Thumbs up to you and cultural flattening

If you’re like me, which is if you’re lucky you’re not, you have an uncanny way of offending people despite going out of your way to be as pluralist and culturally relative as you can to a fault. I think this is one reason I have a longstanding thing bordering on obsession with cultural hand signals. Sure, the classics are the Italian ones and there are the plethora of often overlooked Brazillian hand gestures, but the first one, the thumbs up, is the interesting one. In “the West” it means “okay” whereas in Iran and some other parts of the Middle East it means “sit on it” which is back in “the west” the middle finger.

In these winter months I watch way too many documentaries about places I will never go so try to be acutely aware of these things for some inexplicable reason. However, what do these mean with flattening of culture with internet? Apparently in Iran, depending on who you are, and due to the Internet, they get that you might be telling the nice policeman that you’re okay and not to fuck himself. Taking this one stop further in terms of technological cultural flattening, do LLMs understand these sorts of things? Sure, they will understand via statistical relevance that if I say “does thumbs in Iran mean a bad word,” it will return that it does, but it will not understand if you are Persian or probably not even if you were and it could parse Farsi.

We can take cultural steamrolling even further when we look at the very real already happening sort of bit with links and web flattening as the chat UIs kill links, web pages at large and the idea of connecting ideas.