Comment by krick | Hacker News Reader

Comment by krick | Hacker News Reader

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That's exactly what confuses me. Yes, I would expect some easing on that, but it's so 180° that I find myself wondering, what exactly is that force that defines the direction. Like, who dictates the agenda. I mean, I would always assume that any 4chan-level explanations that have an actual person making the order of how this will go are not exactly true and things must be a little more complicated than that. But how something "a little more complicated" can lead to this? Why yesterday Zuckerberg felt that he must, and today he is totally convinced he must not? Surely he has a better grasp of that than me, but how the fuck does it work? Who decides that one day we are woke, and the next day we aren't?

After all, nobody assumed that wokism is dead the last time Trump was elected. If anything, it was harsher than ever. Why today major supporters of it suddenly say "fuck that"? Please don't tell me that it has anything with Zuckerberg becoming BJJ aficionado, because I won't buy that shit.

Intellectual fads—memeplexes, if you will—burn through populations. There’s a whole lifecycle to a memeplex taking up residence in a host, then eventually getting ejected. Once you’ve ejected a particular memeplex from your mind, it’ll probably never make it back in. You have antibodies. Repeat that for enough people and the tide can permanently turn on a memeplex. Or at least for several decades, until there is a whole new generation of hosts who don’t have immunity.

It’s seemed pretty clear to me that this would eventually happen for wokism (or whatever you want to call it). It’s simply not sustainable to tell the majority of your potential hosts that, because of their inborn, unchangeable attributes (being white and/or male), they are the problem. And people really do not like feeling physically unsafe, which they do in most coastal blue cities, and which almost all women do when there is a man in the bathroom with them.

So the difference between 2024 and 2016 is that the memeplex was just getting rolling in 2016, but today enough people have antibodies that, to any keen observer, it’s days are clearly numbered.

It would take a LOT of explaining about the context and political climate as to why this is the case. Im on mobile so I'll give a very reductive take, the political guard rails have been removed. Billionaire after billionaire, politician after politician has gone to Maralago to meet with Trump and kiss the ring, they've been making donations of millions to his inauguration fund. Trump specifically threatened Zuckerberg with prison, so he fell in line, and that is the "right" thing to do in his eyes because he stands to gain a lot by getting on his good side, he could even get tiktok. On the other hand, his other option is prison or endless harassment from the government. This is the same deal with Bill Gates and many others. It's all performative bs and these corporations have never had any convictions other than to make the most money possible and to accrue power by taking the path of least resistance.

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