The Exchanges

Q Ryan, I'm kind of curious, like you read the message boards. I mean, don't message boards and online forums have a chance, have a tendency to radicalize and also like make the most intense ideas rise to the top. Is that, is this just kind of like a classic case of that?

A I've never heard of that ever happening before. What are you, what could you possibly be referring to? Yeah. I mean, no, it does. I mean, that's, that's definitely the case. Um, I mean, we didn't even really go further into this cause it's so dense, but the reason I was even writing about effective accelerationism this week is because I got sent a tip about a group that was causing trouble on tick tock for my readers. And when I started poking around, it turned out that they were A group I'd written about previously of crypto accelerationists that had rebranded into AI accelerationists and were part of the New York downtown scene, trying to get Peter Thiel's money. Like these are the same people that have been kicking around for five years, trying to bring about some kind of white nationalist apocalypse via automation. And they went from cryptocurrency to AI and it's the same people doing the same stuff, sharing the same memes that they've been sharing since 2017. Um, And I think when you talk about the radicalization of these message boards of these online communities that are talking about these philosophies, what it is is that you don't know who you're talking to, and you don't know what their goals are, where their funding's coming from, or what they're influenced by. So, you know, it's very common to be reading like a Twitter thread, and all of a sudden, like, if you don't…

AI assessment note: “Yeah. I mean, no, it does. I mean, that's, that's definitely the case.”

Q Asking for nudes. Oh, you knew about this, Ranjan? Of course. I'm just, I'm clearly an inhabitor of this. And like my internet is Costco guys, but you guys are seeing something else. What happened with these? Muppets.

A So there's a guy who was running a Muppet, uh, him and his wife were running a fan account for the Muppets. And then a bunch of followers of this account, uh, put him on blast and was like, this guy is going around saying he's polyamorous and he's using that as an excuse to hit on and like sexually harass his followers. And then a bunch of other Muppet fan accounts like came out with statements being like, we don't like this, you know, we condemn this guy. And, and I think that's like a really good model for thinking about this stuff, which is like, Up until that point, I did not realize how deep and vast the Muppet fan community was for adults, and apparently it's quite big.

AI assessment note: “there's a guy who was running a Muppet, uh, him and his wife”

Q Sorry, can you explain that? Like why, why, I mean, the culture war not mattering and ending, it seems like the culture war has just been present. And American life is from the, from the beginning.

A The popular, the online popularity of the, uh, the United Healthcare shooter, to me, speaks to a desire among young internet users for a better, I don't want to say target, but like a better, a better focus of their anger. Like, they are angry. We know that there are, is an internet full of angry young men, and Steve Bannon identified how to Get these guys on his side 10 years ago. He's been very open about using Miley Annapolis to weaponize Gamergate to activate this online army. I think that a lot of that stuff is beginning to feel kind of silly, and I think that this is an inflection point for a lot of these guys who are realizing that, you know, spending all day moaning about how women don't like them on X, like, isn't really satisfying them anymore. And this happens all the time, like, the, the, the Gamergate era came directly after the new atheism movement, which was a similar attempt at sort of engaging with a new kind of young man archetype. So I think we are seeing it yet again, and, and, and I don't know where it's headed, but it does feel like a change is currently happening.

AI assessment note: “this is an inflection point for a lot of these guys”

Q like we're talking about with Hawk Tua and the Costco guys, so do they transcend this for you-ification, or are these You know, memes, the Costco guys and Hawk Tua, are they now dominant on a sub part of the, of a very large subculture on the internet, or are they the, the thing, or are they a niche that Ranjan and I only end up in because we're normies?

A So, okay, like, let's think about Grumpy Cat, shall we? So Grumpy Cat is a weird looking cat that went viral on Reddit because the cat looked weird. And The initial kind of, uh, virality of, you know, an image like that 10 years ago was being driven by people who were super online. Power users, bloggers, aggregators. You know, young people who were super into Vine were sharing Logan Paul videos. Like, it was not mainstream. And, and most of what we sort of think about as internet culture, as meme culture, has never felt very mainstream. But now, because everyone is online, and because They don't need aggregators. They don't need communities to surface things for them. It's, it's kind of becoming, uh, it's, it feels counterintuitive, but essentially if you're a super normal person who likes really basic stuff like a blowjob joke or going to Costco, you can open up TikTok and TikTok's algorithm identifies that and shows it to you. And there's no, there's no arbiter there other than the machinery of the app. So that's why I think we're seeing, uh, you know, what Max Reed kind of dubbed the Zinternet, because if you're just like a normal basic guy and you open up TikTok, it's gonna show you normal basic guy stuff. Uh, as opposed to 10 years ago where you might hear about something viral and that like, you know, weird Redditors were talking about, you know, Pepe the Frog or somethin…

AI assessment note: “if you're a super normal person who likes really basic stuff... TikTok's algorithm identifies that”

Q but if you wanted a really good example, it's more than just a different iteration of the same ideology, right? Like you have one, especially regarding AI, you have one that's very much into Um, slowing down AI progress, worried about that risk, and then you have another group that's like, no, put the gas pedal on as hard as you can, or, or am I not seeing it right?

A I, I have not found much difference in what these two groups want, only the timeframe in which they want them to happen. Um, it is, it, in my opinion, I, I have not seen enough difference between the two. In fact, effective, uh, effective accelerationism was more or less a meme until last week. Like it wasn't really even like a thing. It was sort of just like a way to make older Silicon Valley guys look cringe or more cringe. So It's now becoming a little more, uh, nuanced and a little more coherent, but it, it, it, it mirrors almost exactly kind of like the splintering of the far right post Trump, like it, but, but for AI essentially.

AI assessment note: “I have not found much difference in what these two groups want”

Q But I guess, like, now that the normal is there, do you think that these subcultures are actually going to lose some of their appeal to, like, let's say the normal people who were on the internet, and just trying to find things they liked?

A Well, I think you're asking this question at a very interesting moment, because, uh, Blue Sky, uh, Is now north of twenty-five million users, and it's well on its way to, let's, let, let's say that by this time next year, maybe even sooner, Blue Sky is gonna be around a 100,000, Blue Sky will be around a hundred million users, which I looked up this morning, was what Twitter was at, uh, 2011. So, like, that's how fast this niche platform is growing, and Blue Sky to me is a total reaction To this internet. It is, uh, all of the, the, the remaining weird subcultures of the internet decamping to there and using the sites, you know, blocking and filtering and list organizational tools to carve out those spaces. The other thing here is that a lot of these internet communities were based on places like, you know, they were living in Reddit or Tumblr or communities like that, which were public. Now they're on discord. And the only time you might ever see them is when a meme breaks containment from discord. So they do exist. It's just, they're not nearly as visible, I think, as they used to be until something happens in one of those communities. Like there's like the drama around the Muppet fan account that was doing like, you know, it was like creeping on followers.

AI assessment note: “So they do exist. It's just, they're not nearly as visible”