Weekly Roundup 8/6/2021

I Guess We're Just Doing This On Mondays Now

Today’s Cartoon:

On to the Roundup…

• Wednesday’s Weeds got me thinking: A lot of the political world is shaped by what era each generation grew up in. Now, I think Strauss-Howe is absurdly overfitting for this kind of effect, but there’s always a kernel of truth in these things.
  
  Anyways, the point is, maybe today’s GOP insanity truly is just a product of the Late Boomers having grown up in the 1970’s amid crime and inflation and dozens of other examples of “government not working”.

• Friday’s Weeds: A phrase that got mentioned was “creeping absolutism [on the young left]”. While I won’t deny it doesn’t exist, it doesn’t do justice to leave it at that. Creeping absolutism is the result of the trauma of Millennials having to deal with Boomers’ bullshit for the past decade and a half. Harkening back to Strauss-Howe, what their model doesn’t really account for is that no “Hero generation” (their classification for Millennials) has had to live with a preceding Prophet generation being so abnormally long-lived and thus having such a lasting grip on power.
  
  I also seem to remember Boomers being pretty absolutist towards their parents: “never trust anyone over 30” ring a bell?

• More Noodling on CIZST. I think one result that we get from CIZST on the meta level is the following statement: “Real equity will only follow from political equity”.
  
  I came to this by way of counterexample. One minor background note in the housing debate is that NIMBY was an outgrowth of the backlash to Robert Moses-style anti-blight-crusading top-down development. The idea was that by empowering homeowners at the bottom to stop any old project, society’s most vulnerable would be able to defend themselves from disastrous mega-projects. This, of course, backfired: it turned out that (1) only the people privileged with enough time and resources would bother fighting, and (2) this bottom-up resistance metastasized from stopping mega-projects to stopping all projects. Now, every old crank with an axe to grind can grind an entire P&Z meeting to a halt.
  
  NIMBY backfired because it created bottom-up “equality”, but not equity. Equality is the equal opportunity to go before a P&Z meeting - if you have the time, if you have property to defend before the meeting, if you even know when the meeting is. Equity is having municipal governments with elections dedicated to non-zero-sum outcomes: not scheduling them on odd years (mine does this to minimize turnout), not hiding the legally required public announcements in various local rags no one reads (most do this), having positive-sum voting systems, etc. CIZST makes it pretty clear that when you don’t have political equity — which is just another name for positive-sum systems — everything else is just tinkering at the margins in ways that might… eventually… create the ground conditions for political equity reforms.

• On Quora Going Paid. My feelings about Quora are not exactly a secret. But I don’t need any schadenfreude to know that this is going to end just as well as every other dumb move they’ve made.
  
  To their credit, banning anonymous questions did help on the margins, but it was completely undermined by the sockpuppet/no-real-names-anymore policy. And they’re still paying QPPers to flood their platform with shitty questions - from what I hear, it’s been getting even worse now.
  
  With the push towards monetized Spaces, it’s clear that Quora wants to use the Reddit model of having un/underpaid volunteers do moderation for them, and that they think the siloization of everything moving to Spaces will help insulate users from content that antagonizes them. But this undermines Quora’s core feature: questions! You can’t expect Space owners to do all your work for you in exchange for personalized paywalls, and then also expect them to feel free sharing their stuff out in the open.
  
  This business model works for Reddit because users typically come to Reddit for one thing: a singular interest for which they’d like to find a community. Through Reddit, they often find multiple communities, but Reddit users generally aren’t interested in finding random information. Quora’s completely different, though: it depends on cross-pollination between topics. Someone who wants to read the Politics topic can’t filter out all the Fascism-tagged questions, because those questions are tagged with Politics too. With that dependency on cross-pollination, Quora’s move to the Reddit model is basically just cannibalizing their core business of being “like Yahoo Answers, but with actual experts”. Those experts are going to continue their exodus. It’s really only a question of where they go from here.