My point here is that sometimes, hair-splitting is incredibly useful to understanding what is happening and how to change it - but also, there are many times when pedantry is a delaying tactic which allows you to continue arguing and therefore never have to actually do anything. Furthermore, I would argue that, in general, the impulse to split hairs is pursued in the impotent expectation that the truth-claim established by hair-successfully-split will cause the universe to magically right itself. Which it, naturally, 100% will not.
Reddit may or may not be a feudal system, techinically speaking, but honestly, whether it is or not is utterly irrelevant to the fact that Reddit is being viciously profit-raped by an increasingly soulless corporate management.
The problem here is not that reddit has become feudal, or even that feudalism is inherently exploitative and shitty; the problem is that people are being exploited and something wonderful has been irrevocably ruined. Call it literally whatever you want, as long as you acknowledge that it’s shitty and it shouldn’t have happened and the people who did it are bad people. Period.
This is also a really good example of how we’ve managed to get where we are collectively. While those of us over-educated and generally pretty smug and superior intellectuals look on and tut at how shitty everything is getting, the people who are actively enshittifying everything continue their bulldozing, utterly oblivious of and indifferent to our righteous pontifications.
Philosophy and history have dimensions that are eminently practical. Being able to look back over past events and abstract behavioural and motivational patterns, and then to suss out where you made your mistakes and how to correct them - this is a skill beyond value. And, frankly, the mental masturbation of metaphysical navel-gazing is incredible fun. But when you’re dealing with real-world problems, there is always an intellectual event-horizon past which you are inevitably sucked into a black hole of nitpicking and utterly pointless hairsplitting, and the problem your are trying to solve disappears behind a miasma of jargon and hot air.
Being and Time (Heidegger) and Being and Nothingness (Sartre) are every bit as escapist as the Lord of the Rings (and have about the same page-count). They are all three deep and important explorations of human reality and experience, and they are edifying and illuminating and should be (as far as I’m concerned) mandatory reading. But just as with those who get sucked into the LOTR “world,” those who never escape the black hole of abstract philosophy and metaphysics not only lead smart-zombie half-lives, but their “contributions” to society are generally distracting, confusing, and ultimately unhelpful.
More importantly, collectively, we are all now so well-trained in abstract thinking that it takes very little effort to get us up and spinning. And this proclivity is intentionally manipulated in order to distract us from the real problems in our real lives. The horrifying shitstorm that is identity politics is ruthlessly encouraged and exploited by corporations and politicians and academics and economists so that no one has the mental bandwidth to process the fact that they are getting utterly, utterly fucked in the worst possible ways by unscrupulous corporate sociopaths.
Simply put, it’s divide and conquer tactics, and we fall for it every time because the abstractly-oriented mind is like a near-frictionless flywheel - once set spinnning it can take days, months, and years to run down. By which point your pockets are empty and the interest rate on your mortgage is at 13% per annum, and you are forced deeper and deeper into wage-slavery by stagnating salaries and rising costs due to deliberately manipulated “supply chain problems.”
Honestly, I don’t think I need to say any more. But here’s something to think about:
Consider how much time you spend arguing about politics and compare it to the amount of time you spend actually doing anything of any political substance.
Tally up all of your hours obsessing over the utterly bullshit Trolley Problem and compare it to how much time you’ve spent doing something actually ethical like volunterring at a food bank or programing an open-source utility that will help people everywhere get out from the evil-as-fuck thumb of corporate america.
I’m guessing there’s no comparison.