It's like, at first, it was relatively apolitical except maybe the New Atheists who got popular by criticizing the mostly right-wing religious nutjobs.

But then, I think around the mid-2010s, it started to get super political. Suddenly, everybody started to talk about how the evil wacky removed SJWs were trying to destroy gaming and our culture?

At this point, it seems like many people have snapped out of it and are making fun of these "anti-woke" crazies, but what materially caused this phenomenon to happen in the first place and why does it still persist to an extent?

  • davel [he/him]@lemmygrad.ml
    ·
    9 months ago

    Your framing and your questions seem to mash many different things—spanning decades—together as if it was all one thing. I’m not going to try to disentangle it all, but I’ll make a few of observations.

    • The Internet is a product of the US’s military-industrial complex.
    • “Apolitical” isn’t. “Apolitical” is the politics of maintaining the status quo. It’s the politics of I Just Wanna Grill for God's Sake: White American male labor aristocrats.
    • To a large extent New Atheism was a racist, Islamophobic reaction to 9/11, which provided ideological support for the imperial core’s War On Terror.