Sam Kriss

> Fortunately when the aggressively conventional-minded go on the rampage they always do one thing that gives them away: they define new heresies to punish people for

If the "conventional-minded" define new heresies, against a new creed, how are they conventional? What gives Paul Graham away is what he doesn't mention and may be what bothers him more: the old heresies that the surprisingly innovative and even rebellious "conventional-minded" abolish. (Actually, they do neither, but those who believe the former also believe the latter)

As with the myth of the "cancel culture" that Graham mentions (or the similar myth of "the war on Christmas"), the problem isn't the truth of certain events that do occur. It is the exaggeration of magnitude and ignorance of context. Clearly, at no stage in human history were more people not only free but also able to widely disseminate a wider range of views as they are today. Specifically, far fewer people are "silenced" at universities today than were, say, in the 1950s (except, maybe, in super-woke Florida).

> College students larp. It's their nature. It's usually harmless. But larping morality turned out to be a poisonous combination.

Yeah, larping in a world of Jewish cabals and weather/mind control has turned out to be far more poisonous.

Anyway, for a more interesting and astute perspective on wokeness, see https://samkriss.substack.com/p/wokeness-is-not-a-politics Kriss shows why comparing wokeness to socialism or Christianity --…

I also really enjoyed this more recent post by the same guy:

https://samkriss.substack.com/p/welcome-to-hell

Basically he makes the argument (I think slightly tongue in cheek) that Twitter is analogous to a certain understanding of the Christian Hell, in that it's not a form of suffering you're condemned to, but a form of suffering you actively seek out. More deep social media commentary, but there's also some interesting tidbits in there about different theories of Hell, from ancient Chinese grave inscriptions to CS Lewis.

"Everyone acts as if the problem with Twitter is the other people, and the agony of having to look at their terrible opinions, but they keep saying the truth. Hellsite hellsite hellsite. The problem is you. The problem with Twitter is that you are a demon in Hell."

> AI is a bad writer, but […] Let’s say they finally fixed the machine so it was really good, so its default setting was to write exactly like VS Naipaul. The result would be a world in which you’re constantly confronted by cold emails from VS Naipaul, bubbly magazine articles by VS Naipaul, signs in shop windows in which VS Naipaul tells you about the new opening hours, strangely flaccid sexts VS Naipaul ghostwrote for someone on Feeld, and websites in which VS Naipaul fails to say anything in particular about grilled meats. This would not be an improvement; it might even be worse. Any world in which there is only one literary voice, blanketing everything in the exact same tone, is a nightmare.

(From https://samkriss.substack.com/p/if-you-let-ai-do-your-writing-i-will)

I agree with Sam Kriss, "wokeness" is an etiquette: https://samkriss.substack.com/p/wokeness-is-not-a-politics

> They’ll tell you that actually, there’s no such thing as wokeness. It’s not an ideology. It’s not a belief system. It’s just basic decency. It’s just being a good person.

> They’re right. Wokeness is an etiquette. There are no sects within wokeness for the same reason that there are no sects on whether you should hold a wine glass by the bowl or by the stem. It’s not really about dogmas or beliefs, in the same way that table manners are not the belief that you should only hold a fork with your left hand.

This one IIRC: https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-law-that-can-be-named-is-not
He writes about it here, a little: https://samkriss.substack.com/p/against-truth

In general long meandering semi-factual pieces like this, with odd historical excursions, are one of his things and I don't know anyone else that does it quite the same. (Hmm... oddly enough Scott Alexander, who he cites here, also does some similarly Borgesian stuff, but with a different bent.) One of my favorite writers and I recommend pretty much everything he's done since the early 2010s.