For one thing, when people say "they're losing profit" - well, are they? Or is their target audience not you? A company might care more about Chinese regulatory and public opinion more than American, if their product is very-well established and China is the new growth market and the location of their manufacturing. A company who knows that it won't really lose conservative customers of their very good or very necessary product can totally afford to go all woke, if it helps them with their own staff retention, regulatory compliance, marketing, etc. etc. Going back to the tech companies, yeah if they bring the hammer down too strongly, they WILL lose profit and push people into ACTUALLY forming something new, instead of just talking about it and half-assing it.
And if they're not committed to total war, for all the reasons you outlined: for a normal person to get banned, they have to be noticed. The mechanisms are probably user reporting, and automatic stupid blanket rules around the topics of interest, like COVID, elections "disinformation", trans issues. (For example, in one of my FB groups, every time the word "Vaccine" is mentioned, including in an image, a link to a FB Info Page on vaccines pops up.) This explains why innocuous tweets, including ones CRITIQUING a "bad" tweet, get automatically flagged.
I'm sure they also do covert things like shadow-banning and otherwise limiting the visibility of undesirable account: making it harder to subscribe, removing from recommending algorithms, removing from feeds, being more aggressive in auditing followers, I don't know. I'm guessing they have different lists or categories of users which the system treats differently, maybe?
There seem to be more passive tools to prevent anonymous engagement. I've heard of two cases where they require you to verify your phone number before you can keep posting, or your ban remains in place -- i.e., making you commit and not be anonymous to THEM (even if you are to the public). Or, as another example, Twitter wasn't letting me read or use functionality on my phone unless I installed an app (the way Reddit is doing now), or limiting how much I could scroll without making an account. Poof, one less suspicious reader whose info can't be mined. MIND YOU: these tools are probably more for generating revenue - they need to be able to count you and use your data to advertise to you - but still, it works for reducing anonymity and the spread of untraceable, subversive info. (Of course, if they gatekeep TOO much, they lose users and revenue..... Pinterest, Zulily - brands that at one time or another have required registration to access their content/products - probably have/had these issues. Probably why reddit doesn't require you to verify an email - it differentiates them from their competition!)
Finally, on the Putin question. Not everyone has the stomach for mass carnage, even if they have stomach for a little bit? Also, does China want Russia to execute their entire opposition? I wonder. :D
On comments: This one seems to have come through, though I don't see the short one I saw in the email... Substack has been really slow in posting, particularly in the web browser, the past couple days.
Hah, yea that sounds about right :) I have yet to get any notifications regarding spam filters or other comment moderation, so I don't know that any actually gets done. I have noticed some (presumably) bots that will post something like "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" then seemingly edit it to be "make money on the internet!" sorts of things, but otherwise the comments seem just slow.
That is an excellent point, the advertising is only part of the revenue stream for these companies, and data collection for resale is a really big part. You don't want to ban all the golden geese, just train them not to honk so loudly.
There are signs of something of a thaw happening. Netflix pink-slipping the shrews whose boring garbage just cost them hundreds of millions of dollars. Coinbase adopting an explicitly apolitical company policy. What appears to be a post-liberal counterculture emerging in NYC of all places (as described by that recent Vanity Fair article). I've seen this in private life, too, with fairly liberal friends voicing their frustration with woke.
Assuming the same thing is happening quietly at the big tech platforms, and might have been for a while, that would also explain the lack of total censorship. The woke generate increasing friction for themselves as they get increasingly shrill.
That Netflix move was heartwarming, no doubt about it. I think the shrews as you put it really did over reach, and many companies are realizing they overshot the cultural change and are trying to dial things back. Hopefully more pushback will happen and companies will start enforcing a "keep your politics at home" sort of approach, although I don't know how successful that will be. I am afraid that there is so much political interference in business via the regulatory state that businesses just can't avoid politics in the office, or even break down into different companies serving different demographics fully.
Ultimately it's gotta be a cultural change - in the workplace, a return to professionalism, where the politics of others is simply irrelevant; and at the interpersonal level, a return to a general ethos of live-and-let-live. The infuriating thing about woke isn't that they're insane and wrong about basically everything, it's that they demand that everyone else shut and pretend to agree. There's nothing more obnoxious than the office shitlib that expects you to laugh at their political cracks but starts shrieking when you make your own.
So far as the state goes, over the long run I expect that the much higher level of competition faced by Western countries will force the most egregious DIE policies to be jettisoned as ideological luxuries that we can no longer afford. That will take a while though, given the entrenched interests who benefit from social engineering and are not themselves going to pay a price for it any time soon.
I fear the cultural change necessary will be a collapse of the multi-ideological US empire into small, more homogenous units. (That, or a horrifyingly powerful external foe that almost no one can want to be part of (so China is out) that unifies people against it in the sense of even woke/qanon are not THOSE guys. At this point that might require a Watchmen-esque alien monster invasion.)
Now, maybe enough of the moderate left will tell the crazy fringe to shut up and sit down such that the adults can keep talking and being professional, but I don't know that there are enough shared principles to make that happen. I have a half written essay entitled "Oedipus Left" on the matter, essentially making the argument that the American left does not have any limiting principles to control a continual leftwards push. Wokeism is simply the logical conclusion of the generalized left wing philosophy as it stands today. (The right has its own problems there, but the principle of "leave adults alone to manage their own affairs and take responsibility for themselves" is pretty strong, and almost entirely lacking on the left.)
What really worries me is that DIE policies at the political level will become more prominent as things increasingly go to hell. "See! This just proves how racist this nation is! We need more DIE/SOCIALISM/TOTALITARIANISM!" It seems that total collapse is often needed to correct course, but man, I hope I am wrong.
Yeah, that's the worry. Collapsing empires have certainly tripled down on ideological psychosis in the past. When people lose their bearings due to change becoming so rapid that they lose all point of reference, they'll frequently reach for superstitious fanaticism - the Ghost Dance, the Boxer Rebellion, the Flagellants of the Middle Ages.
I suppose the one faint silver lining in that scenario is that the more a culture loses touch with reality, the more rapidly it dies. That usually takes a generation or two and a lot of suffering and death, though, so in the short run it isn't very reassuring.
There's of course also the middle way, which is almost as bad. The West temporarily pulls back on the crazy in order to fight WWIII, does so just enough to rally the population and win the war, and then immediately reverts to full DIE ... only now with no possibility of multipolar opposition acting as a natural break on the madness.
Huh, had to look up the Ghost Dance thing, never heard of that. Cool!
I wonder if maybe a possibly decent third way might be something like Canada going REALLY batshit crazy, so much so that it heavily stigmatizes the Woke and Progressives in general. It might still require a war, but the horrors of Nazi Germany did a lot to end the early 20th century excesses in the US, largely in one direction, so maybe that would do the trick. It would really suck for Canadians (sorry, John :( ) but since they are so proximate and similar to the US, and considered much nicer and more sane, it might strike a chord the way that Cuba and say Venezuela do not. Seeing our nice neighbor to the North collapsing into bloody madness and tyranny might be the push it takes.
You know it is bad when the "possibly decent third way" is a major nation state dissolving into madness in a suitably visible way. I feel bad just writing that.
I've had a similar thought, regarding Canada specifically. The logical endpoint would be a horrified America invading in order to liberate the imprisoned populace, similar to how Vietnam chased Pol Pot into the jungle when the Khmer Rouge got just a bit too frisky for the comfort of their nominal fellow travellers across the border. The upshot is that Canada might finally have a decent Constitution.
A cynical counter-theory. Inconsistent banning creates a climate of ambient fear, like stochastic terror. It also gives you cover for blanket judgement for authoritarianism.
This idea is 2 minutes old, so it may not stand up to scrutiny.
I that that is a beneficial effect (for the banner) but I don't know if it is intentional in this case. My suspicion based on how well management actually functions is that they would like to be more consistent, but there are so many moving parts and people that they end up being pretty random, but that actually helps them be more efficient by happy circumstance. (Again, happy for the banners, not humanity!) Then again, there might be a few upper mid level folks making that trade off, pointing out that if they are more random they get a lot of the benefits of censorship while still being able to point to examples of not censoring people. I just don't know how many are capable of really thinking like that. (I wonder how you would find that out... it would be interesting to know.)
I love that phrase "stochastic terror"! I need to find places to apply it :)
I think you're completely right.
For one thing, when people say "they're losing profit" - well, are they? Or is their target audience not you? A company might care more about Chinese regulatory and public opinion more than American, if their product is very-well established and China is the new growth market and the location of their manufacturing. A company who knows that it won't really lose conservative customers of their very good or very necessary product can totally afford to go all woke, if it helps them with their own staff retention, regulatory compliance, marketing, etc. etc. Going back to the tech companies, yeah if they bring the hammer down too strongly, they WILL lose profit and push people into ACTUALLY forming something new, instead of just talking about it and half-assing it.
And if they're not committed to total war, for all the reasons you outlined: for a normal person to get banned, they have to be noticed. The mechanisms are probably user reporting, and automatic stupid blanket rules around the topics of interest, like COVID, elections "disinformation", trans issues. (For example, in one of my FB groups, every time the word "Vaccine" is mentioned, including in an image, a link to a FB Info Page on vaccines pops up.) This explains why innocuous tweets, including ones CRITIQUING a "bad" tweet, get automatically flagged.
I'm sure they also do covert things like shadow-banning and otherwise limiting the visibility of undesirable account: making it harder to subscribe, removing from recommending algorithms, removing from feeds, being more aggressive in auditing followers, I don't know. I'm guessing they have different lists or categories of users which the system treats differently, maybe?
There seem to be more passive tools to prevent anonymous engagement. I've heard of two cases where they require you to verify your phone number before you can keep posting, or your ban remains in place -- i.e., making you commit and not be anonymous to THEM (even if you are to the public). Or, as another example, Twitter wasn't letting me read or use functionality on my phone unless I installed an app (the way Reddit is doing now), or limiting how much I could scroll without making an account. Poof, one less suspicious reader whose info can't be mined. MIND YOU: these tools are probably more for generating revenue - they need to be able to count you and use your data to advertise to you - but still, it works for reducing anonymity and the spread of untraceable, subversive info. (Of course, if they gatekeep TOO much, they lose users and revenue..... Pinterest, Zulily - brands that at one time or another have required registration to access their content/products - probably have/had these issues. Probably why reddit doesn't require you to verify an email - it differentiates them from their competition!)
Finally, on the Putin question. Not everyone has the stomach for mass carnage, even if they have stomach for a little bit? Also, does China want Russia to execute their entire opposition? I wonder. :D
On comments: This one seems to have come through, though I don't see the short one I saw in the email... Substack has been really slow in posting, particularly in the web browser, the past couple days.
I refreshed a few times, saw my first one not post, wrote the second complaining comment....then the first one posted and I deleted the second one :D
Hah, yea that sounds about right :) I have yet to get any notifications regarding spam filters or other comment moderation, so I don't know that any actually gets done. I have noticed some (presumably) bots that will post something like "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" then seemingly edit it to be "make money on the internet!" sorts of things, but otherwise the comments seem just slow.
That is an excellent point, the advertising is only part of the revenue stream for these companies, and data collection for resale is a really big part. You don't want to ban all the golden geese, just train them not to honk so loudly.
There are signs of something of a thaw happening. Netflix pink-slipping the shrews whose boring garbage just cost them hundreds of millions of dollars. Coinbase adopting an explicitly apolitical company policy. What appears to be a post-liberal counterculture emerging in NYC of all places (as described by that recent Vanity Fair article). I've seen this in private life, too, with fairly liberal friends voicing their frustration with woke.
Assuming the same thing is happening quietly at the big tech platforms, and might have been for a while, that would also explain the lack of total censorship. The woke generate increasing friction for themselves as they get increasingly shrill.
That Netflix move was heartwarming, no doubt about it. I think the shrews as you put it really did over reach, and many companies are realizing they overshot the cultural change and are trying to dial things back. Hopefully more pushback will happen and companies will start enforcing a "keep your politics at home" sort of approach, although I don't know how successful that will be. I am afraid that there is so much political interference in business via the regulatory state that businesses just can't avoid politics in the office, or even break down into different companies serving different demographics fully.
Ultimately it's gotta be a cultural change - in the workplace, a return to professionalism, where the politics of others is simply irrelevant; and at the interpersonal level, a return to a general ethos of live-and-let-live. The infuriating thing about woke isn't that they're insane and wrong about basically everything, it's that they demand that everyone else shut and pretend to agree. There's nothing more obnoxious than the office shitlib that expects you to laugh at their political cracks but starts shrieking when you make your own.
So far as the state goes, over the long run I expect that the much higher level of competition faced by Western countries will force the most egregious DIE policies to be jettisoned as ideological luxuries that we can no longer afford. That will take a while though, given the entrenched interests who benefit from social engineering and are not themselves going to pay a price for it any time soon.
I fear the cultural change necessary will be a collapse of the multi-ideological US empire into small, more homogenous units. (That, or a horrifyingly powerful external foe that almost no one can want to be part of (so China is out) that unifies people against it in the sense of even woke/qanon are not THOSE guys. At this point that might require a Watchmen-esque alien monster invasion.)
Now, maybe enough of the moderate left will tell the crazy fringe to shut up and sit down such that the adults can keep talking and being professional, but I don't know that there are enough shared principles to make that happen. I have a half written essay entitled "Oedipus Left" on the matter, essentially making the argument that the American left does not have any limiting principles to control a continual leftwards push. Wokeism is simply the logical conclusion of the generalized left wing philosophy as it stands today. (The right has its own problems there, but the principle of "leave adults alone to manage their own affairs and take responsibility for themselves" is pretty strong, and almost entirely lacking on the left.)
What really worries me is that DIE policies at the political level will become more prominent as things increasingly go to hell. "See! This just proves how racist this nation is! We need more DIE/SOCIALISM/TOTALITARIANISM!" It seems that total collapse is often needed to correct course, but man, I hope I am wrong.
Yeah, that's the worry. Collapsing empires have certainly tripled down on ideological psychosis in the past. When people lose their bearings due to change becoming so rapid that they lose all point of reference, they'll frequently reach for superstitious fanaticism - the Ghost Dance, the Boxer Rebellion, the Flagellants of the Middle Ages.
I suppose the one faint silver lining in that scenario is that the more a culture loses touch with reality, the more rapidly it dies. That usually takes a generation or two and a lot of suffering and death, though, so in the short run it isn't very reassuring.
There's of course also the middle way, which is almost as bad. The West temporarily pulls back on the crazy in order to fight WWIII, does so just enough to rally the population and win the war, and then immediately reverts to full DIE ... only now with no possibility of multipolar opposition acting as a natural break on the madness.
Huh, had to look up the Ghost Dance thing, never heard of that. Cool!
I wonder if maybe a possibly decent third way might be something like Canada going REALLY batshit crazy, so much so that it heavily stigmatizes the Woke and Progressives in general. It might still require a war, but the horrors of Nazi Germany did a lot to end the early 20th century excesses in the US, largely in one direction, so maybe that would do the trick. It would really suck for Canadians (sorry, John :( ) but since they are so proximate and similar to the US, and considered much nicer and more sane, it might strike a chord the way that Cuba and say Venezuela do not. Seeing our nice neighbor to the North collapsing into bloody madness and tyranny might be the push it takes.
You know it is bad when the "possibly decent third way" is a major nation state dissolving into madness in a suitably visible way. I feel bad just writing that.
I've had a similar thought, regarding Canada specifically. The logical endpoint would be a horrified America invading in order to liberate the imprisoned populace, similar to how Vietnam chased Pol Pot into the jungle when the Khmer Rouge got just a bit too frisky for the comfort of their nominal fellow travellers across the border. The upshot is that Canada might finally have a decent Constitution.
A cynical counter-theory. Inconsistent banning creates a climate of ambient fear, like stochastic terror. It also gives you cover for blanket judgement for authoritarianism.
This idea is 2 minutes old, so it may not stand up to scrutiny.
I that that is a beneficial effect (for the banner) but I don't know if it is intentional in this case. My suspicion based on how well management actually functions is that they would like to be more consistent, but there are so many moving parts and people that they end up being pretty random, but that actually helps them be more efficient by happy circumstance. (Again, happy for the banners, not humanity!) Then again, there might be a few upper mid level folks making that trade off, pointing out that if they are more random they get a lot of the benefits of censorship while still being able to point to examples of not censoring people. I just don't know how many are capable of really thinking like that. (I wonder how you would find that out... it would be interesting to know.)
I love that phrase "stochastic terror"! I need to find places to apply it :)
Mind-reading apparatus. That’s what we need. It would of course create problems, but how many would it solve too. There’s a subject to think on