This is an excellent analysis of the state of the modern internet, though I don't entirely agree with his diagnosis of the cause; I think it's more down to two main things:
1. We are all, at heart, covetous xenophobic apes, and we've been doing the same basic thing (arbitrarily define an in-group and an out-group and proceed to wage total war on the out-group) since before we were even human. This is just the latest iteration of the thing we've always done.
2. For more than a decade now, people have been spending fortunes building platforms and algorithms that rely on ever-increasing user 'engagement', often without really knowing what that is. As it turns out, conflict is the most engaging kind of engagement. Twitter especially is a machine for conflict - it funnels anger-inducing information to the user and makes it trivial to strike back at the source of the anger. I really don't think anybody did this on purpose, but it's what we ended up with.
This doesn't feel right. I ask myself, do I go places to look for people to fight with? Emphatically no. Do you? Probably not. I just read this great|hateful book|movie|thing. I want to talk about it with people who have experienced this book|movie|thing, would be great if they saw it the way I did, also great if they disagreed but we could discuss it with a shared language and experience. I feel we are too far apart and too lonesome to go around picking fight, do picking fights form groups? I don't usually engage because 1) strangers on the Internet mean little to me; 2) I think I hold an unpopular opinion; 3) I'm not driven to articulate every thought I have. Conflict drives a good story, I think that's true in a narrative sense, but I don't think it's true we humans go looking for it. I want to believe we are more cooperative creature than a belligerent one. The whole Twitter/Facebook "like" culture is a testament, we want to belong.
I think your post is a good way to split up some of the ideas in the article.
I really think #2 is a good point, but I get frustrated at many arguments for #1. People are emotional beings and will seek out fights, but that doesn't mean all fights are arbitrary. People that talk too long about the Culture War on a meta level, without ever considering specifics and painting it all as pointlessly arbitrary, strike me like "both sides are the same"-type centrists, lacking any interesting positions or even understanding, and are just focused on feeling superior to both sides.
Maybe the issue is I see concerns that we can address bigotry in media and harassment in other environments as the core of the "Culture War", and the worst instances of "cancel culture"[0] as weird outliers to it that can be fixed, but some others think of the worst instances of cancel culture as what the Culture War is about, and the saner conversations are weird unimportant outliers. But as long as we're taking the hundred-foot view of talking vaguely about "Culture War" and treating it as arbitrary arguments, we're not going to realize we're not even talking about the same thing, and it's just posturing around how we already felt about the phrase.
[0] When I refer to the worst instances of cancel culture, I'm not referring to cases of celebrities just not getting renewed after publicly being bigots, but the cases where the backlash gets personal and mismatched for the issue. ContraPoint's video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjMPJVmXxV8 talks about the sort of thing I'm referring to.
Great points. #2 is spot on. I think we ended up here because of the currency of media is attention. Sensationalism,(especially conflict as you noted) draws humans in like moths to a flame.
I agree with your #1 point, humans aren't quite as different from our ancestors as we think.
That said, I don't think the author of the article really supported his points adequately. He seems to have a very strange view of the world and society driven by and centered on his own experience rather than research or any kind of science. This paragraph:
"Online public spaces are now being slowly taken over by beef-only thinkers, as the global culture wars evolve into a stable, endemic, background societal condition of continuous conflict. As the Great Weirding morphs into the Permaweird, the public internet is turning into the Internet of Beefs. "
...Is a good example. I don't think many people would agree that "the global culture wars" are a thing, or that continuous conflict as he sees it is a stable condition or endemic.
I get the impression he's a young person who has bought into the snake oil of the Internet being the Thing That Changes Everything and now that he's tired of waiting for the singularity to occur, he's disillusioned and griping about it.
I don't agree.
I think the problem with 'engagement' isn't conflict. It is that engagement in Internet remains virtual, and that's a source of discontent. We need to translate that engagement back to reality
This article resonates with me and my experiences online to a startling degree. Specifically:
“We are not beefing endlessly because we do not desire peace or because we do not know how to engineer peace. We are beefing because we no longer know who we are, each of us individually, and collectively as a species.”
I think we are seeing a genuine lack of strong family, social, and organizational ties among most people, myself (sadly) included. I don’t think I or any of my peers fully grasp what we’re missing and how isolated we truly are. I think we as a cohort had very good reasons for participating in that change, such as me (an LGBT person) leaving the Catholic church I was raised in rather than bury that other part of myself to fit in. The problem is that I replaced it with nothing, and I think the same pattern has repeated across many other people and many other traditions. The temptation is to suggest MeetUps and other things built to connect people, but those suggested replacements don’t come with the same assumption of trust built in like many traditional organizational and family ties do.
The thing is it's not just religion. There's been a commensurate, if not larger, decline in participation in "civic organizations" as well.
Sports leagues, fraternal societies (like the Elks or Masons), parent-teach organizations, volunteer organizations (like the Boy Scouts or Red Cross), and labor unions have all seen their memberships steadily decline for the better part of the last 50 years.[1] Doubly so among the youngest generations.
Beyond that, in general we have much fewer close social ties than we used to. Marriage rates have plummeted[2], which means many fewer people have a spouse. Surveys show that Americans have only about half the number of close friends as they did a generation ago.[3] The sizable majority of Americans don't even know their neighbors.[4] And of course birth rates have plummeted, which means that the number of siblings the average person has, and eventually aunts, uncles and cousins are all decreasing.
In general the central sociological fact of the modern-era is the unprecedented degree of social atomization that most of us now face.
Trust is earned. It's not something you can assume.
That "assumption of trust" you speak of included an assumption that either you weren't LGBT or you would bury it your entire life for the comfort of the larger community.
Matthew 10:34-36
34"Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35For I have come to turn "'a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law- 36a man's enemies will be the members of his own household.'
I would say you did the actual Christian thing by leaving. But I'm not Christian, so I'm sure many will find that assertion offensive.
Community cannot be founded upon an assumption that some people will bury an important part of themselves like that. That's a foundation of sand and will not last.
We are seeing such things dissolve because we have other options these days. In the past, people often grudgingly tolerated it because they had no place to go, not because being part of some larger community was some wonderfully fulfilling experience most of the time.
If the world is seeing a loss of identity, it is because we are being freed from the shackles of our old identity. It's normal for there to be a transition period where no one knows what's what.
That's not a problem. It's just a stage in a process.
It's only a problem if we get stuck here and fail to establish a new identity. Then the great experiment fails, the opportunity to become something better is lost and we likely see things crash and burn so the world can sort of return to it's old ways that kind of worked.
This is spot on. I wonder if this exodus has resulted in people trying to make workplaces their "religious community"; but obviously people who happen to be at the same company don't have any reason to agree on important issues. So then the mission becomes trying to make everyone at work care about and agree on <chosen social issue>.
My theory is that people have replaced religion with politics. They've fallen away from organized religion, but they still need somewhere deep down, the comfort and certainty, (or "faith"), that spiritual belief conferred.
Many have found that comfort and certainty in the ideological tenets of the political groups with which they form affinities. As a bonus, people find a sense of belonging that is fairly similar to what 50 years ago those same people would have found in the various churches or temples.
Again, just a theory, but I think this is why a lot of political arguments have started to resemble almost clashes of religious dogmas. Or what the author has termed, "beefs".
People like you who did not created ties to a group like that are quite better and less scary then people who have strong loyal unquestioning ties to groups - whether nationalist, traditionalist or radical Christians (some of Catholics in my country lately tie themselves to extremists).
Membership and trust in these apparently feels great. That feeling is dangerous. That trust is not build on truths being told, it is build on unquestioned authority and aggression.
Reflection from a country where such groups are on the rise and not a side players anymore.
The loss of cultural meeting places, be they churches, or arcades, or malls, is something I consider a huge loss as well. The pendulum might swing the other way yet, however.
If we can reinvest in our community centers and hacker spaces and make them part of the zeitgeist, we might all be rehumanize a bit.
I agree with you, and I too kept thinking "Hmm, that is a really good point." but I found the statement you called out somewhat at odds with the rest of the thesis.
What I understood him to say was that his thesis is that culture wars are not about identity and yet this endless conflict is about a lack of identity. So where does identity really fit in there?
The economic and political incentives of inciting "beefing" were spot on. And there is nothing like amping up the inequality of the distribution of wealth to put energy into the "beef battery" (if such a thing existed).
Hello fellow LGBT person! We actually have it a lot better than many marginalized groups -- if you want community, you can find it. You just have to put yourself out there in an offline sense and disabuse yourself of any ideas that you are somehow better than anyone else in the community. Go on a bunch of coffee dates and you'll make plenty of friends.
It's not organized per se, but in many cities the queer people all know each other. I live in a big city with a big queer scene, and I can't tell you how many times I show up by myself somewhere only to see 3 or 4 people I already know there. Or find out that the new person I'm dating is besties with another friend. We all have pretty similar politics, but we also never talk politics or current events (that shit is depressing). Conversation is largely about our own lives and relationships, which IMO is how it should be. The focus is on making space for and supporting eachother, not winning an argument.
If you're struggling to break in to the community, just set up a dating profile (Grindr if you're a gay man, OkCupid if you're not) with something along the lines of "baby queer here, I need friends". People will reach out to you because we've all been you. I have found people in the LGBT community to be incredibly caring and willing to invest in people they barely know, simply because they remember what it's like to be alone in the wilderness. Community is how we heal, and intentional family built one relationship at a time is stronger than relying on circumstances to provide you with social ties.
Much love, get out there and get involved, let yourself be vulnerable, and you will find your people <3
I wholeheartedly agree but also don't know how to fill those gaps. I'd love a church-like institution. I think about going to church almost every sunday just to experience being together with people in that way.
I remember it fondly from being a child even though I no longer believe in it.
>The problem is that I replaced it with nothing, and I think the same pattern has repeated across many other people and many other traditions. The temptation is to suggest MeetUps and other things built to connect people, but those suggested replacements don’t come with the same assumption of trust built in like many traditional organizational and family ties do.
That's how I see it as well. I find all those "organized" attempts fake (and commercialized ones even more so). I include anything, from AAA meetings, to "meditation" schools in 21st century West countries (where you go do your Zen study, and then go on to your otherwise unaltered 21st century life in late capitalism), to the meetups you've mentioned, and so on.
They can't replace organically grown over the decades (or millennia) traditional institutions and mechanisms, the same way canned laugher can't replace actual audience laughter. They're like a 3D printed sculpture of an animal compared to an actual animal, warts and all.
That's not to say the old organic versions are not damaged and unable to sustain themselves.
I think the lack of strong social ties was also the norm through most of the 20th century (in the US at least) but people didn't have the opportunity to connect with focused interest groups as they do now. Prior to that social ties were enforced through religion and that created it's own problems.
I read this article a few days ago and said almost exactly the same thing. The mook stuff is fun, but the line you quoted:
>“We are not beefing endlessly because we do not desire peace or because we do not know how to engineer peace. We are beefing because we no longer know who we are, each of us individually, and collectively as a species.”
is the important part of the piece for me, and I'm happy to see you and others singling it out. I really relate to what Rao is saying here. It's a sensation not unlike boredom. Like we're all waiting for something, anything to happen.
A weird example: In 2016, I flew home to PA from Boston specifically to vote against Trump in a place that mattered. I stayed with my parents for the night, and when I came back from the voting booths, the TV was on and it suddenly became clear that the unthinkable was happening - Trump was winning. I vividly remember the sensation that came over me wasn't disappointment. It was excited anticipation, like the way you feel right before you leave for a big vacation. It was like "ok, here's something actually _happening_ that I'm a part of." It's kind of fucked up, but that emotion that washed over me felt "truer" than any principled argument that this guy could do real damage, etc. It felt like suddenly I was living -in- history, rather than beside it.
There are places that exhibit this - they’re just not well advertised. Community organizations like the elks lodge and the masons were good examples but not very modern. Eventually these sorts of things will pop up to fill the need.
May I offer you two suggestions? There are other interesting religions that don’t care about sexual orientation so no need to give up on having a spiritual community. Also, you can find local groups on meetup.com for tech, blockchain, art, etc. to augment family ties that you get (for instance) by always calling at least one family member each day.
Really, nothing is as important as being with friends and family.
This framework helps me understand why prominent thinkers on Twitter get so much content-free hate in their replies. Most replies aren't even disagreements with the thing they're replying to. They're missiles in a beef war, against some perceived elite group. So it's not necessary to understand the claim and make a detailed refutation. They can just reply with a generic personal attack, and that keeps the culture war going. And generic personal attacks get multiplied by the crowd more than specific nuanced ones, because they're easy to imitate.
Also:
> You can only predict it by trying to understand it as the deliberate perpetuation of a culture of conflict by those with an interest in keeping it alive.
ie, the warriors are playing an infinite game that they enjoy. You can't win by out-arguing them. The only way to win is not to play.
Maybe I used to follow the wrong people, but a lot of these prominent thinkers didn't really invite discussions, they just made constant statements, where if you didn't agree, the only thing you could do was write a short statement as to why.
I've always thought anonymous imageboards were excellent training grounds for how to deal with all of this. When there's no upvoting or ability to filter people by name, you have to learn how to deal with people who often truly are only posting to make you mad. There are two good responses, both of which are extremely difficult if you have no practice: ignoring it; engaging sincerely and with the assumption that the other person is doing the same. If you persist with the first they'll eventually go and bother someone else, but this is doubly hard because it requires everyone to ignore them, and that only really happens when the bait has grown stale. The second often results in them switching from the troll persona to actual sincerity, but it requires several back and forths of responding with goodwill to bile, and I think it's even harder to accomplish in forums where people have tied their name to their opinions.
It's a good training ground to learn to control yourself for sure. But as soon as there's filtering and up- / down-voting, you'll quickly learn that none of that matters.
I tried to engage in some Reddit discussions regarding politics in my country, and as soon as you don't follow the general sentiment, you get downvoted and eventually banned. Even if you're absolutely sincere and have good arguments as to why you think like this, you'll just get labelled a troll for disagreeing with something.
While it's very frustrating, it's also truly scary, they just end up creating their own echo chambers, only allowing people who agree with them to post or comment. Eventually this moves on to the real world where they'll assume everyone has the same opinion because they've been living in an echo chamber.
I run several discords and forums and I allow a certain amount of hazing to go on. This has a positive effect in some ways obviously has some negatives.
It filters out at lot of "normies". I don't want people who are easily offended on my forum, if you want a mod to protect you, you can go elsewhere. It also immediately filters out the morality police instantly.
HN is pretty good at moderating discussions. Which is the main reason I come here. Still, I've seen plenty of beef only thinking here and I too have been guilty at times.
It can be quite frustrating when you make an observation about someone's comment only to have them automatically assume you were in disagreement. It's good to assume a generous interpretation. Since tone is so hard to gauge on the Internet, discussions quickly devolve otherwise.
At some point people will realize that Twitter doesn't matter. The sooner that happens the better.
For whatever reason, our elites and media are convinced Twitter is very important. Nothing is worse than getting criticized by the peanut gallery. Twitter can end careers, cancel television shows, bring down elected officials.
That power quickly turned from, "complain about lost baggage on Twitter and get an airline ticket voucher for $50" to "I demand anyone I disagree with be exiled to Elba."
The truth is Twitter already doesn't matter, like, at all to almost everyone. Ask your aunt or brother-in-law about what's trending on Twitter and you'll get a blank stare. But journalists and elites continue to be terrified of, and enthralled by Twitter. They've collectively forgotten that "sticks and stones may break my bones..."
Throw in Nadia Eghbal's Tyranny of Ideas (https://nadiaeghbal.com/ideas) and you'll realize it's not humans beefing, but ideas. Posting is praxis, and the internet is a series of tube battlegrounds for the best ideas.
I'm a multitour veteran of the scarred hellscape where modern and historic ideas struggle - 4chan, TEDx conferences, irc, VC conference rooms, local candidate door-knocking campaigns, reddit, and of course twitter. The brawling is better there than in academic journals and library shelves. Today I proudly do my duty fighting off the bad ideas with the Good Ones.
Jokes aside, this is a horribly lame and out of touch take, saying that people's righteous anger is in fact not because of their legit complaints about society, but because
they just want to argue. It's a both sides false equivalence, equal to PG implying he's better off being an "accidental centrist", whatever the hell that means.
Is it though? or is it the disenfranchised finally are able to have their opinion heard? We also get to see the emperors now and we realise they have no clothes - they're just like us.
My hope is this is a brief period of education of everyone to see each others opinions and something better can come of it. As always there are those at work trying to maintain their positions.
For myself I have learnt a lot about the belief systems of other people from the internet. I can only hope others are doing the same, we all have to get along.
Edit: I think of it as the great flattening, to coin a term, previous societies were hierarchical with people in charge handing down dogma. There were some dissenters - they were called antisocial at one stage. Now everyone is at the same level, I've had conversations on forums with people who invented tech, wrote books I've read, I could if I was so inclined seek out other fields - everything is open now. This is bound to cause some 'beefing'. End of beef.
I'm not going to be able to wade through this entire article. If this is at all an accurate characterization of Twitter, that might explain why I have so few followers.
I don't engage in this stuff on Twitter. I've overall had fairly positive experiences on Twitter. I continue to try to figure out how to connect positively on Twitter and on the internet generally.
I don't agree that the only antidote is to go seek out walled gardens and the like. The real solution is to be the change you want to see.
Don't go looking for beefs.
Try to bring solutions, not complaints.
Try to have some empathy for people and assume "They must be having a bad day" or "Wow, they must have a lot of baggage on this topic" and politely decline to get into some shitshow with them.
Remember that having empathy for others (instead of just assuming everyone is simply intentionally being an asshole) doesn't mean being a doormat. Respect yourself. Don't kiss their ass to mollify them or something. Instead, just shut up and quit putting out the fire with gasoline.
Venkat is enjoyable as always, but the central conceit of this essay is an insult to crash-only programming.
The crash-only approach to feuding online is to stop responding when someone beefs with you. Don't try to mollify, don't flame back, don't explain yourself, just: close the tab, do something else, and reboot Twitter later, in a known-good state.
I think this article captures the Zeitgeist of this internet era perfectly.
I'm a bit surprised at the hasty conclusion though:
> The conclusion is inescapable: the IoB will shut down, and give way to something better, only when we know who we want to be — individually and collectively — when the beefing stops, and regenerate into that form. Only that will allow history to be rebooted, and time to be restarted.
The IoB is driven by human nature. It's demise would only lead to beefing in some other arena that we cannot postulate yet...
I'm not quite sure what to make of this, but I think I agree with this conclusion:
> We are not beefing endlessly because we do not desire peace or because we do not know how to engineer peace. We are beefing because we no longer know who we are, each of us individually, and collectively as a species. Knight and mook alike are faced with the terrifying possibility that if there is no history in the future, there is nobody in particular to be once the beefing stops.
> And the only way to reboot history is to figure out new beings to be. Because that’s ultimately what beefing is about: a way to avoid being, without allowing time itself to end.
What this era calls for is us to discover new ways of being human. It sounds grandiose, but I think that's where we are.
I hesitate to criticize this person, because they're presumably writing for an audience that already knows them, and probably are following for this style of writing, but I have to ask: What is it with think-pieces that state obvious and widespread conclusions while using jargon and jokes to obscure how basic of conclusions they really are?
I can't fault people who do this because they're paid by the word and taking 5,000 of them to describe the color of the sky brings them a nice amount, but I don't see why it's done here, where that doesn't seem to be a consideration.
> Importantly, unless you do something dumb that makes you vulnerable to being drawn into the mook-manorial economy against your will, such as saying something that can be used against you while in a position of authority in an important institution, the IoB is an opt-in conflict arena. You only opt-in to the Internet of Beefs driven by a sincere grievance if you are mook enough to want to.
I find this vert true. The particularity of HN is that they did not gather by beef but by learning about the startup scene and skills.
Undoubtedly, some of what this article describes, routinely takes place on twitter. However, I find that something else takes place on twitter much more, or at least as frequently. It goes something like this:
1) Something somewhere happens.
2) A person who may be famous or well know for some accomplishments, perhaps even super impressive accomplishments in a particular field of business or creative endevours, decides to comment on 1) on Twitter
3) Note that this person usually has no particular expertise or knowledge in the area of 1) despite having overall success and fame and lots of followers
4) It turns out that because of 3) their opinion expressed in 250 characters often ( not always ) is either somewhat silly, potentially offensive to some, outright dumb/misinformed or simply lacks sufficient nuance.
5) because of 4) lots of "mooks" and "knights" come out of the woodwork and attack this famous person, along with all kinds of legitimate critics
6) said person feels under attack and/or cancelled and bemoans the state of Twitter, the world and the internet
Now, it may be unfortunate that Twitter mobs attack these people simply for their opinions. But if you opine on something you have no expertise in to a very large audience in public, then I think you should grow thicker skin and prepare to also weather some criticism just on the off chance you actually say something dumb.
It's as if only these people, with their declarations of their opinions have the right to say something controversial, but nobody else has any right to respond to that controversial thought with any criticism or disagreement.
I think the problem is people care both too much about other people’s opinions and also are too forceful pushing their opinions at other people.
I think it was the stoic philosopher Epictetus who said people love themselves more than other people but value other people’s opinions about themselves more than they value their own opinions about themselves. Don’t worry so much about what other people think and say.
What's interesting about this as well is that participating in this economy of beefs makes people deeply unhappy right to the core, and yet they can't seem to step away.
Take any Twitter user with over 20k followers, and almost to a T they appear to be extremely unhappy, depressed, and anxious wrecks who use Twitter to put on a happy face and pretend they're not.
[+] [-] CommieBobDole|6 years ago|reply
1. We are all, at heart, covetous xenophobic apes, and we've been doing the same basic thing (arbitrarily define an in-group and an out-group and proceed to wage total war on the out-group) since before we were even human. This is just the latest iteration of the thing we've always done.
2. For more than a decade now, people have been spending fortunes building platforms and algorithms that rely on ever-increasing user 'engagement', often without really knowing what that is. As it turns out, conflict is the most engaging kind of engagement. Twitter especially is a machine for conflict - it funnels anger-inducing information to the user and makes it trivial to strike back at the source of the anger. I really don't think anybody did this on purpose, but it's what we ended up with.
[+] [-] devchix|6 years ago|reply
This doesn't feel right. I ask myself, do I go places to look for people to fight with? Emphatically no. Do you? Probably not. I just read this great|hateful book|movie|thing. I want to talk about it with people who have experienced this book|movie|thing, would be great if they saw it the way I did, also great if they disagreed but we could discuss it with a shared language and experience. I feel we are too far apart and too lonesome to go around picking fight, do picking fights form groups? I don't usually engage because 1) strangers on the Internet mean little to me; 2) I think I hold an unpopular opinion; 3) I'm not driven to articulate every thought I have. Conflict drives a good story, I think that's true in a narrative sense, but I don't think it's true we humans go looking for it. I want to believe we are more cooperative creature than a belligerent one. The whole Twitter/Facebook "like" culture is a testament, we want to belong.
[+] [-] AgentME|6 years ago|reply
I really think #2 is a good point, but I get frustrated at many arguments for #1. People are emotional beings and will seek out fights, but that doesn't mean all fights are arbitrary. People that talk too long about the Culture War on a meta level, without ever considering specifics and painting it all as pointlessly arbitrary, strike me like "both sides are the same"-type centrists, lacking any interesting positions or even understanding, and are just focused on feeling superior to both sides.
Maybe the issue is I see concerns that we can address bigotry in media and harassment in other environments as the core of the "Culture War", and the worst instances of "cancel culture"[0] as weird outliers to it that can be fixed, but some others think of the worst instances of cancel culture as what the Culture War is about, and the saner conversations are weird unimportant outliers. But as long as we're taking the hundred-foot view of talking vaguely about "Culture War" and treating it as arbitrary arguments, we're not going to realize we're not even talking about the same thing, and it's just posturing around how we already felt about the phrase.
[0] When I refer to the worst instances of cancel culture, I'm not referring to cases of celebrities just not getting renewed after publicly being bigots, but the cases where the backlash gets personal and mismatched for the issue. ContraPoint's video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjMPJVmXxV8 talks about the sort of thing I'm referring to.
[+] [-] 12xo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Accujack|6 years ago|reply
That said, I don't think the author of the article really supported his points adequately. He seems to have a very strange view of the world and society driven by and centered on his own experience rather than research or any kind of science. This paragraph:
"Online public spaces are now being slowly taken over by beef-only thinkers, as the global culture wars evolve into a stable, endemic, background societal condition of continuous conflict. As the Great Weirding morphs into the Permaweird, the public internet is turning into the Internet of Beefs. "
...Is a good example. I don't think many people would agree that "the global culture wars" are a thing, or that continuous conflict as he sees it is a stable condition or endemic.
I get the impression he's a young person who has bought into the snake oil of the Internet being the Thing That Changes Everything and now that he's tired of waiting for the singularity to occur, he's disillusioned and griping about it.
[+] [-] aglavine|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lammy|6 years ago|reply
“We are not beefing endlessly because we do not desire peace or because we do not know how to engineer peace. We are beefing because we no longer know who we are, each of us individually, and collectively as a species.”
I think we are seeing a genuine lack of strong family, social, and organizational ties among most people, myself (sadly) included. I don’t think I or any of my peers fully grasp what we’re missing and how isolated we truly are. I think we as a cohort had very good reasons for participating in that change, such as me (an LGBT person) leaving the Catholic church I was raised in rather than bury that other part of myself to fit in. The problem is that I replaced it with nothing, and I think the same pattern has repeated across many other people and many other traditions. The temptation is to suggest MeetUps and other things built to connect people, but those suggested replacements don’t come with the same assumption of trust built in like many traditional organizational and family ties do.
[+] [-] dcolkitt|6 years ago|reply
Sports leagues, fraternal societies (like the Elks or Masons), parent-teach organizations, volunteer organizations (like the Boy Scouts or Red Cross), and labor unions have all seen their memberships steadily decline for the better part of the last 50 years.[1] Doubly so among the youngest generations.
Beyond that, in general we have much fewer close social ties than we used to. Marriage rates have plummeted[2], which means many fewer people have a spouse. Surveys show that Americans have only about half the number of close friends as they did a generation ago.[3] The sizable majority of Americans don't even know their neighbors.[4] And of course birth rates have plummeted, which means that the number of siblings the average person has, and eventually aunts, uncles and cousins are all decreasing.
In general the central sociological fact of the modern-era is the unprecedented degree of social atomization that most of us now face.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone [2] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/14/as-u-s-marr... [3] https://www.barna.com/research/friends-loneliness/ [4] https://www.studyfinds.org/sign-of-the-times-75-of-adults-ar...
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|6 years ago|reply
That "assumption of trust" you speak of included an assumption that either you weren't LGBT or you would bury it your entire life for the comfort of the larger community.
Matthew 10:34-36
34"Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35For I have come to turn "'a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law- 36a man's enemies will be the members of his own household.'
I would say you did the actual Christian thing by leaving. But I'm not Christian, so I'm sure many will find that assertion offensive.
Community cannot be founded upon an assumption that some people will bury an important part of themselves like that. That's a foundation of sand and will not last.
We are seeing such things dissolve because we have other options these days. In the past, people often grudgingly tolerated it because they had no place to go, not because being part of some larger community was some wonderfully fulfilling experience most of the time.
If the world is seeing a loss of identity, it is because we are being freed from the shackles of our old identity. It's normal for there to be a transition period where no one knows what's what.
That's not a problem. It's just a stage in a process.
It's only a problem if we get stuck here and fail to establish a new identity. Then the great experiment fails, the opportunity to become something better is lost and we likely see things crash and burn so the world can sort of return to it's old ways that kind of worked.
[+] [-] virtuous_signal|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bilbo0s|6 years ago|reply
Many have found that comfort and certainty in the ideological tenets of the political groups with which they form affinities. As a bonus, people find a sense of belonging that is fairly similar to what 50 years ago those same people would have found in the various churches or temples.
Again, just a theory, but I think this is why a lot of political arguments have started to resemble almost clashes of religious dogmas. Or what the author has termed, "beefs".
[+] [-] watwut|6 years ago|reply
Membership and trust in these apparently feels great. That feeling is dangerous. That trust is not build on truths being told, it is build on unquestioned authority and aggression.
Reflection from a country where such groups are on the rise and not a side players anymore.
[+] [-] jszymborski|6 years ago|reply
The loss of cultural meeting places, be they churches, or arcades, or malls, is something I consider a huge loss as well. The pendulum might swing the other way yet, however.
If we can reinvest in our community centers and hacker spaces and make them part of the zeitgeist, we might all be rehumanize a bit.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|6 years ago|reply
What I understood him to say was that his thesis is that culture wars are not about identity and yet this endless conflict is about a lack of identity. So where does identity really fit in there?
The economic and political incentives of inciting "beefing" were spot on. And there is nothing like amping up the inequality of the distribution of wealth to put energy into the "beef battery" (if such a thing existed).
[+] [-] wayoutthere|6 years ago|reply
It's not organized per se, but in many cities the queer people all know each other. I live in a big city with a big queer scene, and I can't tell you how many times I show up by myself somewhere only to see 3 or 4 people I already know there. Or find out that the new person I'm dating is besties with another friend. We all have pretty similar politics, but we also never talk politics or current events (that shit is depressing). Conversation is largely about our own lives and relationships, which IMO is how it should be. The focus is on making space for and supporting eachother, not winning an argument.
If you're struggling to break in to the community, just set up a dating profile (Grindr if you're a gay man, OkCupid if you're not) with something along the lines of "baby queer here, I need friends". People will reach out to you because we've all been you. I have found people in the LGBT community to be incredibly caring and willing to invest in people they barely know, simply because they remember what it's like to be alone in the wilderness. Community is how we heal, and intentional family built one relationship at a time is stronger than relying on circumstances to provide you with social ties.
Much love, get out there and get involved, let yourself be vulnerable, and you will find your people <3
[+] [-] missingrib|6 years ago|reply
I remember it fondly from being a child even though I no longer believe in it.
[+] [-] twoheadedboy|6 years ago|reply
That book really made me think pretty hard about this stuff. It's also a short 180 pages.
[+] [-] coldtea|6 years ago|reply
That's how I see it as well. I find all those "organized" attempts fake (and commercialized ones even more so). I include anything, from AAA meetings, to "meditation" schools in 21st century West countries (where you go do your Zen study, and then go on to your otherwise unaltered 21st century life in late capitalism), to the meetups you've mentioned, and so on.
They can't replace organically grown over the decades (or millennia) traditional institutions and mechanisms, the same way canned laugher can't replace actual audience laughter. They're like a 3D printed sculpture of an animal compared to an actual animal, warts and all.
That's not to say the old organic versions are not damaged and unable to sustain themselves.
[+] [-] itronitron|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sebastos|6 years ago|reply
>“We are not beefing endlessly because we do not desire peace or because we do not know how to engineer peace. We are beefing because we no longer know who we are, each of us individually, and collectively as a species.”
is the important part of the piece for me, and I'm happy to see you and others singling it out. I really relate to what Rao is saying here. It's a sensation not unlike boredom. Like we're all waiting for something, anything to happen.
A weird example: In 2016, I flew home to PA from Boston specifically to vote against Trump in a place that mattered. I stayed with my parents for the night, and when I came back from the voting booths, the TV was on and it suddenly became clear that the unthinkable was happening - Trump was winning. I vividly remember the sensation that came over me wasn't disappointment. It was excited anticipation, like the way you feel right before you leave for a big vacation. It was like "ok, here's something actually _happening_ that I'm a part of." It's kind of fucked up, but that emotion that washed over me felt "truer" than any principled argument that this guy could do real damage, etc. It felt like suddenly I was living -in- history, rather than beside it.
[+] [-] taurath|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway92384|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rngAcc56|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|6 years ago|reply
Really, nothing is as important as being with friends and family.
[+] [-] tlb|6 years ago|reply
Also:
> You can only predict it by trying to understand it as the deliberate perpetuation of a culture of conflict by those with an interest in keeping it alive.
ie, the warriors are playing an infinite game that they enjoy. You can't win by out-arguing them. The only way to win is not to play.
[+] [-] durpleDrank|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woutr_be|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bproven|6 years ago|reply
Joshua: "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play"
[+] [-] nradov|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pochamago|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woutr_be|6 years ago|reply
I tried to engage in some Reddit discussions regarding politics in my country, and as soon as you don't follow the general sentiment, you get downvoted and eventually banned. Even if you're absolutely sincere and have good arguments as to why you think like this, you'll just get labelled a troll for disagreeing with something. While it's very frustrating, it's also truly scary, they just end up creating their own echo chambers, only allowing people who agree with them to post or comment. Eventually this moves on to the real world where they'll assume everyone has the same opinion because they've been living in an echo chamber.
[+] [-] uncle_j|6 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile
I run several discords and forums and I allow a certain amount of hazing to go on. This has a positive effect in some ways obviously has some negatives.
It filters out at lot of "normies". I don't want people who are easily offended on my forum, if you want a mod to protect you, you can go elsewhere. It also immediately filters out the morality police instantly.
[+] [-] jcoffland|6 years ago|reply
It can be quite frustrating when you make an observation about someone's comment only to have them automatically assume you were in disagreement. It's good to assume a generous interpretation. Since tone is so hard to gauge on the Internet, discussions quickly devolve otherwise.
[+] [-] nostromo|6 years ago|reply
For whatever reason, our elites and media are convinced Twitter is very important. Nothing is worse than getting criticized by the peanut gallery. Twitter can end careers, cancel television shows, bring down elected officials.
That power quickly turned from, "complain about lost baggage on Twitter and get an airline ticket voucher for $50" to "I demand anyone I disagree with be exiled to Elba."
The truth is Twitter already doesn't matter, like, at all to almost everyone. Ask your aunt or brother-in-law about what's trending on Twitter and you'll get a blank stare. But journalists and elites continue to be terrified of, and enthralled by Twitter. They've collectively forgotten that "sticks and stones may break my bones..."
[+] [-] dluan|6 years ago|reply
I'm a multitour veteran of the scarred hellscape where modern and historic ideas struggle - 4chan, TEDx conferences, irc, VC conference rooms, local candidate door-knocking campaigns, reddit, and of course twitter. The brawling is better there than in academic journals and library shelves. Today I proudly do my duty fighting off the bad ideas with the Good Ones.
Jokes aside, this is a horribly lame and out of touch take, saying that people's righteous anger is in fact not because of their legit complaints about society, but because they just want to argue. It's a both sides false equivalence, equal to PG implying he's better off being an "accidental centrist", whatever the hell that means.
[+] [-] Yhippa|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chadcmulligan|6 years ago|reply
My hope is this is a brief period of education of everyone to see each others opinions and something better can come of it. As always there are those at work trying to maintain their positions.
For myself I have learnt a lot about the belief systems of other people from the internet. I can only hope others are doing the same, we all have to get along.
Edit: I think of it as the great flattening, to coin a term, previous societies were hierarchical with people in charge handing down dogma. There were some dissenters - they were called antisocial at one stage. Now everyone is at the same level, I've had conversations on forums with people who invented tech, wrote books I've read, I could if I was so inclined seek out other fields - everything is open now. This is bound to cause some 'beefing'. End of beef.
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|6 years ago|reply
I don't engage in this stuff on Twitter. I've overall had fairly positive experiences on Twitter. I continue to try to figure out how to connect positively on Twitter and on the internet generally.
I don't agree that the only antidote is to go seek out walled gardens and the like. The real solution is to be the change you want to see.
Don't go looking for beefs.
Try to bring solutions, not complaints.
Try to have some empathy for people and assume "They must be having a bad day" or "Wow, they must have a lot of baggage on this topic" and politely decline to get into some shitshow with them.
Remember that having empathy for others (instead of just assuming everyone is simply intentionally being an asshole) doesn't mean being a doormat. Respect yourself. Don't kiss their ass to mollify them or something. Instead, just shut up and quit putting out the fire with gasoline.
[+] [-] wwweston|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omgwtfbyobbq|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samatman|6 years ago|reply
The crash-only approach to feuding online is to stop responding when someone beefs with you. Don't try to mollify, don't flame back, don't explain yourself, just: close the tab, do something else, and reboot Twitter later, in a known-good state.
[+] [-] anonu|6 years ago|reply
I'm a bit surprised at the hasty conclusion though:
> The conclusion is inescapable: the IoB will shut down, and give way to something better, only when we know who we want to be — individually and collectively — when the beefing stops, and regenerate into that form. Only that will allow history to be rebooted, and time to be restarted.
The IoB is driven by human nature. It's demise would only lead to beefing in some other arena that we cannot postulate yet...
[+] [-] jrochkind1|6 years ago|reply
> We are not beefing endlessly because we do not desire peace or because we do not know how to engineer peace. We are beefing because we no longer know who we are, each of us individually, and collectively as a species. Knight and mook alike are faced with the terrifying possibility that if there is no history in the future, there is nobody in particular to be once the beefing stops.
> And the only way to reboot history is to figure out new beings to be. Because that’s ultimately what beefing is about: a way to avoid being, without allowing time itself to end.
What this era calls for is us to discover new ways of being human. It sounds grandiose, but I think that's where we are.
[+] [-] kick|6 years ago|reply
I can't fault people who do this because they're paid by the word and taking 5,000 of them to describe the color of the sky brings them a nice amount, but I don't see why it's done here, where that doesn't seem to be a consideration.
[+] [-] bwing|6 years ago|reply
samzdat makes similar points in this article -- esoteric but insightful
[+] [-] Multiplayer|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexis_fr|6 years ago|reply
I find this vert true. The particularity of HN is that they did not gather by beef but by learning about the startup scene and skills.
[+] [-] vasilipupkin|6 years ago|reply
1) Something somewhere happens.
2) A person who may be famous or well know for some accomplishments, perhaps even super impressive accomplishments in a particular field of business or creative endevours, decides to comment on 1) on Twitter
3) Note that this person usually has no particular expertise or knowledge in the area of 1) despite having overall success and fame and lots of followers
4) It turns out that because of 3) their opinion expressed in 250 characters often ( not always ) is either somewhat silly, potentially offensive to some, outright dumb/misinformed or simply lacks sufficient nuance.
5) because of 4) lots of "mooks" and "knights" come out of the woodwork and attack this famous person, along with all kinds of legitimate critics
6) said person feels under attack and/or cancelled and bemoans the state of Twitter, the world and the internet
Now, it may be unfortunate that Twitter mobs attack these people simply for their opinions. But if you opine on something you have no expertise in to a very large audience in public, then I think you should grow thicker skin and prepare to also weather some criticism just on the off chance you actually say something dumb.
It's as if only these people, with their declarations of their opinions have the right to say something controversial, but nobody else has any right to respond to that controversial thought with any criticism or disagreement.
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|6 years ago|reply
I think the problem is people care both too much about other people’s opinions and also are too forceful pushing their opinions at other people.
I think it was the stoic philosopher Epictetus who said people love themselves more than other people but value other people’s opinions about themselves more than they value their own opinions about themselves. Don’t worry so much about what other people think and say.
[+] [-] nsainsbury|6 years ago|reply
Take any Twitter user with over 20k followers, and almost to a T they appear to be extremely unhappy, depressed, and anxious wrecks who use Twitter to put on a happy face and pretend they're not.