The Internet of Beefs

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/

by rinze • 7 years ago

513 309 7 years ago

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.

devchix• 7 years ago

conflict is the most engaging kind of engagement

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.

jamesrcole• 7 years ago

> conflict is the most engaging kind of engagement
do I go places to look for people to fight with? Emphatically no. Do you? Probably not.

People seem to love information that ridicules and hates on "the other side" (e.g. in politics). They like seeing the other side being put down, and the feeling of superiority they can get from that.

wtmt2• 7 years ago

> conflict is the most engaging kind of engagement
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.

Most people are thrust with conflicts on TV. It may not have been their choice to go to, but that’s the fare available from most TV networks (especially the only fare on news and news related debates). World over, the networks know what attracts and addicts more eyeballs (it is conflict and frustration). Social networks also amplify these kinds of conversations. You may visit Twitter to just read some interesting piece of information from someone you admire or like, but the platform is built in a way to distract you over and over again into a deeper rabbit hole of conflict. It’s the same on other “engagement driven” business models too.

zweep2• 7 years ago

You may not go looking to participate in fights, but as a spectator event, fights certainly draw the largest viewerships, whether it's a fight on the street, or the Super Bowl, or a war.

12xo2• 7 years ago

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.

AgentME• 7 years ago

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.

aglavine• 7 years ago

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

Accujack• 7 years ago

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.

nostromo• 7 years ago

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..."

cma• 7 years ago

Twitter pretty ingeniously gave blue check marks to everyone in the media. It is a little private club where they can direct message most celebrities and politicians. Its media relevance isn’t going anywhere soon, it is like Bloomberg terminals at this point.

zojirushibottle• 7 years ago

well, talking only of medias, they have reasons to give importance to social medias. if i were constantly reporting risings, protests, riots, movements, etc. that started online, i would give importance to social media too.

slumdev• 7 years ago

Twitter is interesting because it can bring the unfiltered worst out of politicians and celebrities.

If you wouldn't say it to a bouquet of microphones, you shouldn't tweet it, either, but a lot of people don't seem to get that.

danharaj3• 7 years ago

I think you're taking for granted how twitter is used as a global cafe by communities that would otherwise be disjointed and isolated. For every controversial tweet or tweet of drama, theres thousands of enriching conversations happening that could otherwise not occur.

I think it's ironic that negative takes on the twitter model tend to be as shallow and polarizing as they claim the platform to be. As for me, I think there's some worth to it that could be taken even further if decentralized analogues become widely popular.

gambiting• 7 years ago

>For every controversial tweet or tweet of drama, theres thousands of enriching conversations happening that could otherwise not occur.

I don't believe that this actually happens. Definitely not on twitter anyway.

sp332• 7 years ago

You could say the same about IRC. GP's point is that not that many people are even on the platform. Twitter has less than 350 million monthly active users. It's about tied with Reddit. MSN had more unique monthly visitors than that in 2004.

rob742• 7 years ago

TBH, the 280-character limit (and of course, the attention economy) doesn't really encourage deep and balanced discourse...

AndrewKemendo• 7 years ago

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.

Except they might have read an article on CNBC or Fox that was based on a twitter thread. That's where it actually makes a difference, when it spills over into other media and picks up steam. See: Twitter Revolutions [1]

A few years ago I got calls from a friends, who aren't Twitter users, that they saw me on E! and other news outlets because I was getting lit up on Twitter. The Guardian, CNET, DailyDot all picked up the story and ran with it.

So yes, you're right things on Twitter.com by themselves rarely matter. What matters is when they are picked up by other news outlets and gain mainstream momentum.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Revolution

gist2• 7 years ago

Except they might have read an article on CNBC or Fox that was based on a twitter thread. That's where it actually makes a difference, when it spills over into other media and picks up steam.

Exactly (and what I said in my comment). But it goes further. Take the NYT widely regarded as 'the Paper of Record'. What they say has a great amplifier impact. Ditto for shows like 60 Minutes or even the nightly news in some cases. Most people in media (say in small towns or in less than impressive in any way newspapers) very generally think that is what you aspire to to work for - a major media outlet (in other words some small station person in Idaho is envious of the people who work at the networks like some high school football coach is probably envious of NFL coaches, right?).

_jasper• 7 years ago

Of course we all want this to be true, but the fact that individuals and companies are folding to twitter mobs mean there is real power; and why would people with power want to give it up

rob742• 7 years ago

Of course Twitter is irresistible to the media - they don't need to search lengthy interviews and other texts for quotes that sound bad when taken out of context anymore, now they get the quotes pre-sharpened to a dangerous point and delivered to their doorstep...

leppr• 7 years ago

This hits the nail on the head. Language is very fuzzy: with a long-form article an idea can be refined to a point where an attentive reader will have no doubt about the author's take. With a >280 characters sound bite, the range of possible interpretations is exponentially greater, making uncharitable takeaways easy to come out with.

Twitter doesn't work in an adversarial context.

danso• 7 years ago

It's strange to see someone argue how "Twitter doesn't matter" when it's been a main platform for the world's most powerful man. I use Twitter but don't follow Pres. Trump or find it useful to engage with his tweets, but it's undeniable that he's used it to material effect. [0]

In any case, Twitter is also a very useful platform for the disenfranchised, including those who complain about corporate practices. You come up with a stilted example of "I demand anyone I disagree with be exiled to Elba" and declare that Twitter doesn't already matter, but you're ignoring the many daily situations when companies and organizations actually do respond to tweets, and make explanation or change behavior?

[0]http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/government_says_trump...

CM30• 7 years ago

This 100%. Twitter is utterly irrelevant to 99% of people and organisations on the planet, and the opinions of people on it don't reflect the mainstream in any way whatsoever. It's especially noticeable in election cycles, where the 'extremes' seem to do really well on Twitter but get curbstomped in the actual polls.

But it's also noticeable in many so called examples of cancel culture too, since the whole result of your usual internet backdraft is... nothing much in particular. Everyone I've seen get hammered by negative reactions after saying something controversial online has seen the popularity not change one jot. Logan Paul? Still doing decently. The Nostalgia Critic? Still going strong. The people making these complaints have virtually zero pull as far as actual influence goes, and the angry gnashing of a few hundred/thousand Twitter users is vastly outweighed by a hundred times more people subscribing/following/supporting stars as normal.

For the most part, almost every business is in the same boat. The people on Twitter don't matter. They're not your customers. Most of your real customers don't give a toss what some angry internet 'influencer' thinks or their complaints about your 'offensive' remarks.

When people finally realise that, everything will quiet down and sanity will return.

gist2• 7 years ago

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.

Twitter is in a way like a street protest that gets covered on the nightly news. As an example you can have 1000 people (or even less) protesting in NYC (a region with what 20 million people?) and the media will entirely blow the significance out of that protest proportion. Not that there are 19,999,000 people who aren't protesting but that there are 1000 that are.

Ask your aunt or brother-in-law about what's trending on Twitter and you'll get a blank stare

Exactly true as a general rule.

But better ask anyone what they think is important (and this is the sad part) and they will probably mention something they received from a traditional media source who got what they did from twitter or social media (if not placed by a PR firm etc.)

aristophenes2• 7 years ago

Twitter is amazing. I didn't get into it until a couple years ago, I was missing so much. Many of the most influential, intelligent, thoughtful people post what they think or are interested in. In the past, unless they were a journalist, you'd have to wait for someone to write a book, and then buy it. Now you can pick and choose from the most amazing people of the world, and actually interact with them.

I kind of can't get over that this is free and such a high percentage of the people I want to know about are on it, and I worry that it is a temporary situation before everyone gets so afraid of possible negative consequences that they stop sharing. I think it is an added bonus that important people get used to dealing with criticism, as that leads to freer society.

It's up to you to pick the right people to listen to and not get engaged in foolish flame wars. The information I've gleaned from the conversations I've seen and participated in on Twitter over the last two years have saved me a decade or two of my own personal work.

stallmanite• 7 years ago

I’m a long-time Twitter “not-getter” but this is well-articulated and has made me reconsider.

zweep2• 7 years ago

Can you recommend 10-20 people to follow?

Androider• 7 years ago

That goes for a lot of other media as well. Fox News has on average 2.5M viewers. In a country of 327 million (never mind the world), you can round that 0.7% viewership down and say that in practice nobody is watching Fox News. There are more daily viewers on Twitch than that, and far more viewers in total.

12xo2• 7 years ago

True. The media amplifies Twitter to the point of relevance. Its actually used by a very small percentage of the population - with any frequency. But every "news" outlet relies on it for "BREAKING NEWS". Taking what is nothing but a passing comment, and somehow turning it into "news". That is its power and its weakness.

Multiplayer• 7 years ago

I've already retreated to mostly cozyweb! It's great here.

dt3ft3• 7 years ago

I started building a new cozyweb community. To join, users need a valid phone number. I hope that this will dramatically decrease spam and beefy interaction. I don't expect the community to be huge, but I'd rather have it cozy and small than huge and chaotic.

dredmorbius• 7 years ago

Simply limiting size, throttling invites, and ejecting troublemakers, goes a long ways to civility.

I'd cultivated a surprisingly good, small (~40-50) member community on G+ at one point, largely on that basis.

Mutual anonymity (myself as founder and moderator) worked. It wasn't conflict-free, but conflict resolved, quickly. Most often problems removed themselves, rarely (2-3x?) they had to be removed. That was done as quietly and civily as possibly.

askvictor• 7 years ago

what is cozyweb?

jcoffland• 7 years ago

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.

disqard• 7 years ago

To maintain type safety, function subtypes are contravariant in the input type and covariant in the output type.

"Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you expect others to accept."

Maybe human communications also has to adhere to basic principles to guarantee robustness.

mrspeaker2• 7 years ago

HN is now my last un-deleted social media account... and even here I end up removing 50% of my posts, and regretting another 30-odd% after realizing they were low-value emotional negative "beef" post.

Why is "if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all" so hard in practice? Why do I just NEED to throw in my 2 cents?!

ggreer• 7 years ago

The vast majority of people do follow that rule, but there are so many people reading these comments. If even 1% of them have a moment of weakness (or are kinda dickish personalities), they'll drown out the nice comments.

humanrebar2• 7 years ago

if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all

Because pleasantness isn't a virtue in every context? Some unpleasant things need to be done and said sometimes. In fact, saying no in certain contexts is good, though it can often be unpleasant.

That being said, some people find it pleasant to be unpleasant. Certainly self-censor if you sense that urge arising. Getting drunk on anger or righteousness isn't a good look.

paganel• 7 years ago

I've seen plenty of beef only thinking here and I too have been guilty at times.

Most of the beef-related discussions around here involve either Tesla, Apple vs Google (when it comes to their phones/mobile OSs), FAANGs vs the rest of the world, some futuristic AI fields (like self-driving cars) and I think that's about it. There used to be a beef between supporters of static-typing vs dynamic-typing (I personally was in the latter group), but the static-typing supporters mostly won that debate.

Other than that most of the topics on this website are pretty civilised (with a few exceptions that confirm the rule).

alexis_fr• 7 years ago

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.

Lammy7• 7 years ago

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.

virtuous_signal4• 7 years ago

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>.

spappletrap2• 7 years ago

It's almost like our social bonds are being broken in the same way chemical bonds get broken when we digest food. Like our capitalist society is a higher-order organism that is extracting energy from our societal bonds.

MisterTea2• 7 years ago

I have spoke to many people who have said that they feel that work has replaced their social life, myself included to a degree. It also means that people don't want to move on in their careers as they get too comfortable with their work family and pass on better opportunities. I have a coworker who passed on a great opportunity just because he really likes working with everyone. A close friend had to be prodded by his wife to apply for better positions in other areas to advance his salary. Another friend's wife refuses to get a better job because she likes her coworkers so much.

uncle_j3• 7 years ago

People replace God with something else I have noticed. Many of the Atheists in the Atheists community in the United States started a new organisation called Atheism+, which alienated a lot of group and those in Atheism+ started added a lot of dogma, which I find as someone who observed the split from the outside in the UK to be somewhat ironic.

I am not religious myself (but I am slowly having a greater appreciation of religion as I get older).

galimaufry• 7 years ago

I strongly suspect that the cause of isolation is that we don't treat our workplaces as our community anymore.

My parents' community all met their spouses and friends at work, whereas people of my age seem to find something unprofessional about this. And I believe that old-fashioned civic organizations like the Elks were built from a tangle of professional relationships.

And realistically, where are you going to find a stronger community than among the people with whom you spend 40 hours a week?

rngAcc56• 7 years ago

This is the sad truth about fast and rapidly changing social norms. this lack of identity and community.

kick9• 7 years ago

What rapid changes have we seen lately? The change in that person's comment has been in the making for over a hundred years. The first thing I personally can think of (in the context of America, as one of the last Western countries to accept GLBT people, not in the context of the wider world, which has been accepting for much longer than America) is American GLBT communes in the 1780s.

Given where we are in GLBT acceptance, it seems like, if anything, this was one of the slowest-changing social norms of all, and one that more than a few generations were pushing for before the ones that are currently here.

sebastos• 7 years ago

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.

FooHentai2• 7 years ago

Like we're all waiting for something, anything to happen.

I’ve noticed this trait in myself, beginning with hurricane Katrina. Half the world away, I immersed myself in New Orleans local live news streams, radio, webcams, blogs and forum threads from on-the-ground folks. I had a period of about three days solid obsessively scanning for new information.

There have been several other events that I responded to in similar ways, including the last US election and that airliner that got shot down over Ukraine a few years back.

The guilty enthusiasm you mention was present each time. The event is almost always something disastrous, yet the ‘rush’ to dig for information and get a sense that you’re witnessing unfolding major events is compelling.

I once got drunk with a German friend and, lacking all tact, lamented that the world hadn’t been very exciting since the end of WW2 and that it felt like we were overdue for something similar. I don’t think the point I intended to express was the one that registered with him, understandably.

Do you do the thing where worrying global stuff unfolding (e.g. North Korea’s periodic Sabre rattling) triggers you into obsessing about prepper SHTF stuff for a while? I feel like there’s a connection between the behaviours, but my sample size is only 1 currently.

itronitron2• 7 years ago

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.

iak8god2• 7 years ago

I think you're seriously underestimating the decline of participation in organized religion in the US both during the second half of the 20th century and in the twenty years since. Here are just a few numbers to chew on from Gallop's long-running polls[1]:

* The number of religious "Nones" - people identifying themselves with no religion - was right around 1% through the 1950s. In the 1970s it increased from 3-7%, and stayed below 10% through the end of the century. It's now over 20%. In the 1950's, ~70% of people were Protestant Christians. Now it's half that amount.

* In the year 2000, 12% of Americans reported that religion was "not very important" in their lives. Now it's double that amount.

* In the year 2000, 13% of Americans reported that they "never" attend religious services. Now 29% never attend.

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/1690/religion.aspx

porknubbins• 7 years ago

I’m not sure, I read In Cold Blood, which was as much about the family as the killers and was most struck by how full and vibrant and prosperous life in 1950s small midwest farm community was. It seemed like everyone from teenagers to adults had a huge range of social ties and activities even apart from religion. I’ve lived in small town middle America and nowadays its mostly a dump between meth, opiates and Walmart jobs. Reading that I felt like I understood for the first time why people my grandparents age really feel something has been lost.

ChuckMcM2• 7 years ago

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).

discreteevent• 7 years ago

"And there is nothing like amping up the inequality of the distribution of wealth"

You're adding a little bit of beef flavor to your comment with that one. Inequality of wealth is something that is increasing. That's a fact. The causes and effects of it have pros and cons that should be debated. People "amping it up" is an assertion that tastes somewhat of beef - but it can be made about both sides.

jszymborski• 7 years ago

Thank you for crystallising this succinctly.

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.

tomc1985• 7 years ago

There are many communities out there for people to join and find their tribe, they just aren't easily accessible or indexed centrally. A lot of them filter for like-minded folks -- even the ones that claim to accept anyone.

Focusing on community or hacker spaces is narrow view of one's options. I found mine via attending underground music events, then joining one of the groups and attending festivals with them, which eventually led to strong ties with the burner scene and some of the local artist communities.

I think people are forgetting that to experience these things you need to be present, and do so with some frequency. Open-mindedness and the right vibe will get you far socially. Unfortunately that doesn't really match well with the workoholic atmosphere that many jobs insist on, and so you end up with unfortunate situations like people mistaking their employers for family. I hope that those folks are secure in their employment because it is really easy to be cast out (e.g. laid off) under the guise of, "it's just business". Personally I think feelings of workplace-as-family are just another trap engendered by management to maintain employee retention.

bilbo0s2• 7 years ago

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".

Yhippa6• 7 years ago

When I went to church as a kid I don't remember being anywhere this much beef between the religious vs non-religious. It's way worse. It's not just politics, it's sports, sexual orientation, gaming, and many more domains.

DoreenMichele14• 7 years ago

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.

virtuous_signal4• 7 years ago

This struck me as too tidy, so in the spirit of debate let me offer a little pushback:

We are seeing such things dissolve because we have other options these days.

1) Do we have other options? I think we do, but I don't think the saturation is nearly as high as churchgoing or temple-attending was throughout history.

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.

2) Religions grew and spread in every civilization for millenia. Ancestor worship in East Asia. Hinduism in South Asia. Animism among natives everywhere. Christianity in the West. What if religion and religious community grew and took the forms they did, because they met humanity's social and emotional needs?

So I would restate the original comment as asking (i) what problems arise when something everyone depended on so long disappears in a relatively short time, and (ii) how can we handle those problems. Importantly, stating these questions isn't suggesting that everyone needs to return to religion (which wouldn't even be possible without un-discovering science).

coldtea3• 7 years ago

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.

The only problem is that there were other times of such "freedom from the shackles of our old identity" and they didn't end well -- even if centuries later things picked up.

The late Greek city states, the late Roman empire for one, modern Britain and France (second rate global players, politically and culturally, where they used to be first), and so on... US is close...

PhasmaFelis3• 7 years ago

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.

I think that was exactly what the parent comment was saying, except for pointing out that millions of people have gotten stuck there, and it's been getting worse for decades across the entire developed world. It's even worse in Japan, for example, than in the US, and the collapsing customs and institutions there mostly don't include religion.

Around the world, we're getting out from under religious and secular systems that were pretty good for the majority and quite bad for the minority, but so far we've failed dramatically at replacing them with something that is better for everyone. This is progress, but it's not enough.

codebolt3• 7 years ago

I'm sure you can find passages of the Bible to fit your narrative, but those lines are hardly representative of the majority of Christ's teachings. For the most part he was concerned with healing the sick, feeding the poor and showing love to the unloved. If you were going to pick someone from two millennia ago to become a spiritual leader to half the worlds population, you could have done a lot worse.

codebolt3• 7 years ago

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.

The LGBT community comes with it's own shackles. They assume the only natural thing is for someone to structure their whole identity and lives around what might just be a developmental phase of their youth. I'm certainly glad that type of thinking wasn't promoted when I was growing up.

henrygrew2• 7 years ago

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.

What if this old identity and social structures based on religious texts is essential for human beings and human beings are not capable of forging for themselves a new identity without guidance?

watwut3• 7 years ago

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.

rriepe• 7 years ago

Everyone is the same amount of religious in my experience. The people who join an established religion gain the quality of being predictable.

maxander• 7 years ago

Strong social ties can exist without an overarching authority, or even without any sort of authoritative structure at all- I think the best thing to look at in this regard are modern subcultures (punks, hipsters, hippies, goths, burners, etc) particularly as they exist in decently-sized cities. A bunch of like-minded and like-lifestyled people with an excuse to get together; that’s at least 90% of what the old conservative/religious structures offered.

pjc503• 7 years ago

Indeed. A lot of the modern internet "beefs" remind me of football "ultras"; the sport is really a pretext for the punchup, or at least the singing of death threats at each other.

Lammy7• 7 years ago

I've experienced plenty of that dangerous unquestioning extremist fervor from progressive/LGBT circles too.

im3w1l• 7 years ago

Yeah it's possible that fearful people have intentionally made us lonely and isolated so they can feel safer.

wayoutthere• 7 years ago

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

Lammy7• 7 years ago

I appreciate your comment, but my experience has sadly been the opposite of what you describe. Perhaps I've just been unlucky, or maybe I just come off as an asshole, but people in Bay Area LGBT circles have been quicker to find disagreement and ghost me from their lives than any other group of people I've ever met. After the third or fourth time losing what I thought was a close friend over what felt like a petty disagreement I have become very disillusioned with the entire concept of "queer community". I feel like I've grown more as a person through my friendships with the handful of self-described religious people I've met here by accepting and being able to discuss issues where we disagree.

virtuous_signal4• 7 years ago

I'm also LGBT and I have to guess that

in many cities the queer people all know each other

is massively untrue based on my own anecdatum. Where I'm from, there is certainly a group who all know each other, who hang out at the gay bars, and who seem to have dated many others in the same group at some point. I have seen this by snooping on instagram or facebook - the same set of faces shows up at any gay event, and they do all seem to know each other.

I assume you're in that kind of community in your city. I'm glad for you. I'm certainly not within my city, although I've had "encounters" with people in that group. Given the significant percentage (3.5% according to google) of LGBT people in the population, I have to believe the vast majority of LGBT people are on the outside of any such group you're describing. Our social life is probably drawn from much more average sources (work, college friends, possibly church) than what you describe.

cyorir3• 7 years ago

I think the quality of your experience with dating apps for any given dating app will depend on 1) where you live (are you in an area with a high or low LGBT population density) 2) who you are looking for (very hard to find people if you are, for example, a trans or non-binary person looking for other trans or non-binary friends) and 3) how much time you invest (it can take hours just to get conversations started, and more time before you get to actually meet people). This applies whether you are looking for friends or something else.

taurath2• 7 years ago

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.

dcolkitt• 7 years ago

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.

[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...

pixl97• 7 years ago

Our social connections have been replaced with commercial ones. Where at one point we socialized to relieve boredom and need, now we have never ending entertainment and those that would capitalize on selling it to us over everything else.

mark_l_watson2• 7 years ago

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.

coldtea3• 7 years ago

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.

missingrib• 7 years ago

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.

fallous7• 7 years ago

There are civic organizations that meet regularly, do work within a community, and either minimize or are avoid religious affiliation.

zem• 7 years ago

if you're in the US, see if there's a UU congregation in your area; it might be just what you're looking for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarian_Universalism

throwaway92384• 7 years ago

Chesterton's fence. You removed it, and now it's up to you to prove that you knew what your were doing.

twoheadedboy• 7 years ago

If you or anyone else is interested in this topic I strongly suggest the book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging by Sebastian Junger.

That book really made me think pretty hard about this stuff. It's also a short 180 pages.

Lammy7• 7 years ago

I just ordered a copy and am looking forward to it. Thanks for the recommendation.

wwweston3• 7 years ago

Q: How would one distinguish between IoB culture and a culture in which there is a meaningful conflict between ideas and values?

omgwtfbyobbq2• 7 years ago

The resolution of that conflict. The author posits that the IoB tends to maximize conflict and avoid resolution.

wwweston3• 7 years ago

Observing what avenues for possible resolution exist seems like a good place to start and a productive line to pursue.

But it seems to me that there are some conflicts with deeper roots than IoB culture that have gone on much longer than the internet has existed: whether or not people should be able to be understood as property, whether sacred texts are meant to be understood in the same way as scientific descriptions when it comes to understanding cosmology, to what extent and where institutions like markets, or states, or churches should shape our lives.

Violence has been employed and even full-fledged war has emerged over questions like those, so apparently better avenues for resolution were unavailable.

Does that mean those things were also based in beef-first thinking? If so, was everyone on each side of those conflicts equally guilty of beef-first thinking, and that's how war happened?

Yhippa6• 7 years ago

To me, in IoB culture nobody ever gives in. In other cultures where there is meaningful conflict, there are concessions.

Jweb_Guru• 7 years ago

Do you have any examples of times when people who genuinely and strongly held opposing ideas both made concessions, and weren't coerced into doing so by some third party? I can't think of many.

tlb• 7 years ago

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.

durpleDrank• 7 years ago

"missiles in a beef war" I love this phrase.

bproven3• 7 years ago

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.

Joshua: "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play"

woutr_be2• 7 years ago

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.

nradov• 7 years ago

It is impossible to really express any prominent thinking on Twitter. Wrong medium.

kick9• 7 years ago

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.

creaghpatr• 7 years ago

You're probably right about the first part as it's pretty tangential to usual topics of discussion at Ribbonfarm.

alanbernstein• 7 years ago

I suppose you could have shortened your comment here to "Why is this article so long?". Why all the extra words?

kick9• 7 years ago

Funny! Though the News Guidelines would prevent me from saying that.

A better reduction of the comment that loses less meaning might be: "This article is pointless, and intentionally obscuring that it's repeating universal knowledge. Why?"

claudiawerner7• 7 years ago

My personal gripe with articles like this one is that they invent their own terms to frame the discussion in a particular way, perhaps in the hope that some time in the future, people will really start talking about "Internet beefs" or "beefy conversations" or something equally silly. The issue isn't the length - after all, use as many words necessary - the issue is with the relative paucity of research into whether this topic has been addressed in the relevant fields (sociology, psychology, media studies).

Does the concept already exist in the literature? Are there any similar concepts?

Let me have a go at it. I call this "the hacker blogger mindset", in which relevant literature in the field is passed over or simply ignored (assuming due diligence has been taken to research the topic, which it often hasn't been) in favour of a kind of NIH-syndrome thinking in which every concept the author thinks of is novel, it has not been noticed before by lay people or the academic community, and of course it hasn't been written up into a snazzy article with nice jargon that makes us sound clever like "mook manorialism". We'll throw a reference to Francis Fukuyama or Weber in there to convince the more skeptical that this is more than an unsubstantiated blog post.

A famous guardian of the hacker blogger mindset is Scott Alexander[0] (and to a lesser extent Paul Graham and the LessWrong community), but it's nice to see new contestants who want to try their hand at sociological analysis without referencing any sociology. I hope I'm not being too crude when I say that essays like this are a kind of poor man's academy. You don't have to learn about standing objections to the theory (or the theory's assumptions) made by experts, because I called my theory "internet beef", and the remarkably similar academic theory that already exists isn't called "internet beef" - so none of your objections are valid against my internet beef!

The optimist inside me wants to think that this topic hasn't been covered before, and that the essay addresses a problem that hasn't been addressed before. If that were the case, however, I would have expected the author to at least state as such - that after reading tens of papers on discourse analysis and Internet sociology, nothing similar to "Internet beef" showed up. Maybe I'm wrong and being unfair to the author - in which case, fair enough. Unfortunately, it doesn't negate all the other times I've seen this.

[0] Scott wrote a whole post on his blog about a particular German philosopher. As it turns out, he hadn't read any of the philosopher's works, but only Peter Singer's much-criticized entry in the Short Introductions series. This was sufficient. Likewise, the author of this blog post doesn't seem to have read up on Internet discourse analysis, a topic which a search on Google Scholar throws up hundreds of papers.

Dylan168073• 7 years ago

Explaining yourself is good. That two-paragraph comment explains itself. Get off your strawman horse.

quacker• 7 years ago

Agree. Out of context, this takes a ton of effort to understand.

Some examples

- Great Weirding morphs into the Permaweird

- underground Internet that I’ve previously called the CozyWeb

- unflattened Hobbesian honor-society conflict

- Mookcoins are mined by knights through acts of senpai-notice-me

- retreat into what I call waldenponding or to the CozyWeb

Several of these link to other essays which, in turn, use ever more jargon whose definitions are found in yet other source material.

Lammy7• 7 years ago

I understand how it might seem obtuse and undecipherable, but it makes it so much more genuine and heartfelt to me. You can’t fake the experience of somebody who can channel that style of deep 2000s Internet zeitgeist.

twic• 7 years ago

It reads LessWrong's cooler brother.

Yhippa6• 7 years ago

I thought it was very clever and got my brain to try to stretch to figure out what he was saying. This beats a lot of the content out there that's dumbed down.

1123581321• 7 years ago

A good test of jargon is whether a full translation of it makes the written work too laborious to read. These terms do not have brief, complete definitions in English.

If that is accepted, the question becomes whether the audience understands the jargon. Ribbonfarm readers do or are willing to learn what they might mean.

Dylan168073• 7 years ago

And the first essay linked, about crash-only, screwed up the analogy so badly...

jslabovitz• 7 years ago

I enjoy and appreciate Venkatesh’s Ribbonfarm writings, and other writings like his. While the cultural situations he’s writing about may be obvious, I appreciate his discovery and naming (‘jargon’) of the patterns he finds. You could look at it as developing an intellectual framework. I consider it a sort of contemporary philosophy, which tries to be both conceptual and actionable. Some of his essays have made me rethink major outlooks on my own life, and make important decisions. I think it’s important writing for our time.

Often his essays are essentially experiments in structures and definitions, a kind of ‘what if we looked at things this way?’ methodology. In answer to your question of jargon/jokes, yes, that’s his methodology. There’s a lot of serious stuff in there too, but he likes to have fun with the ideas, as well as try to integrate his words into modern (online) culture in useful ways.

Venkatesh wrote a related article a couple of years ago: ‘A Quick (Battle) Field Guide to the New Culture Wars’ (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/03/06/a-quick-battle-field-g...). He essentially proposes that the only way to understand the the culture wars is to see them as actual wars, fought using the logic of warfare, not of, say, diplomacy or social rationalism. This essay has been extraordinarily useful to me, and has helped me develop very different political stances and associated actions.

As this article itself suggests, I enjoy an information diet in moderation — some short, some medium, some long. Ribbonfarm is part of the medium/long diet, and I feel much better having read there.

EDIT: removed unnecessary criticism of parent]

itronitron2• 7 years ago

the jokes are there to build a bond with the reader through identification of shared knowledge ... specifically, if the reader 'gets' the joke then they feel a sparkle knowing they have a special shared insight with the author.

I got the permaweird joke but the rest went over my head, naturally I stopped reading about a third of the way through as it is long-winded.

mc32• 7 years ago

My initial thoughts when reading were cynical - along the lines of "this person is trying to look clever and sell freakonomic / pop-science type books, but are the statements and conclusions based in fact, likely to be correct or are they useful to me?". Since I can't answer I didn't read on.

kick9• 7 years ago

They do seem to sell freakonomic/pop-sci books. Nice eye!

nostrademons• 7 years ago

Venkatesh has a very playful and idiosyncratic writing style - you see that in his other posts, like the Gervais Principle or the series or "premium mediocrity":

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/the-premium-mediocre-l...

It's just his personality - I don't think it's a particular affection to try to sell more, although I do think a number of his readers are there because they like the idiosyncracy.

I also think that for posts like this, "are they based in fact and likely to be correct?" is the wrong question to ask. Posts about culture, worldview, systems thinking, etc are too broad to actually be "correct" - one way to see if this is the case in a domain is to ask yourself whether two different observers could observe the same facts, pick a different set to focus on, and draw entirely different conclusions (an exercise that Venkatesh frequently does on his blog). Rather, you read material like this for perspective. It's a way of training your brain to look at the same set of observations in an entirely different way. Then when you're faced with actual facts in your own life, you can apply the lens you just read about to it and see what the meaning of those facts is, and ideally shift rapidly between different perspectives to triangulate something approaching reality.

jbrukh• 7 years ago

Well, the simple answer is that it is a cultural work. It is literature, not a documentation.

DoreenMichele14• 7 years ago

I only was willing to look at the article because it was Ribbon Farm and the series on the Gervais Principle was really good. I know a lot already about social stuff. I don't often get big epiphanies from reading things.

People sometimes make up terminology because they are trying to communicate ideas for which there really aren't popular terms. I struggle with this myself. I get accused of being idiosyncratic, using words to mean something they don't to other people, etc.

New ideas require new terminology. It's part of why living languages grow, change, add new vocabulary, etc.

jaredcwhite• 7 years ago

TL;DR: Here's my beef with all the people on the internet with beefs.

dsalzman2• 7 years ago

"the term freelancer comes from mercenary knights, with no fixed loyalties, in the medieval era" - Great TIL

anonu• 7 years ago

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...

jrochkind1• 7 years ago

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.

godDLL3• 7 years ago

I have to say that in my own experience nothing foretells me of an end to IoB. Which is just a new conceptualization of "Eternal September", as far as I understand.

Let me contrast my own world-view perturbations with what we see attributed to "meeks and knights" in the article:

I remember my internal world-view and thinking and feeling from about the age of 4. I am 36 now.

So most people don't.

I was either raised to understand or had that built-in that I was bread and born into a world that is set up by multiple interested parties, and I had a place in the machine. Or had to build my own processes that mined the value-system and become a part of that machine.

Most people don't. Many think they're special. Many feel entitled.

I did not easily get on with people at first, but did make an effort to understand what Russian is meant to imply, Jew meant to imply, Boy meant to imply; in terms of where my place is and who my enemies are and what I am supposed to think and do about them.

Most people pick that up from their surroundings (not being ADD like me), take it in as a given, and embody it throughout and henceforth. Which is a point that I needed to research to understand.

"Most people" is ME, at one point in time or another. That is, people change, people react before assessing their position, people get represented by something or someone for the purpose of this fight or that fight. I learned that all the human "evil" and the moral good could be teased out of my own life experience, given enough time and argumentative power. Any action or inaction or inattention can reflect on me, put me in that "most people" category for a moment.

That makes me an individual, and a part of a larger humanity.

But no associations exist in-between. No shared interest that persists. No values that don't change, no long game that plays out this way or that.

I have no permanent in-group, no close associates with a shared vision, not even some permanent foe group that is always opposed to the way I think or am. And I am starting to think that this is exactly how most people are most of the time now. And that this is a marked change from how even my own parents used to be.

I think I am ill-equipped biologically to handle that kind of thing. The shifting of values, the arbitrariness of goals, the loneliness of most people most of the time.

Mayhap, in this constant endeavour to minister the masses and disperse their attention from focusing on the imperial divide of workers and benefactors that resulted in the world that I find myself in, that resulted in me being how I am; humans have finally hit the ball out of the park? Perhaps the game can not continue. Maybe, we are currently lost, all of us, individually.

The way we used to align and declare ourselves, the shared goals and values, the in-group and the out-group used to be larger categories of things. I think today it all has devolved into very petty squabbling.

I live in the land of Israel (or Palestine if you prefer), and it's pretty quiet, if you ignore the news media ruckus. It used to be much bloodier before my time, I understand.

I'm not sure that it was better the way all that has been resolving itself before. But it sure was less lonely.

thebiglebrewski2• 7 years ago

Man was I really hoping this was an API for cows in a field and sensor data attached to each beef. BaaS, or Bovine as a Service.

mc32• 7 years ago

I know you are joking but there is probably a good case to have a sensor on every piece of livestock, given how cheap the sensors would be and how it would help to manage things. The govt. could even carbon-tax the methane emissions.

mikhailfranco• 7 years ago

Surely BaaS would be for sheep.

thebiglebrewski2• 7 years ago

Legit

narrator2• 7 years ago

In the same way that Spark turns a program into a plan for cluster computation, there's some sort of process by which an idea and a bunch of talking points gets compiled into a big distributed staged media campaign through all channels and institutions that forces culture change that no one asked for. The canonical and somewhat "innocent" example of this is a major advertising campaign for a new pharmaceutical like Prozac for example, where the company pushing it has to explain it through ads, articles, movies (Prozac Diary) and so forth to the general public over a number of years so that people get it as a new element of the social landscape.

Related to this is a question that has bugging me is how is the social justice "ideological pipeline" constructed and operated? How does an idea, become an obscure scientific journal article, become a slew of newspaper editorials and human interest stories, which forms a twitter mob, in which the ideological program has been installed on all the "beef only" thinker nodes, then it's own Netflix show, and super hero movie and then becomes a law where you get put in prison for using the wrong pronoun.

pjc503• 7 years ago

then becomes a law where you get put in prison for using the wrong pronoun

You were going so well until this point, because I guarantee you won't be able to find the story to back this up; it will turn out that the "wrong pronoun" was part of a sustained campaign of harassment or part of a death threat or suchlike.

how is the social justice "ideological pipeline" constructed and operated?

I could talk about how this works, but only if you're genuinely interested and willing to take it seriously. And not as part of a beef.

opwieurposiu• 7 years ago

The "ideological pipeline" is a ratchet effect caused by virtue signaling. A group starts with a baseline ideology. This baseline is the minimum set of ideas you must believe in to stay in the group. A new idea comes along, some group members discover they can earn in-group virtue points by espousing this idea. Eventually enough group members espouse this idea that it gets added to the baseline set. A new-new idea is now required for signaling. Thus the ratchet effect.

narrator2• 7 years ago

There's got to be some ideological gatekeeper giving out virtue points somewhere though. I like the example of coffee being introduced into the west. Nobody knew what to make of it and eventually the pope was asked to make a decision and he said Coffee is a good thing, and then everybody started drinking coffee all over the west. Where's the "X is a good thing" in the ideological pipeline? So often new ideas bounce around and nobody knows what to make of them and all of a sudden a "strong" argument comes along through multiple channels and then everyone starts lining up.

djannzjkzxn• 7 years ago

One of the main ways Facebook succeeded was that it started at Harvard and expanded to other elite schools, then gradually opened to more people. The platform was rationed such that it was something you just got access to, that the cool kids were already using. I’d argue that social justice organically grew through a similar pathway.

Top schools are full of high class young adults. That includes wealthy kids and lower-income kids who nevertheless have high status in their own communities. Many thousand such people studied social justice in humanities classes in the 90’s. They spread those ideas to their classmates, and after graduating, moved on to lead successful careers in law, education, politics etc. where they spread those ideas to more people until they filtered out to society at large.

The missing link you are asking about between academic papers and mass media articles is that the journalists who wrote the mass media articles studied the academic articles in college. I know this firsthand, I went to college with some of these people.

For me personally, a big part of the appeal of the social justice mindset is that it helps me feel like I’m on the good team while earning gobs of money for doing easy work in the tech industry while a lot of others are working hard and struggling. I imagine it’s similar to the popularity of communism in intellectual circles many decades ago, before that ideology was discredited by practical failures.

pochamago• 7 years ago

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.

uncle_j3• 7 years ago

Well it is part of anti-fragile thinking really.

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.

woutr_be2• 7 years ago

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.

throwawaybbb• 7 years ago

It's an odd world where 4chan back in its worst days had a better community than fb, Twitter or reddit do today. And that's with the gore and other unmentionables.

onceUponADime• 7 years ago

Imagine two curves, ressources, and population growth, one bouncing against the other, deminishing it. Imagine a blind force, trying to adapt to this circumstances.

How would a neuro-typus look like, that adapts to strife? How would its build up look like?

What would be the treshold to bring it out of hibernation in hiding out in the open? What could return it to hibernation?

Would it try to create a everlasting thirty year war, if it could? What re-purpose could such a neuro-typus have in peace times? Is something that is adapted to its surrounding even sick- can you call someone who traumatizes and revels in it, in its environment even sick?

Is religion - the maximum production of genetic lotterys for the great lottery of war- at cost of liberty, just another peace time adaption to this adaption to the perfect cycle of strife? How many neuro-typuses are there? Can diffrent neuro-typus form a social machinery?

Has the peacefull humanity, this idealized version ever existed? Or is this just some luxery delusion, created by science? Give me energy in abundance, give me fertilizer, give me fresh-water, give me forrests, i shall devour them, and call myself peacefull.

Will virtual violence (games) allow to hack/circumvent the cycle of strife behaviour?

Will self-surveilance gadgetry allow us to behave, even when the state collapses?

We live in intersting times.

We could feed this regressive behaviour for another thousand years, if we had fusion and spaceflight- but then, we would be exponential up and out there, holding the rocks of gods. Maybe its better to resolve this down here.

To harden the roots of the scenario-tree, give it all the chances to self-control, learned in a thousand years of repetition.

Dang, I wish you could invest kharma in a point, with a dividend, depending on investment. And with insolvency goes away all your posts to the underworld.

chadcmulligan2• 7 years ago

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.

4thwaywastrel• 7 years ago

I don't think the posted conception of the culture war as a "holding pattern of conflict" is incompatible with the idea that it's also a legitimate outpouring of the voice of the disenfranchised.

Some might say that we've become stuck in that outpouring, and enamoured with conflict rather than any kind of coherent vision for how to be.

chadcmulligan2• 7 years ago

Could be, maybe these conflicts are fundamental to being human and no resolution is possible? This is the new normal?

godDLL3• 7 years ago

Anything that indeed has an 'end of beef' to it might be the battle of the ideologically possessed, a battle of ideas in J. Peterson terms. Because this is the end goal, the consumption and annihilation of other doctrines.

But mostly what I gauge out there is indeed IoB. The article is so on-point for me that could just as well have written it myself.

DoreenMichele14• 7 years ago

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.

jcroll• 7 years ago

Don't go looking for beefs.

You can't even post a question on StackOverflow without creating a beef (e.g. "Why would you want to do that?")

dluan• 7 years ago

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.

Yhippa6• 7 years ago

Sometimes I love arguing just to argue. I wonder how many other people there are like me?

godDLL3• 7 years ago

In my own experience:

1. everyone starts out like that

2. some realize that and (sometimes having thought of it for a while) make a decision to persist/stop that

3. some years have passed by since, and now you can't get that reaction out of me, only understanding

tylerjwilk00• 7 years ago

Fascinating and thoughtful article.

I loved this short poignant sentence: "To participate is to lose."

It's so true and so sad.

ggm• 7 years ago

I often ask myself why Facebook, Twitter and Instagram say "follow" instead of link or associate.

People who seek followers give me cause for concern.

stanferder• 7 years ago

Should be "observe".

samatman• 7 years ago

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.

Thorentis• 7 years ago

This is an interesting framework in which to analyse the Internet and the communication that occurs on the Internet, but I don't think all parts of the analysis are correct. Or at least, I think many assumptions about the reasons for people behaving as they do have been made, that are not necessarily correct. I think the observations of behaviour are fairly accurate for some significnat proportion of those involved though.

Could it be, that the Internet has simply magnifed what humans have already been doing for hundreds (thousands?) of years? The rise of the Internet has also coincided with a large portion of the English speaking world (where the Internet first originated) being at the highest point of literacy and education in history. This simply means that the ability of each human to express their own ideas to another human is at an all time high. Now, add to that the ability to: * Observe the large numbers of people that agree with you (social media) * Broadcast your opinions on other groups of people to everybody that agrees with, and to everybody that disagrees with you (social media) * Carry the ability to make these broadcasts with you at all times (smartphones, tablets) * Be able to get instant feedback on your broadcasts (real time messaging, notifications)

... and you have simply magnifed existing human conflicts, desires for attention and belonging, opinionatedness, and so on, by many orders of magnitude.

What we are seeing on the Internet is simply the human experience and human nature on steriods.

---

The writer raises some doubt about how much of what they call the Internet of Beef is actually a culture war. But I have no doubt in my mind that it is a culture war. What is culture? The collective views, values, customs, art, morals, and beliefs of a large somewhat cohesive group of people. This is exactly what is being constantly debated, influenced, changed, synthesized, refined, and convoluted by the on-going Internet wars. It is shaping our culture.

Internet culture - due to the prevalence of smartphones and other devices - has begun (it begun a while ago) leaking into everyday culture. It makes sense then, that the politics of the day would be influenced by what happens online too. You can no longer separate the online world from the "real" world. The real world is made up in large part by the Internet world. Our culture has simply been given superpowers if you like, in order to rapdily evolve and shift and change at unprecedented speed.

bwing• 7 years ago

https://samzdat.com/2017/06/28/without-belief-in-a-god-but-n...

samzdat makes similar points in this article -- esoteric but insightful

monadic2• 7 years ago

In my experience, the vast majority of people have triggers that shut down reasonable communication. For instance, economics is a touchy subject on this forum. It takes a great deal of patience to put up with people who may end up wasting a large amount of your time.

In reality, I think the understanding that people should avoid conflict can only exist in periods of increasing consumption to distract from an understanding that societal engagement depends on more than voting. This is why voting does not require an explanation, especially in online forums: to silence minority opinions without actually confronting contradicting ideals.

taurath2• 7 years ago

My only thought is that this article falls into the same trap it’s describing by oversubscribing to conflict and outlying activity.

nsainsbury• 7 years ago

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.

sigmonsays• 7 years ago

4 times is not enough. maybe post it again?

aazaa• 7 years ago

Some of the requirements for a durable beef:

1. The two sides are evenly matched.

2. There is no way to objectively decide the merits of the beef.

3. Each side of the beef has at least one skilled Knight capable of "eviscerating" Knights of the other side.

4. Knights who do not care one way or another about the ideas involved in the beef. Only the conflict matters to a good Knight.

5. Mooks on each side are plentiful and eager to please the Knight they serve.

6. Knights view their own Mooks as a necessary evil.

7. Mutual dislike between Mook clans must be real.

8. Knights seek balanced matches with no clear outcome. Only the conflict matters.

Remove any of these elements and the beef loses its appeal and participants.

mark_l_watson2• 7 years ago

Good article, resonated with me.

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.

vasilipupkin2• 7 years ago

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.

dasil003• 7 years ago

I don't particularly care about someone's feelings being hurt on the internet. The problem with Twitter and most social media is that they have lowered the effort to interact as low as possible in the pursuit of engagement. The result is a system in which any kind of intelligent discourse tends to be drowned out by a torrent of tribally approved virtue signals. These platforms are dominated by the need to respond quickly in order to generate another dopamine hit, and actively work against deep thinking.

vasilipupkin2• 7 years ago

Twitter is a firehose of information. In order to have a good experience on Twitter, you have to curate who you follow so that you don't see things you don't care about. Once I have done that, I see plenty of extremely intelligent discourse on Twitter, from humor to book recommendations to deep tech discussions to intelligent/sophisticated political takes, to analysis on startups, etc. So, no, I would have to disagree with you.

ianai• 7 years ago

I think it’s something like group solipsism. Nothing can be trusted except what “I” decide. Which is only helpful in so far as maybe we can address this internet backed societal problem with rhetoric similar to how we would address solipsism.

octocop• 7 years ago

The internet is a large amplification device, everyone single expressed feeling or thought is amplified to be the most important topic of our time. Including this post and my comment, people should stop being so serious and enjoy living.

scottlocklin• 7 years ago

Jesus, people making a big deal out of twitter again. Newsflash: twitter is the comments section you took out of your website. It's a shitty version of Usenet; unlike Usenet or the comments section, it lacks any way of subdividing into interest groups and commonalities, so it's one giant global puke fest. Journalist types love it because ... they're narcissistic wingnats and are addicted to stroking their nerd dildoes. It has nothing to do with social atomization; I'm pretty sure North Korean twitter would be the same thing, because arguing on the internet appeals to people's lizard brains.

TLDR: twitter isn't real and you are mentally ill.

dsalzman2• 7 years ago

The best tangible community example of the IoB is Nutrition. Cesspool.

yosito• 7 years ago

This was one of the most entertaining and insightful pieces I've read in a long time. In general, I think it seems like a pretty accurate understanding of the state of the world/internet. But I think it stops short at the end where it talks about moving on from the beefs into new ways of being that will be significant to the future. I think plenty of people have rejected the beefing and moved on to new, positive ways of being. Many people are focusing their energy and lives on science, art and lifestyles that are completely removed from the constant conflict of the modern internet and instead focused on human progress. While plenty of beef can be thrown around about humanism, humanitarianism, the human progress movement and sustainable development goals, those focused on those things seem to have removed themselves entirely from the internet of beefs. I'd suggest Bill Gates as one prominent example.

CoffewithMlik• 6 years ago

This all sounds like a japanese role-playing game.

The Internet of Beefs

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