New Atheism dominated a certain type of Internet discourse from its murky beginnings all the way until the early 2010s. The term "New Atheism", while not officially restricted to the Internet, tries to capture a sense that a more strident grassroots atheist movement formed around the beginning of the Information Age, and not unrelated to it. New Atheism, New Feminism, New Anti-RacismĪtheism is age-old, but Internet atheism was its own thing. All I can do is try my hardest, and trust readers to keep me honest if I screw up. Sometimes pointing and laughing is unavoidable (the New Atheists probably could have done without the Malachi 2:3-related-merchandise) but I think it should be tempered by an attempt at charity. I think these histories are easier to write from a sympathetic position - any study of Internet culture is basically a study of crazy people, and the failure mode is to point and laugh at them without looking for real understanding. The rest of this post tries to trace this evolution, flesh out the history a little better, explain why something like this should happen, and predict where things go from here.Ī warning: I was mostly sympathetic to Internet atheism, but mostly unsympathetic to Internet feminism. They could eventually crash the same way religious and gender issues did (probably to be replaced by something else even more divisive and awful). The Google Trends results raise the tantalizing possibility that racial issues can’t keep increasing forever. The race phase seems to have peaked in 2018 and started declining, before being given new life by George Floyd and BLM. I think you could describe the last twenty years of Internet history as going through three phases - one dominated by religion, one dominated by gender, and now one dominated by race. But intuitively it feels like there's kind of a power law distribution where one topic clearly outstrips the others - maybe not winner-take-all, but at least winner-take-most.
The Internet fights about lots of things. I'm not saying there's literally only one thing the Internet gets in fights about at any given time. Everyone just stopped caring and moved on to race. Nor has some some other gender discourse arisen to replace them. But they're gone now - you'd have more luck looking for recent discourse about Osama bin Laden. When was the last time you heard people argue about "creeps", "nice guys", or "friendzoning"? Mansplaining? #NotAllMen? MRAs and PUAs? If you're in your early 20s, you might not even know what half these terms mean if you're older than that, you’ll remember them with a sort of cold dread. 2014 to 2016 was a sort of transition period, and after that the Internet became obsessed with race, with gender almost forgotten. From about 2011 to 2014, the Internet was obsessed with gender, with race on the back burner. We tend to conflate feminism and anti-racism under the general heading of "social justice", but this blinds us to important details. This pattern is surprising enough to deserve further analysis. Far from these topics increasingly dominating the discourse, they seem to be in decline - or, in the case of racism, to have been in decline until events intervened. Discussion of racism peaked in 2016, then declined - until the George Floyd protests of mid-2020, when it came back with a vengeance. But other gender-related terms (eg “sexism”) show mostly the same pattern as feminism, and other race-related terms (eg “white privilege”) show mostly the same pattern as racism.ĭiscussion of feminism plateaued from 2014 - 2016, then declined. I chose these as especially obvious terms.