I'm probably delusional, but
Feb. 11th, 2025 08:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingI'm going to say something weird, but I want to try to articulate a suspicion I've been harboring since around this time last year.
I feel like there have been a lot of articles and books and podcasts about how people got blackpilled into what used to be the alt right and is now the mainstream Republican party. For anyone who's been paying attention to American politics since 2016, it's become accepted as common knowledge that a certain intersection of internet subcultures was oddly influential in the rise of the cult of Donald Trump.
At the beginning of this was Gamergate. Gamergate was its own discrete movement, but there were a lot of Less Wrong / Rational Wiki people in the background. Now that Elon Musk has become more of a prominent public figure, I think the Less Wrong connection has become much more apparent.
I learned about this in 2014/15 while reading Nick Bostrom's work for (of all things) an academic paper about the 2012 PS3 game Tokyo Jungle, which is a ludic exploration of human extinction. The Less Wrong / Rational Wiki subculture people, of whom Nick Bostrom was briefly a member, have a distinct way of writing and presenting themselves, and it was easy for me to see that there was a clear overlap between them and Gamergate. Because Peter Thiel has been putting obscene amounts of money into giving the Less Wrong people jobs at actual think tanks that influence public policy, it seems that mainstream journalists are finally starting to report on this subculture and their activities.
Which is good, but I feel like the story that's being told about the political influence of online subcultures is missing major parts of the puzzle.
Namely, having watched all of this unfold online while also learning more than I ever wanted to about QAnon, which is also mainstream politics at this point, I'm starting to get the feeling that the movement toward sexual (and ethnic) purity that began around 2015 in fandom cultures has an uncomfortable number of parallels.
I'll need to develop this more as I begin to consider it seriously, but I'm starting to think that the Proship DNI movement(?) is the other end of the political horseshoe for QAnon.
I feel like there have been a lot of articles and books and podcasts about how people got blackpilled into what used to be the alt right and is now the mainstream Republican party. For anyone who's been paying attention to American politics since 2016, it's become accepted as common knowledge that a certain intersection of internet subcultures was oddly influential in the rise of the cult of Donald Trump.
At the beginning of this was Gamergate. Gamergate was its own discrete movement, but there were a lot of Less Wrong / Rational Wiki people in the background. Now that Elon Musk has become more of a prominent public figure, I think the Less Wrong connection has become much more apparent.
I learned about this in 2014/15 while reading Nick Bostrom's work for (of all things) an academic paper about the 2012 PS3 game Tokyo Jungle, which is a ludic exploration of human extinction. The Less Wrong / Rational Wiki subculture people, of whom Nick Bostrom was briefly a member, have a distinct way of writing and presenting themselves, and it was easy for me to see that there was a clear overlap between them and Gamergate. Because Peter Thiel has been putting obscene amounts of money into giving the Less Wrong people jobs at actual think tanks that influence public policy, it seems that mainstream journalists are finally starting to report on this subculture and their activities.
Which is good, but I feel like the story that's being told about the political influence of online subcultures is missing major parts of the puzzle.
Namely, having watched all of this unfold online while also learning more than I ever wanted to about QAnon, which is also mainstream politics at this point, I'm starting to get the feeling that the movement toward sexual (and ethnic) purity that began around 2015 in fandom cultures has an uncomfortable number of parallels.
I'll need to develop this more as I begin to consider it seriously, but I'm starting to think that the Proship DNI movement(?) is the other end of the political horseshoe for QAnon.
no subject
Date: 2025-02-23 03:56 am (UTC)