My novel: http://www.amazon.com/Walk-These-Broken-Roads-ebook/dp/B009RZYO2O/ My blog: http://www.staresattheworld.com/ My Twitter: http://twitter.com/Aurini Glorious Hat! http://www.commieobama.com/pages/hat_info.html http://www.freedomtwentyfive.com/ http://www.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Everything wrong with American politics is everything that's wrong with Reddit. | |
| I noticed this recently because, I'm proud to say, I've managed to raise the ire of just about every group there is out there. | |
| Feminists and MRAs, conservatives and liberals, transhumanists and religious fanatics. | |
| I've managed to piss all of them off, and my Reddit account is basically useless at this point. | |
| But to get into why it's useless, to get into how this relates to politics and the media and what actually controls our society, we need to go back to the beginning. | |
| We need to go back to 4chan. | |
| 4chan is a beautiful thing. | |
| It's easy to deride it as nothing but scatological humor, pissing into a notion of piss, infinite trolls, and quite a bit of human cruelty. | |
| But the anonymity of the thing creates this wonderfully anarchic environment where the posts on B that wind up reaching the front page, that get hundreds of commentators on them and wind up being archived on the 4chan archive, they get that way because they're popular, because there's something good going on in those posts. | |
| And when it first began, there was a huge overlap between Reddit and 4chan. | |
| 4chan is the anonymous, random, chaotic, anarchic environment. | |
| And over on Reddit, it was more about news aggregation, but it had the same tech-savvy, heavy internet using sort of user base as 4chan. | |
| It was just a little bit more formal and not anonymous. | |
| See, on the surface, Reddit seems like a wonderfully democratic way of sharing news. | |
| You go onto a subreddit that is your interest. | |
| You go to subreddit Atheism, subreddit politics, subreddit Paleocon, subreddit MRA, and you post an interesting article up on there. | |
| And if it's a good article and the other people like it, they upvote it. | |
| Now on the surface, there's the obvious problem. | |
| If you're ever on the subreddit at MRA, there's a major problem with feminist sock puppets coming on and downvoting good posts or leaving stupid, distracting criticisms in the comments section on it. | |
| And this is the sort of problem that most people are aware of and is easily addressed. | |
| And there's this misperception that once you get that done, everything's smooth sailing further on. | |
| When there's deeper, more systemic problems to the entire thing. | |
| See, when it started out, Reddit was this heavy internet user community. | |
| It was the sort of people that hung out on 4chan. | |
| There's a huge amount of overlap. | |
| On 4chan, they used to refer to Reddit as the other bee. | |
| But things shifted as time went on. | |
| I like to think of them as the university elite, because the one that really made me realize that there was this different sort of person that went to Reddit was an ex-girlfriend of mine, a biologist, extremely politically correct, vaguely liberal-ish, even though she's probably conservative because we're in Alberta. | |
| And she was going on there all the time to laugh at memes that originated on 4chan. | |
| However, she was also the sort of person that's too prim and proper for 4chan, that's going to be offended by all the scatology and the downright human ugliness that appears on 4chan, that wants the prim and proper, the safe, the polite, the non-anonymous forum to go play around with. | |
| And so as Reddit matured, you got more and more people like this that had these limits to their thinking, that wanted to be part of proper society, think proper, behave proper, look at things on the internet that are proper, as opposed to a truly open mind. | |
| And then there's the anonymity thing, the fact that Reddit is not anonymous. | |
| It's not just that you are held accountable for everything that you write on Reddit, everything you upvote, everything you subscribe to. | |
| You see, one of the other things you can do is subscribe to people on Reddit. | |
| So in my case, I've got the situation where I have a whole bunch of people that hate me. | |
| And if I post something, they're going to come and say something half-true about me, or they're going to come downvote it for no reason, etc., etc. | |
| But even the popular people. | |
| See, this is the thing. | |
| To get a popular post on Reddit, you need a reputation. | |
| You need a whole bunch of people subscribing to you already because they like your uploads. | |
| Now, how do you become popular in a democratic environment? | |
| You toe the party line. | |
| It's going to vary a little bit from subreddit to subreddit, but you have to be sure that you never say anything controversial, that you don't rock the vote too much. | |
| You have to find that right level of controversy to seem like you're on the edge without actually being on the edge, which is why you're going to hear ideas talked about on YouTube that you're never going to hear on AM radio. | |
| AM radio still needs to play the game. | |
| They still need to fit in. | |
| They can't risk offending advertisers. | |
| So what winds up happening is that Reddit, just like every other news aggregator that's ever been out there, Digg, for instance, went down the same route about three years earlier. | |
| What winds up happening is you have the popular party line, power becomes concentrated into a few nodes, and the same message keeps repeating again and again and again, to the point where in the case of Reddit, you know, it out-competed Dig, because at first it was a little bit more free market, but now it's gone down the exact same route. | |
| Now, what does this have to do with politics? | |
| Well, some time back, I was writing for Fast Forward magazine, and I had a brilliant piece I was going to post on the fat tax. | |
| I had an interview with one of the eldermen ministers, whatever in the city, I forget the title. | |
| There's 12 of them. | |
| He had a district. | |
| And I was talking to him about the whole fat tax, about obesity, etc. | |
| And I made the point at the introduction of this article that right now, before we're talking about legislation, while it's still a conversation happening in the background of the public consciousness, this is when we can change things. | |
| This is when you can actually manipulate the future. | |
| By the time you get to the point of New York where they're discussing it already, it's as good as done. | |
| You're not going to change it at that point. | |
| It's happened. | |
| The committees behind the scenes have all discussed it at length. | |
| Everybody that wants a piece of the pie has had their piece of the pie. | |
| It's been sorted out and dealt with, and there's just a few I's to dot, a few T's to cross. | |
| You're not going to change it at that point. | |
| Democratic systems inevitably result in power concentrating into a few nodes that you don't see. | |
| And the newspapers, being one of these nodes, don't ever talk about these conversations that are happening at high levels until the conversation has already been determined. | |
| Of course, fast forward to not publish my article. | |
| So when you go on Reddit, this apparently transparent system of voting articles up of each Reddit, each Reddit dedicated to its own sort of thing, is the illusion, | |
| the illusion of choice, the illusion that your vote matters when in actuality it's the guy that's corralled a number of subscribers that all get to upvote that one article that he's mentioning that creates the true narrative within each subreddit. | |
| And the same thing goes for politics. | |
| That when you have this popular mass appeal as the foundation, eventually the people that can best play to public opinion corral all the power, and you wind up with a false choice. | |
| One shout-out, though, I'd like to offer, and this is on Frost's recommendation. | |
| He writes at Freedom 25, linked down below, the Red Pill Room over on Reddit. | |
| He recommends it, and though I don't have much experience with it, I certainly trust his judgment enough that I'll pass it along to you folks. |