Food For Thought
A lot of philosophies that don't work will work "on the Internet". Big practical problems with some philosophies don't exist, so long as your whole world is "the Internet" and your whole population is "people I talk to on the Internet. That population is disproportionately English speaking, wealthy and white, though I suspect no longer significantly more male than the real world's population. That world is one where scarcity is artificial, your identity is very fluid, and geography is largely irrelevant, while the real world is full of all-too-real scarcity, our identities are very static and largely defined by others and geography dominates everything.
I actually like the results of this, on the Internet. I've said before here that I even find 4chan's /b/ gives me hope for the world. But that's because /b/ is on the Internet. If it was a building on the street where I live I'd probably want it closed down ASAP. The video game Rust is a useful metaphor here too. Inside that video game I find Yahtzee's observation that people are very polite to each other when they both have guns to be optimistic. In the context of a video game that doesn't impose or even suggest such a rule, a MAD-like uneasy truce between powerful opponents feels like an endorsement of the general concept of civilisation. But out here in the real world you don't respawn when somebody breaks the social norms, so we need to set the bar higher.
-- Comment from a resource I frequent
I actually like the results of this, on the Internet. I've said before here that I even find 4chan's /b/ gives me hope for the world. But that's because /b/ is on the Internet. If it was a building on the street where I live I'd probably want it closed down ASAP. The video game Rust is a useful metaphor here too. Inside that video game I find Yahtzee's observation that people are very polite to each other when they both have guns to be optimistic. In the context of a video game that doesn't impose or even suggest such a rule, a MAD-like uneasy truce between powerful opponents feels like an endorsement of the general concept of civilisation. But out here in the real world you don't respawn when somebody breaks the social norms, so we need to set the bar higher.
-- Comment from a resource I frequent