@laurel

> I'll go through the reading material and give feedback when I'm done.

Oh, cool. No obligations intended, just "If you liked that, maybe you will also be interested in this."

> I recently read "Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More" which is about the social conditions during the last decades of the USSR and the behavior of the average people reminded me a lot of what we are dealing with today.

That is a depressing-sounding book title. But I think so, like this paranoia of being branded politically problematic, the actual Lysenkoism. I know some people that were there for the Cultural Revolution (istvan has a lot to say about it, apparently he had family members), the descriptions you hear of the mood is uncomfortably familiar.

> Still, you need to at least subvert a site's administration and/or moderation in order to get to the level we are seeing now.

I'm not convinced it's necessary to do that to get these results, I don't even think you need to do any direct subversion. With Modern Art, the CIA just found a guy that loved Modern Art, they approached him, "Hey, we like it, too. As long as you keep it quiet, we'll send you money to expand your patronage of this wonderful new style of art." So then they create a cutout, use that to funnel money. (That is not a "conspiracy theory"--true story, the term "conspiracy theory" was coined by the CIA--it's been acknowledged by the CIA, it's in newspapers: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html .)

It is really easy to get donations anonymously nowadays. People have Patreon accounts, Bitcoin accounts, how many people have an XMR address in their bio?

> a very big part of the population has concluded that this constant degeneration of online interactions is in their best interests

Most people just go with the flow. Modern Art becomes the acceptable thing, and it's basically impossible for some abstract colored shapes to be interpreted in an offensive way, so it immediately proliferates through the corporate world, and remains popular despite having gone out of fashion fifty years ago.

And if everyone's paranoid and hyper-vigilant, it's difficult to not absorb the mood, even if you don't agree with the politics. You see far fewer people that are able to ignore it: most people replace it with paranoia and hyper-vigilance with the opposite politics.

> Can you recommend some websites?

We're on one, you just have to follow some Japanese people.

> The main website I browsed was 2channel, the one where you need a Japanese ip to view.

Ha, I think I had heard that they do that now. I wouldn't be surprised it it shakes out that way on futaba.