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Hello reader friend!
Here’s my piece this week: The Culture War Wants You. It’s a helpful reframe for any information you consume—remember, it wants you! Understanding “how does this info suck me in?” can help you decide whether you actually want it to live in your mind.
The Culture War Wants You
When the latest culture war clash (like Basecamp's apolitical manifesto) appears in your newsfeed, what does it feel like? Do you want to click it? Do you feel pulled towards it?
If you're human, the answer is likely yes. This is because the information wants you to click it. It understands how brains work and says "don't you care about this?!?"
It's already common knowledge that smartphones pull you towards them. We know they're addictive.
But we don't have a similar shared understanding around the information itself. Sure, we have the concept of “clickbait”. But that feels more like a one-off instead of long-term engagement.
Yet I don't think "addictive" is the right word here. It's more like "alluring." Info like the culture war pulls you towards it.
The culture war doesn't want you to know that it is alluring. That would be like cigarette companies selflessly deciding to warn you they are addictive. Instead, the media paints it as Us vs. Them.
Us are the good guys who care and protect victims. Them are the bad guys who don't care and attack victims. But we rarely examine the "thing itself." What does the information want? And we rarely examine ourselves. Why are we allured by the culture war?
There are many reasons why we're allured by the culture war.
It provides us meaning/purpose, connects us to a community of Us vs. Them, and can make us feel like we're protecting the safety of ourselves or others. Protect unborn kids! Protect immigrants!
In addition, the meme of each side is resilient to attempts to remove it. If I say "let's not talk about free speech" to someone on the right, they will say "that's the exact issue, censorship! Don't you care about freedom?"
If I say "I'm not sure a racial lens should be part of most conversations" to someone on the left, they will say "that's the exact issue, being complacent! Don't you care about marginalized people?"
People on each side will make fun of the other for being snowflakes about the thing they're optimized for. From the left’s POV, the right are censorship snowflakes. From the right’s POV, the left are caring snowflakes.Both sides of the culture war want the other to exist. Memes like any attention, even attention from competitors. All attention is good attention. BlackLivesMatter likes AllLivesMatter in the same way a McDonald's likes a Burger King on the same corner. Knights and Mooks on both sides thrive on the Internet of Beefs.
Their main goal is to keep the conflict going.
In the end, the culture war is constantly becoming more optimized to suck us towards it. It has Medium-Message Fit and is searching for more.
Be aware that never-ending debates like the culture war want you to care about them. Take that into account when determining how much you should actually care.
LINKS
1) Last week, in Popper Criterion for Politics, I mentioned that nations with lots of natural resources like oil can become dependent on them for GDP, instead of educating their people for GDP. One reader, Andrew Weiner, responded:
I guess one of the cool things about the USA is that we too have lots of natural resources, but the government doesn't own them. By keeping them in the hands of private industry, we've avoided the same fate as Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, etc.
Yes! And to go further, we even distributed it to the public in a positive way. As the Berggruen Institute notes here, the US actually did quite a good job of taking “undeveloped” (Native) land and distributing it to the public through Land Grant universities and the Homestead Act:
We can also apply this idea of “public distribution” to the internet frontier as well:
Back to the Popper Criterion for Politics piece, Andrew also responded to my lament about vetocracy/tragedy of the anticommons, noting:
For years this has been a frequent complaint about our government. Gridlock in congress! They can't get anything done! How terrible! But whenever I hear these complaints, I actually feel relieved. After all, if the government is doing nothing, then at least they aren't making things worse!
Primum non nocere, as they say. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say. Government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way, as they say. I never quite understood why everyone besides me bemoans the legislative gridlock :)
This is a good point, but I’d want to differentiate between stakeholders actively stopping progress (vetocracy) and the government “meddling” when they should really just set constraints and then “get out of the way” (State Capacity Libertarianism). Also, I’m reminded of pace layering—sometimes, we want things to be slow! (Like the methodical counting of votes.)
2) The Architecture of Abundance. Great vision setting from The One Project. Excited for more Abundance Economy.
The news was cause for celebration. Reports for the Autumn cycle had been finalized and were now being read and listened to around the world. Global poverty: down 93% since 2020. Every climate target hit this year, with three unexpectedly surpassed. Topsoil at the healthiest levels it has been since 1920. At the same time, average work hours had been reduced another 18 minutes to reach 19.2 per week, with 100% employment of those able and willing to work. And perhaps most hearteningly, average global self-reported life satisfaction was up 2% year over year.
3) These images from FiveThirtyEight show the dismal state of US politics.
First, our two parties can’t stand each other (and that’s not true for other OECD countries).
Second, the US Republican Party is strikingly moving away from democratic norms. It looks more similar to states falling into authoritarianism like Turkey and Hungary and less like New Zealand’s conservative party.
4) Babylon Bee: Federal Judge Rules That Jewish Baker Must Make 'Death To Israel' Cake For Arab Customer
5) The Onion: Norwegian Cruise Line Introduces ‘Now Or Never’ Tour Of The Arctic
6) Rhys: Elon Musk Accidentally Tweets "Buttcoin Good", Spurring Charmin Rally
7) TikTok of the Week. Riding Rollercoasters Without Reacting At All
JOBS AND OPPORTUNITIES
Primavera de Filippi is hiring ethnographers to understand crypto governance.
Pledge 1% helps companies pledge to self-tax their profits. They’re hiring a new Executive Director.
The Community Infrastructure Fund for Mutual Aid. $25k-$50k grants for building infrastructure for mutual aid. From Omidyar. Apply by July 15.
New Public is looking for a part-time staff writer to cover digital public spaces.
EVENTS
Effective Altruist Events Calendar (recurring)
Interintellect Salons (recurring)
The Stoa (recurring)
MUSIC
Possibly my favorite song from Bo Burnham’s INSIDE is “That Funny Feeling”:
The song details a list of things that make us feel the dissociation of late-stage capitalism:
The whole world at your fingertips, the ocean at your door
Twenty-thousand years of this, seven more to go
A gift shop at the gun range, a mass shooting at the mall
Reading Pornhub's terms of service, going for a drive
And obeying all the traffic laws in Grand Theft Auto V
That unapparent summer air in early fall
The quiet comprehending of the ending of it all
I’d call this song style “String of Specifics”. It’s a bunch of specifics, one after another.
“A Little Bit Of Everything” by Dawes is another example of a String of Specifics. It’s a list of reasons why someone is thinking of killing themselves. Not One Thing, but A Little Bit Of Everything:
'Oh, it's a little bit of everything,
It's the mountains,
It's the fog,
It's the news at six o'clock,
It's the death of my first dog,Oh, it's a little bit of everything,
It's the matador and the bull,
It's the suggested daily dosage,
It is the red moon when it's full.
Courtney Barnett is a master at a String of Specifics:
I lay awake at four, staring at the wall
Counting all the cracks backwards in my best French
Reminds me of a book I skim-read in a surgery
All about palmistry, I wonder what's in store for me
Let me know if you have other songs in the String of Specifics style!
Hope you have a good week! Warmth, Rhys
If you like this newsletter, check out the online community of systems thinkers that I helped co-found, Roote.
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