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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   27700 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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Like many people, in the summer of 2016 I signed up for "Pokemon Go." I'd previously spent a couple of months playing Niantic's "Ingess" and though it got me out walking a bit, I lost interest in less than a year. I hoped Pokemon Go might help me re-gamify my preferred approach to light cardio. However, the game servers were apparently potatoes so after the first day, I never played again.

When the COVID pandemic hit, I took up walking again, and decided to give Pokemon Go another try. I was far from alone; the game's revenue went from $650 million in 2019 to over $900 million in 2020, only to drop off just as steeply in 2022. It did tend to keep me out walking longer than I otherwise might; I've now been playing the game for 30-60 minutes daily for a couple of years, in conjunction with my exercise regimen.

The game itself is aggressively mid. I've only played through one mainline Pokemon game (Diamond, if you care)--because I felt like I ought to have played through at least one Pokemon game, given their popularity. But I gather that if you're a real Pokemon afficionado, Pokemon Go ("PoGo") is borderline offensive in its implementation. The Pokemon formula is catch-and-brawl, but while the "catch" portion of PoGo is basically adequate, the "brawl" portion is genuinely terrible.

The explanation is, essentially, "Niantic." Ingress, the game on which PoGo was built, seems to have existed primarily to gamify pedestrian data collection for Google Maps. Niantic spun off of Google in 2015, but has kept its "data collection" DNA; one thing PoGo players can do to advance in the game is scan locations with their phone cameras and submit the info to Niantic. Publicly, Niantic is always talking about finding ways to improve the "get outside and gather with others" aspects of the game. Some changes made during the pandemic allowed players to gather more virtually, and these were hugely popular; when Niantic rolled these changes back, the playerbase revolted and Niantic partially restored the functions (while making them more expensive to use).

Well, this is all pretty boring corporate stupidity, so far. Not many serious culture war angles; it's a game targeted at Millennials and their kids, and it's barely playable outside of fairly densely-populated cities, and beyond that the company behind it had more "big data" DNA than "makes fun games" DNA. PoGo is successful, truly, in spite of itself. None of Niantic's other offerings have ever really taken off as they'd like.

And then today, everyone got new avatars.

Previously, the game had two base avatars--a male and a female. These had slightly different, but mostly overlapping, clothing options. Beyond that you could set hair, skin, and eye colors. You could freely switch between male and female.

There are several things I noticed immediately about the new avatar system. First, there is no longer any distinction between sexes. Rather, the system offers a number of body "presets" as well as a custom body slider. All of the bodies are monstrous; 75% are noticeably obese. The sliders do nothing to address this. All settings are vaguely androgynous; a slender female waist or strong male chest are simply out of the question. Many new faces and hairstyles are available (albeit none with facial hair), and all are creepy and doll-like.

Skin and hair color options have also changed. Most of the options are weird and strictly inferior to past options (avatars can no longer have striking red hair; a dull auburn is as close as it now gets). "White" skin comes in "pasty" or "jaundiced" only. But especially weird--the selection palettes appear to just be randomized. They do not cluster dark skin with other dark shades, or light skin with other light shades--it's just a mess of brown tones, in no particular order.

The clothing--most of which players must purchase using premium in-game currency--hangs oddly; every pair of pants looks like someone is wearing an overloaded diaper. Every shirt hangs like drapes. Previously "sexy" clothing now just looks ill-fitting; muscular male outfits are now vaguely flabby, curvy female outfits are flat or distended.

Discussion has raised a variety of points about Niantic possibly recycling assets to cut costs, or relying on AI conversions, or seeking to tap the Fortnite crowd with more Fortnite-esque physiques. Memes are dropping. Complaints are dropping. Waistlines are dropping. And dropping. And dropping.

Theories, too.

I don't know what will happen next. It doesn't matter very much to me, except insofar as I have a distinct preference against the new avatar system. But the culture war angle just seems so glaring. Perhaps because of the target demographic, though, I don't see a lot of discussion of it. I kind of assume that Niantic is ready to deploy the "racists and transphobes hate the PoGo update" press releases, though I haven't seen one yet. But basically everyone hates the body updates, even if they are glad to have more hair options. I think my favorite comment on reddit was here:

"As a nonbinary player I always wished they'd remove genderlocked customization"

One finger on my monkey's paw curls inward

It would also be interesting to know more about what's happening internally at Niantic--like if the work here was done by AI, or by diversity hires, or what. I've heard completely unverifiable rumors that Niantic management is outrageously out of touch with reality but also petrified to kill their golden goose, so it is hard for me to imagine them green-lighting these changes without culture war blinders on. But maybe they really are just terrible at their jobs?

Well, there's your tempest in today's teapot. Such a small thing! And yet so clearly intended to make the game less pleasant to the San Francisco outgroup. Perhaps I will rethink my position on the possible existence of microaggressions.

I was surprised by the hate for the new avatar system when it came out, but I suspect the issue is a mismatch between goals.

It looks to me like niantic have tried to make it so you can make your avatar look (by degrees) like a stylised version of you. Sure there's a few wonky edge cases, but it's got sliders, it's got range, you can mostly make it look like you.

The trick is most players don't want it to look like them; they want an anime avatar. They want skinny waists and bold hair colours, despite that not being what they look like. Niantic expected people to make themselves, and took away tools that wouldn't achieve that.

Of course there's some grounds for incompetency - the way the clothes have adapted is non-ideal, and the sliders don't have enough range as the art direction (and the old avatar models) implies. I suspect that, over time, more colours/styles and more slider range will be added back in; possibly yes, for a cost.

I was wondering why my avatar was suddenly an anemic 12 year old boy! Did not expect to find the explanation for that here at The Motte.

There's definitely a non-binary bent to it. I got three options of faces, one of them is boyish and the other two are feminine. I thought maybe trying a slightly bulkier body style would make me look less like a tween, but while my body bulked my head remained the same size, making me a microcephalic.

I don't think I've ever played a game before where I actively hate seeing my avatar's face.

I wake up -> there is another psyop. Thanks for the post, I'll be sure to skim /vp/ for funsies for a couple days now.

As someone who actually played PoGo before I got locked out of it, for me this is 95% in line with my interpretation of Niantic's total mismanagement of the game. The gender removal is the only real brow-raising part, but even then I vaguely remember that the in-game clothing store was a thing, and it was gender-locked to hell - many gender-exclusive items had no genderswapped version and about the only unisex things were the accessories. I can squint and see a parallel universe where lifting that restriction is a net positive thing, but modern Pokemon-related things are not known for enjoying extra bare minimum work to make the transition (pun not intended) actually work, and it wouldn't be their first mind-boggling fuckup with models anyway.

I've heard completely unverifiable rumors that Niantic management is outrageously out of touch with reality but also petrified to kill their golden goose

PoGo is the definition of "failed potential" in all respects, including this one. Even as jaded as I am I'm willing to believe this is mostly sheer, genuine incompetence, ticking the boxes with as little effort as possible. Actual directed effort to advance CW causes seems far beyond the corpses propping up the game's steering wheels.

Tangential but in its time it really opened my mind to how little effort is required to run an almost literal free money printer (and still fuck it up from time to time), as well as how shit a game can get before I drop it in disgust because I still think the core gameplay loop of "walk around, collect pokemon" is genius and at one point it was almost the only thing that forced me to walk out and interact with my local community. It really is a milestone in gaming, just not in the usual way.

I’m placing my bets on incompetence. Is this really different than Oblivion’s potato faces? I understanding is that was an outsourcing problem. Something about FaceGen.

Really, this comes down to whether you think Niantic could culture-war their way out of a paper bag.

If what you say about locked accessories is true, this was probably seen as the cheapest way to double the number of custom options available to each player.

I would take the other side of that bet. What makes it different than Oblivion's potato faces is that they already had good art, and replaced it with bad art. The difference is not subtle, so a lot of people knew in advance that the new art was bad, which would obviously undermine any plausible benefits to the change. Nor is there any serious technical challenge to hide behind; these are low-fi models and textures implementing what is probably the single best-understood and simplest-to-implement 3d art style there is. There's a DEI entity being paid by the company to propose CW changes to the game, and this matches quite well to a DEI change. Having been involved in the sausage-making for DEI-mandated changes to video game art in the past, that's what this looks like to me.

If what you say about locked accessories is true, this was probably seen as the cheapest way to double the number of custom options available to each player.

I'm sure that's roughly accurate to how they sold it to management. From experience, my guess would be that the artists got their marching-orders from management, decided it wasn't worth fighting, and did exactly what they were told with full knowledge that they were making trash, given that the alternative would involve a direct threat to their employment for a ~zero-percent chance of achieving anything. Your boss paid money for the bad advice because it's the bad advice he wanted. Having paid for the bad advice, he's not interested in you telling him that it's bad. Shut up and push the buttons, art monkey.

Having been involved in the sausage-making for DEI-mandated changes to video game art in the past

I would love to see an effortpost on that sometime, if you're up for it.

This thread might be of interest to you. I'd be happy to elaborate if you have further questions.

Hey! Morrowind’s faces were…uh…they were definitely the best part of the character models.

Point taken. I agree that it’s plausible, I’m more like 70-30 against. Maybe 60-40, at this point.

yeah, I'd be about the inverse. It's entirely possible that it's just sheer incompetence. Stranger things have happened.

Pro-trans advisors have been proven to collaborate with Niantic. Erasing the gender binary raises increases the perception of inclusivity of the game in the eyes of such consultants.

Niantic could culture-war their way out of a paper bag.

Niantic isn't apolitically standing on the sidelines.

It’s possible. The elements are present, and I can’t say I’ll be surprised if there turns out to be a press release condemning the transphobic userbase, or whatever.

I find it more likely that this is a lazy solution to technical debt or to giving players “more” by reusing assets. That’s the kind of mundane blunder that happens all the time, San Fran or not.

I work for a defense contractor halfway across the country. We’ve got a DEI statement or three on our website! But if we ended up in the news for making ugly software, let alone an ugly plane, there would be a dozen reasons I’d suspect before asking if it was done to promote idpol. There’s just…so many other considerations.

That Twitter account says Niantic hired a DEI training company, and also that they’re in San Francisco. Neither of those things is enough to explain screwing up your flagship product! Perhaps there’s a simpler explanation?

But he’s also making it his job to piss people off. If there’s a reasonable explanation, you’re not going to hear it from him.

But if we ended up in the news for making ugly software, let alone an ugly plane, there would be a dozen reasons I’d suspect before asking if it was done to promote idpol.

idpol has an issue with human bodies that it doesn't have with planes.

cue NCD aeromorph fans raging autistically

I fucking hate it. They removed the anime cartoon style and replaced it with something that is NOT Pokemon. Now I just look like some kindergartener who bites people at school

My gut hurts from laughing, but to be fair, I think the kind of 10 year old willing to go engage in dog-fights and clobber wild animals senseless probably did bite people at school.

Wow, those avatars are ugly.

Have you tried bird watching? It's like Pokemon Go in real life. It's a great excuse to go for walks and explore new areas. Want to scratch that collector itch? Everytime you see a new bird, add it to your life list. See how many you can collect. Also, birds are just amazing and beautiful unlike those fucking avatars.

If you want there's a free app called Merlin that will help identify birds and keep track of your list. It's totally free with no ads. I'd also recommend a pair of binoculars.

Yeah, but can birds shoot fireballs at each other?

In your imagination, sure. Just like imaginary monsters.

By this reasoning, it's pointless to even read a fiction book, since you could imagine things that might have been in the book, and the book is imaginary itself.

Nuh uh, they're real

From a redditor:

When you try and make the hips bigger, it makes the hands massive.

More just dumb than clearly some ideology. Unless the ideology is merely that ugliness is desirable.

They don't think it's ugly. They actually prefer it. They are the ~1% approve at the end of any poll about do you prefer building A or building B.

People like Ozy really exist. They really do have actual disdain for things a statistically normal person finds beautiful. From Ozy's own self-description:

"One could very reasonably make the case that the natural human aesthetic sense prefers realistic paintings of beautiful landscapes with water, trees, large animals, beautiful women, children, and well-known historical figures"

"However, art of this sort leaves me cold"

"The first time I saw it, Joan Miro’s The Birth of the World moved me to tears from its sheer beauty. I make a special effort to visit it every time I am in New York City, including taking my husband to see it on our honeymoon so he could understand my aesthetics better. "

This is Joan Miro's The Birth of the World

To them uglyness isn't ugly. It's genuinely mindnumbingly beautiful.

In Malcolm & Simone Collins "A Pragmatist's Guide to Sexuality" they model sexuality with two polarities, one for intensity and one for Yes/No. So most people have an inborn strong intensity towards Bloated Corpses and that is often paired with a disgust reaction. Makes sense evolutionarily. But evolution is a blind idiot god without context. So sometimes the intensity meter stays the same but for the Yes/No marker the 1 becomes a 0, and they become sexually attracted to Bloated Corpses with all the intensity that most people are repulsed.

Is this just possibly the mid wit phenomena where they understand enough to know the art is “prestigious” so they trick themselves into liking it whilst looking down on bourgeois taste?

I experienced transcendence the other day watching SM64’s Invisible Walls Explained Once and for All
The meticulousness, the detail of the tooling, the sheer effort put into breaking down every type of wall into something imminently understandable, the ineffable beauty of a person who watches a man die to an inviswall at world record pace and then decides to spend 10 months bring such trivial suffering to an end "Once and for all." And the feeling of seeing those invisible lines, now, even when they are no longer shown, the simple bliss of knowing. Of this world never feeling the same again.

The epic journey through each piece, culminating in the final victory lap- a reimagining of the SM64 ending cutscene, but here playing that welling music over each and every conquered inviswall.

Alternatively. This is a 3 hour video about polygons. What you take out depends on what you bring in.

The sheer effort, technical skills, and dedication required to make that video are admirable and beautiful things (even if they're largely dedicated to something mundane and mostly worthless). I can't say the same for modern art, where literal trash piles left behind by accident by the janitorial staff are mistakenly assumed to be part of the exhibit (or the other way around, where art exhibits wre mistakenly assumed to be trash by the janitor).

I get that that's a thing but I'm generally skeptical. Until there is good evidence otherwise I take it for granted that people are honest about their aesthetic preferences.

Surely these things aren't mutually exclusive, but rather in concordance with each other, right? Which is to say,

they understand enough to know the art is “prestigious” so they trick themselves into liking it whilst looking down on bourgeois taste

is the mechanism by which they arrive at their genuine, honestly held aesthetic preferences such that

They don't think it's ugly. They actually prefer it.

...

To them uglyness isn't ugly. It's genuinely mindnumbingly beautiful.

I mean, you see this talk about manipulating, say, straight men into genuinely, honestly believing that fat women and transwomen are beautiful and sexy by putting them on magazine covers or pushing them to watch porn featuring such people. If one believes that such manipulation of one's genuine, honestly held aesthetic preferences are possible, it's not unexpected that they themselves have undergone such intentional transformations of their own genuine, honestly held aesthetic preferences in order to better conform to what they believe is socially just or whatever.

Fat women can be charming, within a certain threshhold. They have a certain gravitas about them (pun not intended, believe it or not).

Social Construction radicals have to attribute all thought to social construction. They can't admit to any inbuilt preferences, only social constructs. So when they find someone's who has 'converted' they can't attribute it to helping someone who was already inclined to like X realize who they are. Instead it has to be that they finally broke through their socially constructed preferences into liberated ones.

In my personal experience with these types of people there is a strong case of "my expansive preferences are natural, which is proof that your narrow preferences are socially constructed." Similar to the 'well obviously we'd all fuck dudes if we could, but society would collapse so we need social pressure to keep men straight' phenomena. Just a total inability to model other minds. Very similar to polyamory people. Their end of bell curve genetic inability to feel jealousy is obviously perfectly normal. Your jealousy meanwhile is a patriarchal social construct you can be liberated you from.

For people on the tail end of the bell curve the typical mind fallacy is a hell of a drug.

I do think Tumblr took these people's pre-existing preferences and intensified their conviction of their moral superiority. AO3 is not Pornhub and everyone used to understand why they attracted different sexes. It took tumblr to convince people that the only reason men don't rely on AO3 is because they've been socially constructed not to. For the average person of this 'if we just push body type X enough people will change!' mindset I think it's more likely that they went to tumblr because they had a predisposition to like the art there and then got socially radicalized. Not that they were a straight guy who got converted and now wants to spread the good news.

Perhaps this is true of the most extreme radicals. I've never seen one, and would disagree with them.

But as a substantially less extreme radical- I'd like to highlight that though inbuilt preferences are largely genetically constructed, the pressures that drive genetics are in part socially constructed. Even things like trees have genetic structures that are derived from a sort of negotiation between different forms of life, the trees and their pollinators, via the process of sexual selection. And then the appearances they settled upon drove our aesthetics.

Which is all to say that even these things aren't just one way. There's a negotiation between the genetic and the social going on here. Sexual selection means that the aesthetic really can drive the genetic in the tail end.

If these "radicals," as you call them, stuck to Bene Gesserit-style multi-millennia plans involving eugenics in order to manipulate the genetic causes of the individual/cultural preferences, I think this aspect of the culture wars would be significantly less contentious.

Do you not differentiate between what's beautiful in nature and what's beautiful in art? I guess I am in your 1% since I vastly prefer that Miro image to a typical watercolour of a pretty landscape. But that doesn't mean I don't find nature and the other things people have evolved to be attracted to incredibly beautiful (or that Miro doesn't agree or Ozy don't agree, for that matter). It's just that representing one's preferences in 2D in such a basic way seems crude, unimaginative and close-minded.

I'm really sorry if this post is too long. I hope it will be at least interesting. I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'representing one's preferences in 2D'. But if you find me crude, unimaginative, and close minded perhaps this post will be morbidly fascinating for you. Regardless, I'm thankful for your pushback.

I think what people find beautiful has a basis that is like 80% human nature, 20% human culture. An extreme example of the influence of culture. Japanese teeth blackening!

But I would find it strange if every human culture recreated it. Black teeth don't touch on the human nature nerve ending. It's a cultural influence on aesthetics that seems to die out when not constantly reinforced.

Meanwhile on the human nature aspect I think each person's aesthetic sense is the same filter that applies to nature as it applies to art. Thing's arn't beautiful and then we discover them. It's the reverse. We have beauty preference that reward or discourage us when we find them. These preferences reveal to others what our individual dispositions towards the environment are.

In the beginning there is an advantage for living near running water. That advantage builds into a reward signal for things that indicate running water, like shinyness. "Find running water" is too complex but 'happiness chemical reward for seeing shiny thing' is simpler to build into our nature. So now we have a preference for shiny things and we encounter Jewels. It's a worthless hunk of rock but that doesn't matter. It activates the same 'reward shinyness' part of the brain that is contextless.

It's the old AI joke. "Instead of programming AI to make people happy, why not program people to like Hydrogen. Afterall, there's a lot of hydrogen."

There is a reason we don't get happy about hydrogen. And it's the same reason why people worldwide like shiny things.

So what's beautiful in nature vs what's beautiful in art? Well if our aesthetics are our human nature with individual variation, mediated by culture, then the answer is nothing. Its the same sense organ applying to both objects.

which is why autistic people love Brutalism.

see the following image

On the left is a heat map showing where someone with a typical brain will focus their attention. On the right is how someone with ASD views the same house. Here's what Sussman and Chen state in the article:

Notice how a person on the autism spectrum, at right, avoids details like windows (which might suggest eyes) while a typical brain instinctively goes straight for them, without conscious awareness.

Pause here for a second and imagine Jane Jacob's eyes on the street concept. It's comforting for me to walk down a street full of windows and houses with front porches and pleasant symmetry. I generally welcome the interaction with my neighbors and, while not creepy about it, can't help but glance over now and then to see if I can catch their eye. I think that is typical.

Now imagine that your brain doesn't work that way. Imagine that your brain is completely overwhelmed by the eyes on the street. It's too much to take in, even just the buildings. Or it's an uncomfortable reminder that someone (unfriendly) may be tracking you. Now, is it possible you'd find some comfort — or perhaps just a noticeable reduction in tension — passing a building that instead looked like this?

So there is an instance of nature very strongly affecting preferences. Normal people like buildings that align with our caveman brain's constant search for faces. Austistic people hate making human eye contact. So now the whole world gets to endure Brutalism.

But then there is culture! It can't be thrown away entirely. Turns out we can break people's brains with enough repeated influence. My sincere apologies for the extended quote but it bears repeating in full. Bold parts were added in by me.

In Architectural Myopia: Designing for Industry, Not People we find that

, Gifford et al. (2002) surveyed other research and noted that “architects did not merely disagree with laypersons about the aesthetic qualities of buildings, they were unable to predict how laypersons would assess buildings, even when they were explicitly asked to do so.” The researchers traced this disagreement to well-known cognitive differences in the two populations: “Evidence that certain cognitive properties are related to building preference [was] found.”

Training to See a Parallel Reality.

Training is required to induce “architectural myopia” in a student, as the research suggests. The reason is that the peculiar industrial aesthetic now considered normal within architecture runs contrary to our physiological needs (Salingaros, 2006). We humans have evolved inside a complex, fractal, structurally hierarchical environment, so that our neurophysiology responds positively to and receives sensory pleasure from natural environments. Traditional architecture and urbanism in all of their multiple variations manifested over millennia and across geographical distances precisely follow this natural geometry, which is why our brains recognize them and respond to them.

Training adds additional layers of preference on top of our instinctive, evolved responses. Architecture school invests several years conditioning the student to respond preferentially to abstract industrial forms and surfaces. At the same time, this industrial aesthetic is touted as superior to all previous, traditional expressions of built geometry. Elaborate theories of history and technology are given as apologias for this now-correct aesthetic, solely appropriate to this wholly unique climax period in history (Banham, 1960; Giedion, 1941; Gropius, 1965). All of this effort creates individuals that see things differently from the rest of us.

This long-term program of psychological conditioning, has, since its development in the original Bauhaus, turned out to be extraordinarily effective. An architect experiences the world in a very different manner to any person who has not undergone the same training. By internalizing preferences derived from abstract images that override our neurological structure, over time, responses become automatic and crowd out other, more innate responses. The result of this aesthetic hegemony is the phenomenon of “architectural myopia”, an interpretation of reality that conforms to ingrained beliefs.

In those situations where emotion isn’t triggered instinctively by human physiology, our evolutionary makeup is not decisive and can be bypassed. Thus, in front of drawings or designs on a computer screen there is sufficient emotional isolation, and an architect judges the industrial, minimalist, “contemporary” designs positively as isolated objects possessing a pleasing clarity and monadic legibility.... At the same time, anything that resembles the complexity of traditional architecture is automatically judged negatively (its meaning is supposedly associated with reactionary or philistine culture) and it is rejected without any reflection.

In summary, yes. What's beautiful in art is what's beautiful in nature. It's the same instinct, influenced by culture. When you reveal a beauty preference you unavoidable reveal an aspect of how you perceive the world. All that's left is to discover is what percent of that is your predisposition or cultural molding.

Thanks for posting that architecture writeup. It links to this debate which has some nearly supervillain-tier speechifying from the pomo side.

PE: Why does Chris need to feel comfortable, and I do not? Why does he feel the need for harmony, and I do not? Why does he see incongruity as irresponsible, and why does he get angry? I do not get angry when he feels the need for harmony. I just feel I have a different view of it.

Someone from the audience: He is not screwing up the world.

PE: I would like to suggest that if I were not here agitating nobody would know what Chris's idea of harmony is, and you all would not realize how much you agree with him ... Walter Benjamin talks about "the destructive character", which, he says, is reliability itself, because it is always constant. If you repress the destructive nature, it is going to come out in some way. If you are only searching for harmony, the disharmonies and incongruencies which define harmony and make it understandable will never be seen. A world of total harmony is no harmony at all. Because I exist, you can go along and understand your need for harmony, but do not say that I am being irresponsible or make a moral judgement that I am screwing up the world, because I would not want to have to defend myself as a moral imperative for you.

CA: Good God!

Wow, I just read that debate, and it's truly fascinating and somewhat distressing. A lot of the anxiety I have about culture at large comes from the idea of post-modernism, something only truly accessible and enjoyable to a select few, but forced on the many. And somehow it has come to prominence due to the fact that the aforementioned select few are often in places of prestige and power. And more than that, it's self-sustaining; not, as is said in the notes on that debate, simply within the circles, but in society at large. A lot of people are swept up in liking, or at least defending, these inexplicably ugly tastes, which is much more offensive than those styles merely existing.

That's not what's really depressing about this.

The most telling lines of the whole debate are as follows. It's not his weak defense where he claims he has a right to feel the sense of harmony too, it's the fact that he believes the purpose of architecture is this:

What I'm suggesting is that if we make people so comfortable in these nice little structures of yours, that we might lull them into thinking that everything's all right, Jack, which it isn't. And so the role of art or architecture might be just to remind people that everything wasn't all right. And I'm not convinced, by the way, that it is all right.

It's their anxiety being expressed as art inflicted on other people.

You could possibly construct some kind of steelman about it the same way you could for "raising awareness", and honestly this has been one of the great functions of genuinely distressing art through the ages; to bring attention to some awful thing that should never be forgotten. But on the other hand, nothing will ever be all right. There's money to be made and power to be attained in making sure nothing is ever all right, so people get to continue to inflict their neuroses on others.

How would you apply this model to music, where the direct imitation of nature is naturally more of a niche thing (though it can be quite nice in some cases)? And why are rugged, mountainous locales so popular in landscape painting -- maybe that too is a cultural idiosyncrasy and things like the Lascaux cave paintings represent art in a more pristine state? What makes symmetry pleasant?

Teeth blackening is unusual in that it resembles "naturally" blackened teeth, which are disgusting. Most art fads aren't like that.

I think you give nurture short shrift. The thing is, so does post-modern art, which by prizing novelty (and sometimes ingenuity) over all else, simultaneously rejects the fruits of both biology and culture.

Interesting and a lot of the story as you tell it I agree with, but there is a bit of a perspective of 'overriding what's natural = bad' in your post that I don't agree with.

I can't reply at length right now, but just a few thoughts:

-We are constantly learning to like things we might 'naturally' dislike, and that's good if we're not blind to how we're being changed. (Kids don't like coffee.)

-Watery, glittery beautiful landscapes (real ones) are essentially unfakeable. Their rarity and the knowledge that they are real healthy ecosystems that have developed over millions of years and offer our bodies and communities good things is part of their beauty. Pictures of the same are available in plentiful supply and these days are entirely disposable. I think the abundance of such images is a large part of how they strike us. Looking at a beautiful lake is a sublime experience but looking at a painting of one usually does little for me; the latter has a copied, possibly manipulative nature that is just as loud as if it were covered in neon graffiti – it overwhelms any latent aesthetic appeal the image may once have had.

-Architectural myopia may be real and bad. But that doesn't mean just making buildings the way we used to is better. There might be learnings from traditional and learned notions of beauty that can be combined into something better that would not read as plain mimicry.

-We live in a world where screen-based imagery is cheap and increasingly has no limit in its abundance or ease of production. Living in this visually unprecedented world is constantly updating our sense of what is visually pleasing, whether we like it or not, and we can constantly learn from this experience. This is the process of becoming visually literate in 2024. Which is different from the process as it was in the time of Rembrandt, and again from the same process in the time of Miro. While I like the Miro image, I also find the idea of being moved to tears by it completely ridiculous, but I accept that it may have hit differently in decades past. Being able to actively learn from imagery around us in its full social context can open up new worlds and communicative possibilities, at least if we are alive to what is happening inside of us and don't just internalise a false ideal (as I tend to think some brutalist architects of the past did).

I find your comments intriguing, because I have the opposite reaction you describe. To me a well rendered painting or drawing of a landscape is often more attractive than an actual landscape. Or if not more attractive, more pleasing in a slightly different dimension. Have you ever felt a desire to be inside a picture: not literally, but to be in the place the picture is depicting? That the art is trying to communicate something higher and better than anything we can actually find our our normal existence? That the artist is taking what is beautiful and good about a landscape but crafting it in a way that no real landscape can match up to, throwing out the small bits of ugliness that is inherent in any landscape we can actually see and replacing it with the ideal? Because that's something like 70% of my aesthetic preferences. I want art to be more beautiful than life, more transcendent, more glorious and inspiring.

What do you see attractive about something like Miro painting? To me there's no real attraction at all. It does not show me anywhere I would want to go, any emotion I would want to feel, any state of being I would want to inhabit. I don't find it repulsive, but I don't see the point of it at all. What's the draw for you?

I'm not immune to the idea of a landscape that draws you in and in the past have liked such. These days I'd mostly prefer the landscape to be quite unusual or presented in the right context. I kind of like the Lo-fi girl videos because they seem especially well calibrated for the mood they are trying to create; I loved Scavengers' Reign because of the continual newness of its alien landscapes and wildlife. Whereas simple beautiful photos of earth's landscapes have been so abused for the purposes of marketing, screensavers, etc that they have in general lost their charm for me unless curated/displayed just so. Or else I feel that they are trying to suck people in to look at them as distraction, instead of in relation to the place where they're displayed (a pet peeve is places that display photos of the cities where they actually are, like a London cafe that has photos of London on the wall, a sure sign that you are in a crappy tourist spot.).

As to why I find the Miro piece attractive, hmm, hard to articulate, but I guess I like its choiceful colour combos, its combination of crisp shapes with rich more naturalistic textures. It feels like it abstractly represents elements of thought being observed, like when you close your eyes tightly or meditate. I find in it a sense of soft motion and microscopic scale interaction, like we're in some kind of primordial soup or subatomic field that could run on peacefully for millions of years. But I ain't gonna pretend this doesn't sound a little pretentious. In the end it just feels like Miro caught onto a certain wavelength and was able to share it at a time when it hadn't been captured so well before.

Kids don't like coffee.

Yeah, but they're right to dislike it (that's why everyone puts cream and sugar in it). It's actually kind of strange that energy drinks (that are just... better coffee/tea) took so long to appear on the mass-market, since aside from maybe Jolt they were very much a creature of the mid to late 2000s. Which is unfortunate, since there were far more drink companies and varieties to choose from whereas now it's all just Monster.

at least if we are alive to what is happening inside of us and don't just internalise a false ideal

The thing about beauty is that creating it requires serving others (if not created, simply possessing/being something other people want). Thus, those who think they know best cannot create beauty; that is why the master morality modes generally create ugly things (brutalism, Christian Rock, Steven Universe, etc.). It's just cognitive differences: servants specialize in creating the beauty, leaders specialize in refining it. These modes of cognition aren't equally represented across/between genders.

Living in this visually unprecedented world is constantly updating our sense of what is visually pleasing, whether we like it or not, and we can constantly learn from this experience.

Well, that and our art is more beautiful (our tools to make it are way better, we can spend more time on it due to post-scarcity, and unlike Medieval artists we have photos and videos as reference material), so much so that it's just background noise. Scream just doesn't really fit on a body pillow the way anime girls with... similar expressions do and I'd actually rather look at the latter than the former. Yeah, something something superstimulus, but all beauty inherently exploits that.

The thing about beauty is that creating it requires serving others (if not created, simply possessing/being something other people want). Thus, those who think they know best cannot create beauty; that is why the master morality modes generally create ugly things (brutalism, Christian Rock, Steven Universe, etc.).

I agree with this. Equally, though, a subservient mode of creation is just going to generate more of what people already like, and ultimately end up disappointing them. I feel like the most genuinely pleasurable experiences come from creators who serve both an inner master and the public too.

As always posts like this that equivocate "attraction to bloated corpses" and "making vidya game characters a bit more aggressively bland" leave me thinking that the gamergaters are not the ones with a normal scale of beauty.

The kind of people who unironically claim Zendaya is a 3/10 are the 1%ers.

  • -12

Zendaya isn't outright ugly, but something about her is strongly reminiscent of an Olmec head that had its face flattened with a frying pan

I'll climb aboard this train. I saw the recent Dune movies and she is a very plain woman. She's lean in a bad way I don't like. She's entirely flat and lacks a feminine figure. Her face looks decent in photos. But I'm wondering how much careful makeup and editing went into the photoshoots. Her face looks much worse on film.

Comparing her against women her age: she's in the bottom third. Not ugly, but aggressively plain and flat in a unattractive way.

And that's fine for an actress. Not every woman in Hollywood needs to shapely and big breasted.

The very fact that she’s not fat surely puts her in the top half for women her age.

Usually I would agree. But she is so thin and flat that she lacks a feminine figure. She's way too far in that direction.

Not every woman in Hollywood needs to shapely and big breasted.

No, but damn I miss the days when there were more of them in our media.

https://www.cnu.org/sites/default/files/architecture-poll.jpg

80% prefer left. 20% prefer right. When presented with other aesthetics I'm willing to bet that the 20% people will not dissolve randomly into like this or that. Their preference for uglyness will correlate. They'll find themselves saying 'you like Right? did you like B in the A/B painting over there? Omg I liked B too what are the chances'.

High. The chances were high.

I'm afraid I have no idea who Zendaya is.

Zendaya

Google her. Or don't. All you need to know is she's an actress who could definitely win a keynesian beauty contest or ten.

just googled her. Yeah I see what you mean about winning a few Keynesian beauty contests. Anyone describing her as 3/10 is definitely outside my comprehension.

Yeah I see what you mean about winning a few Keynesian beauty contests

Show me those AD-AS curves, baby...

Same Keynes, but different context. I'm actually curious about what @CloudHeadedTranshumanist meant by that qualifier - that even if Zendaya might not be the most beautiful in many particular judges' minds, she would clearly be the most widely-perceived as widely-perceived as beautiful?

She toned it down for Spider-Man: Homecoming (where her character wasn't supposed to be a Love Interest yet), with just hair/wardrobe/body-language choices that you'd think would be another "Hollywood Homely" trope but which worked okay, but even there claiming only 3/10 would be silly.

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Ahh I'm sorry if I gave that impression that I find these things equivalent. I was trying to use extreme examples to illustrate a point that the same trait that exists in the extreme also cascades down into the merely uncommon. I don't think most of these people are Bloated corpse tier, though those absolutely do exist. It's more a natural consequence of my point about propensity to intensity and yes/no being separate traits.

I think of it as a bunch of brackets. First there is the building that 70% of people prefer A to B. Then there are the aesthetic tastes of those who find themselves in the 20%. Those in the 10% minority opinion etc etc.

So for example I mostly find Stevens Universe to be ugly, but I get why it works and am willing to put up with it. Most people probably find it neutral. There is a certain person who adores its style and hates on actual beautiful things. I'd put them in the 30% bracket.

Then there is Ozy who appears to be the 5% bracket. Everything evolution selected for us to find beautiful/important, symmetry indicating health, indication of running water, open plains allowing for awareness of both predators and resources, kin to treasure and protect, Ozy's mind finds completely unstimulating.

Then there are the people who shudder with delight at the idea of fucking amidst flies over a bloated corpse. Sub 1% bracket.

Dunno if that changes your take on my take but I hope that clarifies my own intuitions on the topic.

"Corpse" is quite defensible in regard to the "white" skin tone; it absolutely does look like "has been found dead, completely drained of blood!". Not sure about "bloated", although I know my taste runs fatter than most men's so I'm maybe not the best judge of that.

Unless the ideology is merely that ugliness is desirable.

This has been a conspiracy theory on the right for a while. “They” are trying to demoralize you by insisting that ugly things (architecture, art, music, people) are beautiful. Very common /pol/ thread topic. Also comes up whenever female video game protagonists are mid. I don’t quite understand the objective or mechanism here but this is a very mainstream claim among that crowd.

From Bauhaus: A Graphic Novel, pg 50-54

"I saw them all, their faces as they crossed the threshold, their hands gilding over the textiles searching for the weave, their eyes reflected in the chrome plating as they let their certainties fall away....their certainties about what a house is, or an object...what a human being is, when there is no gender. In the 'Triadic Ballet' I want to show people move in space. The geometric forms represent the rationality that humanizes and merely stages physicality....and I wondered if, when they left the last room and went back out into the world, they would be able to look at it with the same revolution in their eyes.

The exhibition didn't convince the Landtag, which decided to shut me down: too expensive they said...but I was uncomfortable politically: the right-wing parties won the elections and we were bizarre and revolutionary creatures with socialist leanings. The masters' contracts were not renewed, and the Weimar experience ended on the first of April 1925. I was only six years old! Isn't it the same for everyone? You can still become anything but they tell you you're wrong....that you need to color within the lines, that geometry offers only a limited series of shapes, that words are to be written on the lines of a page. The control exerted by the outside world forces you to define your identity, while all you want is to experience yourself in the world. Your freedom is frightening for them.

This a very common sentiment in extremist left circles. Anarchists in particular. Shifting aesthetics first in order to subvert the current social order and show people that another world is possible. It's not intended to be demoralization, no one actually sits down and goes bwahaha now I will make the world ugly to demoralize my enemies. It's exaltation. Revolution. Religious ferver. It's the sincere conviction that they are breaking people out of Plato's cave and liberating them.

Destroy 2000 Years of Culture is a prayer, not a conspiracy.

I want to be clear though. This doesn't mean the average person making this kind of art is thinking in these terms. That's an entirely separate issue. It's more like how the average conservative might say 'washington is holding back Americans with too much red tape' and then when you keep digging at where that phrase came from you eventually find a Mises Libertarian arguing with a Ancap. Or how a normal left leaning person might say "Healthcare is a human right. We have to help everyone" and then when you keep digging at their phrase you find a Kropotkin-poster arguing with a Noam Chomsky fan about whether the point is to liberate humanity from all Social Exploitation or if it's about liberation from all Material Inequality which Generates Social Exploitation. The tails tug at the core.

Twitter.com/Artiah669/status/1778933764984320157

It's been a real thing for years. The call is "NORMALIZE X", where X is a deformity, mental illness, obesity, etc. it's the natural result of "representation matters.".
You can see it in all the comments: "Damn apparently every character needs to follow strict societal beauty standards rooted in white supremacy" etc. etc.

Once again it's only a conspiracy theory when outsiders notice what the insiders celebrate.
Even that dev who was recently making excuses about how face modeling is hard snuck in an "and actually it's good to challenge cis hetero beauty standards and we're doing it deliberately" towards the end.

Once again it's only a conspiracy theory when outsiders notice what the insiders celebrate. Even that dev who was recently making excuses about how face modeling is hard snuck in an "and actually it's good to challenge cis hetero beauty standards and we're doing it deliberately" towards the end.

I find this apparent feigning ignorance endlessly frustrating. The writers and academics who call themselves "progressive" are very open about their desire and willingness to manipulate the populace into believing things they want them to believe by putting in certain tropes into the fiction they write. This is justified on the basis of their stated belief that all fiction manipulates the audience, and so it's better to do it with conscious intent for causes they consider socially just instead of doing so unconsciously while merely focusing on creating an entertaining/meaningful work of fiction which they contend inevitably reinforces the status quo which they find bigoted and intolerable. It's not always possible to nail down this as the cause of any given individual case of uglification, but given the prevalence of these types of people in fiction production and the ubiquity of this narrative, I don't think benefit of the doubt is at all justified, and it's perfectly reasonable to default to the presumption that any specific case was due to ideological intent until proven otherwise.

And if we were to follow the same standards by which such people deem fictional works as "white supremacist" or "patriarchal" or "heteronormative" or whatever, there would be no question that we could conclude that these were caused by ideological motives: as long as someone can write a convincing-sounding essay connecting some work of fiction with these concepts they consider bigoted, it doesn't matter what the creators were thinking or intending, these works are ideological and for a bad ideology. If the creators had nothing but pure entertainment-focused intent or even if they were actively trying to send a message of equality, then that just means that they fell prey to their implicit/unconscious biases which proves just how entrenched white supremacy/patriarchy/etc. really is. But double standards are also justified on the basis of relative power and such (which themselves are justified by someone writing a convincing-sounding essay).

You see this more broadly with people claiming not to know what "woke" or "critical race theory" mean. It's a kind of dishonest bit of self deception that fools no one other than themselves. I just wish they would loudly and proudly stand up for what they believe in, proclaim that they are trying to manipulate the populace for the purpose of a better, more socially just world, and let the chips fall where they may. I find Scott Adams to be... a very silly person not worth paying attention to, but when he said that he was hypnotizing people, including through the very same message of informing them of this hypnotism, because his hypnotism would work even if the audience was consciously aware of what he was doing, I could at least respect that more than this shell game of implausible deniability many writers and activists on the left like to play of openly claiming a desire to manipulate the audience and then acting shocked and appalled that others would accuse them of making creative choices meant to manipulate the audience.

It bothers me immensely and I'm struggling to finish an essay trying to explain it clearly.

Do you know Lewis's "The Inner Ring" speech? I think it's related to how concentric rings of social circles form, with people at each layer sneering at those in the outer layer, while apeing the fashions of the inner layer they're desperate to be inducted into.

The other (hierarchy) is not printed anywhere. Nor is it even a formally organised secret society with officers and rules which you would be told after you had been admitted. You are never formally and explicitly admitted by anyone. You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are outside it; and then later, perhaps, that you are inside it.

There are what correspond to passwords, but they are too spontaneous and informal. A particular slang, the use of particular nicknames, an allusive manner of conversation, are the marks.

It has no fixed name. The only certain rule is that the insiders and outsiders call it by different names...” From outside, if you have dispaired of getting into it, you call it “That gang” or “they” or “So-and-so and his set” or “The Caucus” or “The Inner Ring.” If you are a candidate for admission you probably don’t call it anything. To discuss it with the other outsiders would make you feel outside yourself. And to mention talking to the man who is inside, and who may help you if this present conversation goes well, would be madness!

The "shell game of implausible deniability" is how people advance in leftist circles. The dev I mentioned must affect all the correct mannerisms to be admitted to a higher circle in his ideologically captured industry. But to name that circle would be unthinkably gauche!
To label it with a term like "woke" announces you're an outsider, the worst kind of scum who has despaired of any social advancement, and anyone hoping for admission must publicly shun you.

Normalize healthy BMI and smooth skin! Wait why am I being dragged to the ludovico theatre? Oh no its the Tess Holliday swimsuit special!

'We are hated and (((they))) are destroying things we like'.

That is the basic aggrievement of the polack. Many modern culture war aspects map fairly neatly into the antipolack position, and polacks are largely losers who lack escape mechanisms from the assaults on their favourite escapes. A redneck in his cabin can still go out and drive his coal roller, an Indian can turn to the pro-India internet to get his ego reinflated, a Chinese can continue ignoring the incomprehensible west, but the polack can only suffer within the communication environment he is wholly nestled within and which he has little alternatives to enjoy.

it makes the hands massive

But the real question: does that happen in reverse?

It would be darkly humorous for a yaoi fan to create a male model with large hands (I don't know why they do this) only for the final product to more closely resemble the unflattering physical stereotype of yaoi fans.

Perhaps I will rethink my position on the possible existence of microaggressions.

Honestly, I think microaggressions are best modeled as "real, but 100% projection/revealing too much about the speaker/thief thinking everyone steals".

I propose "micro-defection" for this, or enshittification-by-social-capture. The "my patients/students/customers are [not my favorite race or gender], so I won't try as hard serving them; what are they going to do, fire me?" effect. The woke are more correct than the mainstream in asserting that the sum of micro-aggressions is outright aggression- it's just that the only people who really care to micro-aggress are the woke (which we see in stuff like Covid vaccine distributions, grading disparities by gender, etc.).

"As a nonbinary player I always wished they'd remove genderlocked customization"

Failure to acquire properly-fitted women's clothing generally blows ex-men's cover even before you see their face (ex-women don't have this problem since women's clothing is a strict superset of men's clothing). It is strange that there doesn't seem to be anyone trying to fix that problem (or if they are, they're on the down-low/everyone who wears it passes so well they're invisible?).

Though, I do have to say that the disruption is even-handed enough (and not just "ill-fitting female clothes on the male model") that I don't think it qualifies as "micro", since even the models that transpeople would prefer are ruined by this change (being they would already have picked "attractive model of the opposite gender").

I have always preferred calling them "micro-aggravations". Yes, it's a real thing, but it really says more about the aggravatee's psychology and what they find annoying/unpleasant than it does about anything that can be properly called "aggression". One can still care deeply about reducing their impacts, even on a society-wide basis, but I think this terminology more appropriately captures the concepts that they use to describe the phenomenon and avoids the horrific conflation with literal violence that plagues the rest of the associated political movement.

The woke are more correct than the mainstream in asserting that the sum of micro-aggressions is outright aggression- it's just that the only people who really care to micro-aggress are the woke

Ah yes, only your outgroup performs a basic-but-ubiquitous behavior like minor acts of aggression.

Care to provide counterexamples? Preferably the official policy of a multibillion-dollar system.

What's your ingroup?

Counter examples would require ingroup to be identified, but give us one of reasonable scale and it's generally trivial to find some policy or practice that can framed as an act of aggression towards others. Even hobbyists can rightfully be accused of taking money that could spent to benefit starving people and squandering it on unnecessary self-satisfaction instead.

Let's go with "Non- or anti- woke Americans". Which examples are as good as redirecting COVID vaccines to the less-vulnerable?

That would be the micro-aggressions that the woke-americans claim are being conducted, obviously.

Such as...

The others tend to be a bit more overt about doing it and don't care as much about deniability; the entire premise of "micro" is that the action is either minor enough to be completely deniable, or apparently neutral on its own but not in aggregate. That is, far as I can tell, unique to woke; though that may simply be due to who is and isn't in power at the moment.

The new "female" model is just the male model with boobs stapled on

Oh no no no, they can't just bait like this, it's not sporting. And the worst part is PoGo is one of the few videos games that has an actual female player base rather than male not-models with boobs strapped on.

It'll be interesting to watch the universal condemnation turn into "only the chuds hate this" after the articles come out. It happens every single time, like people just forget what they used to think.

Gotta be honest this seems like a very mild culture war angle. The models were already quite androgenous and subdued in their sexual characteristics (certainly there was no option to look like Schwarzenegger or Parton). The one clear CW aspect is the removal of distinct genders... But c'mon. Have you met the Pokemon go community?

The pictures of the new models linked look just look like garden variety incompetence. Yes the waists are wider but there's also just a general reduction in detail and quality. Looks like someone decided to cut corners, maybe chose the cheap 3d modelling house.

The one clear CW aspect is the removal of distinct genders... But c'mon. Have you met the Pokemon go community?

I would add that the skin tone "randomized palette" seems like a pretty clear CW angle as well.

Gotta be honest this seems like a very mild culture war angle.

I mean--I did characterize it as a "small thing!" But when a (widely known as incompetent) video game company feels comfortable removing distinct genders from what is sometimes characterized as a "kids game," that doesn't seem like a completely empty data point, either.

I would add that the skin tone "randomized palette" seems like a pretty clear CW angle as well.

I'm not seeing it. Can you explain what you mean?

I prefer to posit that the accidental noticing we are performing is unfortunately more reflective of our biases and sensitivities than a concerted effort being shoved down our face.

The more likely reality is that a series of parallel incompetencies all got baked into a product by vague statements being proposed and implemented poorly, and the proposers being unwilling to look stupid by saying 'shit this was dumb shut it down'. We only see that sort of shutdown when it is high profile, like the Batgirl movie, and there are plenty of examples of these 'project managed by committee' products coming to market with clearly observable yet individually minor deficiencies.

When these organisations play the culture war angle, there is usually zero subtlety because they think consumers are idiots. Dragon Age Inquisition hit us over the head with fan favourite voice actress Jennifer Hale voicing Krem, a transwoman (transman? I couldnt fucking tell) whose dialogue options specifically highlighted her transness. Mass Effect 3 specifically highlights the homosexuality of Cortez and Traynor to scream 'HERE BE GAYS' at every opportunity. I'm sure theres some retardation about racism and species in some games, but the main example, Warcraft, shit the bed on its analogies so badly that its not worth repeating. (ok a brief one: being racist against orcs bad because thrall good. yet the orcs ravaged stormwind, teldrassil, the entire draenei species... as a racism analogy warcraft orcs are pretty fail. this point is weak, if I get loredumped in a followup rest assured I will roll over and immediately surrender because blizzard games are only good for porn and not worth my brain cells defending or attacking).

Finally, the fuggofication of video game characters which is the specific bugbear of this thread is certainly deliberate for a large part - there is no need to make women fat - but I would also argue it is a consequence of improved technology for face rendering. Old tech had blocky faces with clean lines, but the faces tended to be symmetrical and smooth even in uneven lighting since there wasnt enough power to render small details like cheek lines or sellions. Now with dynamic HDR and higher resolution facial textures we can see every stupid wrinkle and line moving. Combine that with facial capture tech honestly still being ass (requires artificial boosting of detected movements to cause the algo to change) and we get clown faced movements that trip straight into the uncanny valley.

No, I think Niantic hired some true believers are consultants and then took their advice.

https://twitter.com/Grummz/status/1780987222835232771

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Gaymers got their way on this. Gamers, and women, did not.

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