They're a thing and people have thoughts about them! Thoughts that don't always fit appropriately in to other threads.
So, feck it, let the horror show begin...
So, feck it, let the horror show begin...
The Culture Wars
- Thread starter DOTA
- Start date
Also thought we might as well have a megathread on the "culture wars" since everything that isn't corona revolves around this in mainstream media atm.
I think Class wars is far more worthy of investigation.
Culture wars seem an inevitable consequence of free access to information on the internet.
As it's relatively cheap to disseminate information, it seems we're in an age where we see more information than ever before, and a lot of people expect that information to reflect their personal values.
It's messy because we have all widely adopted the same mediums used to deliver this information (e.g. YouTube and Twitter).
Add in filter bubbles - really algorithms substituting active search for passive presentation - and it exacerbates the feeling that there's an us versus them within culture.
Also add in the brutal fight for your eyeballs within the attention economy where information needs to go further and further down the rabbit hold to grab our hearts, bodies and minds.
?
UFOs
As it's relatively cheap to disseminate information, it seems we're in an age where we see more information than ever before, and a lot of people expect that information to reflect their personal values.
It's messy because we have all widely adopted the same mediums used to deliver this information (e.g. YouTube and Twitter).
Add in filter bubbles - really algorithms substituting active search for passive presentation - and it exacerbates the feeling that there's an us versus them within culture.
Also add in the brutal fight for your eyeballs within the attention economy where information needs to go further and further down the rabbit hold to grab our hearts, bodies and minds.
?
UFOs
Culture war has nothing inherently to do with the internet, and it began long before the internet was a thing. The modern American conservative movement is entirely built on culture war.
YouTube definitely has to answer for pretty much guiding people into the far right, though, to your point about algorithms.
The algorithms aren’t that clever. They take whatever you’re interested in and give you more of the same. If you’re into right wing vloggers that’s the direction it will take you. If you’re more interested in left wing politics you’ll be dragged further and further left.
My youtube recommendations are a train wreck because my 11 year old son uses the same log-in. Chaotic mish mash of Fortnite, Fall Guys, bouldering, FUT and kayak fishing. Not even a hint of Jordan Peterson.
EDIT: And F2 Freestylers, so much F2 Freestylers (they’re actually very watchable, check them out)
There's a term for all of this - network homophily. Its based around the idea that human relationships are innately homogenous, and even more so during the information age where networks can compartmentalize groups of people based on their interests (primarily to target advertising to them). It also explains why everything has gone so tribal all of a sudden during the social media age.
Good article about Youtube algorithm/radicalization (with a couple of good ones linked within) - https://ffwd.medium.com/all-of-yout...is-a-far-right-propaganda-machine-29b07b12430
Not very novel is it?
Logically this makes sense, but I'm pretty sure studies have shown that more often than not it pushes right.
A quick google search provided this, for example:
https://www.researchgate.net/public...ube_Algorithm_and_the_Alt-Right_Filter_Bubble
Maybe it's as simple as radicalizing right-wing videos being shorter than radicalizing left-wing videos, and are thus favoured by the algorithm, but the end result is still the same. Probably no one at YouTube set out to create a fascist recruiting tool.
Yep. I've noticed myself how aggressive the Youtube algorithm is. Even if I accidentally click on a Shapiro video my timeline is bombarded with right wing content. I watch a few progressive channels and its definately not the same with left wing content.
isn’t left wing content just a bit late to the party? A couple of year back I remember asking for left wing youtuber recommendations to give balance to a friend who was watching a load of Stefan Molymeux (a truly reprehensible scumbag) videos and there weren’t many options. More recently there seems to be a lot of good left wing content but the earlier, very popular, right wing stuff might have some sort of “first to market” advantage when the algorithms do their thing.
Probably true to an extent. There has always been left-wing content, but not as much. It also didn't help that so many otherwise popular internet personalities (often related to gaming) turned out to be at the very least alt-right adjacent. PewdiePie is the common example, but there have been so many more. I mean, Notch, the (sort-of) creator of Minecraft, is basically a Nazi.
People being fed things that reinforce their current bias = narrow lanes of society that don’t leave room for tolerance.
Nobody is in control of these wars. AI is tasked to make money. Not improve society.
Tax the cultural pollutants. YouTube. FaceBook. Twitter to a lesser extent. Not a little. A lot.
80% of revenue derived from a business model that doesn’t feed people balanced content.
feck THEM ALL. BURN IT DOWN.
Nobody is in control of these wars. AI is tasked to make money. Not improve society.
Tax the cultural pollutants. YouTube. FaceBook. Twitter to a lesser extent. Not a little. A lot.
80% of revenue derived from a business model that doesn’t feed people balanced content.
feck THEM ALL. BURN IT DOWN.
The gamer influence on culture wars is interesting. Especially the venn diagram of gamergate and trans right activists. Very hard to figure out where you might stick right and left wing labels in that mess.
Or I may be getting a distorted view of things after wasting too much time watching Graham Linehan gradually lose his mind on Twitter.
GamerGate is pretty easy to label: it's firmly right-wing.
Not uniformly, particularly not initially, but it was driven by misogyny from the very beginning (even if not everyone or even most realized). From that point it morphed into something which has essentially acted as a recruitment platform for the alt-right. Take KotakuInAction on Reddit. Its stated purpose is "ethics in gaming journalism", but it's firmly entrenched in culture war and has been for years by this point.
Edit: Here's a good example. The third highest upvoted post ever on KiA is a call to action against the banning of a sub called "Fat People Hate", which was exactly what it says on the tin. No doubt there was a lot of overlap between the two communities. The fourth highest one is "Pussy Pass Denied mods are being threatened with doxxing if they don't hand over the sub over to SJWs to shut down. One mod has already lost their job." You can probably guess what Pussy Pass Denied is about. Here's a hint, it's not ethics in gaming journalism.
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Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that. They obviously existed long before the internet but it seems hard to divorce the internet from today's culture wars.
With filter bubbles, it seems we're being fed a lot of bespoke information. Conflicts of ideas seem to occur due to this split (and are perhaps more accelerated?).
Edit - Saw you mention GamerGate and that's a good example of what I'm trying to get at.
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Absolutely. What I find interesting/counter-intuitive is the overlap of gamergate with trans rights activists (who are at the heart of a furious culture war)
Oh yeah, definitely.
This will no doubt piss a lot of folk off but is it possible that the gamergate/trans activists vs TERF war is about misogyny vs misandry?
Obviously not saying all trans activists (or even most) are misogynists but is it possible some of them are and they’re disproportionately vocal in that particular culture war skirmish?
I think you're wildly overstating the extent to which trans activism and gamergate (and connected incel-y alt-right types) intersect. The broad social scene I'm in is very LGBT+ friendly (I'd say most people in it would be somewhere in that acronym) and I'm good friends with a lot of trans and non-binary people. Literally the only time I've ever heard about trans activism interacting with gamergate is when you've referenced it on here.
To be honest, it comes across like your only knowledge of the 'debate' has been through the filter of Graham Linehan tweets and replies. Obviously I don't mean you share his views, I just mean that if your exposure to the discussion about trans rights has come primarily in the context of what is said by and to possibly the most toxic and divisive individual in that conversation, you're unlikely to have a particularly well-rounded perspective on it.
That’s all very fair. I definitely have a quite distorted view of this, as my main exposure is Twitter rows. Which is obviously way more toxic and distorted than real life.
Anyone know some good left-wing intellectuals to follow on twitter?
There's always Richard D. Wolff, a Marxian economist. Obviously he's mostly interested in economics.
More thinking about someone who loves to go mental on twitter and trash talk with his opponents.
Maybe @Sweet Square has an account?
This is only partially true. Delete your cookies and see what youtube comes up with. I get Mr.Bean, chill out mix, and
I don't think google does it on purpose, but people have learned their algorithms and are using them. (On a side note I also believe youtube algorithms are killing youtube because half of the videos by creators are now filled with stuff they do for the algorithm, i.e trigger comments, ask for likes and follows etc.)
this is the only worthwhle twitter account ever made
https://twitter.com/WASBAPPIN/
He wants to nuke Russia and China and their enitre population to stop fascism, which is Assad's bombing of Idlib.
https://twitter.com/WASBAPPIN/
He wants to nuke Russia and China and their enitre population to stop fascism, which is Assad's bombing of Idlib.
https://twitter.com/Econ_Marshall
this guy but his videos are usually better than tweets which i dont follow
https://twitter.com/shaun_vids
also matt bruenig is my personal favourite but he's not everyone's cup of tea. his blog archives are more fun
http://mattbruenig.com/
edit - this guy started as a moderator of a subreddit with about 1000 people in 2016 and it's shocking to me that he has an actual twitter following now
https://twitter.com/mugrimm
His pinned thread is fantastic
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Turns out endlessly tweeting die son of a pig whore to a certain former Tory prime minister is against Twitter terms of service. So much for free speech!
Sup PM?
I have the answer to your question.
Note to readers: I'm an American and a former international trouble maker that helped Occupy Wall Street go global by drawing people to live stream activism in 2011.
Having reported on hundreds of protests, mostly in DC, NYC, & Baltimore, our ability to reach viewers was completely unrestricted until the winter of 2012. YouTube, Livestream, and UStream all targeted left political content. They gave everyone a warning that they'd be purging content without consent to create a reserve on their servers. This was the first shot over the bow. Throughout Occupy, our team of activist journalists worked with various anonymous on political policies, workers issues, protecting whistleblowers, and other things by effectively constructing and deploying Twitter Storms that would trend on Twitter regularly. By 2013 both Twitter and Facebook throttled the left activist reach to a point that it we might have been reaching what seemed like a half dozen of out regular contacts. Between 2013 - 2015, I attended several hacker conferences to and made friends with some of the EFF folks. I was told there's nothing anyone can do about it. Companies had the right to restrict users.
It hadn't been until just about 10 months ago, I noticed activist groups getting big follow and views. It was overnight @YourAnonNews gained an extra million viewers. BLM groups for a while gained similar attention, all of a sudden on Twitter. Facebook doesn't seem to have changed, though.
I've been mostly out of all this stuff since the 2016 election when I got fired from my radio station job in DC for flooding twitter and facebook with the contents of the DCLeaks. My view was that I didn't care if it was surfaced by Putin, the content was worthy of discussion.
by 2017 our group discovered the only way to break through the Facebook throttle wall was money. We had started paying for access for more views. (I was out by this time, but kept in touch)
I almost forget the latest development, I think it was June of 2018 - Twitter and Facebook had been pressured to deal with social media activist groups that might have some effect on the 2016 elections. Thousands of left and right groups and individuals were simply banned from Twitter without much of any explanation. The working group of livestreamers I had an account with was shut down during this time. One of my investigative reporter friends tracked it back to a far right lobbyist office in DC that motivated politicians to put pressure on social media activists.
The culture wars boil down to the difference between those who want to impose their values on (and to control) others, and those who want to live and let live.
For example, most evangelical Christians who are against homosexuality are not content to themselves be heterosexual. Instead they wish to stop gay marriage (for example), even tho' gay marriage does not impact their own freedom or lives and has nothing to do with them.
Or take the issue of abortion, for further example. It's those who wish to control what women can do with their own bodies vs a woman's right to choose.
The impulse to control others - to impose your will on others - is usually disguised in various ways (through references to 'morality' or 'religion' for instance), but it's basically about control and domination ... and it's mostly driven by toxic masculinity.
If the exercise of freedom does not impact on someone else's freedom, then it should be no one's business to interfere. But the culture of control and domination can't accept have that. This culture reaches its zenith in the far right and fascist groupings - where domination by physical force (or threat of force) is the core credo.
For example, most evangelical Christians who are against homosexuality are not content to themselves be heterosexual. Instead they wish to stop gay marriage (for example), even tho' gay marriage does not impact their own freedom or lives and has nothing to do with them.
Or take the issue of abortion, for further example. It's those who wish to control what women can do with their own bodies vs a woman's right to choose.
The impulse to control others - to impose your will on others - is usually disguised in various ways (through references to 'morality' or 'religion' for instance), but it's basically about control and domination ... and it's mostly driven by toxic masculinity.
If the exercise of freedom does not impact on someone else's freedom, then it should be no one's business to interfere. But the culture of control and domination can't accept have that. This culture reaches its zenith in the far right and fascist groupings - where domination by physical force (or threat of force) is the core credo.
BTW Pogue
Next time you're looking for a different perspective, try The Hill's Rising Show w/ Krystal and Saagar
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPWXiRWZ29zrxPFIQT7eHSA
I quit watching cable news a while back. Since then I watch a few episodes of this show to catch up on political news. They seem fair and cover topics more thoroughly
Next time you're looking for a different perspective, try The Hill's Rising Show w/ Krystal and Saagar
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPWXiRWZ29zrxPFIQT7eHSA
I quit watching cable news a while back. Since then I watch a few episodes of this show to catch up on political news. They seem fair and cover topics more thoroughly
Cool. Thanks. Will check it out.
So that's why this place is about 85% to the left?