I wrote a thing, not because these forum wars are important in themselves, but because they represent our future at the broadest level. They are like crystal balls, you peer inside and can see the future.

I use here the term “truth” as a form of ontology, whatever its form. (but you don’t need to know)

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GAF shits on Era, Era shits on GAF. So, in this symmetrical warfare, where’s the truth? Is it then in the middle?

Nope, it doesn’t work like that.

Truth can be on the far left, it can be on the far right, and it can be at any point across that spectrum. Truth is just where it is, for any particular issue. When you think you got it, it jumps somewhere else and proves you wrong. You cannot “box” it heuristically so that you already know where to find it every time. To find it for any particular problem requires very, very hard, meticulous work. (cue flat-earthers, another symbolic pattern)

ResetEra is “manufacturing” a very specific kind of truth, that you know you can find when you go there.

That’s how an echo-chamber works: it’s a manufactured consensus that you know is built accordingly to a canon.

And when you’ve built this consensus you’ve also built the prerequisite for war (any war), because that consensus implies the culling of every possible mediation, of all doubts. Replaced by the bright-white purity of righteousness and certainty: the strongest deep feeling you’re right, fighting the good fight. And you feel good as consequence, in a self-serving endless loop of reinforcement.

In our history, religion has served the same purpose. It was a powerful tool to orient and focus precisely the will of people, like the point of a sword or a lance. A weapon. And that’s why historically religion has been the cause of many wars. In this case Era is using politics exactly as a form of religion, and that’s why the behavior of their moderation is very similar in the patterns of the “Inquisition”, false accusations, censorship and all that.

Curiously, as with religion, the focus is never *what*, but who (“us” or “them”, friend or foe). Because religion is always epistemically wrong. It’s always subjectivity without any objectivity. Are Christians more right or “truer” than Muslims? Nope, it’s all arbitrary. Just men going against other men, and finding an arbitrary cause to do so. Today we mimic that with sport (are Lakers truer than Warriors?).

If you remove the “who” and replace it with “what” then you have at least a shot at truth. Otherwise nope, just a victim of heuristics.

Technically it is heuristics all the way down, but without going down the rabbit hole you could say heuristics are the tools we use to simplify and reduce the world to pieces that make sense, that have meaning, that we can at least manipulate and use. This is an obligation (I play with words here, what I mean is that another way doesn’t exist), because you cannot use what you cannot use. But you have to remember that this compression and reduction through tools isn’t the real thing, and quite frequently it leads us astray.