Non-political content online gets nerfed; AIs never got superintelligent in e-sports; Is "selling out" no longer a thing?

Desiderata #30: links and commentary

The Desiderata series is a regular roundup of links and thoughts for paid subscribers, as well as an open thread and ongoing Ask Me Anything in the comments.

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Table of Contents:

1. Red vs. blue digital town-squares.

2. 2012 continues to be a fulcrum year.

3. Mainstream media incompetence made prediction markets look good.

4. Why did AI companies stop competing in e-sports?

5. No conscious oversight over who gets liver implants is bad.

6. Selling out, artists, and writing on Substack.

7. God-shaped holes hungry for content.

8. From the archives.

9. Ask Me Anything.

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1. Last year I warned in “The internet's "town square" is dead” we would end up with a “blue” Twitter and a “red” Twitter—tailored echo-chambers reinforcing their own political views. At the time, I thought the blue-team competitor to Twitter (now X) would be Threads:

To put it very simply: there is a good chance (not an inevitable one, but a good chance) that Threads becomes the “blue” Twitter, while Twitter becomes the “red,” well, Twitter—following the same sort of politicization, red or blue, that has happened to the smaller Twitter clones, and that you can find almost everywhere in our culture.

I’d say this has pretty much come to pass, except it’s been BlueSky lately that’s overtaken Threads.

Why not Threads? To explain this, I think people need to understand that writing or producing content about politics is the short and easy path to engagement, but in doing so you strike a dark bargain. You have to be comfortable being hated. I think Zuckerberg, with his ongoing rehabilitation of his image, and in the wake of how much he was blamed for Trump's 2016 victory, was honestly just tired of politics. And so anything heavy or political was openly banned or shadowbanned on Threads. This, along with some differences in structure (e.g., an Instagram-like emphasis on visuals and connecting users to brands) opened the space for BlueSky to become the “blue” digital town-square.

Personally, I think having a blue and a red town-square is a significant net negative as an outcome. For it's important to have a culture which is not entirely about politics—to have topics, writing, thinking, ideas, discussion, that spans the aisle. But you can imagine how difficult that is if there's no one big shared platform that crosses political lines and instead all the discussion is split into pieces.

Science (outside of IQ graphs) is increasingly absent from X; same for literature (outside of scandals). All the non-political content of our civilization has been fundamentally nerfed by the splitting of the digital town square post-2022. And it sucks.