What Game Is Jeff Bezos Playing?
wsj.com
wsj.com
And I don’t mean this in a strictly partisan way, like its not popular to have unique perspectives on conservatism anymore, it’s more popular to fall in line with the current administration's narrow definition of conservatism.
I also expect more informed people are wary of cult of personality type contrarians, like trump or musk, who have weaponized the social media contrarian reaction engine to an extreme
This is the opposite of what is going on. The conformist era was what began around 2018 to 2019. That is when the term cancel culture became mainstream. That was when one was expected to conform to the dogmas or risk being cancelled and having one’s career ruined. It increasingly got worse over the years.
Cancel culture and all that dogmatic conformism is still around but now there is more free thinking than 6 years ago.
So the situation is the opposite of what you are saying.
The conformist era was [the beginning of time] -> now, and into the future.
'Cancel culture' has always existed and still exists. It's the dominant socioeconomic group deciding a person must be shunned because they have breached the group's value system, and must be made an example. The United States, firmly based in puritanism, has shunned from the beginning, and there's probably at least a dozen churches getting together and shunning some member right now as I type this.
The only thing that changed in that period from around 2016-2020 was the dominant socioeconomic group wasn't entirely white conservative males. That was a problem, the event had to be digested, analyzed, the situation had to be labeled (as we see here, it's the "conformist era") and work had to be done to eliminate it and ensure it didn't happen again.
Conformism of any kind is bad. There are those of us (such as myself) who are against the conformism of the 1950’s (which was also a type of puritan cancel culture) and the conformism of Victorian England (just throwing out an example) and what happened starting in 2019.
I distinctly remember in the early 2010’s that conformism had diminished. Maybe I felt that way because I was in college at the time but I remember there were a wide variety of options across the political spectrum being expressed and vigorous debates both in the media and around college campus. No talk of “deplatforming” back in the 2010-2015 era. The idea I remember was to invite people of different views and listen and debate them.
Tv shows and movies had many scenes that were “offensive” without the kinds of responses you see nowadays.
The “white conservative male” was not dominant in 2010-2015. Many voices existed.
I myself am not white. When I was in college over 10 years ago I never got the feeling white conservatives were dominant.
Around 2018-2019 the conformism began again. It was a different type of conformism than the 1950’s. A conformism in a different ideological direction. But it was still conformist.
This is a statement so vague as to be meaningless. I doubt you're opposed to forcing conformity to our norms against sexual abuse of minors, or of sexual or physical abuse in general, or against property crimes, or defrauding others. The vast majority of conformist behavior is automatic and unconscious. Everyone who belongs to a religion is outwardly broadcasting their conformity to the group or they're shunned. Saying conformity is bad is saying religion is bad.
> No talk of “deplatforming” back in the 2010-2015 era.
I recall that the neo-nazi web site Stormfront had a very difficult time being hosted anywhere in that timeframe. There wasn't any controversy over kicking hate speech off your platform then. Not that it didn't happen, it just was routine business.
> I myself am not white. When I was in college over 10 years ago I never got the feeling white conservatives were dominant.
Can you list the US presidents who were not white christian males?
In some eras those things are tolerated, when they produce results, and in some eras they are not. Most places and times, tbe nail that sticks out is the one that gets the hammer.
Agreed!
The majority doesn't value contemporary contrarians, and it only values past contrarians once their ideas win over the majority.
The majority values winners, not contrarians. Although while doing so, they often give lip service to valuing contrarians, and everyone imagines they would have been early supporters.
I think it is because the modern internet is an amazing tool for assembling conformist mobs of thought. The individual really becomes a type of outcast in this structure.
The way to get more likes and views is in out-conforming the next person.
The radical individual is most likely to just be ignored.
It is almost like we have evolved a structure of a conformity lottery. If you can reach a certain threshold of public conformity display, then you might get your lottery number called for cash and prizes.
The radical individual is basically doing some 80s cable access show that not only no one watches but most don't even know exists so most don't even bother.
I consider myself a radical individual but if I was 15 right now? I know without question I would be as conformist as possible.
It’s because humans latch onto language as if their map is reality
Even here there’s a pretentious filtering to conform to the memory of the group in charge; this syntactic structure is of course the proper and correct format!
It’s our biology choosing self which socially is to conserve our own perception
Online everyone is being normalized the conserve the perception of mods/platform owners (aka just more normal vain humans, no need to deify them) rather than out in the world normalizing to a more unique creole of sorts
The abstracts of STEM are a terrible philosophy for building social life. Created a bored and repetitive culture that depends on taking a knee before some webmaster rando for comments to avoid shadow bans
In fact I think a lot of the dynamics playing out right now make more sense from the lens of the Democratic/left leaning parties being more “conservative” and right leaning parties being more change/reactuonary
I’ve lost count of the number of businesses and celebrities that have been canceled and protested by the “intolerant conservatives”. Not to mention, some of those causes have been wholly made up. Nobody has been forbidden from saying “merry Christmas”, no matter how many times your uncle shares some post about it in Faceboook.
I dont think it's particularly complicated. Bezos wants to makes money, and preserve his companies. He judges that the best way to do this is to make some signs of fealty and hope that the storm passes. Additionally it must worry all the tech bros that Musk is in Trump's innermost circle since he is both smart and a wildly loose cannon.
If Trump really wanted to hurt Bezos he could, for example, decide that Amazon could not sell anything from China, could not bid on space contracts against SpaceX/Starlink with Kuiper and Blue Origin, and must offer untrammeled access to the FBI to anything on AWS. So tossing the Trumps a few million and performing a little dance is a cheap insurance policy.
Everyone in the tech bro orbit is doing a similar calculus. Microsoft must be quietly thanking their stars that they never succeeded at social networks and therefore avoided the whole moderation/censorship thing, but even they have political vulnerability.
> But Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and space pioneer, is a businessman, like any other, trying to make his way in the era of Donald Trump.
He's not just any businessman, he's a billionaire who runs gigantic operations that depend on getting a healthy slice of federal and DoD dollars, so the author is either starting from a falsehood or is uninformed.
To the rest of us, Bezos' game is clear. He's trying to thread through a multidimensional needle's eye. First, he's trying to appease Trump to get a share of DoD money. Second, he's trying to compete with fellow oligarch Elon Musk. Third, Bezos has to compete in such a way that there's not a popular movement against oligarchs as a class. Tough constraints. Wouldn't want to have to figure that out myself.
Where? The only place they have competing interests is in the space race, but Musk has won that one long ago. Personal wealth, yeah, but both are filthy rich already.