Hate Mail and the New Religious Wars in Tech

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/21/hate-mail-and-the-new-religious-wars-in-tech/?nl=technology&emc=cta2_20120621

by ilamont • 14 years ago

108 85 14 years ago

pogue.blogs.nytimes.com

Terretta• 14 years ago

Interestingly, the same phenomenon that makes people write those emails can make them "double down" on a tech choice. A friend defaults anti-Apple so refused to buy the "Jesus phone". After four Android phones, each less reliable than the last while his sister's still rocking an iPhone 3GS, he switched last week ... To Windows Phone 7. He just paid $500 for a phone that, 3 days later, was announced would not be upgradable to Windows Phone 8. All because he is determined that Apple users are smug fanboys.

(Personally, I think he should have gotten a Google Galaxy Nexus if he wanted his sister's mockery about constant obsolescence and non working hardware to stop.)

Swizec• 14 years ago

Casual Apple user here - it entertains me to no end how quickly everyone is to denote all Apple users to be fanboys to such an extent that they are downright anti-apple fanboys.

In reality I think more Apple users would ditch Apple as soon as something significantly better came along, than Android users (who chose to use Android, not people who bought a "generic smartphone") would ditch Android should something better come along.

Ygg2• 14 years ago

As a casual PC user, some of the stereotypes are not unfounded. In my experience I know of quite a few pro-Apple and anti-Apple extremists. Just looking at them quarrel makes me wonder what do they put in those products?

ThePherocity5• 14 years ago

iOS 6 won't run with most features on 2 year old hardware. Windows Phone 8 - Won't run on < 1 year old hardware. ICS Can run, but doesn't because of carriers.

They're all shite.

silvestrov• 14 years ago

iPhone 3GS will be 3 years old when iOS 6 is released.

iPhone 4 will be 2 years old. It will only lack Siri, FaceTime over cellular network and support for 'Made for iPhone' hearing aids.

I wouldn't call that 'most features'.

dr42• 14 years ago

What's so bad about replacing the phone every couple years? I'd rather these phone manufacturers moved things forward than worry too much about what the non early adopter crowd think. You don't have to update to ios6, nothing's forcing you too.

You write as though your phone came with some kind of guarantee it would support future software.

Just because you can't upgrade to iosX doesn't make what you have shite.

batista3• 14 years ago

>They're all shite.

A really big "jump to conclusions".

First of all, all of those are marvels of technology, a state of the art unbelievable even 10 years ago, and would be considered pure Star Trek level technology 20 years ago.

Second,

(a): not being able to run with SOME features (where did you got thay "with most" features from?) on "2 year old hardware" is not the same at all to (b): "not being able to run at all on < 1 year all hardware" or (c): "could run, but will not because of carriers".

jessedhillon• 14 years ago

He detests Apple products because he feels that Apple users allow themselves to be defined by Apple through their purchasing decisions. So, he refuses to buy an Apple phone -- even going to ridiculous extents to exercise a non-Apple option -- ironically, allowing himself to be defined by Apple products!

If Apple goes left he will go right, if they go up he goes down; he is still deciding his tech choices based on Apple's choices, only he's navigating the whitespace where Apple fans navigate the blackspace. If he were truly free, he would simply choose the best phone for his needs and lifestyle. Instead he is as slavishly bound to Apple as the people he mocks.

gutnor• 14 years ago

Android fanboys pick on me because I bought an iPhone and I should really have chosen Android because bla bla bla. I have an iPhone 1st gen (bought in 2007) ...

What I noticed though is that since there are great Android phones on the market, the number of fanboys seems to have diminished quite a lot. It is as if having some real reason to like Android, they don't need to crusade anymore. People are weird.

bconway• 14 years ago

After four Android phones, each less reliable than the last

Seems unlikely.

planetguy3• 14 years ago

Good article. I'm trying to think of other products which inspire this sort of pointless religious war. Cars are the big one; try reading the comments section on autoblog one of these days.

Typical Ford POS. Glad to see they haven't changed at all...same irrelevant company with the same irrelevant, mediocre products.

Gm is just not good at making decent cars.i cannot think of a single GM car that i would ever consider purchasing..

Given that cars are so expensive and visible I can kinda see how people get their identity so caught up in them (though I strongly suspect that most of the people with the sorts of opinions expressed above are probably too young to drive). Phones, however, are a mystery to me.

gfodor2• 14 years ago

Calling the things we carry in our pockets today "phones" is nothing more than an artifact of history. (In fact, my iPhone is a terrible phone.)

Smartphones are devices we use constantly, all day, probably some absurd number of times per hour, and it is a statistic that is surely going up. It's hard to think of any other product we have a more intimate relationship with. It's become more and more of a tool that we cannot live without. These are the attributes of a product that cause an emotional attachment, and is the reason people get so worked up about "phones". (You'll note this ferver didn't really reach a fever pitch until after "phones" were no longer phones.)

neutronicus2• 14 years ago

Also, it's usually two years until you can get a new one in the US, what with the way contracts work.

majormajor3• 14 years ago

"devices we use constantly, all day, probably some absurd number of times per hour"

So, they're like phones, then. ;) When I was a teen, my peers and I used our phones (some of them even were landlines) constantly. But the fashion attribute was minimal, and the functionality was pretty much identical regardless of brand.

Not that that kept me from feeling immeasurably cooler than everyone else when I got a nice and tiny Nokia 8290...

redthrowaway• 14 years ago

> Smartphones are devices we use constantly, all day, probably some absurd number of times per hour, and it is a statistic that is surely going up.

I might be the odd one out here, but I'll often go days without so much as touching my phone. Either I have my laptop with me, which is better than my iPhone at everything save being a phone, or if I'm just looking to burn time I'll read my Kindle. I have friends who are constantly glued to their phones, and I simply don't understand the attraction.

batista3• 14 years ago

>Calling the things we carry in our pockets today "phones" is nothing more than an artifact of history. (In fact, my iPhone is a terrible phone.)

Really? In what other way except "battery life"?

Sound reviews found it had excellent sound, and same goes for reception. And the reliability of the phone network, even for simple calls, if far better than what it was back in the day.

And the contact list, search function, visual voicemail and ease of use for those functions is far better than most, if not all, pre-iPhone phones.

cosmez• 14 years ago

"I'm trying to think of other products which inspire this sort of pointless religious war"

almost anything will cause it, i have seen ladies doing this for furniture companies and shoes.

majormajor3• 14 years ago

Yeah. Sports teams, stores, schools, authors, movies, music, foods...

I think it's harder to come up with categories I've never seen fanaticism over...

flomo• 14 years ago

Video game consoles are possibly the worst, as it is extremely important that one's fourteenth birthday present be the correct one.

Meanwhile, phones are relatively cheap and disposable, so I agree the holy war is a mystery to me to. Perhaps its the same 14 year olds as with the consoles.

protomyth2• 14 years ago

Any object can inspire wars of belief in those who use them quite frequently or the amateur observer. Get in with golfers and hear the rage or praise over different brands of clubs. We just don't see this behavior in its totality because most of us are not involved in every niche under the sun. It seems amplified where the item is personal / customizable or expensive.

quandrum• 14 years ago

Almost anything that involves subjective judgement can cause this sort of thing, I think.

Because at that point it is about you. At a certain point, iOS vs Android or Ford vs Chevy comes down to something personal. Something about you made that choice, so you better defend who you are(not what the product is).

ddelony2• 14 years ago

The topic that inspires the most vitriol by far is anything to do with Israel or Palestine. The comments on any YouTube video or nasty even by YouTube comment standards.

TeMPOraL• 14 years ago

http://paulgraham.com/identity.html

http://lesswrong.com/lw/gt/a_fable_of_science_and_politics

zdw• 14 years ago

The cure for this angst is to know the consequences of your decisions, and to accept them as being made with the best intentions at the time.

For example, I regularly work with no less than 7 different OS combinations (OS X, OpenIndiana, Windows, Linux, OpenBSD, iOS, FreeBSD), and don't hesitate to recommend different ones in different circumstances.

To recommend software or hardware without at least passing knowledge of the merits of alternative solutions is frankly negligent. For example, I don't have any Android devices (mainly because of the software upgrade issues), but I know situations where I'd definitely recommend them.

Living in a tech monoculture, whatever it may be, isn't healthy.

planetguy3• 14 years ago

Nah, the cure for this angst is not to care so much about whatever consumer electronics you're using.

My phone is a bit crappy. There are definitely better ones on the market. But I don't care, it does the job. There are better TVs than my TV, better ovens than my oven and better vacuum cleaners than my vacuum cleaner, but they all do the basic job for which I bought 'em and their imperfections don't cause me any huge grief, so who cares?

crusso2• 14 years ago

> Nah, the cure for this angst is not to care so much about whatever consumer electronics you're using.

I dunno. I see non-technical friends and relatives choose the wrong devices out of ignorance pretty regularly. They waste hours of their weeks fartzing with text messages that are much more difficult to type out, having trouble reading email from people they want to interact with, and spending lots of their hard earned money on other things like external cameras that are mostly unnecessary when you have a decent camera on your phone and learn how to use it properly.

I'm here with my in-laws this week and one of the problems I've noticed is that they paid for the lease of a really crummy wifi router from their ISP. The darned thing doesn't even let them Skype with their grandkids on their iPad unless they're in the same room. To compensate, they have to either go out and spend more of their fixed income on a new router or just not get the benefit of the technology that they've pretty much paid for (but bought the wrong one of).

Like most things in life, knowing when to spend the time and energy to care and when to just make due isn't an easy no-brainer.

stevenwei• 14 years ago

There's something very specific about the tech industry that seems to attract this kind of vitriol. I mean, you don't often hear people saying, "Oh, you bought a Camry instead of a Civic? You're a fucking idiot!"

But when it comes to technology this type of flaming is all over the place, even as times change: yesterday's Windows vs Mac has become today's Android vs iOS, and programmers are constantly arguing about static vs dynamic.

What is it about tech culture that makes people so attached to their decisions, and so willing to attack others who happen to have made a different decision because they happen to have a different opinion?

planetguy3• 14 years ago

I mean, you don't often hear people saying, "Oh, you bought a Camry instead of a Civic? You're a fucking idiot!"

Actually, you pretty much do, in a lot of places. Mind you the segmentation is less Toyota vs Honda and more American vs Japanese vs European, but there's a lot of automotive fanboys having stupid arguments in the comments section of any automotive site you might care to check out.

msrpotus• 14 years ago

I think it's actually most fields that have that. Listen to people talk about places they've visited and you get some of the same things. It might be that just because this is online, in a tech forum, we see that kind of anger about tech.

ilamont2• 14 years ago

The discussions occur in practically any field where there is a perceived rivalry among brands. All you need is a forum and a critical mass of anonymous or semi-anonymous users (and trolls). E.g.,

lol do this in an unmodified civic you’d get your ass whipped by that camry

http://conceptmods.com/modified/camry-vs-civic/

icebraining2• 14 years ago

Try delving into sports. People will literally set stuff on fire because of their preferences.

petercooper2• 14 years ago

I'd cut it right back to people merely being weird and antagonistic for no reason. It's easier to realize sometimes you're just the latest random target of a touchy, unstable human animal and drive away as if in a safari park.

We had a woman come up to us on vacation and say our 2 year old daughter was an "evil little thing" merely for chattering away while eating lunch. I said nothing and just grinned at her until she popped a vein and stormed off. There are plenty of antagonistic oddballs out there, just grin at 'em (or don't reply to their e-mails) until they go away or start being civil and rational.

orangethirty• 14 years ago

We end to judge people by our own standards, and exptect them to be like us. This is something I've been dealing with a lot, and have noticed other programmers dealing with it, too.

I always have a problem with smiling. I smile a lot, and am generally a happy person. People hate that. They want me to look down, be depressed, and generally be a party-pooper. But I just cant do it. Have even been called names a work because of that.

My daughter is also like that, and usually gets the same treament yours got. And I'd like to apologize for that lady. Don't let that get in the way of having a great time. Fact is, the most fun I have is when I'm out with my girls (wife and daughter) and we just start having fun with whatever is in front of us. Last time we went to fly kites I found two broken kites, and used both to build one. Everyone was looking a me like I'm a nutjob, and even made some comments. But you know what? I gave my daughter that kite and it was he highest flying kite in the whole park!

Like the internet says: "Haters gonna hate". To which I add: "Let them hate while I have a great time, mate."

jcr3• 14 years ago

First off, what happened to you and your daughter is just disturbing. It's a great example of offensively manipulative and disagreeable people, as well as how to deal with them effectively. People like that actually do exist, and knowing how to deal with them is beneficial.

The less obvious but much larger problem is simply miscommunication. It happens all the time, and the limitations of written text only compound the problem. When you think about the tiny fraction of a percent of the human population that qualifies as "great writers" over history, and the fact that they often rewrote their best works multiple times before publication, it's easy to see how our quick text writing (like this discussion forum) is pretty much doomed to constant miscommunication and increased hostility until things spiral out of control.

I don't claim to know you, but for years I've read the thing you've posted here on HN, and you've always seem like a good and reasonable person to me. None the less, I can think of a time when you and I interacted, and some strange miscommunication took place. It was regarding the decor of the Madonna Inn in San Louis Obispo. If you and I had been discussing it over a beer, I'm sure the miscommunication would have never taken place. I'm certain topic doesn't matter that much to either of us, and in person, we'd mostly agree on it, or at worse, agree to disagree in a friendly manner. That exchange of ours has stayed with me; it's a personal reminder to try being more clear in the things I write.

None the less, I see the same sort of thing constantly on HN and everywhere else. A poorly worded statement, misinterpreted out of context, spiraling the discussion out of control in some pointless, heated, and in some ways harmful direction.

Miscommunication happens to all of us, even when we're good people with good intentions. For the record, I'm sorry we disagreed about the decor of some hotel, but looking back at it, it's hilarious and it's a good lesson in how one poorly worded statement can make a pointless mess.

petercooper2• 14 years ago

None the less, I can think of a time when you and I interacted, and some strange miscommunication took place. It was regarding the decor of the Madonna Inn in San Louis Obispo. If you and I had been discussing it over a beer, I'm sure the miscommunication would have never taken place.

I surely wasn't implying I have a total lack of crazy ;-)

Crucially, it was a brief disagreement and not one either of us wanted to spur on. You're right, miscommunication happens. Backing away from trivial misunderstandings, as we did, is the smart move IMHO. Sometimes explaining one's motivations or responses can cause a cascade of miscommunications that makes things worse.

The sad part comes when this natural bump and grind of discourse spirals, as you say, into lengthy, heated grudge matches that result in lasting antagonism (although without this, I doubt Usenet would have lasted so long ;-)). That is what's really worth avoiding. The natural bump and grind of textual discourse? It keeps things interesting, if we let it.

ChrisNorstrom2• 14 years ago

I see the same sort of thing constantly on HN and everywhere else. A poorly worded statement, misinterpreted out of context, spiraling the discussion out of control in some pointless, heated, and in some ways harmful direction.

This is why the last few months I just stopped commenting here on HN, and quit a lot of other forums/communities. My communication skills just don't seem to be solid enough to help me avoid unintended conflict.

ddelony2• 14 years ago

Some advice from an old journalism professor of mine: no matter what anyone else says or does, just smile and says "Thanks for letting me know how you feel!" It's a difficult person disarming tactic.

ilamont2• 14 years ago

One thing that wasn't addressed in the article: Unlike the 80s or early 90s, online anonymous discourse is now a mainstream activity. The standards for discourse on practically everything -- politics, local news, technology, style, health, etc. -- tend toward rudeness, hyperbole and ad hominem attacks.

Another trend: Writers are no longer seen as a protected class. Magazines, newspapers and broadcasters and other professional gatekeepers (PR agencies, marketers, etc.) used to control the discussion. While they still guide and feed the discussions, readers know they make mistakes and have biases. To many, the media is suspected of being under the thrall of some perceived agenda (liberal media, Apple fanboy, shill for XYZ).

javajosh2• 14 years ago

This is a very insightful comment. I'd go further and argue that this kind of media-directed hate mail scales with a general unraveling of our faith in our institutions - the media being an important category. Although the OP has made a really good suggestion about how people take gadget reviews personally, he failed to bring up how a general lack of trust also creates a lot of fear and animosity.

Ah, and I'll add a possible contributing factor: envy. There may be a quite a lot of envy of the author's voice and audience, and acting out because the person feels powerless to influence their peers, like the author does.

The lack of trust and influence that contribute to the generation of such vitriol are actually very tightly linked. As standards for intellectual integrity go down, on a personal and societal level, trust decreases proportionally, and "influence" starts to depend more on emotion than reason. Seeing well-reasoned arguments lose again and again, people (quite reasonably) start adapting, start using the "effective" strategies for influence like invective, emotionally effective fallacies, and general buffoonery.

This is why Fox News is so corrosive. Whatever your politics, the people at Fox are all liars. A clearly biased news channel that bills themselves as "Fair & Balanced" - and yet they have a huge audience, and are extremely successful. People learn from this. This is also why people like Blagojevich are so corrosive: even though he (eventually) went to prison, his months of shameless pandering gave people the sense that shame and responsibility are truly outre. The Republican party in the US has been particularly bad about not accepting responsibility for mistakes, wrong-doings, or inconsistencies: they present a disciplined, consistent defense of any accusation of impropriety. And it works, and people see that it works, and it destroys us.

xaa• 14 years ago

I agree with all this, but it would be silly to blame Fox News or the Republican Party (or for that matter Apple, with its locking down of hardware/software and questionable environmental practices) for choosing what works.

The blame is totally on the uneducated electorate (or "consumerate"). Conversely, IMO, education is the only lasting solution to these problems.

(NB, there is at least ONE non-liar at Fox: Shep Shepard. It's hilarious to see him directly contradict his co-worker shills, often earning him a place on Jon Stewart).

nhebb• 14 years ago

This isn't really surprising when you think about human nature. We tend to create rivalries where none should exist. Country vs country, state vs state, college vs college, high school vs high school, team A vs team B, boys vs girls, company vs company, department vs department, ... well, I think you get my point. People are tribal and competitive. Tech fanboyism is just an extension of that.

robomartin2• 14 years ago

Not one person likes to be wrong about the choices we make. That's human nature. Some individuals have a need to defend these choices to death, even when faced with greater realities that negate anything they could possibly say about their choice. I remember one guy who would show-up at these professional meetings around the time the iPhone came out. He would make it a point to go around the room and tell everyone that his Blackberry was the only professional business phone out. I was using Blackberry myself at the time and had done so for ten years. Even I thought he was beyond weird. He simply didn't want to be wrong. Never bothered to engage with him in any way. It was pointless.

There's also a tribal or team-oriented element. This effect is often seen in fora such as, yes, HN. Group behavior is also a very natural human trait. Some find it hard to resist it. If you dare go against tribal dogma you become the subject of a brutal "coordinated" attack. Unless you have a thick skin these events can be emotionally draining.

It is often hard to be the one thinking outside the group. People have a natural aversion to change and will resist and attack anything that goes against the direction of group thought. Either join them or deal with the punches. Just remember that all nearly all great discoveries stemmed from questioning what the majority took to be the truth, sometimes at great personal risk. The message is that, just because everyone thinks a certain way, behaves a certain way, supports a certain product it doesn't mean they are right. It just means that they are doing what "everyone else" is doing.

It'd be interesting to see the range of hate-mail these tech columnists get.

crusso2• 14 years ago

> Not one person likes to be wrong about the choices we make.

The "pain" of insecurity balances over-confidence to help us find locally-optimal decision points. Like with other types of pain, the usefulness of it in some situations can get misdirected and misused pretty easily now that we're out of the jungles and not interacting with each other face-to-face. The anonymity of the Internet is so different from early human encounters that we have a lot of trouble dealing with it.

> Just remember that all nearly all great discoveries stemmed from questioning what the majority took to be the truth

Then again, a lot of sheep die by straying from the herd and getting picked off by predators. Like most things, cutting the balance the right way and making the best decisions at the right time is really really hard.

If it were easy, lots of animals would be competing with us for dominance of the earth.

lotharbot• 14 years ago

I think it's more basic than not wanting to be wrong.

It's not wanting to be disagreed with, even if right/wrong doesn't apply. If I decide product X is the best because of features Y and Z, and someone else decides product Q is better than X because they don't care about Y and Z, we may have both made completely correct choices based on our preferences/goals. It's not as though I was wrong about features Y and Z, or about their importance to me. But another person disagreeing about their importance can trigger psychological defenses.

The hate mail in the article concedes the phone has great hardware, but complains that it's a "nerd phone", "heartless", with "no vision". Posts on car forums might concede that a car gets great mileage but complain it has "wrong wheel drive". Blackberry guy thought it was important that he had a professional business phone that was designed with that role in mind. This is where that sense of tribalism comes in: someone has decided that a particular attribute is really important, and anyone who doesn't care about that is an outsider and a weirdo.

It takes a certain degree of maturity to recognize that things are good for different purposes and that it's OK if someone else's purposes don't match yours.

robomartin2• 14 years ago

Sure. Of course. That's a more fundamental feeling. Interesting takes on this in Dale Carnegie's book. A very interesting read but not necessarily the easiest concepts to apply due to our aforementioned mental programming.

apu• 14 years ago

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/

zainny• 14 years ago

Marco and the like are probably a bit guilty of stirring the pot and encouraging this sort of behaviour to an extent, but reading this article his definition of a fanboy did certainly come to mind:

http://www.marco.org/2011/04/10/fanoboy-fan-boi

fan•boy |ˈfanˌboi| noun

1. informal derogatory: a term used to describe people who bought a product that competes with the one you bought, which is probably more popular than your choice, for reasons that you wish to discredit or diminish because you’re secretly afraid or upset that you made the wrong choice.

recoiledsnake• 14 years ago

The very funny thing about that is that Marco wrote that as a counterpoint to people calling him an Apple fanboy, when the iPhone was more popular than Android.

>which is probably more popular than your choice, for reasons that you wish to discredit

At that time, the usual suspects Horace,Gruber, Siegler et al. were vehemently claiming that Android would never overtake the iPhone(which Marco seemed to have fallen for) but it happened later in 2011.

So that quote seems especially funny now in retrospect as it has been turned on its head and now actually describes Apple fans calling Android fans "fanbois".

neutronicus2• 14 years ago

I always thought this kind of thing was catharsis like yelling at people while driving.

stesch• 14 years ago

In the 1980s and 1990s, consumer-tech religious wars were a little easier to understand. Back then, there were only two camps: Apple and Microsoft.

As an Amiga user I feel a bit different.

protomyth2• 14 years ago

As an Atari 400, I too feel a bit differently.

He forgets the great Commodore / Atari rage wars and the great switch with the ST / Amiga.

SoftwareMaven• 14 years ago

This is an effect of human tribalism and occurs in just about every aspect of human life. People need to be part of a group, and part of being part of a group is castigating outsiders.

Businesses that recognize this and play to it will always have more loyal and ardent customers, but you have to be willing to black-ball some potential customers in the process.

postfuturist• 14 years ago

I've really tried to make a conscious effort to always assume that someone's opinion is valid, even if I disagree, and to extend this to all matters of taste and opinions. I understand that some developers like working in Windows, or enjoy developing native iOS apps. First, I can't assume that it's always because of cognitive dissonance or ignorance that people enjoy things I loathe deeply. Second, I need to make an effort to recognize the aspects of the thing that are desirable and assume that the things that bother me, don't bother everybody in the same way. It's an unpopular mode of thinking among software developers, which is normally ruled by tribalism and prejudice.

dredmorbius• 14 years ago

I did that for a long time. It's still my default working assumption.

I've actually worked to consciously question that. There are ideas and belief systems which are actively dangerous and hostile (Fascism, Qutbism/Islamist extremism, certain strains of new-agism, and, I'm starting to believe, so-called free market extremism and modern strains of Rousseauism).

Or maybe I'm just getting old and set in my ways.

marklindhout• 14 years ago

Free software allows for freedom.

Most (if not all) frustration in tech comes from the lack of it.

sbuk• 14 years ago

This post perfectly illustrates the kind of passive aggressive statement that can light the touch paper of a flame war. It's essentially the same as saying "it just works" from an Apple perspective. It's another example of tribalism and closed thinking.

azakai• 14 years ago

Relevant to this is the story about working at Apple stores,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151336

It isn't just writing nasty emails to people that positively review products from competing companies. It's that the level of adoration and devotion is so high in some cases, it affects people's choice of career. One quote in the article basically said, "I pushed Apple products for free, so getting paid to do it is even better".

I do not understand this behavior myself. I can see being a fan of various things (I'm a fan of Linux for example), but of a multinational corporation like Apple, Microsoft or Google?

gbog• 14 years ago

> When you buy a product, you are, in a way, locking yourself in.

Yes, but more or less.

Xcelerate• 14 years ago

I've gotten to where I don't have any particularly strong attachment to brand names. I've used Windows all of my life, but just recently ordered a Mac. I still like both operating systems a lot (and would like to experiment with Linux as well). I suppose a decade ago when I was 12 I may have made some disparaging Apple comment, but now it seems juvenile that anyone would spend a lot of time debating these sorts of things.

Then again, I spend very little time shopping for clothes or reading about cars so maybe this is just a product of being less social than most.

jsz0• 14 years ago

This seems to happen anytime people are forced to make a choice from a limited number of options. Everything from sports, to politics, to consumer electronics of different types. I think it's because our brains are really good at comparing two or three things. It may even be that we have a sort of obsession with comparing things. We just can't help ourselves. When your available options expand though it becomes far more difficult to compare. The thrill of comparing two objects and reaching the correct conclusion is gone at that point. The stakes are also much lower. Few people are going to sit down and compare a dozen different things so even if we do make the wrong choice no one is going to notice.

hristov• 14 years ago

This is not as much about tech as it is about advertising and commercialism. Our young generations are exposed to more and more advertising, commercialism and crass materialism throughout their lives, so it is no freaking wonder that young people will turn their phones into some kind of pillars of their existence.

This was fueled by the so called "tech journalists" that fueled the original mania about the ipods and iphones, etc. which basically resulted in a bunch of monsters that defined themselves by the type of gadgets they use.

So in a way that NY Times writer has only himself to blame.

icebraining2• 14 years ago

Where I live we're slightly behind the curve: my peers still define themselves by their football (soccer) team. And I define myself by the lack of one ;)

thebigshane• 14 years ago

I think you have a point about materialism because they inherently go hand-in-hand; if you define your life by your accumulation of material things then these types of brand/identity "divisions" are also part of your life.

But I think this kind of heavily-invested identity rivalry started way before advertising, right? And I certainly don't see how a product reviewer could be blamed.

b1daly• 14 years ago

I work with audio and music, and at various times have needed which software platform I was going to use. DAW software is very time consuming to learn, and there are all sorts of platform "lock in" effects. Also network effects to consider. If the software you use is bad, your life and work can really suck. For professionals, there is actually a lot at stake. So I have had periods of evaluating which software to use, checking out forum discussions and so forth, and always found myself disturbed by my own inclinations towards tribalism.

I finally decided that it makes pretty good sense to take sides when your livelihood is at stake. For most modern people there choice of technology does affect their work, even if it's not directly related. The emotional tendencies towards tribalism are probably one of the "survival heuristics" that cause us to pay attention when faced with important decisions. Since it isn't always easy to tell which decisions are ultimately important, we are primed to treat many decisions as if they are. That's my desk chair hypothesis!

Hate Mail and the New Religious Wars in Tech

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