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I am basically a pacifist, inclined to what in India is sometimes derisively referred to as Gandhigiri (loosely “LARPing Gandhi”). If I don’t check the tendency, I naturally retreat from, and go into denial about, unpleasant and violent realities. But it’s time to admit it: 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 Trump. He’s more consequence than cause.

To endure through a war without either retreating from the fray, or developing crippling PTSD from losing too many poorly picked battles, you need a good map of the battlefield, a sense of the movements of various combatant groups, their objectives, tactics and strategies, awareness of recent battles and their outcomes, current live battles, and emerging flashpoints. Here’s my first draft attempt.

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

Full disclosure. I am not going to pretend to be personally neutral here. With rare exceptions, my personal sympathies pretty much uniformly fall on the left side of this map, with most of my ideological commitments being left-libertarian. With my editor hat on, I try to ensure that this blog spans a broader spectrum of implicit political positions than my own writings do, but it still isn’t Switzerland.

Here is a list of some key battlefronts, corresponding to the numbered locations on the map. The list is not meant to be comprehensive (though feel free to suggest more in the comments), merely indicative of the broader contours.

GamerGate front: Along with #5, probably the original flashpoint, the Fort Sumter battle of our times. The August 2014 conflict between fans of traditional gaming and indie women in gaming staked out what remains the key battleground today. Nominally, the battle is between those who want stronger, more accountable governance of online de facto public spaces, and those who want them treated like true public spaces with strong free speech protections. Harassment, trolling, botnets, private/commons conflicts, censorship, all fit into this battle. In some ways this is ground zero, and sets the rules of engagement for all battlefronts. Climate politics: Largely fought between a mix of old and new left on the one hand, and a corporate-backed (Koch brothers, Big Coal etc) climate skepticism faction on the other (supported by a volunteer army of dedicated foot soldiers serving as small-scale retail doubt merchants). Interestingly, this flashpoint includes a climate hawks vs climate doves schism within the left. This battlefront can be found more in the blogosphere than on Twitter or Facebook, as well as in institutional backrooms. It is one where both sides have settled in for a really long slugfest. If I were to draw a more metaphorically rich map, this would be an oceanic battlespace, like the U-boats vs Allied shipping battle in the North Atlantic in World War 2. Healthcare: This is almost entirely old left versus corporate welfare state, with Obamacare repeal efforts in Congress being the focal point. Rank and file on Twitter are relatively less active on this battlefront because there’s not a whole lot for them to do (besides endure sustained FUD from both sides). But this is almost certainly the most consequential culture war (and being fought in town halls), even though it does not play out as visibly as some of the others. Academia: This is probably both the murkiest and most visible battlefront, and has contributed to our wartime lexicon such phrases as “safe space” and “trigger warning”. Celebrated cases like those of Bret Weinstein and Jordan Peterson have played out here. Four forces meet at this battlefront: The academic Marxist left defined by authoritarian intersectionality politics and postmodernist (very broadly speaking) intellectual culture. A broadly anti-blank-slate set of postmodernism-skeptic academics who include both left and right members as well as relative outsiders like Nassim Taleb A broad coalition of student activists (who can turn militant) encompassing BLM, LBGT activists, and various other factions. They form the core of the SJW (social justice warrior) cadre. A minority of politically right-wing academics who are surprisingly not much of a factor relative to doctrinal heretics within the left (broadly construed) Ferguson Front: The primary cause for BLM (Black Lives Matter), this battlefront pits the black community against the police state, the penal system, and homogeneous right-wing white populations. The battlefront acquired sharp definition in August 2014 with Ferguson, but the history of course goes all the way back to the first video-taped incident with Rodney King back in the 90s. Gun rights activists and the NRA are part of this battlefront (via, for example, the Trayvon Martin shooting). The Christian right and neo-Nazis maintain some awkward neighborhood relations somewhere around here. Sexual harassment Ground War: The #MeToo movement in the mainstream media, the tech industry, and academia. Key flashpoint battles include Susan Fowler vs Uber, the Matt Lauer case, and a variety of academic cases. Though there is a corresponding battlefront on the right (Bill O’Reilly, Roger Ailes, Steve Wynn cases), the pressure to clean house and instill new norms is far higher on the left. The right for the most part appears to have successfully controlled this front. Sexual harassment Air War: The entertainment industry has unique high-visibility characteristics that make it a separate front. It started with Bill Cosby, but the Harvey Weinstein and Louis C. K. cases are what made the #MeToo movement cohere. The aftermath of frantic virtue signaling theater at awards ceremonies has driven this to evolve in different ways than the ground war. Hyperneurotypicals versus non-neurotypicals: 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. Unlike traditional attacks on “PC culture,” the non-neurotypical argument, that the regulation of thought and speech by the authoritarian left imposes an impossible cognitive burden on a disadvantaged minority, acts as a sort of internal paradox. I predict this will be what what shifts the advantage from the authoritarian to the libertarian left. The James Damore vs. Google battle is an early view of how this type of battle plays out. Old versus New Decentralizers: This pits old-school decentralization ideologues, who often came from green/environmental/sustainable/local movements, against a new breed that is fueled by crypto wealth and is stridently libertarian in its p2p sensibilities.

There are definitely many more battle annotations one could make on this map. Among the important battles I left out to avoid clutter are mass shootings, anti-immigrant (and anti-Muslim in particular) flashpoints, LGBT rights, the opioid epidemic, and various endemic conflicts having to do with homelessness and poverty. There are also long-running battles such as the Drug War, and abortion rights, which have been eaten by software and gone online. And finally, there are localized battles with national and global consequences, such as the battle over housing in San Francisco, which will determine the future of Silicon Valley and therefore the world.

If I left out your favorite battle, let me know in the comments. There’s a chance I’ll make a bigger, more complete map.

Some battles are not part of the culture war proper, but increase the overall FUD within it. The prime example is the battle over irreproducible results in science, especially in social psychology. Since so many of the battles involve deploying social psychology arguments, this makes the whole theater of scientific justification on all sides very shaky.

War Mind, Peace Mind

You may have a different reaction, but 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.

Over the past few months, I’ve made a mental shift to what I think of as war mind. Civilian, peacenik war mind, Gandhigiri war mind, but war mind. It resets many behavioral defaults to new values, and has me modulating and managing my online interactions differently. Seemingly crazy behaviors start to feel sane. Seemingly sane behaviors start to feel crazy. I am still largely a pacifist, but I do pick the occasional battle. At least once in the last year with a Russian bot.

If you think I’m overstating the case here, and making out minor online kerfuffles to be a condition of widespread Hobbesian war, you just might be enjoying the security of a well-protected institutionally ensconced life, likely with a cushy paycheck job and a home far from the battlefronts. A place from which you get only a sanitized view of what’s going on. If on the other hand, you take the culture wars seriously, chances are you are both exposed to them and not entirely free to retreat from them.

More importantly, chances are, you have something at stake, and a reason to take part in the conflict on one side or the other, either as combatant or peacemaker.

Sometimes the combatants win, sometimes the peacemakers win, but the clueless always get traumatized.

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. To unleash a botnet pumping up a hashtag around an inflammatory topic is undeniably an act of undeclared war. To send rape threats to women in public forums, forcing them to retreat from public view, is not very different from invading a city and driving women into hiding. It is probably paranoid to assume that random people you meet online are malicious until proven otherwise, but you should at least keep in mind the possibility that they could be malicious. Or a patsy for someone who is.

If you haven’t personally experienced damage online, go on Twitter and take a look around at what more vulnerable people than yourself are being subjected to. It’s not pretty.

I find it rather astounding that many are able to convince themselves, on the strength of the role played by jokes and memes, and their own experience of relative safety online, that this is all just a huge joke. And it’s not just the parade of black men being shot on video by an unchecked militarized police. Week after week, dozens of people suffer physical or mental trauma, financial losses, and destroyed careers and reputations, in the course of the culture wars. Sometimes it’s a huge, concerted online+offline malicious campaign that does the damage. Other times, it is blowback from a single ill-considered tweet that attracts an enraged mob looking for something new to feed on.

And for every celebrity caught up in the conflict, there are dozens whose pain is only visible to their friends on Twitter. And for every one of those, there are probably dozens more who end up as collateral damage — as often from friendly fire from beFUDdled allies as from adversarial malice — in the conflict.

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. We’ll be discussing the root causes — perhaps it is inequality, perhaps it is finally dealing with the legacy of slavery and structural racism, perhaps it is deteriorating public health from a failing healthcare system — for decades. But what actually matters today is simply recognizing what is going on.

And there are plenty of high-powered, heavily resourced homegrown combatants in the fray as well, ranging from the OG billionaire crowd — the Kochs, Mercers, and Soros class — to entrants from the new economy ranging from Palmer Luckey (founder of Oculus and bankroller of underground meme factories) to Peter Thiel (who broke new tactical ground with his takedown of Gawker media).

The wars are also new, in a way combatants from the old culture wars of the 60s and 70s don’t seem to want to recognize. Not just new in terms of tactical innovations and the fourth-generation nature of the conflict, but in terms of an expanded, and fragmented, ideological landscape that creates unexpected new alliances and antagonisms. The plural wars is justified.

Compared to the relatively monolithic Counterculture versus The Man war of the 60s, decorously announced by Eisenhower in his farewell address, the current state is practically Hobbesian. Instead of being given a friendly early warning by a decent president, for many, the first sign of the war was the election of an awful one two years into the hostilities (I date the start of the new culture wars to GamerGate/Ferguson in August 2014).

While the old Saul Alinsky (Rules for Radicals) playbook is certainly being deployed by all sides, there are also entirely new and unwritten playbooks being developed and deployed.

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.

The long tail of new ideological combatants is perhaps the most remarkable feature of the new battlefield. From anarcho-capitalist (ancap) crypto warriors to non-neurotypicals, there is a veritable zoo of combatant types and ideologies here, all busy pseudospeciating adversaries (I prefer that term to the rather useless othering) and finding creative new ways to hurt each other. You reductively map it to the 1960s/70s culture wars of Nixonland at your own risk.

Tweeted Notes

I haven’t yet gathered my thoughts on this whole theme properly, besides drawing my map, but I did tweet a bunch yesterday (March 5), throwing out some initial thoughts on the culture wars topic. I’m compiling them here.

The overarching theme of these tweets is this: there is a war on, and except for the low level of actual killing, it is a real war, not an allegorical or metaphoric one. The most visible battlefields are online forums like Twitter, Facebook, and various well-connected regions of the blogosphere. But there is also plenty of old-school direct action on the streets, in traditional media outlets, and behind closed doors.

The combatants include professional cyberwarriors and seasoned amateur guerrillas pursuing very well-defined objectives with military precision and specialized tools. Then there is the small but highly skilled corps of shitposters whose skill at information warfare is matched only by their fundamental incomprehension of the real damage they’re unleashing for lulz. And finally, masses of clueless patsies being programmed like insect swarms by all sides. What Renee DiResta labeled always-on mobs in her post last year.

In other words, there is a war on, it’s very real, causing real pain to many, and involves huge consequences hanging in the balance, from the future of academia and the conduct of science to the future of the planet itself.

Believe it or not, the swinging of a presidential election is actually a fairly minor chapter in the ongoing saga. When it’s all done and over with, and the dust has settled somewhat, I believe we’ll look back on this era as being as consequential in reshaping the future of the United States and the world as the Civil War.

Here are my tweets from yesterday, slightly cleaned up.

All my tweets today inspired by one overarching thought: we are not living in peacetime. We’ve been living through a (relatively bloodless) wartime since mid-2015. Not just that, but in many respects a wartime comparable to WWI in terms of scale of social/institutional change.

We may have arrived in an era of permanent fake news, with no possibility of authoritative common ground on anything. How do you adapt to/survive in such an info environment?

The speed of bullshit is the same for all observers

The growing conspiracist fringe (comprising subcultures that organize around one or more core crackpot beliefs) is not a solvable problem. I propose calling them lottery worlds. Key governance problem is socializing outcomes when one occasionally turns out to be right.

The deployers of fake news as a weaponized infowar tactic aim for 3 outcomes in enemy populations: 1. Fragmentation of truth ground (divide) 2. Retreat of adversaries from public spaces (conquer) 3. Mutual cognitive retreat among neighbors, at speed of bullshit, from doubt (incapacitate)

The great irony of today (or perhaps it’s a judo move, which Putin is reportedly good at) is that anti-democratic ideologues have pushed us into a condition of monstrously metastasized hyperdemocracy, operating within structures too indirect to handle its raw force. Well played.

For most Americans, work reality is primary social reality. Community/neighborhood realities have been weak to nonexistent (cf Putnam’s Bowling Alone thesis) since ~1980s. Paycheck people have been unusually cognitively protected from infowars relative to free agents/unemployed.

Allowing myself the conceit of self-classifying as a good (as in non-malicious) blogger, I wonder if the blogosphere is overall turning lemon market, bad driving out good. It isn’t as bad as twitter or Facebook, but blogosphere too has skidded downhill in fake news era.

If I weren’t a blogger I probably would have left social media in the last year. An interesting challenge if your work requires you to stay in public info spaces is that you have to choose between believing you’re going crazy or that the culture wars are real, with real PTSD

The appeal of both libertarianism and monarchism, so different on the surface, is the same: a refuge from crowds gone mad due to info ubiquity and bullshit superubiquity. Jose Ortega y Gasset (Revolt of the Masses) saw this coming a century ago, but it’s only truly arrived in this decade. Neither has a hope in hell of traction without radical (=dystopian) simplification of society.

In an infowar battlefield, you’re only as powerful as size of your connected subgraph in the random news forest. Instead of retreating, try and increase the size of consensus group. Share/amortize info verification/falsification costs. Next best thing to own primary sources.

News has a CAP theorem breakdown problem. When producing news-like content becomes cheap enough, people will choose consistency plus availability and give up partition tolerance. Neighbor vs neighbor. Alt fact vs alt fact.

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

If you’re retreating from social media, narrowing info sources to fewer “trusted” ones, and breaking up with friends who suddenly seem to have gone crazy,… Congrats, you’re a casualty of infowar. If you think of it as mental health/self care, it’s worked even better on you.

When I’ve laid out this case, that there’s an actual war on, in recent months, I’ve often gotten a particularly silly response: that it’s all in my head (and the heads of those who agree with me). It’s all just a matter of words and words can’t hurt or do damage. That if I’d only stop consuming (or I suppose, producing) so much social media, and spent more time in “healthy” activities, I’d see that this whole thing is a figment of my imagination.

This of course, is a true patsy take. Which side you’re a patsy for is revealed by what “healthy” activities you recommend for those in the fray. Common revealing suggestions include “just focus on building things,” “focus on family/friends IRL”, “meditate”, “go to the gym and deadlift”, “read classic old books, not this trash” etc.

Patsy, patsy, patsy, patsy, patsy.

My general conclusion is that the people who respond with denial are rationalizing a personal retreat by pretending that there isn’t an actual serious conflict underway. That even momentous events like the rise of Trumpism are one-off accidents and that we’ll return to “normalcy” once the damn millennials get jobs and settle down instead of wasting time tweeting and eating avocado toast.

I have no problem with people who feel they have to retreat from the fray simply as a matter of personal mental health (normalizing mental-health self-care is one of the good things that might come out of all this). Or those who find peace of mind by unplugging and meditating more. That does not mean there is no conflict or that those who stay in the fray are fighting an imaginary war that’s all in their heads, or that it won’t matter in the end.

In fact, this kind of retreat is precisely the reaction many of the hardier combatants are looking to provoke among adversaries. To retreat without even realizing that retreat has been forced on you, rather than chosen by you, is to lose without even realizing you were in a fight. And cede access to public territory you didn’t know you had a right to (and need for).

Prognosis

If you do agree that there is a real war on, and that it’s worth fighting to whatever extent you’re able, there are many more questions to ask and ponder. Here’s a sample/core dump of my current thinking.

When will the war end?

Probably 2020-2024. The peace-making technologies and governance initiatives in the works will take at least that long to be rolled out, and it will take at least that long for the current global swing towards ethnonationalism to work itself out.

What can we do about identity politics?

Nothing. People with many different identities are in the battlefield now and they’re not going away. All politics involves identities, and it is better to have them acknowledged and deployed consciously rather than pretending everybody is the same. A basic mistake the right makes is to assume that deploying identity in a culture war is a choice rather than a condition of entering the fray at all. This will be a healthy thing in the long term even if it feels toxic now.

Should I retreat from social media?

You can if it makes you feel better and you need to take care of yourself. Just don’t pretend there isn’t a war on or that those in the fray to a greater degree than you are imagining things. And don’t act all surprised if somehow you end up as collateral damage despite being in retreat mode. As a wise woman once told me, you may choose to unsub from the culture wars, but the culture wars sub you.

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). Neither the authoritarian left, nor the libertarian right, has what it takes in terms of cultural capital to go the distance, and both are already in rearguard mode.

Half of this is the outcome I’d personally like, but that’s neither the reason I think it’s likely, nor the reason I’ve picked the quadrant I have. The other half is something I wish didn’t have to be the case, but I think people hoping for a fully demilitarized state with low/non-existent institutionalized violence (in the form of police and penal systems predisposed to criminalize poverty and misfortune, and a security state predisposed to criminalize foreignness) are delusional.

The authoritarian left will lose because it underestimates the degree to which humans want to freely negotiate their own relationships with other humans, rather than within some sort of coercive matrix of doctrinaire mutual expectations mediated by prescribed identity performance masks. This does not mean identity politics will go away. It will merely be an very weakly regulated aspect of human relationships, worked out 1:1 most of the time. To the extent larger scale institutional behaviors focus on this aspect of human relationships, it is the institutions that will weaken and die.

The libertarian right will lose because it underestimates the degree to which humans are driven by genuine, non-judgmental compassion and collective instincts, and inclined to rely on large-scale patterns of mutual aid that are not also patterns of mutual judgment. If there’s one lesson that was driven home for me reading writers like Hannah Arendt and Ursula 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.

It took me a long time to recognize the depth of this truth because I personally am much less sociable and mutualism-driven than most humans. I mostly free-ride on the others being this way.

Why will they win?

Ultimately, for drawn-out conflicts like this, those who can build economic power steadily rather than draining it, tend to win. I had a good tweet about it a few months ago:

If a military conflict lasts longer than 3 yrs, economic strength determines outcome.

If an economic conflict lasts longer than 30 yrs, ideological superiority determines outcome.

If an ideological conflict lasts >300 yrs, technological generativity determines outcome

We are in the 3-30 years range here. Judgements about which ideologies can grow, go mainstream, and exist sustainably as part of the institutional landscape become much easier if you think 30 years out instead of 3. Very few ideologies have the legs to last long. Most are just good for a few years of bloody skirmishing, not for building lives around.

What is the future of democracy?

Bright but transformed. The world is too complex and interconnected, and individuals too empowered and mutually connected, to be governed any other way. But the renaissance in democracy driven by digital technologies may leave it unrecognizable.

Can we return to human-scale technology?

No. There are bots, look around. The genie is not going back in the bottle. We’re just going to have to tame it.

Isn’t this just tech addiction, to be fixed with more responsible UX?

The folks at the Center for Humane Technology seem to think so. I don’t. I hope I am wrong and wish their project luck (disagree and commit), but I think it is largely wishful authoritarian-left thinking.

Thinking this is a “technology” problem feels like a category error to me. Like calling the conflict with Al Qaeda/ISIS a “war on terror.”

We are not fighting because unethical dark-pattern designers are making us click without thinking. We are fighting because there are reasons to fight and valuable things to fight over, such as control of rich and powerful institutions.

How will the US emerge from this?

Diminished but stronger. There will be a transient dip in global influence and stature lasting a couple of decades. But the bright-side angle here is that this is the only place in the world culture wars could play out. After the trauma comes the psychological growth, and that will be valuable. In a way, parts of the world that seem to be cleverly avoiding similar culture wars are building up cultural growth debt.

As has been the case many times in the past few centuries, the US is deceptively backward seeming here. It is actually ahead of the curve in important ways, while seemingly more culturally advanced countries have kicked growth tin-cans down the road.

Will we see a return to normalcy?

No.

Thanks to Renee DiResta for many useful discussions