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Crowstep  1yr ago (theintrinsicperspective.com)   3019 thread views

What the heck happened in 2012?

theintrinsicperspective.com

Submission statement:

Erik Hoel argues that 2012 was a cultural inflection point. Just as 1968 signalled the peak of the 1960s cultural revolution that would set the stage for the next few decades of social change, 2012 represents the beginning of the (spoiler) smartphone era and a new round of social change.

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2012 was the year of Barack Obama's re-election campaign.

His team felt he might have trouble getting the same turnout because he hadn't delivered enough for his base. So leftwing activists started agitating various left wing causes online and off.

One big thing was the Trayvon Martin shooting, which was made into a national issue and kicked off BLM. The press went all in on the shooting, ignoring a lot of facts on the ground. ABC famously edited Zimmerman's 911 call.

Also SanFran tech workers started building in ways to censor and throttle conservatives on their platforms.

As a result random left of center people started having the attitude that "things are worse than ever but we're winning". Previously there was a perception that racism was on the decline.

The re-election of Obama was taking by many on the left as a signal of final victory, that the era of the white man was over. Social media throttling prevented them from hearing any opposition.

That lead to a great deal of shock when Trump won in 2016.

His team felt he might have trouble getting the same turnout because he hadn't delivered enough for his base. So leftwing activists started agitating various left wing causes online and off.

Also, the spectre of the first "black" president of the US ending up as a one-term failure was too horrific for them to even contemplate. Hence the deployment of really underhanded tactics against Romney as well, who was just a cuck trying to play by unwritten rules, and an open declaration of culture war by completely mainstream leftists.

Is it not obvious?

Smart phones and Post-Modernism went main stream and the old guard of the GOP were broken by the populists.

I think honestly the things that I see in the culture now that weren’t when I was a kid (for reference I graduated high school in 1996) is a couple of really big “zeitgeist” changes. First, was the idea that everything was awful in some way, and that no amount of effort was actually going to help matters. People made fun of the Hope and Change Obama campaign poster. If you believed in a better world, you were a naive person. It was all cynicism all the time. Everyone knew problems were unsolvable, the climate was fucked and we were at peak oil and nobody cared.

At the same or similar time, therapeutic culture (probably through over diagnosis of mental disorders) entered the mainstream of discourse. I believe this kind of ideology is ultimately disastrous because it gives answers that are meant for a population already severely broken and who need to be treated gently and pushed this same bubble-wrapped feelings first idea onto normal people. This created two affects: it gave cultural scolds the language and legitimacy to curtail speech, and it created a culture full of wimps who can do little for themselves and thus break much more easily than their ancestors. Cultural scolds have always been around, but until therapeutic culture entered the mainstream, the idea that people suffered harm from reading things they disagreed with didn’t have much traction. Once everyone started feeling trauma, and their body started keeping score and so on, it became the job of everyone to protect the weakest from trauma and the resulting mental illness. Which means that if you say something wrong in public, you’ve committed violence and inflicted trauma. And thus venues that allow that are now participating in creating trauma. The second is that people themselves are much weaker simply for being taught to be that way. They can’t handle loss or defeat, they can’t handle not getting what they want, and are unwilling to put forth effort into getting those things.

If you put those things together, you create a sort of grim dark world. Everything is awful, you’re weak and will be harmed by mere words. When you live in grim dark, you don’t see much to look forward to. Why work hard when you aren’t going to get anything much for it and the world will boil to death? Why have kids? Why make art with heart and soul? Why challenge people to do great things when it doesn’t matter?

I think this is the problem for a lot of bastardized media franchises as well. Woke (the cultural scolds) are definitely a part of it, but I think the unstated part of it is that we no longer believe in heroes or heroism. It’s impossible to make a serious hero movie in a culture that no longer believes in that sort of thing. Or at least impossible to play it straight without it feeling naive to the deconstructionist writers and producers who find those stories to be kid stuff. The Jedi cannot be a force for good, because in 2023 everyone knows that everyone with power is oppressive. You cannot have a government that isn’t secretly evil or broken by infighting because everyone knows that doesn’t happen. If you for some reason try it, you have to play it for laughs, either by frenetic action or absolute farce, because hope, change, and belief in a better future are silly.

The Jedi cannot be a force for good, because in 2023 everyone knows that everyone with power is oppressive. You cannot have a government that isn’t secretly evil or broken by infighting because everyone knows that doesn’t happen

Those things are true, though. There is no such thing as pure uncomplicated good, only good enough.

What I liked about the prequel trilogy is that (even though Lucas stubbornly denies this) it portrays the Jedi as incredibly flawed, but still obviously better than the Sith. They take children from their families at as young an age as possible and forbid them from starting their own families so that they never form loyalty to anything above the Jedi order. The novelizations go even further in creating a sympathetic defense for the Sith, to the point that they're not obviously better than the Jedi until Order 66 happens.

I've always thought that a sequel trilogy should be about Luke starting his own Jedi order that is less oppressive than the original one, but running into the same problems that those harsh rules were created to solve. (Kids missing their families, questioning the Jedi ways, potentially creating new Anakins.) I haven't read the Harry Potter books, but based on what my friend has told me of them, the Wizarding World is similarly morally flawed, despite meaning well and being the good guys of their universe.

But back on topic: to me, the problem with our popular culture is the exact opposite of what you're describing. The issue isn't that people don't believe in pure, uncomplicated good. The issue is that believe it exists and that they represent it, while their enemies do not. This is why before JK Rowling became a "TERF", leftists would compare themselves to the Wizards and their political enemies to Voldemort. It's why they describe themselves as the Jedi, and their enemies as the Sith. It's why their definition of "fascist" always boils down to "cartoon supervillain who is obviously evil".

When a self-identified socialist disparages tankies, what they're saying is "I want to do exactly what the Soviet Union did, but it'll work this time, because we'll put a Snowball in charge instead of a Napoleon. We learned from our mistake and won't trust obviously evil people like Stalin, only obviously good people like Lenin or Trotsky."

I don't know if popular culture influences the way people see the world, reflects the way people see the world, or merely gives them a vocabulary to discuss their experiences. Regardless, I think we need more depictions of moral ambiguity, not less.

I'm with you on therapy culture, though.

I think /u/MaiqTheTrue's diagnosis seems more accurate to me. One of the things that jumps out at you when you interact with hardcore woke people is how neurotic so many of them seem to be, convinced that they must walk on eggshells at all times for fear of unwittingly unleashing irreversible psychic harm on those around them. Hence the "micro-aggressions" paradigm, hence the banning of yoga and kimonos, hence the assertion that there's "no ethical consumption under capitalism", hence radical woke activists insisting that EVERYTHING is problematic, hence the claims that even members of minority group X can suffer from internalised anti-Xism/phobia. I'm far from the first person to note that "white privilege" (likewise male, cis, het etc.) as generally defined is functionally indistinguishable from original sin, but without the possibility of redemption (hence the rabid opposition to transracialism).

Even with people that woke people generally admire and consider "heroes" (e.g. Bernie Sanders), that admiration is always tempered by nebulous accusations that the hero is sullied in some nonspecific way: that he "failed to centre black voices" or whatever.

You're correct that woke people see out-and-out conservatives as irredeemably evil (I'm sure we've all seen memes saying that there's no essential difference between a MAGA hat, a KKK hood and an SS cap), but I don't think they generally see themselves as being pure and good. Probably the only way you can be truly "good" with no asterisks in the woke framework is to win the gold medal at the oppression Olympics e.g. a black trans sex worker from a working-class background with a history of drug abuse, a PTSD diagnosis and no green card. Given that woke people are overwhelmingly straight, white, middle- to upper-class, native-born and university-educated, this implies that the modal woke person probably walks around thinking they're kind of a shitty person most of the time ("but at least I'm not one of those bigoted MAGA chuds!").

Dylan Moran once said that all great religions are built on shame. This observation explains so much to me as to how Catholicism, evangelical Protestantism, Islam and wokeness became dominant ideologies in various nations, while Buddhism, Confucianism and so on were left in the dust.

fascists

I think that one has more to do with our most famous historical fascists, who were also cartoonishly evil. To the point where our concept of cartoonish evil incorporates a lot of their stuff. Of course, Star Wars deserves a lot of credit for codifying that language, thanks to its own crisply-uniformed militarist dictatorship with a taste for wunderwaffe.

As for moral ambiguity. The sentiment you describe informed a lot of art through the 90s. This wasn’t just the Modern Age of comics, it was the Dark Age. Pure 80s futurism was passé. Cynicism and deconstruction were in. More importantly, a generation of kids who’d grown up on the one style had developed edgier, teenage tastes. Pop culture delivered: there are antiheroes, and then there are 90s antiheroes.

The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters

Enter Dark Empire, an attempt to expand the galaxy far, far away by continuing the timeline. Somehow, Palpatine returned, and terrorized the galaxy with new superweapons and Force powers. Cue Luke struggling with the Dark Side; never mind his character arc from the originals!

Or Shadows of the Empire, an attempt to expand the merchandising galaxy by fitting into the existing timeline. Between Episodes V and VI, the gang are threatened by a mysterious crime lord, because crime syndicates are cool. There’s Imperial infighting, creepy alien sex pheromones, and this outfit for Discount Han Solo.

As a new decade—and a new, painfully earnest prequel—rolled around, we lost some of that edge. People looked back on Dark and wondered why the timeline was so hectic, or Shadows and asked if Star Wars was really supposed to have rape threats. Everyone quietly tried to pretend that pauldrons and pouches weren’t cool. Wait.

The wheel of time turns, and fashions come and pass. Sometimes people get tired of one style, and another is flavor of the month. I think Star Wars is in a relatively idealistic phase, with the Mandalorian and other shows played straight. Same for superheroes; without Heath Ledger, DC has consistently failed to make antiheroes cool. Marvel hasn’t really tried since finding its cash cows. High fantasy looked to be coming out of the shadow of Game of Thrones, but with the hubbub over recent projects, I’m not sure it’ll stick.

Point is, it’s hard to draw a line.

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This is why before JK Rowling became a "TERF", leftists would compare themselves to the Wizards and their political enemies to Voldemort

Well, JKR herself thought Trump is worse than Voldemort: https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/674196610683940864 - so her followers are certainly keeping up. And I mean, why not. In her world, Voldemort only murdered countless people (the exact count have been never made, but different sources agree it is probably hundreds at least, maybe more), and attempted to be a magical dictator of the world. Nothing compared to the evils Trump unleashed on us. Then again, Voldemort killed Lord Voldemort himself (with a little assist of little known boy by the name Potter) and Trump never did anything like it, so the advantage is clear.

I think there is a hopeless/nihilistic/no-heroes streak in some parts of contemporary culture, but mostly surrounding climate activism. (It's a narrative that flatters my prejudices to suggest that it's a cautionary tale about distorting the truth for rhetorical power "for the greater good": the exaggerated claims that global warming will end the world, rather than just be very bad, didn't galvanise people to action but created a kind of numbing despair.) "Only we are the heroes" might be a better phrasing of the problem.

I've always thought that a sequel trilogy should be about Luke starting his own Jedi order that is less oppressive than the original one, but running into the same problems that those harsh rules were created to solve. (Kids missing their families, questioning the Jedi ways, potentially creating new Anakins.)

For what it's worth, the old Expanded Universe novels were exactly this. Luke's New Jedi Order is founded on a much healthier basis and succeeds in bringing together a new Republic and creating some of the greatest Jedi in history... and also runs into some spectacular disasters, because solving problems is hard actually.

Ooooh! I've only read the prequel trilogy novelizations. I didn't read any other EU stuff. Your pitch intrigues me, but my understanding is that specifics of how the Jedi order functioned and how it related to Anakin's fall weren't solidified until the prequel trilogy, and the New Jedi Order stuff predates it. Let me Google this..

Huh, they were published during the release period for Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. Do the books directly reference the prequels?

The new Jedi order takes place after the refounding of the Jedi order and the EU books dealing most with the force and Jedi stuff are usually a) written before it and b) not known for their quality in relation to the rest of the EU.

Phones, phones and phones.

IIRC: 2012/13 was also around the time of the SOPA/PIPA fight (early and somewhat successful internet activism) and the Snowden leaks.

2013 was probably the last or one of the last years where saying "I'm against censorship on the internet" won't get the comment "oh, you're one of those nazis who just wants to call people racial slurs and spread conspiracy theories!". Paradoxically, after uniting under "stop censorship" slogans and learning how much the US government in clandestinely meddling with internet, a lot of people and organizations just switched to "well, maybe a little censorship for a good cause is not that bad - actually, even necessary - and we can surely trust the government to do the right thing here". Maybe it just coincided with some kind of generational shift or something, or maybe it's The System's reaction to being defeated, but living through it was - and still is - pretty bizarre.

Ancient Mayans (or modern New Agers) were right?

2012 is around the time that pop culture should have started experiencing a backlash to all of the progressive cultural victories that accumulated from the 20 or so years preceding it. Instead, that natural rightward energy was suppressed by what we now call DEI officers. And so we ended up with a literal astroturfed culture where no one is interested in what the cultural elites are selling, on a message level, but they keep doubling down on their own path.

Yeah I too saw this take on Twitter ;)

But I want to push back a little bit. For sure, "wokeness" does have a lot of official support and literal commissars in American HR departments. But it also has lots of genuine grass-roots support. As in, people who congregate on Reddit and Twitter and devote their lives to this "extremism" in varying degrees.

I'm sorry but someone who transitions and spends their time and money on an ideological crusades with very good results is a strong opponent. It's an insane level of fanaticism and commitment. I would wager this is an important factor that explains why wokeness is winning. And crucially for my argument, it's grass-roots support from actual true-believers, not a gerontocratic elite pushing unpopular views in a top-down manner.

If you like video games and talking about them online, your world has basically been taken over by these people. You want to talk about game X? How about instead of that we talk about the private life of a VA in that game that once said something transphobic. How about instead of that we talk about LGBTQA+ representation in the game. How about ------.

This happens IRL too. In a group of N friends, most people don't care about the woke stuff. But that one friend who does can decide to push that perspective. What are the others gonna do? They don't really care, and this one friend seems to really care. Through his tone and the very fact of what he's saying he has made it clear that he's willing to enter conflicts about this. So, he's unlikely to get any pushback. People aren't "beaten into submission by commissars" always, sometimes they're just too passive and don't want to upset the social dynamic, so the fanatics get the final say.

Taleb talks about this quite a bit in "Skin in the game". I am not sure I entirely agree with him on all conclusions (mainly that everything is doomed and intolerant minority always wins), but there is certainly a good point in noticing this dynamic.

This strategy worked really well for a long time. If you're were disappointed with overzealous moderation on reddit, where would you go in 2012? Voat? 4chan? It made the wide brush they used, seem to make sense... Because most people on reddit were reasonable and the people on the other platforms seemed so bad.

But as this kept happening, the alternatives got less toxic because more reasonable kept getting pushed out (creating demand) and the bar for what gets you banned got lower and lower. Now, people who got very used to having a lot of control of discourse (and never had to confront being wrong) are losing their grip; Which causes them to double down on the things that are pushing people away. At a certain points, the normies see what's going on and start to pretend they never went along with it, to begin with.

I also have friends that have worked in games media back then. Once they started getting invited to the cool parties (look at E3 back then), they immediately threw all those dirty gamers under the bus.

Why dont the MAGAts win then?

MAGAts

Don't do that. You've been warned before, so 3-day ban.

Because what most of them really wants is to just grill in peace. CW is not what they really want to do, it's something they feel compelled to do by the external pressure and events.

It takes awhile to build the common knowledge necessary for proper prosecution of a culture war.

That too. What we see now on the Left is the fruits of work which has started almost a century ago and intensified about 50 years ago. Maybe in another 50 years the right will develop their own CW capabilities comparable with those of the left.

I disagree on 'taken over' by these people.

I do not care at all for gaming journalism. I ignore them entirely. I don't follow gaming news but 100% there are decent, non-woke popular critics posting video reviews on YouTube with reasonable discussions in replies.

Woke ruins a lot of games and wastes money, but there's a literal infinity of quality games out there...

I get that it's appealing to assert "natural rightward energy" being suppressed by underhanded commissars. It's also the kind of claim that really needs to be backed up.

Sure, in the sense that it is always better to back up a claim then not to back it up, but we should also be careful to not end up implying that the hypothesis, that the way our culture developed was organic, is any way more reasonable.

Eh, when I said “needs,” I was thinking in terms of the Partisan and Inflammatory rule.

"This other hypothesis is wrong" and "my hypothesis is correct" are not the same thing. Many different hypotheses are plausible.

To add my 2c, my experience with this was that I served an LDS mission from 2010-2012, which in a sense is like being cryogenically frozen (culturally) for 2 years. If anyone doesn't know, briefly - you don't (at least, you're not supposed to...) watch movies, listen to popular music, play video games, at the time browse the internet (missionaries now are permitted Facebook for contacting and proselyting, which is a whole thing but big no-no back then.). We had a cellphone but this was a new thing for missionaries and it had only the most rudimentary calling ability. I remember we gained the ability to "text" about halfway through which was very exciting.

Prior to my mission I enjoyed surfing the internet, I remember spending a lot of time on sites like Failblog, and many of the other sites under that umbrella. Facebook was still somewhat cool and I spent time on there, but that was a young people thing. I remember near the end of my mission one of the older members of a congregation I was in had an iPhone 4S, which had this thing on it called "Siri" which was a real life virtual assistant! But before my mission, the only people who had iPhones were like the cool tech bros I was friends with, so that felt like a bit of a shift.

Another thing was getting home and my family members telling me about the song "Party Rock Anthem" and "Shuffling", some one-hit wonder named Gotye, and Kony 2012. The sense I got was that a lot of stuff that maybe used to be more limited to more Online people (as it were in the late 2000s), was now breaching "containment" of sorts and virality was extending more to the normies. I don't know if that's an accurate read, perhaps I wasn't aware enough pre-2009 to see that it was always there in that way, but I think it was a little different. I remember Pants on the Ground and Antoine Dodson ("hide yo kids"), but that was 2010! I thought it was earlier. Is there an online meme "inflection point" as far as normie virality goes, and when was it?

Your read sounds fairly accurate to me, actually, as someone who did not go on a Mormon mission and disconnect between 2010 and 2012. That period sounds about right for when the "online" world started colliding more frequently with the "real" world.

I don’t find this particularly convincing.

Mostly for the same reasons I rolled my eyes at “what the heck happened in 1971?”: it’s sloppy statistics. Bad axes, exponential curves, the works. These issues return with a vengeance in Hoel’s piece: the “depressive affect vs. political party graph” looks a lot scarier before you realize it’s scaled from 1.5 to 2.8 on what I believe is a 10-point scale.

Above all, correlation still doesn’t imply causation. Hoel barely gives any time to the elephant in the economic room. “What the heck happened in 2008?” is an obvious question with a more obvious answer. How many of the pessimistic effects and social trends were fueled by parents losing a job or a mortgage? By the collective resolution that it was hip to Occupy Wall Street? By years of disaffected news delivered, yes, directly to our pockets?

I’m actually surprised that he didn’t cover the political gridlock of the Obama years. First, Obama promised the world, but couldn’t deliver. Then his opposition promised to repeal Obama and all his works, but wouldn’t deliver. And all of this within a Renaissance of brinksmanship, of debt ceilings and filibusters and delayed appointments.

There’s a lot that’s happened since 2012. Even more since 2008. Gesturing at the “vibes” isn’t enough.

I’m actually surprised that he didn’t cover the political gridlock of the Obama years. First, Obama promised the world, but couldn’t deliver. Then his opposition promised to repeal Obama and all his works, but wouldn’t deliver. And all of this within a Renaissance of brinksmanship, of debt ceilings and filibusters and delayed appointments.

I mean there's also Obama or his admin frequently saying and doing things that are inflammatory to normal and not typically highly partisan red tribers(little sisters of the poor, fast and furious, his speech about Trayvon Martin, life of Julia, IRS targeting conservatives, etc) and then calling them stupid or evil for getting upset about it. And you'll notice a suspiciously high percentage of those things literally happened in 2012.

The farce that was the Trayvon Martin scandal and the media circus that accompanied it was definitely a sign of things to come. In retrospect, that is obvious, and the trend isn't abating. That was in early 2012. And I'm sure one thing fueling it was culture warriors following the story on their smartphones all the time and triggering themselves.

Facebook IPO'd in 2012. The iPhone 5 came out in 2012 and it was the first one to support LTE which largely made mobile browsing fun instead of just tolerable. Instagram released their Android app in 2012.

2012 was also the end of the world. Don't forget that one :)

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