I have been watching a trash bin load of video's on the "Modern Dating/Manosphere/Trad/The Wall" topics and while its a fascinating spectator sport, its a bit sad.
It all seems simple enough fun, but very clearly the players don't understand the game. And lots of people are getting hurt. That's not funny.
In all the videos I have seen and all the "think pieces" on the topic, I have never seen anyone bring it all together. There is a great deal of people talking past each other and associated confusion and schadenfreude... but no clarity on the why or how. Lots of various forms of confusion.
So, from my point of view, this whole pile of mess is based on a simple concept. The commodification of life into "entertainment".
Completely selecting for form over function.
All the current dating apps are essentially supplying "romance" at the click of a button. The emergent behavior of the market place has selected for more and more people and features that amplify this property. Then add on the amount of online content generated from the use of "dating" to generate entertainment content and it becomes a self-reinforcing spiral.
So we now have a loud part of a generation(s) of people who treat dating and relationships as a form of entertainment.
I think this has a whole slew of causes and contributing factors and additionally a lot of complex outcomes.
Causes and history.
I think that looking backward, there are plenty of other instances of this kind of pattern. If we look at victorian nobility and the culture of their lives, they were able to spend the majority of their time simply pursuing entertainment and diversion. This lead to the "fashionable" young and wealthy being fairly useless and childish and the eventual downfall of the nobility as a strong cultural bastion.
The interesting thing to note and contrast is that the easy life of the nobility still had some limits. Women especially were still very conscious of the effects of pregnancy. This intrusion of reality into an otherwise boundary less lifestyle placed a limit on the sprial of excess and exploration.
There were other natural and social limiting pressures that impacted on the spiral of behavior in Victorian wealthy and elite classes. The supply of resources was often not as infinite as the childish gambling, spending and consumption of the individuals desires.
Health, pregnancy, accident, crime and age were also limiting factors. Social acceptance and exclusion also mitigated a range of excesses. The justice system was also often a limit, although wealth could insulate some people from those consequences.
If we look at the easy life and consequence free existence that is sold at the moment. (The reality is still going to vary for individuals) there are less natural limits to peoples behaviour.
The natural limits are still:
The availability of food and the ability to have it delivered in highly urbanized areas means that this is almost a non-issue to this generation. Its only in areas where the food supply is uncertain or the individuals personal resources are not up to the task that this issue is even discussed. Consider the "food desert" conversations that are going on in the US at the moment to see the effects of this issue catching up with some sectors.
The availability of healthcare, cosmetic surgery, makeup, insurance etc means that apart from time and inconvenience, these former natural "consequences" of behavior are almost eliminated as a consideration before embarking on some adventure. Birth control is obviously a part of this but will be discussed specifically below.
The social consequences of behaviour have also been stripped away in all sorts of ways. There is almost no "social memory" for many individuals because they live in an almost anonymous way. They are not part of a general community or self-select to join a specialist behaviour based community that will not censure their excessive behaviour. The internet has allowed people to find and inhabit virtual communities that do not limit their behaviour and exist within them.
There is constant pressure on real world institutions at the moment to reduce and remove anything of consequence that particular virtual communities find limiting on their "freedoms". The majority of the culture wars in the US can be seen through this lens as the common factor.
Gender was a natural limit on behaviour until it came under sustained attack in the recent past. This has evolved in a number of ways, but the foundation movement was on the concept of "limits" to accepted behaviour for particular individuals based on gender norms. This fight has pulled in all sorts of social issues and moments and generated all sorts of strange and in many ways horrific outcomes. But the basic issue has been the removal of limits to behaviour.
The interesting thing is that from the point of view of someone who is not engaged in a lifestyle where gender norms make sense, these limits are irrelevant and really are limiting their ability to live their lives.
The most interesting thing however is to map their lives and behaviour and see how much of it exists in the virtual community they are conceptually living their life in. The obvious contrast would be to map their life and see how little of it is still being lived in the "shared reality" that we call "meat space".
I think the most interesting aspect of this is that this whole shitshow is an emergent phenomena of the virtual worlds enabled by technology and the current generation is simply adapting to their environment. I think this shows just how much the environment really drives culture and society (I suspect this would come as a suprise to some people but it seems obvious to me)
This is really the only new thing. People have always created and occupied fantasy worlds that overlap with the shared real world. Storytelling, literature, dance, art, games, fashion, ideology, roleplay, clubs, secret societies, us and them, all these things have enabled people to live with one foot in their imaginary world while their bodies existed in the "real".
Technology has magnified this feature of humanity almost from day 1. Any labour saving device, trick or strategy gave people a little bit more time to spend on whimsy and flights of fancy. This free time turned in recreation, which turned into an entertainment industry. This is simply a natural evolution of the entertainment process as more human limits have been circumvented or overcome.
The wealthy urban life is so safe, well fed, serviced, powered and coddled that a person can exist, mold themselves and their environment to fullfill very elaborate fantasies now.
But the removal of some limits means that we can now more clearly see the next ones.
Age, fertility, health, physiology, lifespan, speed to interface with the virtual, quality of the virtual experience, virtual senses, need to eat, sanitation etc...
However, there are lots of people desperately trying to solve these problems as I type.
Now to bring this all together.
"Modern dating" is a shitshow because its has turned dating into an entertainment for bored people. The only problem with this is that the majority of people involved are not aware of this, so they are being taken advantage of.
This is why very superficial people are self-selecting to participate. The essential characteristics are that particpants be "attractive", "responsive" and "quick to change partners". This maximises the capital throughput.
Like any casino, the game is always rigged for the house. The house is selling the dream of connecting with someone, while maximising the time players stay in the game.
I think the marketing machine has crafted a better message for women to draw them into the machine simply because with the removal of children from the system, women now have essentially a whole lifetime where they need to entertain themselves. The marketing machine has also had more success at commercializing women across their whole lifespan.
Men and boys on the other hand are slightly harder sell simply because of some of the natural limitations that are still in play. Unless boys are visually "attractive" they are very hard to commercialize as a commodity. If your dating platform has condensed the whole "first impression" down to a second or two before the buyer swipes, then visual appeal is the only currency. This is selecting for very photogenic candidates or deception. (Hence the grooming, makeup, filters and cosmetic surgery markets catering to men) Think about the proliferation of automated photo filters and other "enhancement" tools that are saturating the marketplace to provide competitive advantage(or the illusion of) to participants.
Some of the other pressures are to increase the "responsiveness" of the product. All the candidates are now required to have multiple channels of communication and have the ability to engage in multiple parallel communications at the same time. This has spawned a whole slew of technologies to try to reduce the friction around how useful and functional the DM or "direct message" functionality is on all the ecosystem of products that support this marketplace. Some are provided free to the participants while others are sold to them so they can participate faster.
The last aspect is how rapidly the casino can get players back into the game. Consider how much media pressure and self produced user content is being generated about "changing partners", "divorce", "ghosting", "speed dating", "cheating", "child support", "family courts", "welfare" etc etc etc. All these talking points are manifestly ways to reduce the friction of participants getting back into the game.
Is any of this actually new? As usually, this stuff is just a manifestation of human nature meeting limitless capitalism in a 4D environment. The constant pressure against limitations for how to exploit human nature on one hand, vs the limitless humans expressing that nature within the context of any given environment.
The same rules will apply. Environment is defined by the limitations. Human nature is all the possible combinations of behavior possible within that environment. Capitalism is the interaction of all the humans within that environment with each other subject to the limitations of the given environment.
Politics/ideology/religion/society is simply the imposition and enforcement of limitations by humans on other humans in addition to those of the physical environment. They are still limitations on behavior.
Ethics is just telling everyone how the game works so they can feel like they are choosing how to play. At what point is free will an illusion? The point where your behavior meets a limit and you experience an unexpected consequence.
Journalism is the pointing and laughing bit.
Ok, a bit too abstract perhaps.
The point I think I wanted to make is that once you see this whole shitshow through the lens of "entertainment" and "recreation" it all becomes predictable. But like a lot of entertainment, if you peek behind the curtain, the spell is broken... so most people don't really want to peek. (or wish they didn't... cause you know about human nature and telling people not to do something for their own good...) ignorance makes a lot of this possible.
The problem with ignorance is that you often get surprised. "Entertaining" surprises are enjoyable, while "disappointing" and "hurtful" surprises are not. Kind of another aspect of human nature that is pretty self explanatory. My point is that a lot of people who are playing the game are ignorant and are getting surprised in ways they are not enjoying.
So, on one hand, we could fiddle with the amount of ignorance in the player population, but that would probably reduce the amount of players. (See any of the shit ton of videos on line that are in various ways trying to "educate" the players. Soooo many... and from so many angles) So there is no incentive for the platform managers to mess with the ignorance level, especially before they have the players money. Parents on the other hand can tell their kids as much as they like... but ignorant children is kind of the grease that keeps the whole world moving... so good luck with that. I think its one of those human nature limitations that we are still trying to figure out how to overcome. (Education is a bit of an attempt but has been trying to chip away at the problem for a long time and keeps getting re-purposed for other sometimes contradictory purposes)
The ignorance issue also comes full circle and ends up bumping into the age issue. You can only sell ignorant people the magic of the game as long as they are ignorant. This precious ignorance seems to fade over time, especially as people still have biological clocks that are ticking away (no matter how much the medical suppliment/fertility industry wants to pretend otherwise) so eventually people are retiring from the game and no longer participating. They are also demonstrating what happens when you play the game too long or quit playing. (MGTOW, The Wall etc)
As the beneficiaries of the game have increasingly enjoyed its benefits, they have continued to push against the limitations that seemed to be constraining their behavior. So consequence and the short term cost of playing has been continually reduced in some legal contexts. This has twisted the tail of the political class and thought leaders and observers. Many of whom are not clearly benefiting from the game, but are chasers of fashion none the less.
This has resulted in more and more people being sucked into the game involuntarily. Simply from lack of apparent options. There is all sorts of indirect push-back to this with various anti-whatever groups self-orgnaising and being demonized by the game owners and ignorant players. Nothing particularly surprising there. Again, this is just an aspect of the ignorance that any game requires. Ignorant people like what they like and taking it away from them (or appearing to threaten it will cause push back... simples!)
One of the unintended consequences of the game is the removal of children and families from the conversation landscape. The whole game is based on people being in a permanent state of childless wealth and ready to mingle. This has created the emergent phenomenon of seemingly "anti-family" byproduct of the game. This is the interesting nature of emergent phenomenon. They are still very hard to predict except in retrospect.
Hindsight shows us the road by which we have reached this point in perfect clarity. We now have nearly two generations of people who have for "reasons" checked out of forming and succeeding at "families". By this I mean the loosely groups LGBTQI groups, add in the "incels", involuntarily childless, anyone broken by the divorce industry, family courts etc etc. There are all sorts of limitations that have been removed that are facilitating new and emergent behavior that do not result in successfully raising the next generation.
This is all wonderful for the dating game as there is no natural drain on resources (families and children used to consume the majority of adults resources) so the game now gets all that time, energy and money. However, its a bit short term as many exploitative capitalistic systems are. Indirect effect of this is the incessant attempts to "broaden" the market into other countries, other cultures and import more and more people into countries with legal environments that are kind to the game.
Any of these limitless spiral systems inevitably turn into black holes that suck in everything around them and become all consuming. I suspect that there are plenty of historical examples of the same sort of excessive cultures completely collapsing when they reached a tipping point and ate their own heads. This pattern does not have to be exactly the same as the cultural spiral that the US is currently sinking under, in the past it was simple stuff like food spirals or disease spirals that smashed cultures. However, I suspect that situations like the fall of the roman empire and the fall of the aztec empire were cultural death spirals in part due to the lack of limit on behaviours that opened up a massive vulnerability which was then exploited by some other group or disasterous incident. Not sure that it matters and this is not trying to be some list of historical arguments. The point is that a cultural spiral without effective limits becomes all consuming.
Right now the US is wrestling internally between the existing social institutions that create and enforce limitations and the industries that are trying to push away the limits to their growth. This has kind of been a pattern in their extreme capitalism model. So this is not particularly new, it just so happens to be a bubble that has been consuming the cultures ability to reproduce very directly. Many of the western cultures have similar emergent spirals so its not that the US is unique, its just that within the regulatory environment and the extreme capitalism system, its formed this particular death spiral.
The question is if they can recognize it and pull out of it. There is no sign that any of the other first world countries have discovered the solution so its possible the US will be the first to fall off the cliff... but none of the others are currently showing a way other than following it. This includes China, as it has its own variation of the same death spiral because its population is subject to the same Pandoras box problem as the US. There are a thousand differences but at the root they both have the same problem. Declining birth rate. The US just has this death spiral going on in its urban and elite classes, while the Chinese seem to be unable to recover from the previous birth control policies. Different but the same...ish.
I doubt even the Indians will be able to avoid it... however they are culturally at a different place than either the US or China so they will have a longer time before it bites them and they may be able to turn the ship.
The fundamental problem is that families are not cool because everyone has one. Once you see one of the cultures start promoting celebrities based on their strong families and number of children then have and their success at raising them to be good citizens, you will know they have cracked the problem, but currently its the opposite. People are celebrated for individual reasons and discouraged from anything to do with families, commitment, long term life plans and especially children.
There are so many messages in our society that are undermining and attacking these topics. The result is a population with large segments of its people debating and avoiding creating the next generation.
End of society....eventually.
No comments:
Post a Comment