduces transaction costs between entities two things happen. First, the time it takes to reach the "consolidated" part of the cycle goes down and second the exponent on the power law gets more negative i.e. in the consolidated state the first x% of the domain is controlled by a smaller number of larger entities.
One result of this is the impact on "matching" processes like trying to find a contractor, or Google searching anything. Paradoxically, having a greater "reach" on your search (enabled by lower search costs like internet search engines) at first increases your options, but ultimately reduces your options due to the market response/consolidation dynamics.
I think this dynamic underlies a lot of a host of cathedral vs bazaar type CW adjacent topics-- social media landscape, regulatory capture, dating, urbanization, globalization, the "bowling alone" phenomenon, and others
Been a minute since I logged in here, but I wanted to respond that I'd be interested to read that. What technologies exemplify this trend?
Any technology that improves the pace or efficiency (reduces transaction costs) of the movement of goods or ideas would be at play here: cars, airplanes, television, Internet, (and before that the printing press, trains and the ur-example, the horse). But also certain economic innovations, like standardized weights and measures and private property.
I'd definitely read the piece if you ever get around to it.
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