I think the worst part about the culture war was the mentality from both sides that everyone was the enemy unless proven otherwise, so you might as well pick the side that you find the least cringe/offensive. This ended up being disastrous in the long run because you had people who would otherwise be gamedevs, software developers, comic artists, cartoonists, etc end up being culture war grifters instead, and they probably only did that just to seek validation from their peers, and many (if not most or all) of them ended up being lolcows anyway, so it was pointless in the long run. They probably can't even go back to chasing their original dreams either because the cat's out of the bag and everything has been archived.
This even affects people outside of content creation because it brought in the trend of adopting (or LARPing as) some niche political ideology like AnCap, NazBol, monarchist, etc and making that your entire Internet personality, and then just locking yourself into an echo-chamber, either by blocking people you disagree with or bullying the shit out of them. Yeah, I'm kind of guilty of this as well (minus the personal echo-chamber part), but I kind of regret it. Politics and philosophical discussions can be fun provided that you have an open mind, which is why I think older-forums did it better by having containment subforums for heated discussions, but ideologies should not be your entire personality. It will get you nowhere in life, outside of doing podcasts or writing Substack articles for a living.
I don't know if we can ever go back to the way things were, especially given the sunk-cost fallacy is a thing and we are living in uncertain times anyway, but I really miss the days when politics and other heated discussions where in their own containment areas and people can just create and enjoy stuff online.
I'd argue it's more, they've been changed mentally to not ever do anything that isn't political. Some of them can't hide their powerlevel enough to make something someone will care about, and will literally complain about political games before posting swatiskas on Twitter.
Or worse, they'll just talk about their past life of going to some infamous rally and some internet feuds like it's some trauma dump. Or they overcorrect like a drunk driver and go to another extreme of the political spectrum.
But also, I think the big problem too is once you know how people act in this era, the "magic" of meeting cool people online is ruined hard. How do you know that this person isn't crying about you on Bluesky?
@PurpCat
>Or worse, they'll just talk about their past life of going to some infamous rally and some internet feuds like it's some trauma dump. Or they overcorrect like a drunk driver and go to another extreme of the political spectrum.
I feel like that now with the mainstream openly admitting that the culture war was largely a psyop, that it is possible to just admit that you were psyopped and that you are (mostly) done with politics. (I'd say "mostly" because I agree that it's not really possible to be 100% apolitical and that it is perfectly acceptable to talk about certain issues like Internet bills and whatnot.) Granted, some people would probably still consider you a traitor and people on the other side might hate you, but it's better than just swinging to the other side. You might even find a new niche audience that way as there are a growing number of people who are disillusioned with politics, especially the culture war.
