Internet culture and polarization - when and how did it start to go "wrong"?

Egalitarianwhistle · 2019-08-13T13:02:55+00:00

Great post. You're not the only one. A new term I've come across is the dissident Left, that is normal progressive people that have gotten run over by the crazy Intersectional politics bulldozer. For me, it happened when I stuck up for a friend that was falsely accused of rape. I had context and insight on the situation and when the accusation was made on social media, I posted a defense on social media. Long story short, I lost most of my friends and got thrown into the pit. It seems absurd to me that someone would decide a specific charge of a crime based on their politics. And not just one person but a whole mob decided that the accused was guilty and anyone trying to bring evidence forward was "obviously a rape apologist."

As for the narrative, I think you make a great point that feminism gives young women a strong identity and narrative. Young men, on the other hand, especially white cishet heteros, have nowhere to go. On the one extreme, you have mens lib, and a kind of life of apologizing for who you are. On the other extreme you have alt right nazis and in America, shooters. Honestly, I suspect that the rise of trans women has to do with the fact that it only makes sense that men would want to be women in our currenty social mores where women are good and men are bad. Why not change gender identity if it is incentivized?

I wish I could more clearly articulate what Im trying to say. There is much more of a mob mentality since 2016. The internet has become a more dangerous place.

TokenRhino · 2019-08-13T23:29:05+00:00

It is worth while giving serious thought to how this all started. Around late 2000s the culture war mainly focused around religion and atheism. Mostly represented by Christianity vs a kind of liberal humanism. But even at this time the cracks were starting to show in many places.

The first one I noticed was Islam. As the rise of Islamic terror in the 2000s started to effect our culture people started asking more and more pertinent questions about Islam. Mostly, why is so much of the terrorist community Islamic. Here there were left and right wing schools of thought. Those on the left mostly blamed the disparity on economic and social circumstances. It was because they had less and the US had been fucking them over with foreign policy for years. The right concentrated on the content of religious books and beliefs of Muslim people. Looking at the connection between scripture, belief and action. Sam Harris was probably the most prominent in this regard but Chris Hitchens also made similar connections. Now this would have been all well and good except the more we talked the less productive it got. It got so bad that by the mid 2010s Sam was being called a disgusting racist for bringing up Pew data. But it didn't deteriorate on it's own. Because at the same time another split was occurring in the atheism movement over feminism.

This split was ironic because women's rights are a serious issue is many Arabic Muslim countries, yet we find ourselves in opposite sides of these two simultaneous fractures. But for what it is worth much less high profile people were involved in this. Thunderfoot was a debunking/science channel famous for his series "why do people laugh at creationists", who started criticizing feminism in his videos. This was before gamergate and was a reaction to criticism within the atheism community that it was sexist. It involved a site ran by PZ Myers called freethought blogs. This was mostly during the early 2010s. He was really the start of YouTube feminist critics and set the stage for people like Sargon who is essentially biting his format, which was originally designed to ridicule creationists and the religious generally. From free thought blogs came Atheism+. Basically Atheism plus social justice. And this was the precursor to gamergate. Once Anita Sarkesian came out the split over feminism was in full effect.

This was basically the battlegrounds of the culture war until the mid 2010s. After that it got even more hectic as it became much more political with the addition of Trump and went back on religion a little with the rise of Jordan Peterson. At this point this disagreement over values had reached a boiling point and how we saw the world really bore no resemblance to each other. Many formerly Obama voting atheists voted for Trump because they saw Hilary pandering to the social justice side of the culture war and this had become the most important issue for them. Many of them started to change position on things like immigration due to the rather extreme 'open boarder' views expressed by the opposition. Many on the social justice side also changed positions regarding free speech and political violence, due to the extreme positions taken on the other side. Many atheists also softened their views on religion due to the explanations of Jordan Peterson.

Basically what I see happening is right wing politics being reborn after a rather serious cultural defeat. Some people took the same critical eye they used on religion and applied it to left wing social theory. Be it the idea of patriarchy, cultural relativism, open borders or opposition to social hierarchy in general. I see this as a natural course of events. Progressivism was so dominant in the youth especially that it was bound to split. What I didn't see was how difficult this devide would be to navigate. We thought religious people were intolerant, but looking back it was quite civil. Sure they thought I would burn in hell for all eternity, but there was some level of acceptance that I should be able to make that choice, since god gave us free will. With this new paradigm, if you are seen as a sexist, racist, homophobe etc. You are doing people harm and you need to be stopped. I honestly blame the breakdown of conversation almost entirely on today's left. They tried to take a cultural wind and run as far as they could with it, to the point where shaming has taken the place of arguments. Many earnestly want to be done with any form of discussion and just enact what they believe. They think they won and that all discussion is over, but what happens when you win is that it all starts over again.

In reaction to this you also see the rise of counterculture in the right, mostly online in the form of subversive memes and trolling. Basically they get a lot of traction out of being edgy and telling taboo jokes. Much like the atheists of the mid to late 2000s. This technique was latched onto by far right extremists, who saw a whole bunch of people moving away from left wing politics and tried to appeal to them. People landed on various distances between there and the left. This is why you have a lot of 'centrists' and also explains the 'alt lite' a little bit.

There is also the rise of alternate media and YouTube happening at the same time. As people on the right find quite a lot of success on YouTube and it basically becomes the second home of anti social justice politics (after /pol). The television and print media sees the threat of alternative news on YouTube and uses this as a way of attacking their profitability by going after advertisers. People on the left jump on board as a way of continuing the culture wars and winning ground. You see the adpocalypse and right wing pundits start getting banned from Youtube. The tactical error here is that most young people at this point don't watch TV, they only watch YouTube. And when their favourite PewDiePie get's slammed by the Wall Street Journal, all of a sudden these kids are much more sympathetic the right wing arguments about censorship gone wild.

But the problems with the media don't end there either. The whole reason why YouTube could compete with multi million dollar news orgs in the first place is because these corps had been cutting on the ground journalists for years due to competition from online publications which are much lower cost. And when you are just a guy in an office writing things, you can fairly easily lose to a guy in his bedroom writing about things. This brought about the whole 'post truth' era. Where publications started to play looser and looser with the facts and started to blend more opinion with news in order to have a more captivating piece. And also because they don't actually do any on the ground research and you need to add value some way. But this all has a disastrous effect on politics and cohesion. Because now we are all reading different facts, believe different ideas and hold different values and we can't talk about it because we become racist, sexist, homophobic etc.

The only way forward to me is to start talking again. It helps solve literally everything. We are more able to hold lying news orgs to account if we compare and contrast. We are more able to find agreeable ways to test ideas and place objectives for success that can be agreed upon beforehand. And we can find compromises in values that work for everybody. The problem is will and good faith. Too many people still so insulated they think this is a game. But I don't think that will last too long. Hopefully it won't take a civil war for people to wake up and get over themselves.

Thanks for reading my essay. OP was long so I thought I'd let it go a bit. A lot of stuff going on too.

serpentineeyelash · 2019-08-13T21:56:05+00:00

You mentioned it, but I really think Atheism+ was if not the start, close to it. Or perhaps it was just the first time I noticed it. So online, at least, I would say 2011-12ish, with frequent following events that would exacerbate the zeitgeist. Gamergate, for example, then the 2016 American election. But there were also incidents in between that happened, like Shirtstorm and donglegate, if anyone remember. And I'm sure plenty more that I have forgotten or never heard about in the first place.

I agree with you note on who edgy humor used to be something almost integral to the online Left, in fact I remember 4chan being almost unspokenly leftist in 08, but this slowly changed to Leftist becoming arbiters of morality and behaviour, making people use the same tactics towards them that they had used against religious clergy. Suddenly it wasn't christians one could use edgy humor at, but also feminist telling people how to act. In fact feminists targeted almost all the things people (people online) liked and called everything problematic, like anime and video games. Of course this lead them to be a targets of ridicule of those communities.

Leftists, at least online, became rabid, which often leads to them closing themselves of to outsiders and even those that are warm to their interests for minor infractions. Many in the early GG had leftist leanings, but was throw into the circle of 'bad guys' because most online leftists had a strong allegiance to feminism and the narrative that sprung from them. Naturally when you keep telling people that they aren't leftist they begin to believe it, or simply stop to want to be. Only zealots demands total obedience to beliefs, and so think they can treat their subjects with disdain and still have their support. It was inevitable that men turn away from leftist when leftist called them demons in human form, just like how American Democrats lost (or are losing) white men as a voting block.

You can't expect people to stand by you while telling them to vote for their interests and then also yell to high heaven about how you hate them. You demand loyalty while being a bully. Of course people other than true believers leave you and your cause. Just because, for example, democrats believe white men owe them their loyalty doesn't mean it's true. Overmore this belief made them think they could treat them like shit without a negative effect.

steamedhamjob · 2019-08-13T20:16:04+00:00

Sorry I’m not as good at insightful dialogue about these subjects, however, I love reading it, and this post gives me hope because this is exactly the kind of content I was hoping for on this sub.

Egalitarianwhistle · 2019-08-13T21:02:41+00:00

It is truly frightening how volatile the political landscape is right now. With the upcoming Recession on the horizon i am deeply troubled about the future.

magus678 · 2019-08-13T15:49:59+00:00

I don't have special knowledge to your question, but if I had to make a guess, I'd say its social media. It changed more than a few landscapes in more than a few ways, and politics, particularly social politics, were no exception.

This allowed for groups to coalesce around ideas more readily, and in the case of the modern social justice movement, there were already a few greatly potent ideas just waiting to be used. Specifically concepts like racism, sexism, misogyny, and the like. Through the admirable work of those previous, these words had entered the popular consciousness and held power; though there was some disagreement on what constituted which, the agreement that they were a Bad Thing was near universal.

As the lesser daughters of those greater sires, the modern social justice movement was specially poised to leverage those labels to their own ends. It was an enormous amount of power and they were practically handed it on a silver platter.

Living in the ~20ish years post that shift, we can see that they have not been good stewards. Most of the well-meaning advocacy that once existed is now some twisted mutation or vestigial anger over problems that have stopped existing.

Forgetaboutthelonely · 2019-08-13T23:38:23+00:00

I was somewhat raised on newgrounds era edgy humor and etc. But I remember similar discourse as early as 2010. Though back then it was sequestered in it's own little online communities. (tumblr)

I remember a lot of what you describe. In that it was kind of a free for all. Anybody could participate but the implicit rules were that nobody was going to pull any punches.

Though I was also brought up in a very right wing community (by canadian standards) So this was somewhat of the norm for me. Though I do specifically remember wondering why it was that some people around me had prejudiced beliefs towards other people. It made no sense until I became older and learned that those beliefs were often based in fear or a lack of understanding.

I also remember gamergate. And I still stand by my support of it. Because I specifically remember my newgrounds days. And that whole mentality of "if you can't handle the heat, stay out of the oven" approach to the internet.

There were three distinct groups if you ask me.

the pro-gg. The people like me who had been gaming for years upon years and who had seen the bullshit that mainstream gaming journalists were trying to pull. And that's why I will continue to say it was never IMHO about "restoring video game boobies to their full glory." It was about not letting ideological bias affect what games get good reviews (which leads to better sales, more revenue and etc)

There were the online trolls, Who are online trolls. There's no better way to describe them. They're the people who just want to ruffle feathers and be asses.

And then there's the anti-gg which both lumped in the trolls with the pro-gg crowd. and misrepresented the arguments they had in favor of claiming that it was all a push to keep women out of video games.

I've also spent a fair bit of time on 8chan/4chan and the depths of what many would call "alt right breeding grounds"

and to be honest.

it all seems like a misrepresentation.

Like. this video got pretty popular on the videos sub recently. and I can't think of a better descriptor for what 4chan is generally actually like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6f5ys8VU2ek

I also think that the left is unwittingly building a highway to right wing extremism and putting young white men on the express bus. In fact one of the main reasons I'm here discussing this now is because at some level I want people to start to realize just how the left is doing this.

serpentineeyelash · 2019-08-13T16:27:33+00:00

Love the account name, by the way.

I’ve been asking myself roughly the same questions for roughly the same period of time, and I wish I knew the answer! Here are my thoughts.

One possible factor is that the ruling class are exploiting cultural debates to divide and conquer the population. I notice that all the issues you raise are part of the “culture war” – religion, sexuality, gender, race, etc. You’re not even mentioning the universalist issues of economics, wars, environmental destruction, etc – issues that are more threatening to the capitalist economic system and therefore to the ruling class. Of course, both left-wingers and right-wingers still have plenty to say on those issues too, but I think it’s no accident that the polarization is deepest on identity issues which are relatively non-threatening to the system.

For saying this, some would accuse me of trying to scapegoat a class of men for women’s activism. To be clear, those identity debates would have existed anyway, and obviously I think at least some identity issues are important, hence why I started this subreddit. Feminism has been an organized movement for at least one-and-a-half centuries, is clearly ultimately motivated by female interests rather than ruling-class interests, and was deeply flawed long before it mutated into the “SJWism” of today. Still, I also think identitarian divisions have been exacerbated to some extent by forces who want to keep the non-ruling classes fighting amongst ourselves.

I’ve been down conspiracy theory rabbit holes trying to understand who might be manipulating the cultural polarization, but that was of limited help as I found it difficult to distinguish the real evidence of conspiracies from the paranoid speculation and anti-Semitism. Still at least, I’ve concluded that the American empire’s military-industrial-intelligence complex and its mainstream media propaganda are manipulating public opinion far more than most people realize, so they may have played a role in directing attention to identitarian divisions (particularly considering that identity politics propaganda has similarities to war propaganda). They are certainly one of the forces promoting censorship, since they want to prevent the spread of anti-war views. So it is perhaps no coincidence that left-wingers are being corralled into the censorious authoritarian ideology of intersectional feminism and right-wingers are being corralled into the censorious authoritarian ideology of neo-fascism.

Electoral politics push in a similar direction, especially in the US due to the rigid two-party system there. The major political parties have become ever more similar on the substantive systemic issues since they are pretty much all owned by the same industries, so they need to keep finding cultural divisions to redirect citizens’ anger at fellow citizens. More fundamentally, the very nature of party politics, particularly two-party politics, is that people must band together into tribes which have a set opinion on many different issues that aren’t necessarily inherently associated.

Why has all this accelerated so much during the 2010s? One reason would be the rise of the internet and all the contradictory effects that has had. Media business models have increasingly pushed towards polarization, both for social media and the declining traditional media, because outrage gets the most clicks and likes. Another reason is probably the growing anger at the political class about the global financial crisis, environmental crisis, wars, surveillance, and other pressing issues of our time – giving governments an extra incentive to divide and conquer the population. A third reason is the growing awareness of misandry and open aggressiveness of feminism, which I think has been a major wedge issue driving the current political realignment, as many men abandon the left and flock to the right.

The “SJW” and “anti-SJW + alt-right” tribes may seem to have emerged suddenly in the mid-2010s, but what really emerged suddenly were new political alliances. Most of the ideologies themselves were around long before the 2010s, including feminism and to a lesser extent men’s rights. What is new is that two new toxic political coalitions have been quickly built and embedded themselves into the traditional left-right divide. First on the left, intersectional feminists built a coalition of women and minorities and their advocates, and ostracized anyone who disagreed with that. Then on the right, neo-fascists and their more moderate anti-SJW allies swept up many of the left’s new outcasts by building their own coalition of men and privileged demographics and their advocates. There is often little logical consistency in the sets of opinions held by either tribe – it’s all about building a coalition of cultural identities to fight the other coalition of cultural identities. Even this process has precedents in the 1990s and 1970s, but it seems to be intensifying with each new wave of feminism.

This is about as close as I can come to making sense of the current political craziness. I’m not really sure myself, but hopefully I’ve given you some helpful insights to think about.

Title	Internet culture and polarization - when and how did it start to go "wrong"?
Author	LWMAFTW
Upvotes	29
Comments	28
Date	August 13, 2019 12:17 PM UTC (6 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/cpsbrj/internet_culture_and_polarization_when_and_how/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/internet-culture-and-polarization-when-and-how-did.1204874 https://theredarchive.com/post/1204874

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