Nice, you avoided having to think on a self-imposed technicality. Real intellectual rigor there.

Makes it easy to dismiss my argument without bothering to think about it, you mean. Just take abortion, then. Or “tax is theft”, or right to bear arms, or any of a thousand other beliefs you probably don’t agree with.

So like, if you were in a restaurant and ordered food, but it never came because a couple of the servers were blocking food from being served because the company wasn’t taking a strong stance against abortion, you’d think “these good people are taking a moral stand, good for them! The company better not take any action against them to make sure I get my food!”

Or for that matter, if Google stopped all cooperation with the IDF, the company’s Jewish employees could (in fact should) disrupt business because Google was supporting terrorism?

It seems to me that you can only support forms of protest you’d be willing to accept when the other side uses them against you. Basically the golden rule.

A big part of it is that people are so unbelievably cynical now. They’ll rush over one another to point out and then circlejerk over the most negative aspects of every new development, while ignoring every positive.

The old internet would have flipped out over ChatGPT, much less Midjourney, and generated thousands of hilarious stories and images and websites that made ridiculous random comic books or fake government websites for absurd departments or whatever. They would have been delighted with it…and as an afterthought it may have occurred to them that there might be downsides.

Today, people get furious about the fact that AI exists, that it was trained on existing material, that it might affect people’s lives. Long articles are written on the terrible effects AI is going to have on politics or media. Post an AI-generated image in anything other than an AI-art forum, and you’ll be absolutely lambasted. Suggest that there may just be a few updates and watch the downvotes and angry replies flood in.

Part of that is just experience. We’ve lived though a few ‘revolutions’ for which the net effect was…arguably not so great. Part of it is that the age of the average Internet-savvy user is like 35-40 now, not 22, so they’re bringing a level of fear and skepticism that wasn’t there before.

And partly there just seems to be a sort of social malaise and negativity that wasn’t there before. People in 2005 were happy and excited for the future. Now everybody just seems fearful, angry, and burned out.

For real? You’re really suggesting that anybody who says they’re for free speech is actually a fascist pedophile?

IOW you’ve turned it into a thought-terminating cliche.