Eventually, one "snaps".
One habit those attempting to be kind is to give people the benefit of the doubt. If one is faced with the suggestion that there is a war between a legion of unfair partisan actors and a brave group of independent thinkers, one has a choice to make - either believe the accusations are true and take up arms with the accusers, believe the accusations are false and actively debunk them, or decide one has something better to do than get involved.
For the last several years, the constant drumbeat was that the "regressive left" was ruining everything - academia, the news, even the scientific method. A new wave of progressives has emerged, they are organized, and set upon a new identity equity program that will ruin modern civilization.
Given this narrative, it's difficult to not get involved. Who has not read headlines that distort? Who has not seen an article get the science wrong? Who has not met a "liberal" professor that is actually a dumbass? Connecting these dots (that are in reality unrelated) creates an all-encompassing worldview that simplifies life. Humans love patterns. Humans love enemies. Create a pattern, create an enemy, everything makes sense.
After drafting oneself in the War For Truth within one group of "intellectuals", "centrists" or another, life is swell for a while. The problem arises when one realizes that the enemies are easy to vanquish. The leftist identity politics regressive enemies of truth, free thought and free speech do not actually control the media. They do not actually control academia. They do not actually manage reputable journals.
The social justice warriors, as it were, do not actually control much of anything worthwhile. Indeed, newspapers and magazines publish completely clickbait garbage. Everything is "problematic". Companies publish asinine diversity statements. There are seemingly critical events. But it all eventually degrades to background noise within a matter of hours, only to be picked up by the most sensitive of radios. Every defender of all that is good and correct in the world ultimately finds themselves dunking on the same short hoop.
One would imagine that the lack of enemies would move the dialogue forward. No emo-progressive blowhards currently in the way of our treasured freethought? Time to make advances, push humanity forward, in the absence of those that would put under a cloud of identity discontent. As much as this would be satisfying, it never works out that way. Instead of finding new pastures, too many are focused on rehashing prior battles - strangely not to retell successes (as they are often pyrrhic victories) but rather to go over what the awful regressive leftists should have said or should have done or should be doing now in order to be more correct or more convincing.
Layered on top of the obsessive recollections of arguments gone by is a problem that creates an unhealthy competition within the Comrades Concerned About Civil Conversation. That problem is an extreme lack of content. If one is going to make a career out of being right, one needs to find someone being wrong so often as to fill a 40 hour work week. This is quite easy for one committed to a typical political punditry - just watch CSPAN until something happens that would make your audience furious. However for those eager to capture the crown of intellectualism, it is important to not follow a partisan dragon. The challenge is to create a political chat show that appeals to a demographic of people that believe themselves to not be partisans. People that wear "independent" as a badge. People that think contrarianism is a personality.
The content needs to be politics-adjacent. A subtext beside the story. An element of culture or society that isn't being very loudly spoken about, or has an affiliation with "hard facts". If the content approximates a solution to a real problem (economics, healthcare, climate), the proposed solution needs to be sufficiently blue sky, sufficiently eclectic. These are the drugs the demographic is looking for.
Naturally, weaving this web together is difficult. Be relevant, but not too political. Cover the culture wars, but claim as much agnosticism as possible. Talk to a variety of people about a variety of things, but bring the point back to the central effort - the battle of ideas. Dave Rubin's show is the brightest example of this sort of content generation, and how exactly it works has been dissected at length multiple times. (Part two, Part three)
As YouTube chat shows and podcasts to satisfy the demographic of bold independent thinkers grow at a bewildering pace, the competition for content and clicks becomes quite nasty. There can only be so many of the "smartest" people in the room before it starts to feel crowded. Cautious observers of social insanity become content creators. A need to establish dominance over other "intellectuals" creates tribes and a Darwinian purge of would-be competitors. The only rule of the game honored by all players is to not see the game for what it is.
The average audience member will eventually grow to see the cracks in the intellectual potemkin village.
The repeating themes are:
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Now, if one suggested that this is just a familiar version of right wing politics, that would be to commit the same crime as the SPLC - one would be labelling the unlabel-able group of intellectual superfriends!
After all, the 'intellectual dark web' is about building bridges. And their biggest bridge builder (followed both by Sam Harris and Eric Weinstein, and chatting to them on the phone on a seemingly quarterly basis) is Candace Owens:
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This might sound like irresponsible reporting during a pandemic, but that does not matter. Candace Owens has not claimed that any of the Intellectual Dark Web are bigots, so Candace Owens is held in high esteem. Dialogue does not matter. Civility does not matter. All these people are intellectual pornographers deeply committed to mainstreaming anything and anybody that elevates their status as hero to a certain demographic of self-absorbed under-accomplished very online people.
The intellectual dark web is a hivemind of victimhood. It is everything it claims to hate, but worse. A cult of fake intellect, fake accomplishments, and most disgusting of all, fake friendships.
It's infuriating - enough to inspire one to document all of it. Spend one's evenings and weekends begging people to come to their senses. Show even one inch of a spine. An ounce of contrition. A measure of common sense. Planning about how one can effectively bait engagement in order to turn the tide. But now when cannot, one has an opportunity to focus on growing strong, learning on how to get along with the people that matter, and surviving the mess the world finds itself in. Without a petulant mess of "intellectuals" starved for one's attention. It's time to click on something else.
It's a great time for social distancing.
Goodbye.
One habit those attempting to be kind is to give people the benefit of the doubt. If one is faced with the suggestion that there is a war between a legion of unfair partisan actors and a brave group of independent thinkers, one has a choice to make - either believe the accusations are true and take up arms with the accusers, believe the accusations are false and actively debunk them, or decide one has something better to do than get involved.
For the last several years, the constant drumbeat was that the "regressive left" was ruining everything - academia, the news, even the scientific method. A new wave of progressives has emerged, they are organized, and set upon a new identity equity program that will ruin modern civilization.
Given this narrative, it's difficult to not get involved. Who has not read headlines that distort? Who has not seen an article get the science wrong? Who has not met a "liberal" professor that is actually a dumbass? Connecting these dots (that are in reality unrelated) creates an all-encompassing worldview that simplifies life. Humans love patterns. Humans love enemies. Create a pattern, create an enemy, everything makes sense.
After drafting oneself in the War For Truth within one group of "intellectuals", "centrists" or another, life is swell for a while. The problem arises when one realizes that the enemies are easy to vanquish. The leftist identity politics regressive enemies of truth, free thought and free speech do not actually control the media. They do not actually control academia. They do not actually manage reputable journals.
The social justice warriors, as it were, do not actually control much of anything worthwhile. Indeed, newspapers and magazines publish completely clickbait garbage. Everything is "problematic". Companies publish asinine diversity statements. There are seemingly critical events. But it all eventually degrades to background noise within a matter of hours, only to be picked up by the most sensitive of radios. Every defender of all that is good and correct in the world ultimately finds themselves dunking on the same short hoop.
One would imagine that the lack of enemies would move the dialogue forward. No emo-progressive blowhards currently in the way of our treasured freethought? Time to make advances, push humanity forward, in the absence of those that would put under a cloud of identity discontent. As much as this would be satisfying, it never works out that way. Instead of finding new pastures, too many are focused on rehashing prior battles - strangely not to retell successes (as they are often pyrrhic victories) but rather to go over what the awful regressive leftists should have said or should have done or should be doing now in order to be more correct or more convincing.
Layered on top of the obsessive recollections of arguments gone by is a problem that creates an unhealthy competition within the Comrades Concerned About Civil Conversation. That problem is an extreme lack of content. If one is going to make a career out of being right, one needs to find someone being wrong so often as to fill a 40 hour work week. This is quite easy for one committed to a typical political punditry - just watch CSPAN until something happens that would make your audience furious. However for those eager to capture the crown of intellectualism, it is important to not follow a partisan dragon. The challenge is to create a political chat show that appeals to a demographic of people that believe themselves to not be partisans. People that wear "independent" as a badge. People that think contrarianism is a personality.
The content needs to be politics-adjacent. A subtext beside the story. An element of culture or society that isn't being very loudly spoken about, or has an affiliation with "hard facts". If the content approximates a solution to a real problem (economics, healthcare, climate), the proposed solution needs to be sufficiently blue sky, sufficiently eclectic. These are the drugs the demographic is looking for.
Naturally, weaving this web together is difficult. Be relevant, but not too political. Cover the culture wars, but claim as much agnosticism as possible. Talk to a variety of people about a variety of things, but bring the point back to the central effort - the battle of ideas. Dave Rubin's show is the brightest example of this sort of content generation, and how exactly it works has been dissected at length multiple times. (Part two, Part three)
As YouTube chat shows and podcasts to satisfy the demographic of bold independent thinkers grow at a bewildering pace, the competition for content and clicks becomes quite nasty. There can only be so many of the "smartest" people in the room before it starts to feel crowded. Cautious observers of social insanity become content creators. A need to establish dominance over other "intellectuals" creates tribes and a Darwinian purge of would-be competitors. The only rule of the game honored by all players is to not see the game for what it is.
The average audience member will eventually grow to see the cracks in the intellectual potemkin village.
The repeating themes are:
- Promoting boring religious traditionalism as brave new ideas
- Promoting the typical pundit class as a source of edgy takes
- Promoting run of the mill tinfoil hat conspiracy theories and character assassination as new intellectual frontiers
- Promoting needlessly offensive and spiteful hatreds as rigorous debate about things that matter
- Promoting a shallow meta dialogue-about-dialogue as being a uniquely useful and interesting thing to engage with
- Promoting haphazard and self-aggrandizing content instead of responsibly communicating during a crisis
One could remind the players that all these side quests are a distraction, but one is misunderstanding the core goals of the main figures of the movement. None of the heroes of the "politically homeless", "free thought" and "intellectual dark web" are actually committed to accomplishing much of anything except engaging with the worst dreck they can find on Twitter.
It is depressing and disappointing to learn that the most rotten piece of modern politics is truly the "new center" that claims to transcend partisan bickering. It is the most self-congratulatory mental masturbation use of technology that humanity has ever seen.
Pointing out this group's faults is a quick way to be blocked, muted, disregarded. One may invest as much energy as one desires -- it is merely an experiment in self-harm.
After hitting a wall, one may eventually log on and tell all these people to eat feces and decease.
Then the fun begins.
Despite the P-a-t-r-e-o-n saint of the "intellectual dark web" that led them to building their own platforms being one Carl Benjamin, a man unafraid to drop the n-word on stream and make toxic "jokes" about absolutely everyone, the dark web crew that hates political correctness happens to be the biggest fan of pointless kindness in language when they are the subject of a tweet.
It's a simple experiment to do - spend a week itemizing everything wrong with a "dark web" character's faults. Write up your disagreement in a blogpost or a podcast. Tag them in the criticism. The chance of engagement with a critique will be a function of one's status (audience size), one's gender (remember to smile in one's profile picture), and one's deferential nature - it is key to remember to critique in a way that builds the self-esteem of the contrarian dark web hero.
Of course, nobody has time for this. It's much more fun to just find the worst man one can find, and wish prostate cancer upon them in a tweet.
Guaranteed, within a matter of hours if not minutes, the following will happen:
- The dark web conversationbro will quote-tweet the "attack"
- The conversationbro's fans will pile on - even in strangely hypocritical ways that mirror image the contempt of the initial tweet. (one should prepare to be told to kill themselves)
- The conversationbro's fans will report your tweet
- Twitter will lock your account, demand a retraction, and solicit even more personal information in order to get into the service's good graces.
Once one crosses the true "intellectuals", one will be forever branded a "social justice warrior". It will not matter how frequently one has tweeted cartoons of the Prophet, lampooned the overbearing do-gooders, or laughed at a gender identity gag. The tribalism sets in, the content is created. A new person is available to shun, and this is what everyone wanted in the first place.
Free speech does not matter. Disdain for political correctness does not matter. The self-appointed defenders of freedom will be demanding one be unmasked and be made to answer for the sin of suggesting that it would be a bit of comedy for something bad to happen to their brilliant big brained brave bro.
The moral universe of internet contrarians is so broken, so skewed, so poisonous that the only thing that matters is extracting revenge over perceived injustices. Getting even is all that matters - someone on their team was passed over for tenure, released from a contract, unable to fetch the Nobel prize he deserved or dismissed outright - often the names of the specific victims are long forgotten, but the hatred simmers. The targets of the Two Minutes Hate forever multiply, without reason or purpose. The list of social justice warriors is dwindling, but it does not matter - for there is antifa to be found around every corner! If one looks hard enough, of course.
One of the great ironies that exposes the intellectual hypocrisy of the "intellectual dark web" is the contempt the group has for the SPLC. The SPLC's primary crime is creating lists of bad people and then placing the "new center" dark web contrarians adjacent to the alt-right and white nationalism. Remember, this "centrist" political "intellectualism" hates any suggestion that they have any political skew. But the best part about hating SPLC's "guilt by association" is that the cybercontrarians end up hypocritically dismissing everyone associated with SPLC's work.
Here is Eric Weinstein endorsing Jack Posobiec, Cernovich, Curtis Yarvin, as being "early" to a true facts about a pandemic. What is clearly recycled Trump trade war sinophobia here doubles as prescience about an impending medical disaster. It does not matter that Cernovich is a pizzagater that trolls his own events for publicity, or that Jack Posobiec held a "Rape Melania" sign as a false flag smear at a rally. It doesn't matter that Curtis Yarvin that is wishing for a white nationalist dictatorship.
All these missteps and hatreds were directed at the out-group. After all, all the negative impacts of the pizzagate conspiracy didn't happen in Eric Weinstein's house. The intellectual dark web clan simply needs more friends that are awed by their genius.
If that was not enough, here is Eric Weinstein endorsing James O'Keefe:
Eric Weinstein says WaPo is trash as health column interviewed shrink Feb 1st about coronavirus anxiety (silly in hindsight).— uberfeminist (@uberfeminist) March 20, 2020
Then, in same show, Eric says James O'Keefe shouldn't be regarded as 'contaminated', writing James/Project Veritas off is wrong & O'Keefe is WaPo's fault pic.twitter.com/m9czK6qQiK
Now, if one suggested that this is just a familiar version of right wing politics, that would be to commit the same crime as the SPLC - one would be labelling the unlabel-able group of intellectual superfriends!
After all, the 'intellectual dark web' is about building bridges. And their biggest bridge builder (followed both by Sam Harris and Eric Weinstein, and chatting to them on the phone on a seemingly quarterly basis) is Candace Owens:
The intellectual dark web is a hivemind of victimhood. It is everything it claims to hate, but worse. A cult of fake intellect, fake accomplishments, and most disgusting of all, fake friendships.
It's infuriating - enough to inspire one to document all of it. Spend one's evenings and weekends begging people to come to their senses. Show even one inch of a spine. An ounce of contrition. A measure of common sense. Planning about how one can effectively bait engagement in order to turn the tide. But now when cannot, one has an opportunity to focus on growing strong, learning on how to get along with the people that matter, and surviving the mess the world finds itself in. Without a petulant mess of "intellectuals" starved for one's attention. It's time to click on something else.
It's a great time for social distancing.
Goodbye.