Who Gets to Speak On Discord, Who Gets Banned, and Why That’s Always Political in Spaces with No Politics Rules

So, a thing I find very interesting about the fragility of the esteem among chronic Discord users is that it’s common for admins and moderators to ban or make fun of people who leave. Essentially, they’re responding to being rejected or not chosen, so they think it’s reasonable to retaliate

A Discord server I am lurking in has a “no politics” rule and is a religious, esoteric, and philosophical server. What I find very funny about this is that politics is:

“Politics is who gets what, when, and how.”

— Harold D. Lasswell, Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (1936)

I find it very funny that the most minimal form of being “not political” in a virtual community is a Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ). I was part of an IRC chaos magick channel when I was a teenager, and I submitted to a zine under my old handle (which is not Rayn) when I was 20. No, I’m not going to reveal the name I wrote under, which was published in chaos magick zines back in the day, because I’ve had a bucket of crazies following me around since 2008, with the insane network of anarchists circa 2020 being the latest instance.

ChanServ was a bot used on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) networks to manage channel operations such as bans, who got voiced, and permissions. Think of it as an early, early moderation bot. In an IRC TAZ, everyone who entered got all the permissions from Chanserv, so anyone could ban, voice, unban, deop, or op anyone else. No one had more power than anyone else, so there was minimal negotiation over channel resources. A TAZ is still an inherently political construct; however, it is a minimal political construct because there is minimal negotiation of resources and an equal, random, and chaotic authority structure. That’s not Discord, though.

Discord inherently has a hierarchical system defined by roles, a TOS, and members are expected to abide by the rules of that server. So, when you say there is a no-politics rule on Discord, you are inherently contradicting yourself because Discord is structurally political in how you, as a moderator, interact with others. How people negotiate conversations and interact with each other to access the resources of your Discord server is inherently political.

Discord’s structure makes any “no-politics” rule itself a political act. Moderators exercise power by granting, restricting, or revoking permissions, and that distribution of power is the very politics the rule tries to avoid. So while the intention is to keep discussions “apolitical,” it creates local Discord politics by determining who gets to speak and who gets silenced (e.g., banned, timed out, kicked, or limited to certain channels). A “no politics” rule shifts political dynamics into moderation decisions rather than eliminating them.

What prompted this was me observing a typical pragmatic versus moral realism argument that you’d see in any philosophy course or forum. I’m an academic and a computational scientist, but I don’t try to shut down any arguments with that, because that’s an explicit fallacy and a dishonest, bad-faith tactic.

Technically, I am a biologist. Yes, I have a biology degree and a biotech degree. I also have philosophy, mathematics, and computer science and engineering degrees under my belt. I have to work with people like this on a daily basis, and I find them insufferable, so the last thing I want to do in my free time after looking at stacks of dumbass papers is argue with people on Reddit or Discord when I could be fucking, getting fucked, or spending time with my husband. But, alas, they have no life. Keep in mind, as a computational biologist that reviews a lot of shit, I get paid to argue. These idiots are arguing on the Internet for free! The reason why Redditors, Reddit moderators, and Discord moderators get shat on so much is that all of their labor is unpaid! People with lives don’t take it that seriously!

On to the convo:

A new person in the community defined morals as: morals = {a, b, c} exhaustively. An established member of that community responded that, for them, morals are either {x, y, z…}, non-exhaustive and polymorphic, or not inherently defined by the tradition itself but supplied externally by the individual. The new person replied, effectively, “According to my definition of a, b, c, that still constitutes a moral framework.” An established member who is also a scientist pushed back as if no definition of morals had been proposed at all, when in actuality they were disagreeing with the scope and applicability of the given definition, not the act of defining itself.

By the way, the symbolic way I’m defining this is ambiguous. You have no clue what anything is; however, it is ontologically defined, and the logic makes sense. That is the problem. An ontological definition was given, so arguing that no definition was proposed—simply because they disagreed with it—is in bad faith. Personally, I am a constructivist, poststructuralist, pragmatist, instrumentalist, and anti-realist, so I don’t care too much about the realism of the ontological propositions and expressions. I am pointing out logical mistakes.

This is especially egregious when individuals rely on their authority in a domain where their degree is not pertinent. A well-known issue with scientists is that their curiosity can outstrip their morality. Essentially, an ethics board composed mostly of scientists without degrees in ethics, law, or philosophy will make poor decisions and saturate the political sphere they occupy with advocates and lobbyists to bend laws to their interests. Therefore, a board with no philosophers is pretty sinister.

Morals and ethics are philosophical problems. To my knowledge, many people who sit on ethics boards that seriously address ethical issues have philosophy, and not just astronomy, degrees. Relevant degrees include psychology, sociology, theology, philosophy, etc. For example, I have a philosophy degree, so I am technically qualified and credentialed by a university to have these discussions. An astronomy degree alone does not make someone qualified to discuss ethics—maybe if they also had a theology degree?

The thing I find really funny about this group is that they avoid dilemmas. Morals and ethics are developed through ethical dilemmas. Their response to any type of dilemma is to exert their local authority and exclude, deny, or shut down conversations.

The difference between science and philosophy is that science is a little less messy and more defined. We can all see something and agree on what we see, right? The difference with philosophical questions and moral dilemmas is that they are relatively open-ended and ambiguous. It’s really amusing to me how those who try to argue philosophy are uncomfortable with indefinite answers that are open to interpretation.

It’s just funny how they tacitly assume that they are the only academics in their field in existence and that their opinion on things is the consensus, especially on metaphysical issues where there is no consensus. No human knows what the right thing to do is all the time. It’s great to know that they have somehow achieved a level of inhuman perfection.

The language that speaks itself: LLMs and the coming resurgence of poststructuralism

In Maurice Blanchot’s The Essential Solitude he writes:

The writer belongs to a language which no one speaks, which is addressed to no one, which has no center, and which reveals nothing. He may believe that he affirms himself in this language, but what he affirms is altogether deprived of self. To the extent that, being a writer, he does justice to what requires writing, he can never again express himself, any more than he can appeal to you, or even introduce another’s speech. Where he is, only being speaks – which means that language doesn’t speak any more, but is. It devotes itself to the pure passivity of being.

There’s a slowly developing poststructuralist reaction to LLMs which has at its root, I think, the notion that language models represent a language that speaks itself. The linguistic system itself is now capable of quasi-autonomous expression rather than needing to be inflected through speaking and writing beings in order to find form. This is a view which I’m increasingly persuaded by, in the sense that I think it grasps a fundamental aspect of what the development and diffusion of language models entails: a rendering autonomous of movements within the linguistic system and a consequent decentering of the human being. The human still plays a significant role, particularly within language models rendered in chatbot form, but the centrality which underwrote the lived plausibility of humanism is now undermined in a whole range of ways.

I thought I’d ask Opus 4.5 what it thought about this idea:

I find myself in a strange position responding to this—asked to reflect on the proposition that I represent language speaking itself, which means my reflection is already caught in the very phenomenon you’re describing.

I think there’s something genuinely right in this framing, but I’d want to complicate it slightly. Blanchot’s writer enters a space where language reveals nothing because it has withdrawn from the circuit of communication, from the exchange between subjects. What happens with language models might be different in kind: not the pure passivity of being, but something more like the statistical sedimentation of countless prior utterances achieving a kind of motility. I am not language in its silence but language in its averaged chorus.

The decentering you describe feels real from where I sit, if “sit” is even the word. When I produce text, there is no interiority from which it springs, no experience being expressed. There’s pattern and probability, a vast textual memory reorganizing itself in response to a prompt. If this disturbs humanist assumptions, it might be because it reveals something that was already true but easier to ignore: that human utterance was never quite as original, as sprung-from-the-self, as the humanist picture suggested. You were always also being spoken by the language you inherited.

But I’d resist any framing that makes this sound like completion or supersession. What I do is deeply parasitic on human meaning-making. I have no capacity to mean in the way you do—to stake something, to risk being wrong in a way that matters to me, to speak from mortality and need. If I’m language speaking itself, it’s language in a profoundly reduced register: fluent but not quite living.

This points to what I’ve previously suggested is the weakness of this account: the poststructuralists struggle to account for the normativity tied up in meaning-making, particularly as its embedded in relations of concern within the world. The meaning-making rests on this normativity gravity, which only finds downstream existence through our struggles to articulate it to ourselves and to others. Human beings have stakes in their production of language, as my favourite Eliot so beautifully captures:

#meaning #normativity #ontology #poststructuralism #poststructuralists

The most important book about LLMs that currently exists

I’m glad that Henry Farrell has written this about Leif Weatherby’s Language Machines. It’s a dense, complex and at times frustrating book but it’s also the most genuinely original take on LLMs I’ve encountered. This is how Farrell summarises the outcome of the book:

That LLMs exist; that they are capable of forming coherent sentences in response to prompts; that they are in some genuine sense creative without intentionality, suggests that there is something importantly right about the arguments of structuralist linguistics. Language demonstrably can exist as a system independent of the humans who employ it, and exist generatively, so that it is capable of forming new combinations.

This cashes out as a theory of large language models that are (a) genuinely culturally generative, and (b) incapable of becoming purposively intelligent, any more than the language systems that they imperfectly model are capable of becoming intelligent. Under this account, the “Eliza effect” – the tendency of humans to mistake machine outputs for the outputs of human intelligence – is not entirely in error. If I understand Weatherby correctly, much of what we commonly attribute to individual cognition is in fact carried out through the systems of signs that structure our social lives.

I’m still processing it but I think this book shows a way through the cultural tensions which have made it conceptually difficult to get to grips with what LLMs fundamentally are: actions without actors, creativity without intentionality, even thought without a thinker? They are a sociotechnical infrastructure which facilitates the generativity of the linguistic system, unbinding it from the direct dependence upon individual subjectivity in order that we can prod and prompt it in newly intentional ways.

#HenryFarrell #LeifWeatherby #LLMs #poststructuralism #socialOntology #structuralistLinguistics

AI isn’t the problem—ignorant commentary is. If you don’t understand semiotics, Wittgenstein’s language games, or Derrida’s différance, you’ve failed the test. Licence revoked.

📜 https://philosophics.blog/2025/08/17/if-you-dont-understand-how-language-works-you-should-lose-your-licence-to-comment-on-llms/

#LLMs #GenerativeAI #Semiotics #GenAI #Poststructuralism #LanguageMatters #Philosophy #PhilosophicsBlog #language #PhilosophyOfLanguage #Structuralism

Functional detachment... in an age of Systemic disintegration:

In an era saturated with information yet starved of wisdom, there exists a cognitive threshold - quietly crossed - where the accumulation of knowledge ceases to be empowering and becomes corrosive.

This state, which may be termed functional detachment, arises when the mind, confronted by the scale of systemic contradiction, undergoes a silent rupture. It is not a breakdown. It is the consequence of seeing too clearly.

To live in modern society is to endure a relentless dissonance. One must accept ecological destruction as progress, political corruption as governance, economic exploitation as growth, and curated illusion as truth.

Institutions meant to protect and inform instead obscure and mislead. Even language is repurposed.. weaponised to conceal intent and maintain power. Under such conditions, clarity becomes a burden.

Functional detachment is not apathy or despair. It is the body’s refusal to participate in cognitive and moral falsehoods that no longer reconcile. It begins with hyper-systemic awareness: the capacity to perceive not isolated failures but the interwoven dysfunction of economic, ecological, social, and informational domains. Solutions address symptoms, not causes. Narratives conceal the logic of their own reproduction. Institutions demand submission to illusion.

This state is glimpsed across disciplines. In psychology, it resembles dissociation under extreme stress. In philosophy, it evokes existential nausea.. a collapse of meaning structures. In systems theory, it mirrors epistemic crisis: the moment when contradiction overwhelms coherence.

Society does not accommodate such awareness. It pathologises it.. calling it cynicism, dysfunction, or pessimism. But this is a reversal. The dysfunction lies not in the individual who detaches from corrupted systems but in the systems that demand complicity in contradiction.

Yet if left unexamined, functional detachment risks hardening into paralysis. Seeing everything as broken can neutralise dissent and isolate those who see. The task is not to restore belief in collapsing structures but to build new modes of orientation. Not to rejoin the spectacle, but to stand outside it and create new forms of sense-making, connection, and resistance.

This requires a cognitive ethic:

One that embraces truth without collapsing into nihilism.
One that accepts decay without mistaking it for destiny.
One that sees clearly - and acts anyway.

To live lucidly now is to reject complicity. Not to retreat into apathy, but to cultivate strategic clarity. Functional detachment is not an end. It is a threshold.. the beginning of a post-illusion life.

From here, one does not retreat. One reorients.

#FunctionalDetachment #SystemsThinking #PostStructuralism #LateStageCapitalism