The previous post was something of a standalone theory prerequisite for a discussion of how subcultures need walls, and what form those walls take.
First off, I’m using “subculture” to mean a group of people who come together to share their thoughts and culture and time in the context of some shared interest. A group composed of multiple individuals that share memes and that thus becomes something of a Thing itself. The shared interest isn’t really necessary except as a barrier against dissolution into the ambient cultural soup though. Let’s look at how those shared interests can or cannot protect the subculture from dissolution:
If a subculture accepts people from outside who have other affiliations, those people can systematically distort and pwn the dynamic, deliberately in a planned way or just because that’s what happens. Especially if there are a lot of people interested in joining from a similar direction.
Imagine a group of people who are interested in X, Y, and Z. Their first boundary is obscurity. While they are relatively unknown, they can explore what can be done with X, Y, and Z, and pick up the occasional fresh mind who is also interested in that. As they begin to develop their theories and start creating interesting ideas and cultural content, and start to become cool, they start to lose their obscurity boundary.
Once they are cool, they have to start worrying about people coming in because they are cool, or because they are something that is happening that can be captured and redirected for other purposes. For example, you might have another group of people who are interested in A, B, and C, which cash out to taking over things and making them about A, B, and C as well as their original topics. You would expect such a predator subculture to be successful if there were a lot of prey subcultures vulnerable to that kind of entry.
If XYZ, and ABC conflict, then counterintuitively, predatory entryism is less of a concern, because the conflict prevents the ABC entryists from being drawn to the XYZ subculture. They are in fact repelled by it. But if XYZ and ABC are orthogonal, then the ABC people will be interested in bringing ABC to XYZ to create XYZ+, and they will be able, because XYZ wont know to react against it.
So it is important for any growing subculture that values its own existence to get serious about defending against entryists by erecting new memetic barriers that repel most plausible entryists. Lets look at some real world examples:
#Gamergate is a great example. We have the gaming community, which came together of mostly young mostly men interested in playing video games. As they grew in popularity, cultural richness, and coolness, they became something of a target for SJW entryism. After all, the SJWs are interested in fixing toxic cultures by making them more inclusive to women and minorities, and gamers are notorious for calling each other faggots, and using triggering language like “rape” to describe victories. Since such things are not necessarily integral to gaming, the SJW subculture licked its lips and approached its prey, deploying Anita Sarkeesian and a band of sympathetic journalists to close the deal.
Unfortunately, the toxic gaming community had just enough overlap and good relations with the even more toxic *chan community and other anti-SJW subcultures to offer some resistance. Tensions and animosity rose until 5guys happened, when the gamers rage boiled over and escalated to harassment and non-memetic hostility, which was quickly matched from the SJW/Journalist side. At that point it was on, and escalated out of the realm of merely memetic scuffling. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I worry that #GG has gone too soft pretending to be about journalistic ethics or whatever rather than defending its native subculture from entryism by the enemy. I would like to see them harden up and escalate to /baphomet/ and /pol/’s level and beyond before /baphomet/ decides that #GG themselves are soft lolcows, but things might be more delicate than that.
Another good example of personal significance of a less fortunate victim of SJW entryism is Lesswrong. Originally a very interesting community around the art of human rationality, i.e. how to think real good, it left its political back door open to increasing levels of SJW entryism: polyamory, cuddle piles, anti-racism, anti-sexism, identity politics, feminism, socialism, open borders, sex work, etc. As far as I can tell, for a large number of LWers, the community is more or less standard Bay Area Social Justice with some wonky drapery about something called “rationality”. This happened because Lesswrong’s nominal subject does not directly contradict Social Justice. If Lesswrong had instead been repellent to SJWs, instead of attractive, I think this may not have happened.
There are of course hundreds of other examples of communities transformed by entryism. It would be great if someone were to catalog them, but I won’t do that tonight. What I’m getting at here is the general structure of entryism between subcultures.