In Paul Fussell’s book on class (I think), he says that people are really worried about differentiating themselves from the class immediately below them, but largely ignorant of the customs and sometimes even existence of the classes above them. When I found SSC, and then The Motte, and stuff like TLP, I was astonished to find a tier of the internet I had had no idea even existed. The quality of discourse here is . . . usually . . . of the kind that “high brow” (by internet standards) websites THINK they are having, but when you see the best stuff here you realize that those clowns are just flattering themselves. My question is, who is rightly saying the same thing about us? Of what intellectual internet class am I ignorant now? Or does onlineness impose some kind of ceiling on things, and the real galaxy brains are at the equivalent of Davos somewhere?
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Notes -
The next tier doesn't exist in online forums although it can happen in some 1 to 1 private DMs.
The reason is simple, it's not even about the lack of geniuses.
It is that mental energy is an extremely scarce resource.
People are universally fucking lazy and have a budget of only a few minutes per comments.
On the rare instances where someone does lengthy researched comments, like I sometimes do, the person will systematically face disappointment as the probability that the community will engage with as much knowledge as passion and him are close to zero. Not even in the same order of magnitude.
Online communities are extremely poor, extremely scarce in energy.
I'm constantly seeing people stop at the same layer of the discourse, repeat the same shit they seem to systematically never learn from, until they die.
As usual, it is a tragedy to see what I see, and to this problem, there is almost no remedy.
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