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An Ode To The Opinionated Committee Of Miserable Scolds And Ankle-Biters
A short treatise on individual vs. communal activities
Another year has passed, and I guess I'm getting all reflective. This doesn't happen so often anymore, but over the years we spent some time debating "old-Internet vs current-year-Internet". Typically when people talk about it, they bring up how "wild west" it used to be, free from shadowbanning, algorithmic manipulation, and cancel culture, and while it sure would be nice to again be free from Big-Tech shenanigans, recently I started feeling like that analysis is missing a piece. New- vs Old-Internet isn't just about deplatforming and smartphone-driven Eternal September, the advent of social media was a revolutionary change to the structure of the Internet itself. All of a sudden you, yes you, had some chance of becoming an Influencer, possessing the adoration of thousands, and would no longer be just another dude, forced to mingle with the plebeians on some shitty phpBB forum.
As an example of the shift, after the advent of social media, but before The Awokening was in full swing, it seemed like everbody and their dog had to have an "animated avatar ranting about feminism" Youtube channel, and later when they implemented livestreams and superchats, you could see everybody move to unstructured 4-hour streams. I suppose chasing trends is only natural, but at some point things started getting weird... or rather, depressingly ordinary. Suddenly content creators started talking about "branding", A/B testing their thumbnails, and probably deploying scores of other marketing tricks that I'm not even aware of. They have to churn out content at a regular and constant pace, because if you don't. you fall off and people will forget you exist. All the cool kids have spreadsheets now, it's probably less surprising that Kulak, in his quest to be a full-time writer is making extensive use of them, but apparently you can't even do prostitution without them these days.
A while back @DaseindustriesLtd asked if this place feels like home to others, my answer was horribly trite in retrospect, but it tried to get at the ability to speak my mind here, and the desolation of once dynamic and generative communities brought by the semi-recent cultural changes. But the more I think about it, the more it seems like there's something deeper about why this place feels more like "home". A long time ago, back when the crash of 2008 was still fresh in people's minds, I read Modern Political Economics by Yannis Varoufakis, the ex- finance minister of Greece. The final chapter, devoted to solutions to the crisis, had this little paragraph which, for some reason or another, has engraved itself in my brain:
Since this is a post-crash book, Varoufakis was trying to put forward some synthesis of all the economic memes floating around, from libertarianism to communism, trying to balance out planning vs. spontaneity, and individual freedom vs. collective interests. Setting the economics aside, there's something about this metaphor that I find quite fitting here. Ironically it was Dase himself who called us an "opinionated committee" that he doesn't want to justify his writing to, and prefers to write about important issues directly - a clear turn towards becoming a composer free to write whatever music he likes, and sink or swim on his own merit. While there's something to be said about not being so opinionated and set in our way, I'm more and more appreciative of being a part of an amorphous committee blob. I really enjoy that no one has any money to make, clout to chase, or anything to prove here, at least beyond the standard internet forum dick-waving. What's more the problem with the composer route is that you have to compose, compose, compose! As I mentioned above, in the world of Substack, Twitter or Youtube, it's churn or die. Meanwhile, back "home", I can pick up my instrument and join in when I have time and when the fancy strikes me, and when I get tired I can put it back down, confident that the music will still be there when I come back. My old libertarian self would probably spit on me, but there's something to be said about these sort of communal activities, where one does not have to fret about their relative status, or line going up.
I suppose all this is a long-winded and disjointed way to thank you all for keeping the lights on, and the music playing. For all the discontents dissing us, I think this is one of the very few places where the Dead Internet Theory, in it's AI or Human-NPC form, does not hold. Happy New Year to y'all!
Great comment.
I think one of the things that makes this place so great is lack of sorting and visibility by upvotes, which on places like reddit selects for the most easily-digested confirmation-bias-reinforcing pablum. The lack of inline images is a welcome salve to the rest of the internet for the same reason.
I also am partial to the forums in the private tracker community, where there is a pretty strong guarantee of no sock puppets and real consequences to be had from bad behavior, since bans are real and follow the person.
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I think some of it is a size issue. Reddit is so large that even a single forum on Reddit can have 15K followers, and you never get to know anyone. In the old forums, you’d have maybe 2K users, and you get to know them fairly well, and enjoy hearing what people I actually sort of know think about things. Or get advice from someone I know and have some sense of where the advice comes from. On bigger corporate forums, it’s less talking about an issue and more *decamping the reply button to get a short pithy response in that might, maybe be read but that would not get a response. In bigger places you shout into a void, you don’t really have a conversation.
On one hand, that's a good point. Arguably the whole rise of the Influencer was an attempt to keep some sort of a structure in the discourse, given the amount of people involved. In some weird neo-feudalist fashion, people pick their champions, pledge to serve them, and the champions make their case / fight it out with other champions. OTOH, it's not like you can't lean into "shouting into the void" at high volume, this is how 4chan works(/ed) as far as I can tell, and it generated a lot of interesting things too.
4chan is on the extreme end of a communal activity, which is probably too much for my liking, and you're right that the kind of communities I enjoy would have to be on the smaller side.
I think we can agree on that. Influencers are not so much about their fans per se but mostly an avatar for a movement that attempts to publicly dunk on the other side either by arguments or slick presentation or by making your side feel more glamorous or cool. I watch Vaush a good bit and it seems like his niche is to try to put a nerdy face on left leaning politics. Others are trying to put a posh face on right leaning politics. Or whatever the case may be, the influencer is mostly involved in packaging the idea in ways that appeal to different audiences. If you want leftism in nerd-face, you want Vaush among others. If you want right wing nerd-face, it’s Mentis-Wave and that sphere.
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No online communities feel like home to me anymore, and it's because they feel "Public" and "Official", and not like private spaces at all. I think this is because the separation is gone, anything I wrote on here could be traced back to me, and it could also be interpreted badly by people from outside of the community. A private space doesn't work like that.
Most "new" spaces which can be created are created inside of other spaces, and these spaces are hostile in a sense, or at least inhuman (part of 'the system' which has to enforce human behaviour in a top-down manner). So when you make a new sub-reddit you're still on Reddit, so the Subreddit is not yours. And if you make a new Discord server, you're still bound by Discords rules, so the Discord server is not yours. With old forums, you could make your own, since you just copied the code. You could own your own website in the past, and you can't anymore unless you make your own infrastructure.
Also, in the past, nothing I did in a community mattered outside of the community. It's borderline insane that this practice stopped. Imagine if your local shopping center had to refuse you entry because of an email you sent, and that it would be accused of enabling whatever behaviour you did in your own personal life otherwise. That's basically what we're starting to do with the internet.
Another thing which has changed is something I hinted at earlier: We're not expected to be human anymore. I think this is because we have lost the benefit of doubt. Any behaviour which is ambiguous is a "red flag", and you may be punished for it. So you have to internalize what you would look like from outside, and constantly monitor yourself, so that you are not misunderstood (this is rather harmful to our individuality, since it punishes worldviews and attitudes which diverge from the norm). Furthermore, mistakes are not really forgivable anymore. Things like racism, sexism and so on used to be negative traits, but nothing more than that. You could get away with having negative traits, they were just a tiny part of who you were and what mattered was your overall character. Finally, in order to really learn how things can be misunderstood, you have to learn about everything ugly in the world. You're forced to learn that you can't talk about the CP (combat power) of your Pokemon Go Pokemon without making the context clear, and you're forced to learn why. After all, innocence is punished (as it leads to be behaviour which can be misunderstood)
Sorry for hijacking your comment in order to vent, but I feel like I've understood some of the social changes quite well, and I hope that it makes the dynamics clearer for you (I'm adding these, I think the things you mentioned are factors as well). Happy new year!
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Man, imagine if more aspects of life worked this way. Maybe that's just me talking, though.
I sympathize with the sentiment, but it seems hard to achieve. Consider that the quoted paragraph comes from a book that argues for what you want quite explicitly, the problem is that the chapter that promises to deliver solutions and outline a vision for the future is by far the shortest and the most vague. Most people who want this don't seem to know how.
The Amish are one of the few groups that seems to achieve some version of this in a sustainable manner, but most people looking for alternative economic arrangements don't seem to like them very much.
The Amish? They seem to me to be a pretty good example of what he said this vision is not: "Its members do not mechanically play from some given score, written by a despotic musical mind". Amish life seems pretty strict, bounded on one side by the reality of being a roughly 19th century farmer and on another by the various Ordnungs, which by the time you are considered worth having a serious say in them, you've lived under them long enough to internalize them.
Given how much I romanticize them, I probably should grit my teeth and actually learn how the Amish do things, but my understanding is that they do neither central economic planning nor rely solely on collective property, however they do a lot of economic projects, like building a barn for a neighbor, as a community. This may very well involve some authoritarian measures regarding their lifestyle, which means it's not exactly an improv music troupe, but my point is this is the closest you'll get to it in a sustainable way. If you don't like the hyper-individualism of liberal capitalism, you'll need something that inculcates a sense of duty towards the community in the average person, not rather than hoping you can free-ride on "
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Where did Dase end up, if anyone knows? Last I heard he was in turkey iirc
Safe in South America, as far as I can tell.
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I think he has a Substack and Twitter where he was talks about AI, but doesn't want us there or his audience here, so he never advertised it under his Motte name.
I think a few people here know his alts, but I'm not one of them.
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I was with this group since before it left /r/ssc's culture war thread (different username) but stepped back at some point in 2018 because I simply refused to ever use Reddit again. I think I had the link but never bothered to look...until recently. And it's all still here, just as you say. A few of my favorite names seem to be missing, but maybe, just like you, something will spark in their minds, a niggling question or event they can't quite parse and The Motte will be here to blow raspberries and hot-takes right into their soup.
I mostly dumped all social media around the same time, thoroughly unconvinced by its various claims of importance. Twitter is mendacity personified and dumbed down. I was pretty quick to follow Scott and others to Substack, but the social side of it didn't metastasize until this year. What I see there reminds me a lot of what I saw here: untamed, edgy, deeply intelligent weirdos who manage to mostly adhere to civil discourse and sometimes provide illumination where none seems apparent or forthcoming. I like to think of it as The Motte seeping beyond its borders and it makes me happy when I see names I recognize still doing their thing. Most online communities seem to evaporate after a few short years, yet here we remain. #FeelsGood
Sure, I think Substack is pretty good for what it is, but a SocMed is a SocMed. The dynamics between authors are still follower based, where if you don't pull in the numbers, your ideas literally matter less. Forums have their issues, but I enjoy their relative egalitarianism.
A little from A, a little from B, a little from C and soon we've triangulated something approaching knowledge.
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