what was the SJW? Serious question. It's certainly a powerful archetype boogeyman that is still able of haunting and tormenting people. And that includes me, a hard left leaning person belonging, technically, to at least two(2) 'marginalised' minority groupings. 'anti-SJW' themed content generates billions in ad revenue. But what does it all mean? To what fundamental human need does it appeal to? Why does leftypol get so thoroughly triggered by the spectre of 'idpol'?
imo this probably has less to do with the archetypal blue haired college activist than with the strange world created by the encroachment of digital media on everything. This lead in turn to a massive paradigm shift in terms of social norms. The truth is, Universal connectivity radically changed the way we perceive the world and ourselves the way political opinions are communicated and even the very nature of politics. Refer to the works of Marshall McLuhan: our electronic media environment demands total involvement with everyone and everything. there's little room in here for the literate bourgeois individual, that semi detached observer with his own unique snowflake opinions and his distinct private and public personas. The past is a foreign culture and you suffer from culture shock. clickbait content is designed to be as 'triggering' and hence, as shareable as posible. Conventional politics have given way to the algorithm, which is now free to manipulate human consciousness like play-dough in its idiot quest for profit maximisation. Donald Trump's election is testament to the obsolescence of politics as we knew it.
Popular media(sports, videogames, music, comic books) ceased being an escapist individual pursuit and became eminently social and 'political'. At the same time, we are dealing with an unprecedented consolidation and homogenisation of the culture industry. that's how you get 'woke' popstars and would be 'woke' blockbusters, more than ever before, the social consumption of the product becomes part of its marketing strategy.
and yet, we are far away from the utopia of total transparency people like Zuckerberg promised us. instead we get the spectacularization of everyday life. you get the sense nobody really believes in anything anymore, culture is stagnating in a meta-swamp, young workers are more precarious situation than they've been in years, the whole economic system is absurd and may be heading towards ecological collapse or world war.
No, these things are related. You're just free-associating in the hopes that it will help find the connection between things. IMO SJWs are more a symptom than an actual problem, even though they do contribute a bit. I would say the outrage machine is how capitalism tries to appropriate elements that might pose a threat or inconvenience. If you acknowledge an issue and make identities out of it, you can sell merch to the parties involved and make some bank while the issue resolves (or doesn't). And it's in your interest that it doesn't resolve, so it's worth your time to keep the issue unresolved as long as possible so as the argument plays out and people come to the reasonable conclusion, you have to seed bullshit in order to maintain the fight and you rely on nuttier and nuttier people to believe the bullshit and keep the fight going. Enter SJWs.
Josiah King
capitalism has to a great extent become automated. nobody is really in control anymore and the ruling class is freaking out, they talk about muh russian fake news because even they can't begin to understand what's truly going on. Think about those creepy child youtube videos, we are all hooked up to skinner boxes, custom made specially for us. Human run media is being liquidated as it becomes more and more unprofitable. Sometimes I worry we really do live in Nick Land Meme Hell and nothing is actually real. I should get out more and meet some people.
Identity is inherently more marketable than economics or foreign policy. People are drawn to it the same way they are drawn to anything "human" in media. This is exploitable.
Youtube offers online courses in how to optimize your content to generate more views. One trick is to always have a close-up of a face in your video thumbnail. Why? People are just drawn to other humans. Idpol works by exploiting the same psychological tendencies that make us a social species. Identity is inherently understandable, since a lot of it is understood by simple signals. These visual signals - a man in a uniform holding a US flag, a scruffy brown man with a large beard and an AK-47, a fat woman with dyed-blue hair shouting in anger - communicate easy-to-understand messages about identities and the general values backing those identities. A meme of your stereotypical "SJW" communicates a consistent message in seconds where an article or book requires minutes or even hours to cognitively process.
Applied idpol just works on a mass scale. It works the same way any national chain imprints brands that communicate a vague but acceptable idea or value. Just as Coca-Cola's marketing tries to attach values of hometown Americana to a soft drink, your typical SJW (or anti-SJW) attaches vague but easily-understood political values on a mass scale. And just like junk food, these messages are mass produced not to nourish the body but to be easy to consume and stimulate a desire for more consumption by appealing to base, almost sub-conscious values.
When Holla Forumsyps get mad that they ask for redpills and we give them books, just understand that they're asking for political big macs and we're giving them a large garden salad.
or give grants, raise funds same logic still applies though
James Walker
SJW mentality is pretty close to religion.
Jaxon Reed
So-called "SJW"s were an evolution of the intense, dramatic culture that sites like DeviantArt and Gaia Online had, but suddenly applied on a larger scale (with the exact same practical value, that is, none except for the one imagined by the parties involved) due to the progressive growth of internet usage and, at the same time, monopolization of internet spaces by companies such as Google or Facebook. Whereas a 12 year old on dA may be fighting against art theft/tracing and crying over drama, a more grown-up "SJW", due to their inevitable introduction into the political landscape, fights against perceived opression and discrimination for what is justice in their eyes.
Internet communities, due to the way they work, tend to promote immaturity and tribalism. A large, rapid influx of flashing colored titilating images and loud sounds which call themselves "content" and "information" are simply too much for us to pay attention and try to think about. It is much easier to just filter certain content out in our brains and just pay attention to that which fits the labels we have chosen for ourselves. Conversations become mere struggles to one-up one another as we inevitably have to act as content too, in order to compete and succeed in the market of internet entertainment.
Pop culture in burgerland and other burgered colonies (japan & south korea for example) feels like it is all produced by robots who don't understand the meaning and history of symbols, narratives, characters, etc, and just randomly apply them in systematically acceptable ways like those dumb mass-produced Spiderman vids that sub-5 year olds watch, which results in those symbols being devoid of meaning as the deprecation of it's old practical value in previous times has resulted in it's ressurection as the value existing only if profitable. In a way i feel like the Internet has helped towards this end, and that we're either deep in or headed towards a severe creative stagnation. I don't think this is relevant, but i was thinking about it lately so idk.
Austin White
under late capitalism, nothing is sacred and yet everything is a religion. Think about fandoms for example: blatant commodity worship. Our politics have been reduced to pointless ritualistic behavior, at least melanesian cargo cults are useful as mechanisms of social cohesion, we don't even have something like that.
we have to figure out ways to détour and subvert the mechanisms of communication. It's not just about getting out a 'message' but about disrupting the media environment itself and hijacking it for our own purposes.
Lucas Myers
Im gonna reach back a decade but bear with me. 2007 through 2009 was an interesting time. the internet exploded with smartphones, social media, and newfound prominence not just in pop culture but in the day to day life of the average person worldwide, especially those very young. this trend happened at the same time as the biggest recession since the great depression was taking place. For the first time in history you could find anything with minimal effort, even highly taboo things. in the wild west of the internet these taboos (sexual, ideological, religious, etc) had to have some level of effort in searching for them. But now everything is everywhere,literally everything is everywhere. and this shock was so amazing to our collective psyche, and so was the failure of the economies involving most non rich people (Not just the initial shock which was earthshaking to many but the non recovery "recovery" was even worse at demoralizing the proles)that people were genuinely scared and genuinely angry about the future for many decades. And with actual leftism so forcibly removed from 99% of Americans, many of them retreated to idealized worlds online.not all at once but steadily year after year. the tumblr sjw is no different than the facebook groups fellating the troops, or praising country living, being a real nigga, epic atheism, gamer pride, microbrew hipsterdom etc.all are people who dont have the real power to change much of the real world and its power structures so they create their version of a better world online. the only difference was these people were often manipulated by years of media into believing liberal transgressions in the vein of the yippies and jon stewart were something to emulate rather than something to laugh with, and just laughing with them accomplished nothing in the end really, but it was cathartic. the church had been replaced by a morality over true extensions of civil rights to marginalized groups,(gay rights,fighting religious and racial bigotry, secular humanism etc.) but without half the element of forgiveness or being born again that a church brings. but thats not anything new, all the weird cultural groups of late capitalism have their own gods and norms. they all spoke a weird insular language that was a mishmash of decades of propaganda and media so that outsiders could halfway know what each groups members were saying , but not really understanding the full meaning. the vaunted sjw was someone who really knows that they arent gonna change much in the grand scheme, but they could change some incidental details for the better. they just barely had the language to express even that. as wages were falling, housing was diminishing and valuable lives seemed to be disappearing people retreated in these communities to be people they wish they were because they lost belief that things could actually change. HA im powning noobs online, i love gaming (sucks that theres no work in my major though). HA that dirsty obscene joke was fucking funny( too bad i might get laid off and my bills went up while im taking a pay cut.) HA theses no real hope in the future as its going, but at least i can revel in hedonism…. when an sjw comes and tell these people that their one escape from their shitty reality is #problematic its a betrayal on two fronts. one on actually believing one average person has the audacity to change the world and two changing the world by interfering with someones fantasy.
this betrayal of our shitty day to day facade is why they make the perfect villain to large swathes of people. and why they are the perfect deflection for people who want to suppress actual leftism.
Nathan Williams
We rag on these websites, but platforms like newgrounds and slashdot facilitated the same pathologies and social race to the bottom.
We also tend to overlook the role that size plays in fostering tribalism and discouraging nuance in an internet community. Large, fast-moving forums don't allow time for people to bang out a well-thought out response or addition to a post. I remember old phpBB forums where I argued with people who were probably the precursor to today's reactionary Holla Forums gamers. It didn't matter as much because I had the opportunity to bang out a researched post with citations, let it cook in a text file (never will I EVER let a timeout eat another essay) for half an hour, then come back to tweak it a bit and correct misspellings before posting. Hell, sometimes I would find books and scan in pages to provide sources. I could do that knowing that the post would get read and (hopefully) my opponent would respond in kind.
Now it's just a race to see who can spam the most infographics in a thread, who can organize the biggest raid campaign, who can stick around in a thread regurgitating one-line talking points the longest, or who can spout the most polarizing opinion to get the most (You)s. I could go to Holla Forums and type a 2003-era post and scan in pages from my collection to back up as sources. I'm not going to do that because the thread is like to go into auto-sage by the time I'm done, or my post won't get read because it'll get lost in a sea of teenagers arguing, or someone will just skim the post and respond with "lol what a cuck. how much did soros pay you to write that get rekt fag."
I try to avoid internet usage completely. I have a hard job successfully doing so, I'm so used to occupying my time passively consuming media that I feel fidgety and don't know what to do if I'm stuck without a device to consume.
I don't disagree, but whenever I see people try this it just winds up degenerating into self-absorbed "culture jamming."
Creating chaos in the media sphere by disrupting consumption habits can create opportunities, but it's not enough to just disrupt idpol messages. We need to consciously use the same psychological tendencies to spread our own messages. The recent Virginian elections have shown that a concentrated, worker-first, humanist message can overcome decades of red-baiting.
Hunter Sullivan
I should add: internet communications are no substitute for direct, face-to-face conversations. Door knocking and in-person agitation works. Polite sage for double post.
Carter Bailey
hey that's a surprisingly good summation of why i'm a hermit. very good post.
i would however note that in part is a discussion-al question. "we don't want to talk about it, it's not interesting" or perhaps "everyone else is talking about it, we're bored" in a very tenuous part i would say it's the reason /vr/ was also one of the better boards on 4chan, because it takes you back to the pre-internet age culture and people just want to discuss static old media rather than deal with the ever-changing present. (i say tenuous because the individuals posting are still the same, and undoubtedly it will come to pass that discussion will spiral into present-day arguments, or more historical political arguments with present day relevance.)
It's worth noting that on the other side of SJWs you basically have and have had the tabloid press for a long time. The Daily Mail is basically just right-wing "SJWism" (in terms of structure, not surface content) for 40 something women. perhaps most notable is also the flexibility of language to mislead. one person on twitter dislikes a politician's speech? headline: OUTRAGE at politician's speech.
i'm increasingly re-convinced that "human nature" far from being an argument for a market economy is the strongest argument against it: by exploiting "human nature" you can get people trapped in skinner boxes. only through abstract planning against that nature (essentially, creating new structures to steer people in the ways we "know are good" rather than the ways we instinctively want) can you actually build a "good society", and for structural reasons this shouldn't lead to significantly lower net happiness. (i partially base this on, say, an idea about stimulation - if you grow up with the modern internet for example, you might expect constant stimulation, but were the central planners to take it away then the next generation would grow up with a lower baseline - say TV, or even books - and because the baseline is lower, the lower gross stimulation isn't a problem, people are just as "stimulated" in meaningful terms, but have more time to think, etc.)
i think it's also notable that internet communities seem to inherently breed shitposting almost as a pavlovian response. (i mean, i do it, i know i do it, i still do it. i don't particularly enjoy it although sometimes at high velocities it can be fun, trying to think of an inane reply in a microsecond and then post it before the crazy-train has gone further off the rails.) i mean, there are all sorts of reasons "at a distance" it has appeal - disavowed action, the ability to say everything you don't mean, or simply to pattern-match - but structurally it seems encouraged that "everyone" does it.
i think a problem with fandoms is also that we've hit a sort of critical mass, which i will lazily tie into my autistic obsession with full employment. up until quite recently there was a good possibility that you could contribute something to the understanding of a fandom - i.e. in a game, you might notice a secret that nobody else did, or you might notice a more mundane piece of lore and be the person to post this. it was easily possible for everyone to have a "job" and contribute actual knowledge/content to the fandom. as the supply of fans increased much faster than the supply of content, we now have a situation where that isn't the case. within a day, all secrets in a game will be known, before release the entire plot will have been figured out on reddit, etc. so there's no "role" for individuals there anymore. this is particularly bad for older, dead series, where the "previous generation" discovered everything and now all the new generation can do is compete over their own knowledge of the "facts" rather than set out to discover those facts themselves. in fandom terms, they are unemployed and watching jeremy kyle.
Noah King
this is a very good point and on this, i must confess to a disgraceful line of thinking - but one i have to wonder if others share. it goes as follows: "i am tired of this discussion, i no longer wish to argue, i knew i would never convince this individual but i have said all that needs to be said. nonetheless, i will string him along longer - because i know his time is more valuable to him than mine is to me." now sometimes this is true, i type 5 words, he types 5 paragraphs. other times, we're talking a much lower ratio, perhaps 1:1.
i also wonder if other posters often use imageboards just as a way of organising their own thoughts, like a less structured essay prompt, rather than actually soliciting discussion. (in these circumstances, i am of course doing both - but sometimes it's purely one or the other. usually, "arguments" are prompts and discussions remain discussions. so a thread like this has scope for new knowledge.)
Jordan Turner
that picture doesn't have enough labels
Landon Morgan
You are absolutely correct, but I wouldn't call modern social media "the present". They're not the matrix. They're just one increasingly irritating aspect of our lives.
And Donald Trump's election is actually a testament to their pariah status if anything. Donald Trump is not a social media figure. He's a reality show figure who ran a fairly traditional media reality show campaign. He didn't even win because people liked him. He won because he was less repulsive than the pro-Hillary social media bubble. We bitch about idpolers because it's that repulsiveness that the left needs to shake off to start winning the important (i.e. non-social-media) fights.
Gabriel Watson
Trump won because he appealed to multiple milieus. His reality show campaign appealed to rednecks, his "drain the swamp" shtick appealed to disgruntled Fox News dads and his social media activity brought in the millennial incels like Holla Forums and reddit (reposting Pepe pictures on Twitter, etc.).
Clinton's campaign on the other seemed only to focus on one particular group, SJWs and liberal hipsters. They massively overestimated the size of this clientele, which a is loud, but in the end not very numerous minority.
Benjamin Adams
Hipsters.
Joseph Campbell
My boy, sensationalist newspaper headlines full of speculation or outright falsehoods often in contradiction to the article right under it have always been a thing. When I was a teenager (last century), my school class visited a newspaper. When one of us asked the guy showing us around about some falsehood that they published, their reaction was: He made a gesture communicating that it was non-issue. >Well then, that's not really a mistake by the author. The text under the pictures, the headlines, and introductions are written by other people. Further questions about the process and how to make stuff fit the layout revealed that even in the main text stuff was edited before publishing, without giving feedback to the named authors. The wonders of the division of labour, eh? He also said that they didn't bother correcting everything they know to be wrong in later issues, only the "important" things. His entire body became a gesture of pure notgivingafuckness. I decided right there that reading newspapers is a waste of time. Propaganda has always been a thing. You hear so much about evil manipulating algorithms because the propaganda machines made of flesh are bitching about getting replaced by the cheaper alternative. It is not an inherent feature of all algorithms to output results that homogenize what you read, an algorithm can also be designed for diversity (the difference here is very similar to the difference between good single-winner election methods and proportional election methods). And what about consumer responsibility? I don't remember a time when it was typical for a Tory to occasionally read the Daily Mirror or a Marxist rag to keep in touch with what's happening on the other side. I don't see how TV personality Trump is a new low compared to actor Ronald Reagan becoming President of the United States or a porn star running for office in Italy. Sports and games and music and theatre have always been social activities: playing in a group, playing against each other, experiencing being part of a crowd. I believe you do. By the way: twitter.com/bentarnoff/status/928023633234202624
Alexander Thomas
Why can't you just be a hipster and not indulge in identity politics fuck
Jose Martin
...
Jaxson Wilson
2002 is the best tbh
Joseph Watson
SJWs indulge in IDPOL because they can't out "obscure" the sub-cultures they're parasitizing off of, so they pull the politics card to gain power within the group.
Julian Martin
the media environment itself is out of whack. Different media don't exist in isolation, but in a constant, dialectical relationship with each other. It's now common for cable news to spend half the day talking about tweets. The unrelenting rhythm of twitter and 24/7cable news is a world away from the regular punctuated output of the press. I think it's worth it analysing things and how they change instead of insisting things have always been the same and it's all a question of being a 'responsible consumer'. Reality TV (which is hyperreal mindfuckery in its own right) cannot be contained in its regular cable schedule and has begun spilling over everywhere.
RE: Hipsters, New Atheists, Gamers, and other fauna of the 00s.
The new atheist movement was tremendously influential. sjws, the alt right and 'I FUCKING LOVE SCIENCE' normie memers on facebook can all be traced back to new atheism. Not so long ago, conservative christians held a great deal of hegemonic cultural power over flyover country. Dawkins and Hitchens hit the big time during the Bush administration, on one hand, they spoke against the rising religious right, on the other, they capitalised on the war on terror zeitgeist that regarded islamic fundamentalism as a serious threat to western liberal values. The movement, however, lacked any real philosophical or political content beyond this. The new atheists and the liberal secularists won the war but rendered themselves obsolete in the process. In the socially liberal Obama era, they begin to look somewhat ridiculous. The anti Bush coalition included John Stewart liberals, nu atheists and proto alt right libertarian conspiracy theorists, and the boundaries between them were blurrier as well. Without a credible christian antagonist, the atheists begin to turn on each other. some embrace 'social justice' as an ersatz jesus substitute, others become muh rational skeptics substituting the fundie boogieman for an sjw one.
Looking back on the old 'hipster' signifiers, ie. Wes Anderson films, the self consciously 'quirky' dramedies that followed on their wake, 00s pitchfork buzzbands, It really does seem like quaint petit bourgeois escapism. Unlike the 80s underground, it was a fundamentally nostalgic and backwards looking movement. Once upon a time, vice magazine, recently named as the 'least cool' brand by american high school students, was an edgy hipster publication inspired by Jim Goad's infamous answer me zine. Vice's co founder founder, Gavin McIness, turned hard to the right but eventually ended up as an embarrassing alt lite personality displaced by edgier fash pepe newcomers. The founders of American Apparel were also known for their right wing sympathies. All in all it was a strange time, Chris Morris' satirical series Nathan Barley captured it better than any documentary ever could. youtube.com/watch?v=Rqfkuc5mawg
Thanks to the internet, 'the underground' entered mass culture, and thus ceased existing as such. Carles from Hipster Runoff AKA Mexican Guy Debord chronicled the death throes of indie and the rise of the content farm in scathing meme speak before wiping all traces of his work from the internet. Hipsters grew up into 'contemporary conformists', fond of artisanal this and that, cambray denim, bare brick walls and zany light fixtures.
The aura of the underground gradually vanished: from sifting for rarities in dusty record stores to pirating loads and loads of dodgy mp3s from limewire (remember?) to having everything ever recorded available a click away via youtube and streaming services, something is certainly lost among the way. The music press embraced 'poptimism' as a means of claiming a different sort of aura. Mass market Pop music was hyped up as a subversive middle finger held up against the long exhausted spectre of 'rockism'. Eventually, the record companies incorporate these discourse into their marketing, see Beyonce's Lemonade for a particularly blatant example. thequietus.com/articles/22389-rockism-poptimism
I know social justice warriors are annoying as fuck, I really do.
But at this point I'm tired of hearing about them and I'm going to hate people bringing their garbage about them and how annoying they are everywhere they go. Just talk about different shit my god. I am tired of internet gossip infecting our public fucking lives.
At this point it's been four fucking years, hell, 5 years? 6 years? It's all become fuzzy because it blurs together, but the point of it all is that, I am just so god damn sick of hearing about this. And it's probably going to get me surrounded by 5 people telling me I'm an SJW for telling people to just fucking stop gossiping all the god damn time about internet communities. For fucks sakes.
Just live, let live, move on.
Ryder Sanchez
your life is a constant struggle with the sjw that dwells within you. the 'sjw', like the 'dudebro', 'normie' etc. is not a real person, but a sockpuppet the modern human uses in order to enact its inane psychodramas.
Hunter Wilson
Bitch the only thing that dwells within me is my own shit and predigested food, I am just sick and fucking tired of this shit. It feels like it's been 80 years non stop
Ian Lee
>was Oh if only. I'm afraid they'll be empowered by Trump's inevitably ignominious fall.
Anyway, there are various factors that converged to create socjus.
One was the independent creation of what would become idpol, by Peggy Noonan and Derrick Bell. I have absolutely no doubt that at some point Porky realized this could be a potent diversionary tactic against class struggle, and that's exactly the situation we're in now.
Another reason is the growing alienation of the world, not just between people but between a person and its society and its institutions, including the political arena, and thus lose agency even over their own lives. With their capacity to do anything meaningful at all where the rules of society and the State are concerned, they transfer their desperate desire for agency in their own lives to something where they can effect change. Meaningless, insignificant change, but hey, it feels like a victory and helps soothe the alienation.
Third, they're liberals by definition, as their goals are petty and thus necessarily reformist.
Lastly, it serves as a valuable source of social cache in a world of ubiquituous social media. As regular community dies off and is replaced by this horrible simulacrum that is the social network, being seen as being a good person is almost completely dettached from actually being a good person. So we have entirely too many people with signs of sociopathy and cluster B disorders virtue-signalling all day, while behaving awfully. Look how damn many "male allies" turn out to be sex offenders, and how many females display remarkable disregard for people outside of their milieu.
Colton Baker
I first became aware of SJWs in 2012, they've probably existed longer, so probably longer than 6 years.
the sjw is a pattern of media engagement which exists within a broader ecosystem. Think about how sjw outrage bait feedsback into the right wing outrage machine, so it's just people getting outraged at other people getting outraged and so on.
muh karltural marx pedo conspiracy
Xavier Cook
Issue 17 of the cultural magazine Kursbuch, published in June 1969, described the revolutionaries' position in practical terms. Published by German author Hans Magnus Enzensberger, the issue contained a report by the members of Commune 2 in Berlin, titled "Educating Children in the Commune." In the summer of 1967, three women and four men moved into an apartment in an old building on Giesebrechtstrasse, together with two small children, a three-year-old girl, Grischa, and a four-year-old boy, Nessim. For the residents, the cohabitation experiment was an attempt to overcome all bourgeois constraints, which included everything from separate bank accounts and closed bathroom doors to fidelity within couples and the development of feelings of shame. The two children were raised by the group, which often meant that no one paid much attention to them. Because the adults had made it their goal to not just "tolerate but in fact affirm child sexuality," they were not satisfied to simply act as passive observers.
Why are marxists such horrible parents?
Ian Phillips
no surprise there. why don't you point to actual socialist countries as an example of your made-up ideology? topkek
Thomas Bennett
Because true believers are a better representation of their ideology than the people merely unlucky enough to get annexed by the soviet union.
Daniel Campbell
que?
Leo Barnes
Ain't even tryin m8
John Myers
Not much self-confidence there.
Samuel Gonzalez
if these people actually read Marx they wouldn't be utopian socialists.
Carson Brown
if you can still post confidently at all then you're just a fucking retard.
Elijah Edwards
I realized a while ago that neoconservatism and neoliberalism, far from being opposites, are actually complementary. Add the two, and you have the perfect "radical centrist": wants to slash public spending except with regards to war, pretends to be some professional above partisan politics, sees imperialist war as perfectly morally valid because it "spreads democratic values", unwavering faith on a free market that they know it's a myth to fool the little people etc.
SJWs/liberals and reactionaries/aut-right aren't just "two poles that presuppose and generate each other" like Zizek said, but are actually merging.
Chase Baker
I'm not against regulation in the public interest, but I find that without the backing of *at least* a solid social democratic welfare state you can easily fall victim to technocratic tinkering at the edges that doesn't do much. This tinkering also pisses off lots of people that still live shitty lives in our neoliberal hellhole - that pack of smokes or cheap big gulp soda is one of the few creature comforts that your average prole may still have.
For us leftists though, there should be an expectation to cultivate Zizek's inner Stalinism just to keep us effective.
The competitive Super Smash Bros Melee has (in my own opinion, naturally) gone even further and developed its own class system. You have a 1% of pro players who compete among themselves for fame and money, while a larger but dwindling community of fans and amateur players is drawn into factions supporting their favourite pro gamer. All you needed was the addition of competition over money.
I've incorporated my own big shitposts and the responses they elicited into my grad research.
In a defense of people who work for mainstream/legacy media, it's almost impossible to not feel alienated from the product of your labour in a newsroom. You're confined by both editorial policy and what will get consumed in what you can report. Your editors will often edit out key nuances in your articles. Headlines are written that elicit clicks but do not reflect the substance of the article. And finally, articles usually go unnoticed, or go noticed because an outrage brigade got pissed off at you. He was probably just waiting for some PR agency or think tank to pick him up and give him a job that pays him double his journo salary to manipulate the news.
And newspapers are generally good on basic news if you want a more thorough account written after the dust has settled. Magazines are better and quality niche news is mostly web-only. And this is personal, but I always choose print over digital if given a choice simply because my brain has an easier job processing words on paper.
Jaxson Hernandez
I think the way technology has changed the nature of the crowd and of the social is worth thinking about. The suburban boomer 'mancave' has been opened up to the wider world, BLM and president Donald Trump. The football requires a certain suspension of disbelief which cannot be sustained once everyone knows about all the staggering concussion brain damage rates, domestic violence and awkward racial dynamics of the gladiatorial spectacle. The NFL's ratings are in free fall, and younger generations can't be bothered to give a fuck
Zachary Stewart
really good read guys, if only my Holla Forumsyp friend wasn't so I don't give a fuck to any sort of real fucking reading except for his dumb "happenings." how can i convince him we're not ebil commies.
Benjamin Moore
IDPOL I guess
Gabriel Nguyen
How can I stop hating idpol and unironically meme myself into being a privelege checking sjw? I was thinking, hey, maybe I was just an entitled white dude and sjw was the way of the future all along.
Juan Bailey
I thought for sure this was going to be another "how do you do, fellow non-goons?"/"don't you think anti-SJWs are just as bad as SJWs?" thread, but instead its full of genuinely insightful effortposts on the causes and ramifications of PC culture.
If this keeps up, I might just have hope for board quality.
Isaiah Sullivan
No one fought back at rightist idpol like SJWs did. You can't respond to "all niggers will hang" with "actually the proletariat has no color". You respond with a struggle session of demoralizing deeply triggering and problematic language and the destruction of racist history. Just saying.
Aaron Sullivan
the goon conspiracy is probably not responsible for 'political correctness', remember this are the people who spent a decade spamming the word 'nigger' on message boards and chuckling like morons. Prominent left twitter personalities were once irony poisoned edgelords just like you and me. Besides, their influence extends far beyond /srs/, western chan culture itself is the spawn of something awful and much of alt right lingo originates with the gamers who got banned from SA for being too racist.
demoralising for whom? cause i've been pretty demoralised by the last five years or so of the culture war. identity politics is a symptom of the destruction of old forms of identity and their replacement by a new totalising paradigm, ie. a very violent and traumatic process. I've been left over with a sense of derrealisation and self loathing. Instead of hoped for transcendence of identity, that certainly seemed like a possibility growing up, we get a world in which one feels more and more trapped inside structurally imposed categories. I miss the sense of detachment of the pre digital and early digital era, it was easier to preserve your internal locus of meaning. Marx' motto was Nothing human is alien to me Fanon defended his right to lie claim to all human culture. We get nothing. I find myself unable to integrate even my middle class immigrant background into the current narratives.
Our current situation leaves us little prepared to comprehend the past, racist or otherwise. Even the recent past is distant and alien, we wander through the ruins. The apocalypse of the 20th century is incomprehensible cosmic horror. Much of our current reality was drafted up in cold war era military industrial think tanks. The internet itself is the physical manifestation of the trauma inflicted by the bomb on human consciousness. And meanwhile, the present is not a woke utopia of love and tolerance, but an absurd dystopian feverdream that could collapse into murder and total war. And the machine keeps feeding you images of uncertain meaning. Since i was a kid, I've always suffered from 'behavioural problems' and what are probably pathological issues with authority, this probably explains my constant unhappiness and sense of dissatisfaction with everything. Like many in my generation, I crafted a sense of identity around 'irony' and the countercultural. now i feel alienated in a world that demands the performance of sincere involvement. Even the left has been marked by the influence of human potential self esteem pop psych memery(ie. struggle sessions and encounter groups) something that provoked a violent reaction from me even as a kid. I want to disappear completely vanish into the wilderness of anonymity and live out my life as a hermit. The use of the term 'snowflake' in culture war discourse is telling, because some sense of individuality is certainly being suppressed. I guess some people are more sensitive to this than others.
Jordan Brooks
hasn't that always been the Holla Forums party line? idpol etc etc
Daniel White
lately, i've been leaning towards 'civilisation is bad Ted K. was right we are all doomed ahahaaha'
Eli Myers
Black mirror fucked my shit up too fam
Parker Ross
this but unironically
Levi Morris
It is not that but it is just not sincere and the central ideas of things aren't criticised. I've been in these communities a lot and I've seen just how vapid and boring they are. I'm even taking into account many of the AUs and all; if people were being critical then they wouldn't be masturbating to these memes. TBH I think that another thread would be good for containing discussion regarding that; I don't want to distract from the points.
Dominic Clark
HIV CENTRIC HAMILTON HIGH SCHOOL AU
In 2016, one or more Hamilton fans began the hivliving tumblr to raise issues about living with HIV positive status.[1] It was recommended by many on Tumblr and Twitter as a good source of info on HIV+ issues. [2] It was thought to be run by two people: Israa, a nonbinary Chinese-Pakistani human trafficking survivor living in India and the other, Naj, a US born lesbian of color also living in India.[3]
Both of the fans stated that they were HIV positive and both had main blogs of their own. Together, they ran the hivliving tumblr for over a year until Naj linked to her cash.me fundraiser asking for help for medical expenses. Digoxin-purpurpea, another Hamilton fan, realized that the owner of the cash.me account was most likely US based and confronted her about it. After much back and forth, Naj, one of the moderators of hivliving, confessed that she was a US college student who lied about her identities and HIV status. Both Naj and Israa did not exist, she did not have HIV and she did not live in India. She then posted a confession on the hivliving tumblr and tagged it Hamilton. [4] She also promised to repay people she had defrauded on her Cash.me account. To date no proof has been given that she reimbursed anyone.
Some fans believe that she created these identities "…to justify themselves writing an HIV-centric modern high school AU Hamilton fanfiction. They then posited themselves as an expert on HIV for discourse credentials.
This fresh fandom drama content gives off the same vaguely disturbing vibe as those creepy 'finger family pregnant elsa spiderman learn colors' child youtube videos. Weird things happen when you hook humans up to a pavlovian feedback loop. It's all so farcical, a bloody black farce, but a farce nonetheless, much like the spectacle of politics. Nothing is real, except the blood and the casualties.
Aiden Sanders
>jacobitemag.com A bit unrelated but I skimmed through a bunch of their recent articles. A lot of their authors are two-bit late capitalist con men, the type of people who juggle around numbers or hustle for donations. For example: What value do these people create? First guy uses algorithms to borderline cheat at gambling. Other one works at Tech Start-up Without Reason For Existence #19230.
Jose Garcia
i don't necessarily agree with the editorial line of the website, which publishes lots of 'alt lite' type people and tradcaths, but I found this particular article interesting.
muh ''New Economy' is probably the greatest con job in human history: millions condemned to an absurd and aimless existence. Even the tech giants are frauds who produce nothing of worth while haemorrhaging billions of dollars and destroying hundreds of thousands of jobs. Yet, accumulated investment capital needs somewhere to go.
Jeremiah Robinson
All of this comes from Obama and "Demographics is Destiny" I can never say this enough. These people were sold the idea that their ideals were ascendent and their dominance inevitable. Obama "Proved" to them that it was the Lefts Country now and the Right's extinction was a simple matter of time. Any Republicans who gained power were to be neutered and inoffensive Jeb! types. But then Trump happened and Hillary failed. 8 years of believing that they were invincible was shown to be false in the most traumatic and humiliating way possible. Their Utopia was taken from them.
Trump was a pyrrhic victory for the right, because now they have no path except more or less open ethnonationalism. I believe the republican establishment hates trump more than anyone. The office of the presidency has been exposed as a sham, a mere totem of spite worshipped by culturally powerless reactionaries, the real power lies in the managerial networks, who need to create an homogenuous 'tolerant' space in order to keep post fordist capitalism functioning . The clintonite democrat recipe of neoliberal muh nu-economy shilling plus superficial identity politics is a dead end as well. changing economic conditions have created an absurd world in which everyone is worse off except for the hyper rich.
Ryan Clark
I'd agree with you, but after reading it I don't think it has much basis in reality. Most of the article is just dot connecting and trying to tie the whole dirtbag left to zoe quinn, pedo shmorky and a couple of other big aut-right boogeymen. There's no discussion of how the FYAD/Helldump/LF crowd evolved over the Obama years and there's obvious inaccuracies. For instance as a former LF lurker I can tell you that the board has always been socdem at the very least, with large numbers of MLs and other left posters. He inaccurately handwaves this by just saying that the board "went from liberal or socialist." He probably wasn't around to witness McCaine get in one last dig at Vilerat after he got killed in Benghazi (rest in piss)
All he did was just go on the SA wiki and Encyclopedia Dramatica, read a few articles and filled the rest with conjecture.
Also I looked up the tech company the second author works at. It's literally just a company that helps big investment banks automate trading consumer debt. I'm convinced most of these aut-right "leaders" just want to return to a feudal authoritarian principalities, with state-sponsored militias and propaganda networks keeping an ethnically homogeneous and poor underclass obedient to the tech overlords.
The hell are you talking about. Obama reneged on most everything he promised. He was a centrist technocrat to the core who protected wall street from the worst offenses.
Apart from typical culture war bullshit there's little separating trump from obama. Trump would be complaining on twitter that the election was stolen from him right now if Obama passed actual left policies and Bernie promised to continue them.
wrong, go watch TTGL again
A lot of the yelling about elites/deep state is trying to cover for the fact that Trump isn't an outsider anymore, he's another corrupt billionaire politician who's at home in the swamp.
Jace Miller
wow i actually had that Death Cab shirt pictured on the 2001 girl. dang.
Eli Rivera
It wouldn't surprise me if Nick Land's NrX neofeudal dystopia ends up being implemented by nominally 'woke' sillicon valley neoliberals. Their plans for the education system are nightmarish.
Trump's a confused old man who doesn't remember what he had for breakfast. It's like an overlong sitcom gag that becomes increasingly disturbing as time goes on.
Adam Rodriguez
Agreed that imageboards are too ephemeral and fast-moving (8ch is especially infuriating since WE HAVEN'T HAD AN ARCHIVE IN YEARS, NOT EVEN JUST FOR Holla Forums!!), but it's the price we pay to avoid the rulecuckery that renders normal UBB-style fora unusable if you make even the slightest sincerely controversial statements on a regular basis, rather than consciously pre-brainwashing every statement to avoid upsetting the handful of fragile pampered bootlickers every forum mod accumulates, not to mention potential lawsuits if you dare to talk about outside issues.
Something distributed, anonymous, and untraceable is really the only viable approach. We need a new USENET, designed to withstand the spamming that killed it before.
Oh my, anyone here remember the early days of GG, when Atheism+ was fresh in everyone's minds? The first place I heard about GG was on The Slymepit, and it really seemed like Youtube skeptics (Thunderf00t, Amazing Atheist, etc., who incidentally had the most organized and energetic opinionstube presence of any group at the time) would become the center of gravity for GG, undeniably branding the struggle as an internecine one between liberals, instead of yet another "reaction" by "right-wingers" against "progressive" "values"? Holla Forums seizing the reigns of GG, especially on Youtube, was such a colossal downer.
The goon conspiracy is absolutely responsible for usurping admin positions all over the internet, and their past behavior has been overshadowed by their "personal growth", remember when a roomful of these hardassed ironybros was dragged out by their literally triggered girlfriends who just couldn't even after Sam Hyde trolled them? The goons of 2003 were different from the goons of 2008 or 2014 (both population-wise, and as individuals over time), and it doesn't even matter whether or not that change is sincere, because the piranha pool of namefag callout culture they've created for themselves ensures that all of them have to at least put up the most convincing façade they can at all times.
A murker question for me, is how the goons and the Tumblrinas linked up. The goon descent into SJWdom happened as the result of their own internal social dynamics, with only small amounts of high-level leftist theory from more érudite posters as a side-effect of older ongoing political debates. Tumblrinas evolved separately (and, epithet aside, not just on Tumblr, but other similar places like deviantART, fanfiction.net, and LiveJournal), among airheaded teenagers exposed to the most degraded nuclear runoff from academic PoMo crit theory agitprop. Was it the advent of Twatter and NSABook, or did the two start overlapping earlier?
I'm not a goon, or even an imageboard oldfag (clung to USENET until all the ISPs dropped it over "muh pedos"), but are you denying any of the blatant links within the incestuous сirсlejerk he's talking about? Aside from the simple fact LF was founded due to the Paulbot plague of the 2000s, there's numerous other well-known instances of major shifts from a bipartisan population to a "leftist" hugb𐐬ⅹ, like the bets on the presidential elections that resulted in large numbers of rightists being banned. While that poster is clearly an /r/T_D fanboi high on his own memes, the quotes around "proved" indicate sarcasm. And he's right, throughout the Obama administration, especially after 2012, it had become accepted "truth" that after le ebil boomers died off and we imported enough beaners, the Overton Window would inevitably contract to the point of the Republican party simply ceasing to exist. While the bulk of the SJW cancer dates from c.2007 and the destruction of OWS (not to mention a headlock in academic political science dating back to the 1970s, though its insularity prevented that from being very influential before), Obama certainly played a part in worsening its intensity and enlarging its influence. The Title IX Dear Colleague Letter is an infamous example.
Jacob Murphy
SJWs are literally THE JOOZ of leftypol. I've seen more than once anons unironically blame them for the impotence of the left.
Joshua Baker
Space Moose makes me feel pride as a Canadian
Those exist and are on Tor or I2P. Anything like that will attract pedos and other shitheads, followed by expected law enforcement. 8ch is probably as good as it gets.
Agreed, but it was expected given the subject. Pay-to-play has been an open secret in video game journalism for years, no one gave a shit until you hooked people with idpol and a good old fashioned sex scandal.
You're forgetting that Sam himself was introduced BY a goon (Virgil). But I think you're just reading too much into this. SA was an incubator for a particular type of humour that gained popularity in the social media age. Goons that had been honing their craft in the FYAD/LF dojos were therefore predisposed to move in and feed demand for that humour, gaining social capital in the process. They don't have that much pull outside online leftist circles, though. Lots of "progressive" or left-liberal platforms pull writers and admins the Livejournal/dA/Tumblr sphere which values sincere discourse and a focus on personal experiences over broader social trends.
What. The two have had a mutual hatred for each other for decades. Chapo shitting on liberal feminists railing against the berniebros has its parallels in irony-poisoned helldump goons shitting on the sincere internet drama of livejournal emos.
I'm denying the relevance of the links he's drawing. Some of them are incredibly tenuous, which backs up the fact that the author himself doesn't know the history of what he's talking about (apart from a couple of wiki articles)
Even outside of LF (which was strictly understood to a containment cell for shitposting where anything rightly could happen) D&D right-wingers never meshed with the board culture because right-wing posting style never got past goons that had too much time on their hands. You couldn't get away with posting a bunch of shitty research papers from the Cato institute, because goons would tear apart the papers within six hours and call you a retard for believing them. When 4chan opened up, they had a place where they could cite and say anything they want without fear of repercussion, since any mistakes were likely to be ignored and forgotten by tomorrow.
No one outside of the DNC believed this. And Obama deported illegal immigrants in record numbers, so it's not like anyone even drank their own kool-aid.
A reminder that the biggest "wins" in Obama's second term were largely cultural and related to gay rights/marriage equality. When you're a young activist that sees a country curbstomp OWS but eventually acquiesce to gay rights, it's not hard to figure out where all of the action can be found. Meanwhile, lots of minorities expected Obama to make substantial progress on fronts like criminal justice reform and exited institutional politics for protest movements like BLM when that failed to materialize.
Parker Evans
But they're so sloooooooow, they don't get 1/100th the traffic Reddit, 4chan, or even any of the big web 1.0 forums (GameFAQs, Democratic Underground, Fark, etc.) back in the day. I just want something big and diverse, like USENET, where you could run into anyone and talk about anything in a format that wasn't completely braindead, rulecucked, and namefagged to death. GOOD, those people will be lurking regardless, like they are now on NSABook, if normalfags are aware of their presence, it will keep them from falling into the trap of thinking everybody goes and tells the truth on the internet. That was far from the main motivation behind GG. The main impetus tying everything else together was the looming prospect of a McCarthyite Comics Code-style wholesale elimination of gaming (and geekdom as a whole) as a medium of artistic expression and an industrial sector of culture, imposed with the willing consent of the liberals who had traditionally defended it from the moral panics of censorious busybodies. It wasn't about sex, or even corruption, but SURVIVAL. Like I said, people and places change. The hateboner between goons and anons is in many ways a father vs. son tragedy of (epicly gay) Star Wars proportions. That hasn't stopped the massive overlap between Weird Twitter goons and mayonnaise gendered Tumblrinas on Reddit in the Fempire from happening. There doesn't seem to be much written about the history of it, though, and I mostly avoided Reddit, so I'm unsure as to how the two pools of sewage seeped together. That's nothing new, but huge swathes of the liberalatti (the worst concentration of PURE IDEOLOGY was the audiences of ironically unironic pundit parody pundits of the Daily Show and its ilk) certainly drank it up like a dehydrated man at a desert oasis.
Jack Jones
Much of reddit has pretty light moderation.
Carter Cook
Even ignoring the pervasive flaws of its format (upboats, karmawhores, gold digging) and insane ideas that would've been laughed at as dystopian parody but are now cultural norms ("doxing", "brigading", "shadowbanning", autobanning people for merely posting in certain subreddits), there is the omnipresent threat of your sub being nuked by the SRS cabal at Reddit HQ for wrongthink.
Note that I never got banned, and almost never even got a post deleted, at any of the normal webforums I frequented, but I keenly felt the lash of the thought police in carefully trimming each post around the contours of their autism, watching as the first people to get banned when each forum exited its "wild west" stage were invariably the best posters, and each subforum that was closed or merged into another was invariably the one I frequented the most.
I'm just so, so tired of being chased from one forum to another as mods surround themselves with or get coopted by "polite" social-climbing psychopathic parasites.
Jonathan Jackson
Any forum that gets enough traffic will suffer the consequences of high post volume (4/b/) or get moderated to death (SA).
Shame on me for taking their rhetoric at face value, I guess?
First they take our boob sliders, then…the WORLD No one is going to take your triple A budget games away from you, since most of them have been focused grouped to death to ensure they sell. Even so-called "indie" games like Cuphead have lots of venture cash behind them to promote the game. Artistic expression is always at the fringes of any medium, where capital nor pop culture bothers to reach out and change things for normies. You could always just be like me and only buy 3 year-old games on sale. It's just like that XKCD comic where you get new games at half the price, and without any of the shitty drama to boot! And to be honest, I don't even see the need to try and inject tribal idpol into my vidya anyway. Some of my favourite (and brutally violent) games have been made by idpol liberals. See Lisa: The Painful for a good example. Who cares? It doesn't matter, we're in our own silos by and large. From what I've read about tumblr, the platform and its culture largely evolved independent of other platforms. This can be seen in its radically different user base (SA is college age males, while tumblr skews toward teenage girls) and in its debate style, which tends away from irony and more towards a mix of straghtforward sincerity and observational humour.
Look dude, I hate to say it but you seem to have an incredibly rosy view of Usenet forums. Go and actually read some of the old archives from the 80s and 90s: they're full of drama, shitflinging, mod shenanigans, etc. Most of the software infrastructure hasn't really been seriously changed since the early 00s. The architecture is the same, so why would the interactions be any different?
And by the same token, why do you yearn for a wild west anyway? For most forums, that usually amounts to incompetent/lazy mods that allow griefers and other shitposters to spam a forum to death.
To tear a page out of the SA rulebook, you're taking the internet too seriously. Pretend I gave you a 24 hour ban and go outside and read Bordiga. Most forums are parasites sucking up all your free time.
Grayson Wilson
He was never aut-right tier but he definitely became an idpol liberal AFTER Lisa. lisa is also pretty overrated t.my hot opinion
