(2018-03-06) Rao A Quick Battle-Field Guide To The New Culture Wars

Venkatesh Rao: A Quick (Battle) Field Guide to the New Culture Wars. the United States is in the middle of the worst culture wars I’ve seen in my life, either in my 20 years in the US, or in the previous 20 years in India (which in the 90s saw equally ferocious, but less digitally mediated, culture wars). And for once, you can’t blame Donald Trump. He’s more consequence than cause.

you need a good map of the battlefield

I’ve used the popular politics 2×2 meme (left versus right, authoritarian versus libertarian) as a basic canvas for this map. Let’s start with the numbered key to the conflicts before launching into some commentary.

Key Battlefronts

GamerGate front:

Along with #5, probably the original flashpoint, the Fort Sumter battle of our times.

In some ways this is ground zero, and sets the rules of engagement for all battlefronts.

Climate change politics: It is one where both sides have settled in for a really long slugfest.

Healthcare: But this is almost certainly the most consequential culture war

Academia:.. Celebrated cases like those of Bret Weinstein and Jordan Peterson have played out here.

Four forces meet at this battlefront

Ferguson Front: pits the black community against the police state, the penal system, and homogeneous right-wing white populations. (Ferguson Riots)

Sexual harassment Ground War

Sexual harassment Air War

Hyper-neurotypicals versus non-neurotypicals

entertainment industry has unique high-visibility characteristics that make it a separate front.

This is a relatively young and new battlefront but might easily turn out to be among the most consequential in the long term

It pits autism spectrum individuals (or those who self-classify onto it with dubious justification), particularly in the tech industry, against the increasingly tricky-to-navigate environment of fine-grained emerging authoritarian-left norms governing interpersonal interactions.

Old versus New Decentralizers

There are definitely many more battle annotations one could make on this map.

War Mind, Peace Mind

I’ve personally found that accepting the reality of a wartime condition in the zeitgeist is oddly calming and anxiety-relieving, like accepting the reality of a bodily ailment.

Though largely bloodless (with the notable exception of #5), the use of the term war is not allegorical. The bloodlessness is a consequence of the remarkable efficiency of information wars, which allows combatants to inflict psychological trauma and institutional destruction on the adversary with very little bloodletting.

But the damage is real, as are the warlike intentions. To assume good faith as the default or mere misguidedness, rather than active malice, is to set yourself up for damage.

And we can’t blame the Russians or Wikileaks or the latest inflammatory Trump tweet. At least not entirely. They provide some of the fuel, but not the sparks. The culture wars are raging because there is plenty of mass-movement true believer energy spoiling for a fight on all sides.

If you assume you have seen it all before, and that there’s nothing new here, you are likely playing right into the hands of those who are refining novel ideologies and tactics.

Believe it or not, the swinging of a presidential election is actually a fairly minor chapter in the ongoing saga.

The basic reason infowar tactics work at scale is that our brains are wired for evidentiary scarcity (like our metabolism is wired for scarcity of salt/sugar/fat) We seek confirmation (fragile) over disconfirmation (robust) because that’s rational in info-scarcity environments.

a particularly silly response: that it’s all in my head

This of course, is a true patsy take.

this kind of retreat is precisely the reaction many of the hardier combatants are looking to provoke among adversaries

Prognosis

When will the war end? Probably 2020-2024.

Who will win?

A grown-up and expanded version of the libertarian left (driven by the tech industry) along with a cleaned-up and shrunken version of the authoritarian right (defined by a minimum viable policing function).

The authoritarian left will lose because it underestimates the degree to which humans want to freely negotiate their own relationships with other humans,

The libertarian right will lose because it underestimates the degree to which humans are driven by genuine, non-judgmental compassion and collective instincts,

If there’s one lesson that was driven home for me reading writers like Hannah Arendt and Ursula K LeGuin last year, it is that the sovereignty ideal at the foundation of most libertarian thought is an impoverished variety of full-blown freedom, which can only be realized through richer patterns of connection.

the renaissance in democracy driven by digital technologies may leave it unrecognizable.