patrick.net

Not everyone is equally hypnotizable.

They’ve got an answer for that. The goats are simply segregated from the sheep, siloed in echo chambers where they can yell at one another all they please, without any danger of their criminal thoughts infecting the rest of the herd. Remember those social graphs, the sentiment analysis algorithms. It’s easy enough to identify normie-adjacent accounts, and prune those connections; simplicity itself to ensure that posts made by incorrigible irredentists will never besmirch the timeline of the oblivious American Griller. This isn’t even necessarily sinister, after all, the normie has no interest in politics or philosophy, he just wants to talk sportsball and Marvel movies and Kylie Minogue ... so that’s what the algo shows him. It gives him exactly what he wants, and thereby ensures he never sees anything he isn’t supposed to. ...

Consider the actual effect of siloing. Has this actually prevented our ideas from leaking into the mainstream? Not at all. Instead, it’s essentially created a distributed digital Athens: the most intelligent, interesting, irreverent, and creative anons have been crammed together into one sprawling global nuclear meme reactor.




That we are numerically insignificant next to the sheer biomass of normies and brainwormed NPCs is irrelevant; if anything, it’s an advantage, because it makes it much easier for organic relationships to form, simplifies informal reputational economies, and, quite frankly, keeps the midwits blessedly muted. This metapolitical Thing we’re all involved in is essentially the only source of anything remotely novel, thoughtful, or funny, the only place in which autists and artists motivated by truth and beauty pursue those things merely for the sake of it. Everything else is a wasteland.

Since nothing culturally interesting is happening elsewhere, there’s an enormous cultural pressure gradient, which the cell membranes of siloing aren’t capable of overcoming. The result is that our ideas do, in fact, leak out. By now the smuggling trails are well-established. Memes, hot takes, and talking points are generated in private group chats populated by anons; from there, the gems are disseminated publicly to the siloed social media sub-networks; they’re then picked up by facephag dissident right-adjacent personalities, the podcasters and livestreamers and think tank boffins – because, remember, there’s nowhere else to get fresh ideas – who sanitize them of their more disreputable aspects and launder them to their much larger audiences; and from there, those ideas percolate out into the broader culture.