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Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

TL;DR: The Internet allows people to self-publish ideas, uncontrolled by universities which [according to the article, really!] were the main gatekeepers of speech before.

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This is not a complete summary of the article.

The article also postulates that due to the threat caused by people outside the academy/media/"cathedral", the overton window has shifted sharply in a radical direction in order to flush out those who are insufficiently loyal.

And if I recall correctly, that this is a regular process. Which has led us to this rather extreme point, historically near the extreme for the US.

It is a regular process, but when it works normally, it is self-limiting. The idea is that recently it hasn't been successful, the political opposition hasn't been silenced (it merely moved outside the Overton window), and so as the danger signals grow, the radicalizing response grows, to a point where it is perhaps counterproductive.

What makes it self-limiting? There's always an opponent, someone completing for resources or whatever, that you can use this method to outgroup and purge. That's just one of many mechanisms driving it.

What are the specific counter-reactions you see that limit this as an ongoing/regularly exercised pattern?

Once the enemy is weak enough, the reaction dies down. What indicates a strong enemy? According to the article, among other things, its media presence. In the past, if academia and mainstream media didn't give a platform to a view, it was effectively silenced. Today, such views can reach the wider public via the Internet.

(This isn't really my opinion, I don't have good enough evidence for or against; it's just my understanding of the claims of the article.)

> universities which [according to the article, really!] were the main gatekeepers of speech

This erroneous concept seems to have spread to this writer via Curtis Yarvin (of Urbit/Strange Loop fame/infamy.)

It seems superficially valid because the media loves to use witnesses of academic prestige that back its own agenda. However, it should be clear that the ultimate gatekeeper has always been the media, not any media-selected credentialed proponents of whatever position the media wants to be seen as the most prestigious and scientifically valid.

I don't know much about Yarvin but I imagine his point is the universities indoctrinate the teachers and the journalists who in turn indoctrinate the public.

It baffles me that university professors, who are in front of a minority of the population for typically only 4 years, are viewed as having all this control, whereas the people who literally own the media, who can arbitrarily hire and fire any voice they please, are viewed as somehow having less sway over their own company's output.

You're ignoring the power they have to shape minds during that 4 year period, which is particularly powerful for residential students who are out of the nest for the first time, how they can keep doubleplusungood people out of a lot of professions by not letting them graduate (it's now getting explicitly official in some, and personally sobering for me, the moderate conservative-libertarian I was in 1979? No way today I could become a scientist in the US today), and apropos of that, they control who gets to teach K-12 students, the Overton Window in K-12 curricula (which has had a serious allergy to effective teaching of reading for close to a century now, and much later math), etc.

I don't disagree, but my point is that it's still less power over media than those who actually own the media have.

If universities are really brainwashing people, then those who own the media can just not hire those brainwashed people. Power over hiring is the ultimate level of control over any organization, media companies included.

You can make the argument that the media needs an audience, and if the masses are brainwashed then they have to speak in that language. But if you're talking about non-objective-truths such as values, and those values are so widespread that media has to cater to them - that's not brainwashing, that's just popular culture.

Yup. And the idea that all people whose political commentary carries a certain amount of influence are part of some similarity-enforcing "elite" doesn't stand up to the smallest amount of scrutiny, unless one believes that televangelists, radical libertarian think tanks, the NYT and Marxist professors are a fairly homogenous group.

Errr, have you actually paid serious attention to "televangelists"? I benefited from growing up Catholic in a strongly Pentecostal area which I've retired to, and I can assure you they aren't exactly preaching the Word of God anymore, but something much more temporal. Fast forwarding, I'm told they're fully on board with feminism nowadays.

Now, there is some distance from "radical libertarian think tanks" and the rest, but, for example, can you find any serious distance between any 4 of these groups on immigration? Use of marijuana? And libertarians are a relatively small, and in the US, a disintegrating group.

It's possible they have some areas of agreement (none of them are white nationalists, for instance), but that hardly means that Pat Robertson, the Koch Brothers, Krugman and Chomsky are on the same page in terms of values and objectives

I'm sure there's enough diversity of opinion between televangelists for some of them to be on board with feminism, but that's more a sign that the US has less of a religious Establishment than many countries rather than more.

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