The key feature of a forever discourse, I think, is a preponderance of weak men.
The topic in contention must be complex enough that there’s “good points on both sides”. The average member of either side is almost certainly wrong on at least one point, so astute members of both side wind up having something to argue against when meeting an opponent on the other side.
Another feature is a repeated routine of abstracting and essentialization. People will have these arguments over and over, so much that they reherse their talking points, sometimes just to commiserate with likeminds, sometimes addressing them at a hypothetical unlikemind. These talking points are often target the weak men.
And, in practice, these rehersals often serve as bait for the weak men in question to come out of the woodwork and argue — but also for the strong men to concede or hedge while offering up the better points.
Now, all of this is pretty banal observation about the dynamics of internet discourse.
But what motivates me to grant it the name “forever discourse”, is when you’ve been around this block often enough, done the song and dance a hundred times, and you can feel it metastaticize. (Pun intended.)
Because if you’re truly astute, you want to be savvy. To get through to your interlocutor, you want to do everything you can to avoid triggering their pattern-matching early, prompting a thought terminating cliche and dismissing you as just like every other unlikemind they’ve argued with before.
So at first, maybe it suffices to concede the weakest points first, and then offer a stronger argument. But not everyone dunking on the outgroup is actually ignorant of even those stronger arguments. Dunking a weak man simply makes for a punchier Poast than steelmanning.
So it isn’t enough to simply make the stronger argument — just because it’s strong doesnt mean it’s never been disputed. Nonetheless, you’ve heard the counterarguments and have your own counter-counterarguments.
So what do you do now? Guess your interlocutor’s rhetorical power level, and try to throw off their pattern matching by anticipating their level of counterarguments?
For me, one of the most embarrassing possibilities in a debate is to be caught rehashing a stale point. If I say something to which someone can respond “oh yeah, I’ve heard that one before”, it feels like an instant L. Mortifying.
And it hits all the harder if I was trying to be clever, trying to predict their opening moves, but they went with the Sicilian Defence instead of the Spanish Opening.
My fault for trying to sequence break the dialogue tree, but—
Doubling back, more concisely this time, the key feature of a forever discourse is just how many people are having it at any given time. A weak man gets halfway around the world before a strong man straps his boots; there will always be more “lucky 10k” people having their first brush with the object level discourse while you’re terminally at the meta-meta-meta level.
Put simply, the agony of the forever discourse is that common knowledge is impossible.
Is the person posting bait on your feed a level one discourse noob, or a level twenty discourse master? They might genuinely be that uninformed, or they might mostly agree with the dumb take, and they know if someone is fool enough to bite back with the a common counterargument, they’ve refined an even stronger counter-counterargument and you’ll have egg on your face for underestimating them.
If you were in a small community, if there was a common forum or blog feed that everyone read, then you would have the common knowledge chain of “I know that you know that there’s a common counterargument to the claim you just made, so what new defense do you have to back it up?”
But when the discourse is slowly percolating throughout small pockets of community and five websites screenshotting each other like eternally reigniting ground fires…
What tool do we have to avoid rehashing the same argument for the next twenty years?
Anyway, I mentioned at the top that I think this is a distinct concept from a culture war. Culture wars share a lot of features in common with forever discourses, but there are a few significant differences. The big one is that culture wars inspire a lot sound and fury; they makes people mad and mind-kill them, but another big one is that a lot of culture wars come down to teams sports and signalling. At its most intellectual, culture warriors disagree about core values and oughts.
And while you can get plenty worked up and drawn out in forever discourses, your position isn’t a core parts of your identity. (I hope!)
Part of why I finger lack of common knowledge as the integral thing to sustaining a forever discourse is that I genuinely think if you could sit everyone involved down in a room and bring them all up to speed on the reams of spilled ink over the years, taboo all the map-disputes, and drill everything down to specific assertions, then most of a forever discourse would vanish in a puff of logic.
I’m a writer, and a lot of things people fight about in the world of writing advice and story criticism has the vibe of a forever discourse. Is worldbuilding good or bad? Should you use adverbs, show don’t tell, outline or improvise?