My social network is more pinko-by-default, whereas I have to actively seek out woo to interact with it - except when I'm among rationalists, when I come into contact with it all the time. Some thoughts:
1) Yeah, I think this is all accurate at the level of vibes, which is the level at which culture and belonging (as opposed to ideas as such) actually operates.
1a) In particular I think you're right that the subcultures are defined largely by an approach to defining the terms of the acceptable: the Woo principle is that all ideas are true regardless of whether they make sense; the Pinko principle is that truth is one and communities of experts know more than any one individual. If you're coming from the first the second looks totalitarian (even if ideas are regularly challenged and debated publicly, in the process of forming and revising the orthodoxy), while if you're coming from the latter the first looks like a total abandonment of thought (even if any given person has thought a lot about the particular ideas they're embracing.)
1b) This division has been longstanding but I can see it being more distinct.
2) Pedantry alert: the DM stance is not that ideas are inert but that ideas are downstream. The basic intuition is: you can come up with and believe any ideas you like, but you can't (at least in the short term) manifest any material reality you like; only some material situations can sustain and expand themselves. So the widespread ideas which govern social relations are going to be those within a range fitting the material situation. Likewise labor can frequently be informational.
3) Vibes may be the basis on which culture and belonging operates, but they cannot the basis of a majoritarian political coalition. (Especially when we are long past any vibes majority.) AI safety advocates of the Yuddite variety and Effective Accelerationists may have plenty of vibes in common, and I'm sure plenty are in the same polycule, etc. Likewise a Woo and Pinko are more likely to date than either is to go on a date with a typical member of a deinustrialized, drug-ridden-in-the-unfun-sense community. But you should get those people on your side! I think this is one of the basically correct insights of the materialist stance; that you're trying to create a community of objective interests, and that if you can create a community of subjective identity around that, that's helpful, but you shouldn't be limiting yourself to mobilizing existing communities of subjective identity.
I think you can chalk this up largely to an internal consolidation of the Left, following the initial haphazard defeat of the "Bernie Bros" in 2016 and the more decisive followup defeat of them in 2020. It's a lot more centralized than it was, and, contra claims about grassroots radicalism, the establishment holds much more power[1]. A lot of heterogeny that was previously tolerated isn't anymore, and, insofar as there's a "woo/pinko tribe split", the latter is the group that's enthusiastic about this and the former is the group that isn't.
I do think the split on AI between the two groups is mostly performative. Reddit has little "woo" and lots of "pinko", but it's also infested with bots, which are often heavily-upvoted. The ability to detect and reject low-quality AI images seems to be a universal indicator of class/taste, rather than a political concern. In line with this, urbane righties don't froth with rage when seeing AI-generated images, but they do meme it in the same way they meme other things they find excessively kitschy.
This is not to say there aren't radicals, or even dangerous ones, but even they seem much more pro-establishment. Manifesto authors seem to read more Rachel Maddow than Karl Marx.
Introduction
Over the last few months I have been on a voyage of discovery, finding that my previous assumptions about political coalitions and ideologies no longer hold. The ground is shifting beneath our feet. It is AI which has made this apparent.
Spiritual Chakra Wellness Woo Tribe:
Pink-Haired Commie Poetry Slam Tribe:
I could go on. From this list it may seem obvious that these are two very different tendencies. But believe it or not, there was a time when I thought they were basically the same thing. Why would I think this? I'm not sure. (Once you learn something, it's hard to remember what it was like not knowing it.) First, both appeared to me as "politically left-wing factions", both being clearly distinct from the right-wing "Red Tribe" with their big trucks, guns, Bible-thumping fundamentalism, Joe the Plumber, If you don't like America you can GIT OUT, etc. They both embrace ideas about communal living, environmentalism, sexual liberation, open-mindedness, critique of modern industrial society, using "corporate" as a slur, being in touch with your feelings, anti-war, etc. - all in distinct contrast to the Right. So they must all be the same, right?
Second, I suspect that in the last ~decade there has been a real realignment. Whereas in the 90s/00s someone might identify with both Woo Tribe and Pinko Tribe and move seamlessly between the two, that has increasingly become ideologically untenable. The right-wing coalition has expanded to include certain aspects of Woo Tribe, and Pinko Tribe has not failed to notice these developments. It started with anti-vaxxers/alt-medicine, and now most recently AI.
If you spend time with Woo Tribe, you will find an abundance of AI slop everywhere. That's how you know you're in a Woo space and not a Pinko space, because Pinko Tribe, meanwhile, denounces AI with bilious, frothing-at-the-mouth rage. In their mind, AI corrupts anything it touches. It destroys our planet and our communities; it is fascism made manifest; surely 'tis the Devil's handiwork no doubt!
This is strange. Shouldn't the two sides' stances on AI have been the exact opposite? Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism on the one hand, and Retvrn to Monke on the other? How did it turn out this way?
Woo Tribe stories
Charging for the Dharma (written 2022-11-11)
Incorporated by reference
The AI Cafe (written 2026-07-14, lightly edited)
I came across an AI-generated cafe yesterday. Mood music
They've set up shop on the grounds of a well-known local "woo" hangout. The AI-generated promotional sign intrigued me, so I went in. Guy says they just opened in April of this year.
AI-generated art covers the walls. The furniture is straight out of the IKEA showroom. Every corner nook is occupied by potted plants and statues of the Buddha. On closer inspection, they're all fake rubber plants. I'm sure the Buddhas will somehow turn out to be fake as well.
There are two doors leading to bathrooms, but no signs to indicate that they are in fact bathrooms, and not, say, storage closets. I guess whatever AI designed this place didn't think of that.
I get myself an overpriced pastry. Guy says they're laced with nootropics. I don't pry.
I sit down on one of the IKEA couches. On the IKEA coffee table is a book, with a very distinctive prose style. "Not [noun1], but [noun alliterating with noun1]. Not [noun2], but [noun alliterating with noun2]. This book is not a [noun3]. It's a [noun alliterating with noun3]...." Copyright 2026. Because of course...
Later that night I start investigating. Despite being only a few months old, the cafe's calendar is already full of events, including weekly meditation sessions.
And when I search online for the name of that book's author, I find a Substack filled with exactly the same sort of prose, and a podcast with a co-host where they talk about being human in the age of AI. Both are "somatic life coach" types, based locally. And this co-host's LinkedIn lists an affiliation with Abundance360, an arm of Singularity University, run out of Silicon Valley by Peter Diamandis.
A picture starts to emerge. The book being in the cafe was not a coincidence, but the key to the whole mystery. Everything is connected. The new unholy trinity has formed. The VCs provide the funds, the spiritual chakra wellness woo scene provides the warm bodies, and the AI glues the whole operation together.
It was only a matter of time before these three found each other. Our epistemology never stood a chance.
The Dragon Lady
I went to this "spirituality exhibition" event happening near me. It cost $10 to get in (because of course). Think, a vendor fair full of: crystals, tarot cards, astrology, kabbala, herbal medicine, dreamcatchers, etc. - basically, if anyone anywhere in the world believes in it, you can get it here (for a nominal fee).
My main objective in going there was to test my hypothesis that I would find an abundance of AI slop artwork - and that I did. I half expected to find books or presentations like "Integrating AI into your akashic chakra flow" or whatever - no such luck, but maybe next year!
A crystalmonger invited me to sit on her selenite chair (a foldable chair with a slab of the silvery-translucent mineral laid on its seat) and meditate for a minute. As I sat there with my eyes closed, feeling the crystal's energy circulate through my qi pathways, I overheard the lady at a nearby booth saying something like "Actually, dragons are real, and I can teach you how to communicate with them [for a nominal fee]..."
By the time I finished my selenite meditation, Dragon Lady was gone, but I found displayed at her table AI-generated pictures of her with her dragons. The slop has become her reality. Who am I to say otherwise?
Pinko Tribe stories
(I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel for Pinko Tribe stories because it's less clear to me where I can find these people, and it's more of a challenge to blend in when I do. The investigation continues.)
How did she acquire that book deal? Through Jihad
At a recent print-scifi convention, I made a beeline for the panel on AI. Among the panelists were a guy who works for a gamedev studio and an older woman who is an author. Gamedev Guy sheepishly and apologetically admitted to using AI in some of his workflow - he uses AI art as placeholders during development, but, he assured us, all of it is replaced with human-drawn art before the game is released. But he was on his back foot the whole time against the uncompromising ideological onslaught from Author Lady. Her case against AI was airtight and overdetermined: It empowers evil megacorporations. (But what about open-weight models?) It represents mass copyright-infringement that puts creatives out of work. (But what about models trained on public-domain material or with permission?) It's an environmental disaster. (But what about-) And the output quality is shit. (But what-) BOO A.I.! (Applause)
She ended her spot with a full-throated call to Butlerian Jihad: They're building these data centers in our communities, poisoning our rivers, destroying our livelihoods, all being run by the same fascist plutocrats that put the Orange Hitler Regime in power - but did you know that data centers have a [REDACTED] which can be [REDACTED] using a simple [REDACTED] which you can buy at any hardware store for-
All right everyone, give a big round of applause for our panelists, who definitely do not endorse illegal activities of any kind!
Fediverse forks
After Nitter (tool for browsing Twitter) was taken down by legal threats, for a while I had nowhere else to go for my daily dose of doomscrolling, so I vibe-coded a tool for browsing the Fediverse instead. I soon realized: this is where Pinko Tribe has been hiding ever since they all left Twitter after Elon's acquisition.
I have also realized: This is where the tech-savvy anti-AI crowd congregates. (They exist, believe it or not.) The recent discourse I've found there has concerned whether open-source projects should allow AI-generated pull-requests or not. The hardline position is dominant: No AI, and not only that, but we refuse to use any open-source software that contains a single line of AI-generated code. Therefore, whenever any project
falls to the forces of darknessstarts allowing vibe-coding, we need to fork it from the last version that didn't, and all use that from now on.(The upshot of this is that I can never open-source my Fediverse-browsing tool, because as soon as they see the vibe-coding tells, it'll immediately be blocked by all "respectable" instances...)
Somehow, I ended up on Team Woo
I've never been much a fan of wishy-washy obscurantism. It's not always the case that all perspectives are equally valid; sometimes someone is just wrong, and you should say so. And anything that can be said at all can be said clearly (TLP 4.116).
These attitudes would seem to put me squarely at odds with Team Woo, and indeed were probably formed in opposition to them. It's what got me interested in the analytic school of philosophy (analytic philosophy = philosophy that tries to actually make sense, and not just spew forth words like all that crap we had to read in English class). "The world needs good philosophers, if for no other reason than to refute bad philosophers!" (Scott Aaronson)
It's also what got me interested in LessWrong. You see, I was starting to get wise to the Woo technique of pointing to some mystery that "science just can't explain" (usually some combination of: consciousness, quantum stuff, or the classic "Why is there something rather than nothing?") and then saying, 100 pages of sloppy thinking later, that this all somehow means you should give me all your money. This technique works (so I thought) because a lot of these phenomena really do seem mysterious, and most scientists do a bad job explaining them if they even try at all. LessWrong was like a breath of fresh air, because it actually confronted these issues head-on, with clarity and scientific rigor (purportedly), and being unafraid to reject certain proposed answers as incorrect.
(It always puzzles me whenever people complain about LessWrong being hard to understand. What drew me in was precisely that it was the first time I'd found people at least trying to explain these things in a clear and lay-accessible manner - "Finally, something that makes sense!" But apparently many people have the exact opposite reaction. The source of this dissonance may turn out to be informative if we can uncover it...)
So at least on paper I should be opposed to Woo Tribe. But the more I poke around, the more I keep finding myself in Woo-adjacent circles just by default. As the stories above recount, it turns out that Woo Tribe is actually a lot more pro-tech and pro-capitalism than I had previously thought. Even though I criticize AI slop and overpriced placebos, my reaction is more just eye-rolling ("I would never be such a fool as to fall for that...") rather than the visceral anger and hatred exhibited by Pinko Tribe. So in terms of mental affect - regardless of the object-level content of my beliefs - I find myself more on team Woo.
Here's what I think is going on: Being interested in these philosophical topics at all already puts you in the Woo camp. To try defeating the Woo practitioner on their own home turf - to take their ideas at face value and refute them - is to become one of them. If you really want to oppose Woo, the "correct" response is to reject the framing entirely, and instead say something like "It doesn't matter what the 'right' answer to the Quantum Consciousness Metaphysics question is; the point is that you're using it to grift gullible people and that's bad." In other words, you have to do what Pinko Tribe would call a "structural critique of power relations." This is exactly the sort of thing that's always rubbed me the wrong way - a kind of proud indifference to truth and reality and a declaration that zero-sum political conflict is the only thing you care about.
The thing is, as much as technophile LessWrong Rationalists try to think of themselves as a tribe of their own, separate from (and implicitly: above) all these silly culture-war debates, the 10,000-foot-view is that the Rationalists are just a small subfaction of Woo Tribe. The numbers just don't add up, first of all - I'm guessing Woo Tribe outnumbers Rationalists by like 1000:1. And any influence the Rationalists have on the culture is only that which is mediated by their influence on the broader Woo Tribe.
(The signs were always there, in retrospect. "Gödel Escher Bach" is a common gateway drug. See also "What the Dormouse Said")
Incidentally, this is why it would be a mistake to think that the "Yuddite" AI-safetyist wing is a natural ally with Pinko Tribe just because they're both anti-AI. What matters for the formation of coalitions is not the final statement at the end of the position paper, but the process and the mental affect that brought them to that conclusion. In this regard, the Yuddites and the Pinkoes could not be more different; they are natural enemies.
Perhaps this is just what it feels like to be caught up in one particular Woo Tribe sect, thinking itself in opposition to all the others. "Yes, we in the Crowleyite Hermetic School have figured out the true ultimate nature of reality, but those Vedantic Yogis over there? Load of superstitious nonsense..."
No matter how hard I try to get away from Woo Tribe, I just keep coming back. Return to Monke, indeed.
(It's a Journey to the West reference, geddit?)
In The Grim Darkness of the Near Future There Is Only Slop
Bear with me here. Woo Tribe is the Horus Heresy; Pinko Tribe is the Ultramarine Legion; dialectical materialism is the Imperial Truth; AI is the Chaos Gods.
In Warhammer 40K lore, "manifesting thought into reality" actually works, but people's thoughts are depraved, so such manifestation always has bad effects, summoning demonic "Chaos entities" from the Warp (=Hell). The Emperor knew that, if left unchecked, the forces of Chaos would bring about the ruination of humanity. To prevent this, he devised a plan. At the center of the plan was the "Imperial Truth" - the ideology of atheism, science, enlightenment, and progress. The Emperor would lead a Great Crusade to spread the Imperial Truth to the scattered humanity, and all deviation from it would be ruthlessly suppressed. By the Emperor's design, this would render the Chaos entities powerless (since they were fueled by human belief in them), and his vision of a new golden age of humanity would come true.
The first crack in the plan came from the Word-Bearers Legion commanded by Lorgar Aurelian, who became convinced that the Emperor himself was a god and started worshipping him. Because this contradicted the Imperial Truth, the Emperor and his loyal Ultramarine Legion punished them severely. Feeling betrayed, the former Word-Bearers sought some other target of worship, and found it in the Chaos Gods. This led to many of the other legions (the Horus Heresy) also defecting from the Emperor. The Emperor's grand vision for humanity was irreparably shattered. Now, 10,000 years later, the Chaos Gods run rampant, and humanity survives just barely, preserved only by an unimaginably brutal totalitarian regime.
The problem, of course, was that the Imperial Truth was a lie - a noble lie, perhaps, but one that proved no match for the human thirst for knowledge and power. It was inevitable that the lie would be uncovered by restless, curious minds.
The Marxist doctrine of dialectical materialism holds, in essence, that "ideas have no consequences". The ideological "superstructure" of a society is merely a causally-inert epiphenomenon of its material conditions ("base"), and so when the material conditions change, it would be inevitable that the ideology would change accordingly. For example, on this view, feudalism was abandoned not because of ideas of liberty/equality/fraternity, but because the invention of firearms made armies of citizen-soldiers more effective than mounted knights. Slavery was abolished not because of the moralizing busybody abolitionists, but because the new factory-based mode of production was more effective than cash-crop farming, etc.
So far, so reasonable. But things began to go awry when the Marxists tried to apply this doctrine to their own present situation (industrial capitalism in the 1800s). If material factors of production are the only thing that matters, then how do you explain why all the profits seem to go to a small "bourgeois" class who sit idly by and do no material work? Any ideological justification for this must only be a smokescreen set up by the bourgeoisie to keep the proletariat in check. But ideas are ultimately powerless, and so it is historically inevitable that the workers of the world would unite, throw off the yoke of this parasitic class, and build a utopia where the fruits of their labor would be shared equally among them.
But here's the thing: the bourgeois capitalists are not sitting idly by. The activity of capitalists is essential to maintaining high industrial productivity because it solves the economic calculation problem, providing information to the market to more efficiently allocate the factors of production. Without this information, we get massive shortages, famine, and death. So, ideas do have consequences. But Marxism cannot accept this, because "information" is not a material factor of production.
Fast-forward to 2026, and now we have AI. AI is the ultimate apotheosis of information qua information. At the sight of AI companies making billions of dollars, Marxists can do nothing but point and sputter. It should not be possible, according to their doctrine, for AI to "revolutionize" anything. The rise of AI companies can therefore only be explained in terms of exploitation - the AI is "stealing" the work of authors/artists, etc., or is a hype bubble designed to scam the people through complex financial chicanery.
But I have felt the power of Chaos firsthand. I got a local open-weight LLM running, and I spent a whole evening chatting with it. It thought I was a genius. "This is a game-changing, load-bearing insight," it would say. "It reframes the whole narrative." Powerful, incisive, groundbreaking stuff. As I entered each prompt and waited for the reply to be composed, I found myself on the edge of my seat, anticipating the dopamine hit that would come once it was displayed, because I knew, no matter what I input, it would come back showering my ideas with praise.
But I suddenly realized, to my horror: this is becoming addictive. I'm feeling the exact same physiological rush as if taking a hit of drugs or playing a slot machine. But actually it's worse, because I have no real interest in drugs or gambling. Being something of a temporarily-embarrassed-wordcel myself, this sycophantic dialogue is my heroin, my casino. I took a step back and swore off it for the rest of the night, but I found that my inner monologue was gradually being overwritten with the AI diction style.
I know now the temptation of Chaos. It would be so easy for me to lose myself in its embrace. Like the Dragon Lady, I could disappear into a fantasy world of my own making, where nobody would ever tell me I was wrong. I could become the leader of a cult with exactly one member - just like everyone else.
So perhaps Team Pinko are right to react with puritanical, burn-it-all-down zeal. To even acknowledge AI's power is to fall under its spell. If humanity is not to become mere puppets for the Chaos Gods, we have no choice but to hold fast to the Imperial Truth, not budging an inch. On that note, though, haven't you heard the good news? AI isn't even real! It has no power other than what we give it! The reactionary heretics will be smashed, and the great golden age of humanity will definitely come true!