Transcript
Speaker: Jasper is a recovered Twitter addict and amateur culture anthropologist who has been lurking around the different niches of the internet for almost over two decades, reading forums and spending over four hours a day observing the greatest posters on Twitter at his peak.
Speaker: Today, he is here to share a bit of what he saw from arguably the golden age of the internet, when a myriad of online subcultures proliferated and permeated into the mainstream culture.
Speaker: There's very little solid written about this and with the ephemeral nature of the internet, many tweets, accounts and blogs have since been deleted.
Speaker: So you really had to be there at the time to know what happened, which is why I'm so excited to bring you on to share this bit of a lost chapter in the history of internet culture.
Speaker: So for the roadmap ahead for today, Jasper will talk about the top four internet subcultures he encountered.
Speaker: And then we'll draw some common threads across them and think about the implications on society and what it reflects about human nature.
Speaker: Before we dive in, my first question to you is why Twitter and how did you become involved on these online forums at the time?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So I started Twitter with a personal account where I'd only follow my friends and whatnot, but it was only after I graduated.
Speaker: that I started getting more and more into these subcultures.
Speaker: So around 2016.
Speaker: Just to walk a little back, I'm from Canada, so these subcultures are very North American-centric or Anglosphere-centric.
Speaker: And, yeah, so I just wanted to put that in there.
Speaker: But, so two big things happened in 2016, both on Twitter and basically for my Twitter experience.
Speaker: 2016 was when Twitter first implemented their algorithmic timeline.
Speaker: So this is similar to what you'll see today on basically any other social media, but prior to that, your timeline was only accounts that you followed in a chronological order.
Speaker: After this change, the most relevant tweets to you would be pushed to the very top.
Speaker: And these tweets could even include things that you don't necessarily follow.
Speaker: And with the takeover of Twitter Now X by Elon Musk, this algorithm has become even more intense and intense.
Speaker: So that like, yeah, like you'll like, there are posts that everyone will see and like, you're not following at all and you're not quite sure why you're being served it, but like it has intensified.
Speaker: But back then it was at a lower level, but still very influential.
Speaker: And then walking back a bit more.
Speaker: So initially I used Twitter for personal stuff.
Speaker: Eventually I followed more economics accounts, finance accounts, and then
Speaker: started following more anonymous or pseudonymous accounts because people want to talk without their employer, without expressing the views of their employer being in trouble with that.
Speaker: And then that's at the point where I became exposed to what I call, or what is called weird Twitter or irony Twitter.
Speaker: So I think the anonymous nature of Twitter allows people to be kind of the truer version of themselves or the more exposes their inner dialogues and insecurities and vengeance.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: So yeah, you don't have to put your name to it, whereas Facebook, it's obviously a real name account.
Speaker: Twitter was one of the first social media platforms that had less connected to your real identity in nature.
Speaker: Yeah, you can follow people that you have no relation to.
Speaker: Yes, exactly.
Speaker: And your interaction only stays on a click of a button, a like, share, comment.
Speaker: Instead of a Facebook, there's more of an infinity game going on because you're friends forever.
Speaker: By the time you click that unfriend...
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Twitter is way more ephemeral nature.
Speaker: Facebook, I remember back in the day, you would have a wall to wall, so you'd have a conversation.
Speaker: Twitter, you reply to a tweet, and then maybe like 10 days later, you got digged down to find that.
Speaker: So the conversations are much more free flowing in that sense.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Twitter is kind of like you write a message, put it in the jar, and then leave it on the river.
Speaker: For people to see, to like it, to retweet it.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So at the time you found this new tool to kind of at first as a professional tool.
Speaker: Yes, as a professional tool, but then also as a tool of amusement because people were posting interesting things like charts or like analysis, but people were also just making jokes.
Speaker: And these were pushed to you by the algorithm.
Speaker: Yes, like some people in my circle, either like my following, either retweeted or liked it and then it got pushed to me and that's how I got exposed to this, yeah, irony Twitter.
Speaker: Okay, so irony Twitter, is this like an umbrella term for all the subcultures you are about to describe or is it one of them?
Speaker: It's one of them.
Speaker: So what it is is basically people making jokes online because Twitter was at that time very text-based.
Speaker: I mean, it's still very text-based, but obviously now you can put video and photos on.
Speaker: Yeah, I like the older times when it's just purely tech space.
Speaker: Now all the social media platforms are converging.
Speaker: Everything is turning into short form video.
Speaker: But back at that time, that was the only sort of medium you could really make silly little jokes and then you could have a ton of people laugh at them, right?
Speaker: You're basically a stand-up comedian on the internet.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So perhaps let's...
Speaker: talk about what are the four subcultures?
Speaker: Okay, yeah.
Speaker: Walking it back a bit more.
Speaker: Before I get more into this one.
Speaker: This first grouping, I'll call it a grouping because it's like a Venn diagram.
Speaker: So there's weird Twitter slash irony Twitter.
Speaker: And with irony leftism or dirtbag leftism, that'd be my first grouping.
Speaker: The second grouping is the alt-right slash frog Twitter slash eco-fascism degrowth nihilist pessimists.
Speaker: That's the second grouping.
Speaker: The third grouping is the exhilarationists.
Speaker: And then the fourth grouping would be the involuntary celibates, the incels slash the look maxers.
Speaker: So these are the four circles on the same vein diagram.
Speaker: What's the... Well, the thing is, it's not... Okay, what I mean is these groupings are a Venn diagram themselves.
Speaker: So if you can think about four different Venn diagrams.
Speaker: Okay, for each topic.
Speaker: Yes, but in a way, these ones all relate to each other because in all the different spheres, they connect on some way or other.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And yes, I will make those connections clear.
Speaker: Okay, so just to recap, I mean, you sent this to me ahead of time, so disclaimer, I actually knew this, but I didn't do any research, so I'm completely ignorant of what these are.
Speaker: Number one is irony Twitter slash irony leftism.
Speaker: Number two, frog Twitter slash eco-fascism.
Speaker: Number three, accelerationist.
Speaker: Number four,
Speaker: look maxing in cells, fem cells, different colors of pills.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I have no idea what these are.
Speaker: So just take it away.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Let's, let's jump into it.
Speaker: Um, I mean, actually, you know what, what are you most interested in out of all these four?
Speaker: And then I can work with that.
Speaker: Let's work with that.
Speaker: I mean, I think the last one I can tell what it is roughly.
Speaker: Cause it is firmly permeated the mainstream now.
Speaker: Yeah, so let's just go with the order you sent to me.
Speaker: Okay, okay.
Speaker: What is irony Twitter?
Speaker: All right, yeah, irony Twitter is in the same vein.
Speaker: People are making jokes, heavily tinged in irony, satire, absurdism, lots of inside jokes, sort of the start of outrage farming, if we can call it that.
Speaker: What is outrage farming?
Speaker: Outrage farming is basically you make a tweet and it's something ridiculous that you write or not necessarily ridiculous.
Speaker: It's something that you write in order to get a lot of interactions with.
Speaker: And usually it will be outrage.
Speaker: Like you say something that's like completely absurd to people and they'll be like compelled to reply to you.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: They're like, they're like, this is ridiculous.
Speaker: Like I have to write something.
Speaker: But in their heart of hearts, maybe they don't actually think that because sometimes it is that ridiculous.
Speaker: So you wrote it just to invoke the response on the Internet.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: To kind of check if there are people that actually have common logic and common sense to care.
Speaker: No, well, it's just to have fun on the Internet, which is like and to get interactions.
Speaker: And because the more interactions you get, like the more likely people will interact with your post, the more you'll get pushed on the algorithm and the more people will likely to follow you.
Speaker: It's a very positive feedback virtuous cycle, right?
Speaker: Like if you're a good poster, you get amplified and more people want to follow you.
Speaker: So there's both the humorous nature of the tweets that attracts people themselves, but also people are using it as a way to gain traction to their accounts.
Speaker: Yes, exactly.
Speaker: So irony Twitter, do you have...
Speaker: Yeah, so the most famous account is this guy called Drill, D-R-I-L.
Speaker: And he, for whatever reason, his humor caught a lot of people's attention, including mine.
Speaker: And that's how I first get subsumed beyond what I call official Twitter, where it's just people speaking in a professional capacity or organizations or corporations.
Speaker: Give us an example of the best tweet of Drill.
Speaker: Well, I wouldn't say it's the best one.
Speaker: This is just the illustrative example.
Speaker: But he said, drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time.
Speaker: So it's impossible to say if it's bad or not.
Speaker: So in a way, this is sort of an outrage farming tweet because obviously this is a ridiculous statement, right?
Speaker: Because I mean, sure, you can get to work on time, but it doesn't justify the deaths of people that you kill through drunk driving.
Speaker: But he's also interrogating sort of the utility of nuance because it's like some people will justify inaction because of something else that benefits society.
Speaker: So in a way, there's two sides of it for this specific tweet.
Speaker: So what you're saying is...
Speaker: On the internet, there are people who are overly analyzing, overanalyzing debate topics, trying to justify things that are unbelievable on the merit of nuance.
Speaker: And he's saying like, oh, you're doing it too much.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: He's satirizing those people who make those sort of arguments where it's like, yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So that's his staple tweets, right?
Speaker: Yeah, it's one of his examples.
Speaker: A lot of them are just poop jokes and things of this nature.
Speaker: But I guess the main point of this is the amount of seriousness in this joke is totally— there's no straight man in this.
Speaker: It's all just being silly.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: How did this become a trend?
Speaker: Well, the humor at the time was very popular so a lot of people liked and retweeted it and propagated it throughout.
Speaker: Do you think the people who consumed the tweet understood the intention behind it, making fun of nuance?
Speaker: Um, well, what was that not part of the intention at all?
Speaker: Well, that's the thing.
Speaker: It's like, it depends how deep you read onto it, right?
Speaker: For the outrage farming part of it.
Speaker: Like if you read it at the service level, you think it's just ridiculous.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But if you dig deeper down and you like understand like the nature of the poster, you're like nothing you post is serious.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And then you interrogate.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: It's because he's doing this.
Speaker: So he actually had a point in mind when he was making these tweets.
Speaker: Well, it's possible, but he could have just been, you know, just having fun.
Speaker: And that's the thing with the internet or with Twitter specifically.
Speaker: A lot of people are having fun without deeper meaning, but then maybe some people have a deeper meaning to it.
Speaker: So that's irony Twitter.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: How did it permeate to the mainstream culture?
Speaker: Well, I think in this day and age, the use of irony is just super, super, super prevalent in humor.
Speaker: Everything is ironic.
Speaker: Maybe this is my personal bias, but I do think that earnesty is on the decline in day-to-day interactions.
Speaker: People say stuff that they don't mean, or they write stuff that they don't mean.
Speaker: And that's I think that has come from this like the popularity of ironic humor.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I think I know what you're saying.
Speaker: It's like people who disregard intentions and truth and just kind of take everything lightheartedly.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There's like a lack of seriousness.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it's because it's a coping mechanism in a way.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's like because things are not as good as they could be.
Speaker: It's a way for you to like deal with those facts if you maybe can't change your situation.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Do you have another example?
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Well, this is another one.
Speaker: This is another classic of his.
Speaker: I don't really understand why this one is so popular, but it's, I'm not owned.
Speaker: I'm not owned.
Speaker: I continue to insist as I slowly shrimp and transform into a corn cob.
Speaker: So this is speaking to people who are getting made fun of online and instead of just taking it and being like, okay, like, yeah, like you shit on me.
Speaker: Like, like, I don't have a good point here.
Speaker: They'll like continuously start to fight back and like be like, no, but this, no, but that.
Speaker: So he's saying like, this is a representation of those sorts of people.
Speaker: Like, I'm not owned.
Speaker: I'm not owned.
Speaker: Owned means you are, you lost.
Speaker: Pwned.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like in gaming terminology, like I owned you.
Speaker: And why is it shrinking to a corn cob?
Speaker: Because you're corny.
Speaker: oh it's not very sophisticated but it just speaks to basically this um this uh phenomenon that people have when like they're people don't they dig themselves into a hole yeah they keep on digging and they would never uh admit their failure or their their uh defeat yes
Speaker: for for the um to protect their ego online yes okay yes so um so that tweet was making fun of those kind of annoying people on the internet yes yes in a way in the meta way but if you look at it on his face value it's like what is he really saying and that's the thing it's like when you become so online like like i was
Speaker: you start to analyze the text in such a degree that it's like you're trying to comb it for what the meaning of the poster was.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Can we move on to how does it relate to the second circle of the Venn diagram, the leftism?
Speaker: The leftism, yes.
Speaker: So because this humor was so popular, it was used by progressives or leftists to sort of further their own political agenda.
Speaker: So to promote the policies and politics that they like, they would employ the same type of humor
Speaker: but in service to what they believed in.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So these people like to troll neoliberals and they like to troll conservatives.
Speaker: So it's like equal opportunity.
Speaker: I mean, I'll give you this this one example of like trolling people will do.
Speaker: But this guy tweeted, I love working at the post office in Columbus, Ohio and ripping up absentee ballots that vote for Trump.
Speaker: So this actually hit national news because people thought it was real, but it was just an irony leftist person just shitposting, right?
Speaker: Just having fun online.
Speaker: Trolling Trump supporters.
Speaker: Yeah, so then people obviously just went on these accounts like,
Speaker: Someone investigate this guy right now.
Speaker: He's like, our democracy is in danger, like stuff like that.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So that's sort of the style that they would go through.
Speaker: So so they would use.
Speaker: Yeah, they would use the same sort of humor for in service of their politics.
Speaker: Okay, and 2016 was the election year, right?
Speaker: That's the year Trump elected.
Speaker: Yes, yes, yes.
Speaker: How much did this play a factor in the culture leading to the election?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So for those that don't know, in 2016, the Democratic race was between this Democratic senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton.
Speaker: Hillary Clinton eventually won the nomination, but it was after these Bernie supporters really pushed hard because they really believed in a more progressive vision for the Democratic Party, a more socialist vision than what they saw as more of the same old from Hillary Clinton continuing on from Obama.
Speaker: So when Bernie Sanders lost, a lot of these irony leftists, who were sometimes pejoratively called Bernie bros because they're predominantly male, were really upset because they felt betrayed by the Democratic establishment.
Speaker: They didn't really find a future with Hillary Clinton.
Speaker: They know Trump is really bad, but they're stuck in two... Bad candidates.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So in that sense, this sort of subculture was quite behind Bernie.
Speaker: And it might have had an effect on the election, but obviously it's just micro... What did they tweet?
Speaker: Give us the tweets.
Speaker: So these Bernie Bros on the internet leveraging this?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So for example, this is a tweet by one of these Bernie Bros.
Speaker: Dems are going to look themselves in the mirror, take a deep breath, and tell themselves, we got to be more racist.
Speaker: So here, like this, so this is after the election of Trump.
Speaker: But here, he's like, oh, they're going to take the wrong message from Trump's victory because, like, they thought that he won based off that when they think it was the progressive politics that was lacking or the real notion of their perceived desire for change that was lacking.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So is there anything else with the irony Twitter?
Speaker: Yeah, we'll move on to the second one.
Speaker: But basically, they are, as evidenced by that ripping up ballots for Trump tweet, like they are constantly trying to troll the right-wing Twitter, and right-wing Twitter is obviously trying to troll them.
Speaker: But so through that sort of interactions, I got introduced to what I'll call the alt-right, frog twitter, nihilists, pessimists, de-growthers.
Speaker: And this is a pretty large category.
Speaker: And it covers a lot of different things.
Speaker: What is it?
Speaker: What is it?
Speaker: How would you describe it?
Speaker: So it's like a new form of conservatism outside of mainstream conservatism.
Speaker: That's like the first part.
Speaker: Well, that's the alt-right part.
Speaker: The second part is the critique of society, of modern society, and associated nihilism with like, we can't do anything about this.
Speaker: It's like the situation is really bad.
Speaker: Sort of like...
Speaker: Irony Twitter was also quite nihilistic.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So you're seeing there's a disregard for seriousness.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So there's a common thread in this where like there's a sort of a loss of hope in both sides and they use humor and whatever to deal with it.
Speaker: As a coping mechanism.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: As a coping mechanism.
Speaker: So, yeah, let's start with, so one of the biggest accounts here is this guy called Bronze Age Pervert.
Speaker: And he sort of, as evidenced by the name, he longs for a return to the time of the Bronze Age.
Speaker: Bronze Age because he thinks like society has become emasculated, feminine, it's without dull and without spirit.
Speaker: So he's like, like he was one of the seminal parts of this, this subculture, right?
Speaker: He would criticize like people who like followed rules as bug men.
Speaker: I'll give you a few like tweets to like sort of describe what sort of, um,
Speaker: vibe he's giving off.
Speaker: Yeah, give us the best of the highlight reel of these are his two very famous ones.
Speaker: Ancient men conquered cities, put them to the sword and fire.
Speaker: Meanwhile, you go to wine bar with GF and enjoy tasteful banter.
Speaker: You are gay.
Speaker: So basically here he's mocking like the modern man because they're not like going on going to conquer cities and burn them down.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it's sort of like this sort of like return to tradition and critique of current society, which is like very deep into frog Twitter.
Speaker: And then he has this one, and this one is quite offensive, so be prepared.
Speaker: Can anyone explain getting up at 5 a.m.
Speaker: to quaff Duncan, work two part-time jobs, four hours in traffic, fat wife, why isn't ISIS better?
Speaker: I love this shit-lib talking point that guys in ISIS are doing it because of lack of jobs.
Speaker: Yes, they'd rather be flipping burgers.
Speaker: So his sort of, you can see the common theme that ties these two together.
Speaker: It's that he thinks that modern life is so constrained, all about following rules, and you're sort of dominated by society in ways like over-socialized.
Speaker: And that's one of his many critiques, like obviously racism, anti-feminism,
Speaker: At least joining ISIS, you have this sense of individual agency and fighting for bigger calls.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So that's the point he's trying to make is like there's no point living in this modern society.
Speaker: So you can see, you can also look at it from the ironic lens, right?
Speaker: Because he's saying this sort of to critique how comparing us to people 2,000, 3,000 years ago, we're so much different, right?
Speaker: And why do you call this a frog tweet?
Speaker: A frog Twitter is the name they called it because of Pepe the Frog.
Speaker: How is it relevant?
Speaker: Because Pepe the Frog was like sort of co-opted as like a right wing symbol.
Speaker: So like they would call each other frogs.
Speaker: Is it a derogatory term?
Speaker: No, no, it's a self-name.
Speaker: But yeah.
Speaker: So people on their right wing would call each other frogs on Twitter.
Speaker: They would call this niche of the internet Frog Twitter.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And any more on this topic?
Speaker: Oh, yeah, for sure.
Speaker: So that's explaining sort of like this return to tradition part.
Speaker: There's this other account called...
Speaker: Faceberg, but he renamed himself to Neat World Order.
Speaker: But he's basically critiquing, again, modern society.
Speaker: He's like, joke, dropping Moab on an empty desert to kill a few terrorists.
Speaker: Moab is a mother of all bombs, basically a really big non-atomic bomb that you drop from a bomber.
Speaker: Moab, okay.
Speaker: Yeah, woke.
Speaker: Dropping MOBAs
Speaker: mobile online battle arena like league of legends or dota dropping mobas on civilians to render their male population infertile so basically he's saying like you don't need like weapons anymore like conventional weapons anymore to like destroy someone's society you can just get them hooked on video games video games yeah i get it yeah
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Here's this other one.
Speaker: Eating alone in your car may be the most formidable sociological manifestation of post-industrial capitalism and its ensuing alienation.
Speaker: And it's a picture of this YouTuber called Reviewbra.
Speaker: He's a young guy, wears a big suit, reviews food in his car, has a very fancy language, and it's a picture of him.
Speaker: But...
Speaker: Yeah, basically, they're all critiquing society in a sort of a nihilistic and pessimistic way.
Speaker: And then a lot of these... So that tweet, he was attacking the guys who were recording themselves...
Speaker: No, he's not attacking it.
Speaker: He's just saying, like, as an observation, like, eating alone in your car is such, like, a novel thing in human civilization.
Speaker: Because, I mean, for a long time, we have, like, ate in communal places, right?
Speaker: Eating with other people.
Speaker: Now you're in this vehicle that you've driven to go eat, but you're not even eating in the restaurant.
Speaker: You're eating in the car, which is obviously not very comfortable.
Speaker: And so it's a commentary on that, like basically how we've moved to that point.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So yeah, there's a lot of... So this frog Twitter has a very Luddite view on obviously technology and how its influence on society.
Speaker: They're always like saying... There's this meme they use like live in the pod, eat bugs.
Speaker: Like you might have heard it before.
Speaker: No, what is that?
Speaker: But basically, like they're saying like the end goal for like, like being a consumer in this world is like because every like because things are getting worse and worse in terms of like living standards, things are getting more expensive, like the eventually like.
Speaker: the WEF or the global elites or however they want to call them are trying to make people like live in like like pods like small spaces and eat bugs or crickets for protein yeah so it uh it longs to return to the
Speaker: old and old uh yes yes there's definitely a lot of like it's conservative right so they want to preserve the past and so that that's yeah it definitely is nostalgic and it's uh is there a political theme to that too were they trump supporters yeah yeah yeah for sure because they thought he would bring it back he would roll back a lot of like the more progressive politics that were out there
Speaker: But I just want to go back a bit and talk about the pessimism in general and just to say that this fear of Twitter was like, I think it's more pessimistic than the progressives.
Speaker: There's this guy called Hisparek.
Speaker: He doesn't really post anything about politics, but this is what he says, which kind of captures the theme of what a lot of these frog Twitter people are saying.
Speaker: We care about nothing anymore because we are forced to live as though we don't.
Speaker: To truly care about our privacy or the environment or the future of anything we ought to hold dear would terrify and alienate us because we are compelled to be implicated in its destruction.
Speaker: Modernity is that which makes us all its agents.
Speaker: To love something in our time is to contradict oneself.
Speaker: To live your principles in age of slackening and disintegration, you have to be observant, analytical, and considerate about everything, and puritanical and aromatic in response to it.
Speaker: You have to solve and escape mazes and flee to the hills in order to stay still.
Speaker: You really are forced to be your own philosopher and social critic, because no one else has been before here to leave you as a guide, even if your objective is, as mine is, to live according to the guidance of those who have gone before.
Speaker: So you can see there's a deep conservatism in there where you want to follow what has worked in the past, but because we're trotting such new territory, it's impossible, right?
Speaker: You can't teach your kids or you can't parent your kids on how to use TikTok if there wasn't TikTok 3,000, 2,100 years ago, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So that's a pessimism.
Speaker: That's the radical pessimism.
Speaker: And it's sort of fatalistic too because it's like, oh, it's like we can't go back.
Speaker: So did these, the first two subcultures you mentioned, did they all kind of emerge around the same time that Twitter changes the algorithm?
Speaker: Yeah, so like the peak of this like irony leftism as well as frog Twitter was 2016, 2017.
Speaker: Okay, so after the election, it kind of died down.
Speaker: Yeah, a little bit, yeah.
Speaker: It's still going on today, but in a much different and reduced form.
Speaker: In what sense is the reduced form now?
Speaker: Well, I think both sides are kind of disillusioned.
Speaker: Because the frog Twitter people, a lot of them were disappointed.
Speaker: by what they thought Trump didn't do.
Speaker: And then they're annoyed that, like, obviously Trump lost and they're like raging against that and all the things that Biden is rolling back of Trump's actions.
Speaker: And then on the leftist side, or the irony leftist side, they're also disillusioned because Biden won, not a...
Speaker: not a progressive candidate compared to their standards.
Speaker: And they're like, what more can we do to really like, like it is America doomed to just not embrace the progressive politics that they like.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Then, all right, shall we move on to the third one?
Speaker: I just want to touch on one more part of this.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: By the way, when I talk, let me finish first.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Otherwise, the transcript will jam all together because if you're talking, I'm talking.
Speaker: They can't split out who's talking on the transcripts.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Sorry about that.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Go ahead.
Speaker: Yeah, and just one last thing, which is adjacent with frog Twitter, is the eco-fascists.
Speaker: So these people are sort of so, I guess, dedicated to what they see as the golden age of the past that they're like, oh, we need to basically destroy industrial civilization because humanity is doomed with all this technological change and societal change.
Speaker: So they follow the writings of the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski.
Speaker: And that's why I think recently there's been a lot more focus on him because he was made popular in these circles.
Speaker: Now there's a Netflix special on him.
Speaker: It's eco-fascism circles.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Like, and it's reaching the mainstream.
Speaker: And I mean, degrowth is now percolating into like the stop oil stuff where people think that like we need to just slow consumption, stop consumption of fossil fuels in order to like save our society.
Speaker: But obviously these people were far more
Speaker: right-wing and aggressive in their thoughts but I mean how much do you know about Theodore Kaczynski?
Speaker: I kind of know his influence after he became popular.
Speaker: Yes, yes.
Speaker: But tell us who he is.
Speaker: Yeah, so he was a child prodigy, was one of the youngest math professors, if not one of the youngest math professors, was a MKUltra test subject, which was like a U.S. government mental control program.
Speaker: But that's not the point.
Speaker: Eventually he gets tired of what he sees as this troublesome modern society.
Speaker: He quits his job, moves to the woods in a cabin, and then starts sending bombs to people that he sees as propagating the system.
Speaker: He submits a manifesto to a newspaper, I don't remember the name, called Industrial Society and its Future.
Speaker: And it's basically like a critique on modern society saying, oh, we as humans, we started off having to fend for ourselves, Maslow hierarchy of needs, like we had to work to get food, shelter, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: Now he's saying in the developed world, most of those basic needs are already fulfilled.
Speaker: So we have to have self-actualization.
Speaker: and that is much more difficult than just providing for yourself.
Speaker: So the Twitter heads were bringing back his writings and philosophy.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Yes, exactly.
Speaker: So I didn't read this before I got on Twitter and I read it.
Speaker: And obviously he killed multiple people.
Speaker: He's not a good person at all.
Speaker: But the thing is, his writing, to get out there, people related with it, right?
Speaker: Because he talked about what we have is surrogate goals.
Speaker: Because past your survival needs, what else are you looking for?
Speaker: Some people try to achieve a lot in their careers.
Speaker: Some people try to have a big family.
Speaker: But for some people,
Speaker: it's like never enough right like no matter what you do you still want more and you still want to achieve and he's saying that that like tension in society like um is sort of driving the technological process yeah right because people want to do more and more because um they have this inner ambition or they have goals
Speaker: And so he's saying we're going to get into the state where like the society is so complex and fragile that like he thinks that it will be catastrophic if it somehow fails or that you have to control people so much to maintain the structure of the society.
Speaker: So that's basically what he was saying in that piece.
Speaker: So he's like, we got to destroy society.
Speaker: Another big thinker on this is Penti Linkola, who's a Finnish ecologist.
Speaker: And he was very against what he saw as technological progress, development, population growth, the prioritization of people over the planet, basically.
Speaker: Okay, so I guess I can see why you group all these subcultures together into the same bucket.
Speaker: They're all kind of critiquing the current modern stage of where we've evolved to as a civilization.
Speaker: Yes, exactly.
Speaker: And there's some, like, maybe I'll read a Pentelincola sort of snippet just to show you what sort of energy he's trying to give off here.
Speaker: So this is about the refrigeration of fish.
Speaker: He who knows fish like the back of his hand has a lot to cry and a lot to laugh about.
Speaker: How many times have I heard my guests thank me for my burbot soup?
Speaker: Why, this fisherman's soup is wonderful and fresh too for once.
Speaker: Yes, burbot soup is a heavenly dish.
Speaker: My soup is really delicious.
Speaker: Although to make it, I only use the burbots which have lost their color.
Speaker: Burbots are a type of fish.
Speaker: A sure sign that the fish has been kept a while too long and is no longer good enough to sell.
Speaker: The burbots found in markets and shops will be fresher than mine.
Speaker: I can remember a young fish researcher who took food hygiene one step further.
Speaker: This person discovered that fish did not cool enough when covered in natural ice chips.
Speaker: He found so many bacteria in them that he figured he needed to produce ice chips mechanically.
Speaker: Full of enthusiasm, he cheerfully brought this news to the fishermen.
Speaker: The number of fish stored and manufactured ice chips would soar, he claimed, and so would fishermen's profit.
Speaker: Too bad that the price of an ice chip maker is equivalent to the income a part-time fisherman might make in two years, and the majority of our fishermen in Finland work part-time.
Speaker: Even a full-time fisherman would have to spend a full year's income in order to afford this machine.
Speaker: Freshness hysteria means nonsensically increasing the frequency of transportation by transporting increasingly smaller quantities with increasingly expensive equipment.
Speaker: and this applies to all food products.
Speaker: When I see one of those refrigerating vans that cost a million or two, I shiver.
Speaker: A friend of mine, a potato farmer, takes his newly unearthed potatoes to the shops three times a day.
Speaker: It is all quite charming.
Speaker: The potatoes shine like emeralds and are almost alive.
Speaker: But just how much does this cost?
Speaker: The most moronic buyers won't even take bread that isn't hot from the oven.
Speaker: These shops have all refrigerated shelves and freezers and toilets and tiles and sinks.
Speaker: Most of the shops in my youth had nothing, but of course none of them are left now.
Speaker: They were all closed down in the first assault of the hygienic inspectors.
Speaker: Any shopkeeper or farmer in Finland can confirm what I'm writing.
Speaker: Whenever I hear someone moaning about food prices, I think to myself, no wonder food is so expensive.
Speaker: After all, this fuss made about hygiene.
Speaker: Sometimes I make the mistake of riding my bicycle in the warm south in Hungary or France.
Speaker: There I notice always notice the simple joy of men and flies and market squares and shops where there is no hygiene fuss.
Speaker: Fuss over hygiene only seems to flourish in my own country, which is frozen half of the year.
Speaker: Okay, maybe he's going too much into Finland there.
Speaker: But you can see like this, this taste of technology goes all the way to like refrigerating fish.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And yeah.
Speaker: Is he living in our times or was he before?
Speaker: So he just died recently.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So he, yeah.
Speaker: But a lot of his writings were written even in the eighties.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And that became, that had a comeback.
Speaker: That had a resurgence with this.
Speaker: I want to call it like eco-fascism.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: Let's move on to the third because we're a bit short on time.
Speaker: Yes, yes, yes.
Speaker: So the third is the exhilarationists.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And exhilarationism, as it's normally seen to be from, originated in the late 90s, 1995 at Warwick University.
Speaker: There was this cybernetic culture research unit, which was a part of the philosophy department there.
Speaker: and they started thinking about a lot of crazy things.
Speaker: Cyber warfare.
Speaker: Cybernetic culture research unit.
Speaker: What's cybernetic?
Speaker: Cybernetic is basically it's a system that relates to itself.
Speaker: Cybernetic research unit.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Culture research unit.
Speaker: Okay, yeah.
Speaker: So the idea behind accelerationism is that the only way to break ourselves out of this capitalist morass society that we live in today is to let capitalism do the work for us.
Speaker: So we have to accelerate the contradictions in capitalism so that we move to whatever's after it.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So these accelerationists really hate both conservatives and progressives and liberals because they see them as people who are pulling on the handbrake trying to stop this machine from going because they think that the machine is going to go and something is going to come out at the end and it will break us from this thing and it could possibly be better, it could possibly be worse, but at least we're not stuck in this...
Speaker: system of capital.
Speaker: So it's trying to accelerate the progress of capitalism to reach the end goal, which is what communism, socialism...
Speaker: Which is undefined because there's different types of accelerationism.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: Like obviously for the left side, they want capitalism to break so that we can enter post-scarcity, right?
Speaker: So we have a society where there's no more, we can satisfy all our wants, right?
Speaker: They call this, there's a funny name they call this, it's
Speaker: Fully automated luxury gay space communism.
Speaker: Fully automated luxury gay space communism.
Speaker: Fully automated means like robots are going to do all the work for us, right?
Speaker: Luxury means like we're so far past post-scarcity that everyone can live a life of luxury.
Speaker: It's gay because it follows progressive social values.
Speaker: It's space because we have somehow managed to be an interstellar species.
Speaker: And it's communism because it is, yeah, obviously it's a court.
Speaker: That's one version of the utopia that we're progressing towards.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yes, yes.
Speaker: In a positive way, are they saying this is where we should go or is this if we don't change the course, this is where we end up?
Speaker: They're saying that this is where we have to go and we have to go there by post-scarcity and we get to post-scarcity by accelerating the capitalist system so that it can break through the scarcity barrier.
Speaker: So, well, number one, what scarcity barrier are they talking about?
Speaker: And two, how are they using Twitter to champion this accelerating of the capitalism?
Speaker: What are they suggesting to do?
Speaker: Well, basically, like, okay, first of all, like a lot of these people are in the philosophical spheres.
Speaker: So, okay.
Speaker: It's not very practical advice.
Speaker: Most of it is they're posting about something that they find interesting and they're having fun with it.
Speaker: I think in a practical term, that would mean doing everything you can to reduce barriers to capitalist growth.
Speaker: So less deregulation, ironically.
Speaker: So are they, again, are they using this thought experiment in the humorous way or are they actually believing in this cause?
Speaker: Well, that's the thing.
Speaker: Because of the layers of irony that are on the internet, can you really tell?
Speaker: I think that some people think that, like, yes, this is true, but maybe some people are just having fun as well.
Speaker: Okay, so this accelerationist movement, you have no way to verify whether... Just on the internet itself, though, right?
Speaker: And that's why it goes back to the earlier point of the death of earnesty online.
Speaker: People just post whatever they want, right?
Speaker: And you don't really know what they mean at all.
Speaker: Okay, so do you have an example of this accelerationism, of a tweet?
Speaker: Accelerationist tweet.
Speaker: Let me see.
Speaker: Are they a completely separate group during the same era of... No, so this is concurrent with Frog Twitter.
Speaker: And there was some overlap with also irony leftism too.
Speaker: Do they fight each other on the comment sections?
Speaker: Because...
Speaker: I guess it goes into this greater overarching theme where like there's obviously something wrong in modern society and the world.
Speaker: People want there to be change.
Speaker: People don't see a good way out.
Speaker: And like these are different ways of posting through it and of coping with what we are living in today.
Speaker: So this is one of the angles.
Speaker: And it's I guess it's a freeing angle because they're like, even if it gets worse, like maybe it'll get better at the end.
Speaker: Or basically the other perspective is that
Speaker: what we do politically to stop or to accelerate, it doesn't really matter that much, right?
Speaker: So it also goes into nihilism, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Anything else or should we...
Speaker: Um, yeah, no, no.
Speaker: So, yeah, let me, um, see one, one more thing.
Speaker: Um, basically just to explain the accelerationism a bit more, they see capitalism as like a closed positive feedback loop.
Speaker: So, um, like it's reinforcing to itself.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So, um, uh,
Speaker: Basically, they think of capital as like an inhuman machine.
Speaker: Like they don't think that they think that capitalism has capital itself has become like a new unwritten relation because we have created this money, which is a social technology, and we're all trying to get this money.
Speaker: And just through this through this, the existence of this like shared belief that now almost everyone in this world in the world has, we act in ways that can only be explained by like that this is like a new religion and that it's the natural endpoint will be actually something closer close to what Marx says is like a communist society, because he himself thought that like the contradictions within this capitalism would eventually
Speaker: like break the system and lead to communism.
Speaker: So like that's like, so that's the, like the, it's a, it's a, it's a quite a Marxist view.
Speaker: It's basically repackaged Marx.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What else can I cover here?
Speaker: I think... We can always come back to it at the end because we'll kind of draw commonalities among all of the four topics.
Speaker: Yes, yes.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: We'll go... We're kind of emerging already along the ways.
Speaker: Okay, and we'll go into the last one, which is incels, which everyone knows it now because unfortunately it has broken into the mainstream in a really big way.
Speaker: But the short of it is it's involuntary celibate.
Speaker: It's people who feel that they are celibate and it's not...
Speaker: because of choice, right?
Speaker: I first personally encountered this, my friend sent me this documentary called Love Shy, which is about involuntary celibate men who think that they're afflicted with this condition that prevents them from like interacting with women.
Speaker: And then they all, they congregate on an online forum called loveshy.com.
Speaker: But obviously that forum, the users on the forum branched out onto other social media.
Speaker: And I really think incels have taken over a lot of the parts of the internet.
Speaker: Like the right wing, a lot of them are, a lot of the dissatisfaction from these right wing people might be because they could be incel.
Speaker: The left is always calling right wing Twitter people incels.
Speaker: There's this idea of the incel crisis where it's like people don't know how to interact with the opposite sex anymore is the first thing.
Speaker: And the second thing is like the relations between the two sexes are getting worse and worse.
Speaker: Like people are like assuming the worst about the opposite gender.
Speaker: But just, yeah.
Speaker: Online gender wars.
Speaker: Probably have to walk it back a bit.
Speaker: Sorry.
Speaker: Yeah, okay.
Speaker: I mean, it kind of relates to the second subculture you talked about as well, commenting on the loss of masculinity in modernity.
Speaker: Yes, yes.
Speaker: So these people are obviously bitter about their place in society because I guess masculinity in every form, like they want to have a woman, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Um, and, uh, it's, I mean, I think this is something that all societies are going to have to contend with.
Speaker: Like how, how do you have a people, like how can we repair our gender relations?
Speaker: Because obviously like these people have failed either in society's views or their own views.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So how can we help these people who have, uh, failed and then how has society failed them?
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: But now, like, there's been many attacks by incels on innocent people.
Speaker: Like, for example, in Toronto, there was a guy who, like, posted on Facebook that he was an incel and drove a truck and killed a bunch of people in uptown Toronto.
Speaker: There's Elliot Rodger who's like the patron saint of the incels where people... He was a student in California who killed a few people with a gun.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: I think that this combined with the already existing declining fertility rates in the developed world is going to be a problem that society is going to have to tackle.
Speaker: But unfortunately, this ideology, because it's online, can propagate to other people.
Speaker: And people are starting to believe in it more because of the existence of people like them.
Speaker: So why did you group all the other terms together?
Speaker: Like we talked about incel, right?
Speaker: What is looks maxing?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So for incels, I guess there's two options that they think they have in their mind.
Speaker: One is looks maxing.
Speaker: So they think that physical attractiveness is everything.
Speaker: So they think that they're incel because they're not physically attractive.
Speaker: So the idea of looks maxing is improving your physical look.
Speaker: And that could be through soft maxing where, OK, maybe you improve your skin care routine, you improve your hygiene, fix your posture a little.
Speaker: And then there's hard maxing, which is like the more crazy stuff, which is like plastic surgery,
Speaker: people get leg lengthening surgery to become taller, right?
Speaker: Where does going to the gym fitness fit into this?
Speaker: Yeah, I think gym is soft maxing.
Speaker: Like, it's more like it's less intrusive and, like, damaging to your life.
Speaker: So heart maxing, what else is there?
Speaker: So, like...
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: So it's basically stuff that is like surgical or like, I mean, there was this this.
Speaker: So this is when I saw looks maxing like hit the mainstream is when people on TikTok were like talking about bone smashing, which is basically you take like a brick or something hard and you smash your jaw to promote to break it to promote growth in your your jawline so you can have a nicer jawline.
Speaker: And that's like one example where like it was actually posted as a joke.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But like because obviously that's not how the human body works.
Speaker: You can't grow your bone like that.
Speaker: But I mean, this goes back into the loss of earnest in society.
Speaker: People actually believe it.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Because people are just posting whatever they want.
Speaker: And incel, this terminology has really proliferated in society.
Speaker: I don't know how much it has in Singapore here, but there's Chad.
Speaker: Chad is someone who's super masculine, super alpha.
Speaker: People say alpha and beta all the time.
Speaker: Alpha, beta, omega.
Speaker: What's the other one?
Speaker: Sigma.
Speaker: Sigma.
Speaker: Yes, Sigma.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Sigma male, that's become huge.
Speaker: And all those things have spawned from this Incel sort of sub-community, right?
Speaker: Really?
Speaker: That's quite interesting.
Speaker: There are lots of chats.
Speaker: You know Red Pill and Blue Pill too, right?
Speaker: That is very much integrated into Incel.
Speaker: So let's move on to talking about the pills.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: But in The Matrix, the protagonist, Neo, is offered two pills by Morpheus, his mentor figure.
Speaker: One of the pills is red, the other pill is blue.
Speaker: The red pill is you open your eyes to the existing uncomfortable reality and there's no going back.
Speaker: The blue pill is go back to your previous life, blissfully ignorant of what you've learned.
Speaker: um so relating that to um incels and looks max and culture they're like oh there are some uncomfortable truths about like human uh gender relations that like uh so you can be red-pilled on that like you like learn about oh
Speaker: Like what they think is the truth, which is like, oh, like super attractive people get all.
Speaker: Higher success rate.
Speaker: Yes, higher success rate in dating, whatnot.
Speaker: Or you can be ignorant of that, be blue pill and just like live your life and just try not to think about it.
Speaker: And then there's these other pills as well.
Speaker: So there's the black pill.
Speaker: What's the black pill?
Speaker: The black pill is basically it's an extremely pessimistic, nihilistic worldview.
Speaker: They're like, it's impossible.
Speaker: Like there's nothing to be done.
Speaker: Like the problems are insurmountable.
Speaker: So you could basically just give up.
Speaker: So wait, so red pill, the logical conclusion from that is you should improve yourself.
Speaker: You should work on your, you know, your dating skills to improve your chances.
Speaker: Then blue pill is like stay on course, accept your fate and just focus on other areas of life.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Black pill is like...
Speaker: it's over, like there's nothing I can do to make this better, like it's fucked.
Speaker: So like people went, so and then this has like permeated to other parts of the internet.
Speaker: So like you can not just be blackpilled on dating, but you just be blackpilled like, oh, I'm blackpilled because they didn't get my coffee right this morning.
Speaker: Like it's like right, like the language evolves to be something like you can use it.
Speaker: It applies in a lot of different scenarios outside of celibacy.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But then there's the white pill, which is the pill of optimism.
Speaker: You're like, yes, things are bad, but like I can like we can do better.
Speaker: Like like they can improve, like things can improve.
Speaker: Like there is a possibility of that.
Speaker: And then there's what people call the clear pill, which is just like it is what it is.
Speaker: Like this like we have this society, we have this structure.
Speaker: We just have to like with ourselves, like just navigate it through like the positives and the negatives.
Speaker: So what's the difference between clear pill and the blue pill?
Speaker: Because the blue pill has the ignorance aspect to it.
Speaker: So blue pill just means you... You subscribe to what people call the conventional views of society.
Speaker: Which is what, for example, in the dating context?
Speaker: Do you believe what you're fed?
Speaker: Yeah, sort of.
Speaker: For these red pill guys, they think physical attractiveness is end-all, be-all, right?
Speaker: They're like, it doesn't matter.
Speaker: So it's basically rejecting that.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Blue Pill are like, uh, there's, it's okay.
Speaker: It's like, it's just like your personality or whatever.
Speaker: Like, yeah, it's true love.
Speaker: There's like, um, yes, yes.
Speaker: It's like basically, I guess it's ignoring some of the psychology behind like relationships.
Speaker: yeah like yeah okay so these are all the pills you can take and emerge yes that emerged from incel but now i think you can really apply it to everything else in the world and in life yeah um but it yeah it became very popular because of of incel yeah um okay perhaps now like after we
Speaker: talked about all four unless you have something else to share.
Speaker: No, no, no.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I'm hearing a couple commonalities.
Speaker: I mean, number one is definitely this dissatisfaction to the status quo, whether on the societal level about economic realities, about inequality, social norms, and lastly, the sexual frustrations.
Speaker: And they all channel their dissatisfaction through the internet.
Speaker: And they have found communities where they can congregate and reinforce their own views and also work on their views because they're intellectually sparring with other communities as well.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: And it kind of gives them that identity too when they, in this society where they can just feel like they're being ignored, unheard, you know, just a replaceable part of this cog of this big capitalist society
Speaker: machined right yes yes exactly so they are they are trying to um basically build a new community where this existing like in real life community can't really exist because like when are you really going to talk to your friends in a joking way about these matters it's like you have to kind of go on the internet to like find these communities
Speaker: Do you think the society led to these subcultures or did the subculture kind of emerge themselves and permeate into this society?
Speaker: Do you think they existed offline before?
Speaker: I think in part they did because these like, for example, the eco-fascists, like those writings existed for like decades before.
Speaker: But it's just the Internet has allowed for the democratization of information and for people to network when they wouldn't necessarily be in the same spheres.
Speaker: in real life, right?
Speaker: And it's especially because these are more controversial topics.
Speaker: For example, there's a combined vulgarity to all these subcultures, right?
Speaker: It's stuff that's uncomfortable to talk about in real life.
Speaker: I really like the point you brought up earlier about this lack of earnesty and seriousness.
Speaker: Why don't we just...
Speaker: dive deeper on that as kind of the common thread connecting to all of these.
Speaker: Once you have this internet forum, people can speak anonymously.
Speaker: It's a democratic platform, but on the flip hand, you also don't know what's true anymore.
Speaker: And that's not even talking about the rise of AI and the fake content.
Speaker: These are all real content generated by people.
Speaker: But even given that context, there's still a loss of genuineness in the discussion.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And I think part of that is because of the anonymous nature.
Speaker: So you can say whatever you want and you have no real consequences to yourself.
Speaker: But actually, there are consequences because you're influencing the discourse of society and someone will read it and think of it some way.
Speaker: And that's one thing I wanted to touch upon is the idea of this eternal straw man that is created by the internet.
Speaker: Because there's always someone saying something so insane that further supports your own view, right?
Speaker: Like, for example, that drunk driving and going to work tweet.
Speaker: Some person can see that and be like, what the heck, this is why we need to do this, this, and that.
Speaker: But at the end of the day, it was a joke tweet, right?
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: or joke tweet.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So because of this straw man, I think this is like increasing the polarization and radicalization in our politics because people are like finding enemies that like might not even be real and just and just getting mad about it and getting more frustrated and angry.
Speaker: And then like the cycle like repeats itself.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it's a much more convenient way to bully other people and to kind of let out your other frustrations in life.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Because ultimately we're social animals and like it's easier to bully people online than in real life.
Speaker: So that's that's what it is.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Do you think the same patterns emerging in the real life offline too?
Speaker: Do you think people nowadays have less regard for truth and fact- I do think that self-deprecating ironic humor is relatively more popular now.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And maybe that spills over more into like the loss of earnest in society.
Speaker: But like, obviously, this is something that is very difficult to quantify.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And it's like it's cross cultural, too.
Speaker: And it depends on like basically how many people are as as online as I was and propagating that culture versus like people who have ignorance of this and are just like experiencing it secondhand from other people.
Speaker: experiencing second hand as like in real life if you behave a certain way and then I didn't know you got that from the internet.
Speaker: Yes, exactly.
Speaker: What do you think is the impact of this on our society, civilization?
Speaker: Do you think it's a good thing?
Speaker: Well, it just makes it very confusing, right?
Speaker: Because, I mean, like I know obviously you can't speak the truth every single time.
Speaker: Sometimes you have to do the little white lie.
Speaker: Like you brush under the rug the inconvenient truths.
Speaker: But like at the end of the day, like if we're not actually saying what we mean, then what are we really doing?
Speaker: Like in these conversations, what are we talking about at all?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like it's meaningless.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So what I find, I, I always use Twitter.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But what I find is 90% of the content now is garbage is, uh, it has very little information value because one is it,
Speaker: well, it could be AI generated, but also it could be repeated, repetitive from other sources.
Speaker: But also it's just, you don't know whether, like, what is it intended for?
Speaker: It's out of contact.
Speaker: Is it like trying to send a business message?
Speaker: Like it's like an ad that has a hidden note, a footnote under saying like this is an ad, but you don't know this is an ad.
Speaker: So it's harder and harder to tell what's the contact of the message nowadays on the internet forums.
Speaker: That's like the part of the loss of earnestly, but that's also why I thought this was the golden age of Twitter specifically.
Speaker: because now uh for at least for twitter you can you get money based on your impressions and uh how many people interact with your tweet how many people view your tweet i mean it's the same on tick tock and it's the same i'm sure on some other social media platforms so now instead of like really posting what you want to post you you post in order to gain interactions and make money right you want to make money online
Speaker: So people are posting what gets interactions and maybe that's not necessarily what is informationally useful or relevant or whatever.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So you're making this point that we're past the peak of the golden age of internet because of the change in the algorithm and the monetization of these social media platforms.
Speaker: I think that's a very important point.
Speaker: It's kind of overlooked a lot.
Speaker: Yeah, like 100%, the tweets you see nowadays are not the ones that...
Speaker: represents like what's the most um relevant but it's just most what's most like catchy and uh hits all the keywords right um exactly like we're optimizing it's all algorithmic now and it's and i think it's actually going to get worse with as more generative ai comes out like
Speaker: these tweets that first this person wasn't even being serious and now it's not even real.
Speaker: It's going to be like a double whammy to like basically discourse is going to be flooded but with so much garbage.
Speaker: And in this like world where you only have a limited attention span, like you can only consume so much.
Speaker: And I think a lot of people will start clocking out because like it's just garbage, right?
Speaker: Just garbage, garbage, garbage.
Speaker: And like how can you like get anything meaningful from it?
Speaker: Yeah, which is why I think offline, in-person, real-time discussion like this podcast will become increasingly valuable, at least for me.
Speaker: Spending more time offline with people that I actually know to have real interactions will foster more intellectual growth and get more inspiration out of it than people.
Speaker: reading twitter out of contact you don't know whether it's a robot behind it yeah 100 i agree we're trying to bring real life back yeah um but obviously it's harder it's very hard now because right like society has been changed by the internet in such a way that like you always have a convenient friend to talk to in your hand
Speaker: Once you just go back to that, once you monetize the platform, it changes the nature of the game.
Speaker: It's like before it's a safari, like you can do whatever you want, but now it becomes like a field house in the Olympic game that there's certain rules and you're really only competing in the 400 meters, 800 meters, you know, the long jumps.
Speaker: And these rules are how do you optimize your, you know,
Speaker: keywords, your titles, and short form videos, right?
Speaker: How do you game the system to reach the right audience?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And of course, there can be meaningful content made out by that because like some people actually do can produce like algorithmically useful stuff.
Speaker: But I guess the issue is now this is a big game, right?
Speaker: There's so many YouTubers, so many TikTokers that like the volume of everything has increased and it's going to be increased more as AI gets better and better and people still try to fight this battle.
Speaker: And just with anything else, I'm thinking about like monopoly or the consolidation of power.
Speaker: It just goes with anything.
Speaker: Like once you have this single determinant of the rules of the game, there's a loss of diversity because all the content creators are trying to
Speaker: game the system the same system in the same way that producing the same content which is why like when you scroll through TikTok or other social media it's all the same thing it's just different people trying to bandwagon on the same trends producing content that has very little authenticity and uniqueness while at the same time they're trying to build a brand but their brand is really just whatever is popular that's everyone's brand now
Speaker: Yes, yes, exactly.
Speaker: Because it's about the quantity, it's not about quality.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: It's about, again, like the barrier to upload something.
Speaker: It's so low now, and it's just...
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And in one way, it's great because it's the democratization of information.
Speaker: Like back then, like to get anything written out, you have to be on a newspaper or be published.
Speaker: Now anyone can put anything out.
Speaker: But the problem, I guess, part of it is the volume.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There's just too much out there.
Speaker: yeah and yeah and having i think a critical mind like being able to select information understand their contact understand their usefulness know what you're looking for and how to find them will become increasingly important 100 i think like the ability to filter out like what's real and what's not in the coming decades is going to probably be one of the most important skills
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Where are these Twitter heads now that were part of this era of golden age?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, are they still active?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I guess there's a few buckets, like some just became inactive.
Speaker: Like some of them were not very happy with Elon Musk takeover of Twitter.
Speaker: So they've migrated or they just went inactive.
Speaker: Some of them have been straight up banned and then they never rejoined.
Speaker: Some of them are still going.
Speaker: Some of them are still going and even more popular.
Speaker: Some are still going and some are less popular.
Speaker: There's no really defining path that these posters have gone.
Speaker: But do you see... But there's obviously new posters as well.
Speaker: Sorry for interrupting you.
Speaker: Yeah, but do you see the activity volume...
Speaker: the amount of vibrancy or dynamism continue after different changes of algorithm, the stage of the technology?
Speaker: Well, it's hard for me to say that because I guess part of it was like at that stage of my life, I was very interested in that stuff.
Speaker: And now it's like I'm less.
Speaker: You recovered from Twitter.
Speaker: I recovered.
Speaker: So now it's like I don't really need to visit it.
Speaker: And honestly, I don't want to because you're right.
Speaker: There is a loss of vibrancy.
Speaker: It is not as interesting because
Speaker: there's there hasn't been a lot of evolution from what we were at before right like a lot of these themes are still very deep on the internet right and they're still there but like what's new i guess like it's like nothing's really changed i guess right this this the sense of pessimism is still there the sense of like how are we going to solve it the sense of oh there's nothing we can do it's kind of still there and there hasn't been like really something to break through that i think
Speaker: Yeah, I think it's because the infrastructure today, the technology, the monetization, like the creator as a profession trend really changed the nature of social media and online forums.
Speaker: And back in the days, it was more of a conducive environment for subcultures to emerge, permeate, and cross-pollinate.
Speaker: But nowadays,
Speaker: the environment has changed.
Speaker: You're in a different era, you're playing a different bowl game, and it's all about, you know,
Speaker: how many subscribers, how many views, page views.
Speaker: Yes, because ultimately you're trying to sell a course, you're trying to sell vitamins, you have a discount promo code.
Speaker: The posting for the love of the game is maybe still there, but a lot of people are way more money focused now on it.
Speaker: I think that goes for the entirety of society, and that's the capitalism positive feedback loop.
Speaker: Everything just gets more and more commercialized, financialized as we go on.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Perhaps we can draw a conclusion to this episode and maybe we can end it on a bit of a reflection on human nature and what does it say about us that look at our civilization...
Speaker: progress from uh you know the hunter-gatherer stage to you know the uh agricultural societies to you know industrialization with technologies to today where people can talk to each other on the internet um coming up with things that you know just culture the emergence of culture has changed so much um
Speaker: What are your thoughts after being observant of these trends for so long?
Speaker: I mean, for me, obviously, I've read all of this stuff, and a lot of it is staring at the void.
Speaker: A lot of it is quite depressing.
Speaker: But I came out at the end of it like...
Speaker: happier that like i i don't think the blue pill is the solution i think the solution is the clear pill just to understand and know all these things and that they do exist i mean ignorance is bliss to a certain extent but at the end of the day like you like you need all the information that you can to to to be able to progress uh like just personally like in our society
Speaker: um how come you didn't get depressed i mean there were there were stages i was depressed i was like like wow like life is meaningless blah blah blah but i think like somehow i i was able to grow grow out of that um so but that's another thing like yes the internet can severely impact your mental health based on what you read um uh like like
Speaker: but i think now um i and i think one of the big things that helped me was the rejection of irony and like the embracing embracing earnesty and like a lot of people are like playing a character that they don't really want to play in in life or on the internet and honestly you just need to be yourself and like be who you want to be so i guess that's that's a weird way to cap
Speaker: this off it's like a personal growth point but like I do think we do have to counter some of these trends like maybe just personally
Speaker: Yeah, and I think this podcast is my little effort at contributing to this counterculture, inviting people like you who, you know, I know personally, you know, I could go the traditional route inviting big-name guests and trying to be, you know, next hit show, but then I'll lose my...
Speaker: uh uniqueness in the in the conversation topics in the guests that i bring um you know then if i'm just trying to play for the applause what is is there for me to gain exactly so first and foremost um
Speaker: The value of this podcast is completely in this hour at this room between us right now.
Speaker: If people take something away from this, I'm very happy.
Speaker: But if not, I'm happy that it happened because we had this earnest exchange and conversation, discourse on this shining a light on this very important subject matter.
Speaker: Thank you for having me on, Mikrid.
