Identitarian Replacement Theory 🤔
Anyone strongly motivated by identity is probably easily replaceable by robots/AIs. I could get behind a conspiracy to actually do that.
Conversation
This is not a trivial hypothesis. I strongly suspect that the underlying identity factors that stabilize things like racial identity are actually productive capabilities in the form of highly stable and ritualized professions that should be possible to automate more easily
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I have never met someone with an overdeveloped social identity who didn't have a strong streak of John Henry going. The innermost layer of the identity is typically prowess at something GPT-3 could pick up on with the right scaffolding.
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This mini-thread inspired by the ongoing mainstreaming of "white replacement theory" by Carlson et. al.
While the underlying organic demographic shifts are real enough, it is unclear to me how you would even design and execute a conspiracy to amplify it beyond basic immigration
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Nothing particularly "white" about this sort of identitarian replacement anxiety. In India there's a similar "Hindu replacement theory" that's been around for decades, fueled by vaguely confused child-bearing arithmetic around 4-wived muslims and "love jihad".
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In general, such theories are *always* favored by local majorities with a history of actually doing what they claim they fear is being done to them (drive out/ghettoize local minorities etc). Kinda projection basically.
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These trends tend to be region-sized, which is why the nation-level demographics are misleading especially for large nations. The right size is typically about the size of a US state, perhaps < 20-30m population overall, and a couple of major metros.
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In India, Muslims tend to be ghettoized in major cities (often they originated as entire lower Hindu castes converting voluntarily in the middle ages, not "forced"), but Hindus got cleansed out of Kashmir. And of course there was partition, a vast two-way ethnic cleansing.
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(which was specifically a Punjabi and Bengali story that had very little impact in the rest of India... south Indian Muslims for eg. largely sat out partition).
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I hesitate to use the word "racism" for this dynamic, because the word is seriously abused, and because the pattern can happen around identity eigenvalues other than race (language and religion are arguably even more powerful, something Americans haven't experienced as much)
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But also because the underlying psychology is rarely straight-up racism, which is an other-directed attitude. It's mainly the acute anomie of simply not being able to understand the history of the world/humanity except through the presence of one's own "kind" in it.
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For a long time, I had this problem filed under "unsolvable humans being human" problem, but I now see a way out. Replace anyone who can't get past this kind of auto-centricity with robots.
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In case the logic isn't clear, if you're forced to invest identity into essentially cosmetic attributes of yourself, it means your underlying "economic" role is fungible and you're trying to add premium mediocre superfluous differentiation.
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I'm putting "economic" in scare quotes because I don't mean it in the same sense market fundamentalists do. It's broadly the subset of attributes that determines how you fit into the world.
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One of the "tells" that this pattern is going on is that people who believe in it assume promoting more child-bearing is the solution, studiously ignoring that kids grow up to be their own people, making their own life choices unless actively restrained by trad geronto-autocracy.
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Once I made up a near-future sci-fi story based on the sudden, mysterious disappearance of the Indian subcontinent via a rogue micro-blackhole, just to poke at the conceit that a well-posed history of humanity requires you to be represented in it. It wasn't easy to think through
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I also tried thinking through the same thought experiment, but using the disappearance of all white-majority parts of the word and that was vastly harder, because the West is so much more central to the past millennium of history than India.
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But for better or worse this conversation is likely to dominate the next decade of US politics, once the "vacation" from the culture wars that is the pandemic fades away.
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For anyone interested/invested in this conversation from any direction, I strongly recommend looking into the history of such cases where white people were NOT involved. Recognizing the universality of this shitshow pattern is kinda liberating and creativity-catalyzing.
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For guilt-ridden whites -- don't worry you didn't invent a new pattern of moral failing. For minorities -- your "people" have probably done the same/worse when they were the majority. For believers in "white replacement theory" -- relax, not humanity's first rodeo of this sort.
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Fwiw I think the most extreme example of this pattern is probably Han China ("Mongol Replacement Theory"?)
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Long term, if you triangulate from falling birth rates with development, rising anti-natalism, and the fact that in an open society kids will grow up in unpredictable ways, there is actually no policy model that can guarantee all 3 of identity purity, high fertility, development
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Pick 2 of 3:
Purity + high fertility = under-development
High development + high fertility = unbridled "impurity"
High development + high purity = low fertility
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The only real choice is: close societies and age out and die (Japan), or keep them open, and let whoever wants to make babies do so (until recently, the US).
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I don't generally comment on racially charged topics, since Asians share in the white privilege of being able to sit out the uncomfortable conversation with basically zero consequences, which I usually exercise. But this feels kinda important.
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