23 ms·

The Internet of Beefs

513 points by rinze 7y ago

CommieBobDole 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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.
    - ghayes 7y ago
      I've noticed this pattern emerge more than ever on the front page of reddit. The vast majority of generally public posts tend to be deeply negative, for example, from right now: 1. Joe Biden calls game developers "little creeps" who make titles that "teach you how to kill" 3. Father tackles son’s opponent after illegal move at high school wrestling match 4. Jaylen Brown murders LeBron 5. Puerto Rico fires two more officials after Hurricane Maria aid found unused ... 6. This is how a grown woman decided to act toward someone peacefully protesting a fur store 8. Joe Biden calls game developers "little creeps" who make titles that "teach you how to kill" 9. Breaktester gets what he deserves (/r/instantkarma) 11. Just another day in Texas (/r/idiotsincars) More than half of the front page is about the "other side" losing, and this is on one of the most browsed websites on the Internet.
  - deleted 7y ago
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  - wtmt 7y 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.
- 12xo 7y 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 7y 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjMPJVmXxV8 talks about the sort of thing I'm referring to.
- aglavine 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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.
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- zojirushibottle 7y 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 7y 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.
- danharaj 7y 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.
Multiplayer 7y ago
I've already retreated to mostly cozyweb! It's great here.
- dt3ft 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
  what is cozyweb?
kalalala024 7y ago
https://twitter.com/superbowl2020hd?lang=en https://twitter.com/superbowl2020hd?lang=en
jcoffland 7y 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.
- mrspeaker 7y 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 7y 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.
    - dt3ft 7y ago
      That is also true offline. Does Debbie downer ring a bell, for example?
  - humanrebar 7y 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.
    - 7y ago
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alexis_fr 7y 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.
Lammy 7y 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_signal 7y 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>.
  - spappletrap 7y 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.
    - codetrotter 7y ago
      I think this way of looking at it is interesting and I don’t see why your comment is currently being downvoted. Sun Tzu wrote about humans acting as a bigger organism when an army work together as one. And with that in mind, and with your comment on top of that, I wonder: We generally agree that self-awareness is a sign of general intelligence, right? So if a group of people see them selves as one, in some sense, and act as one in some sense, then could we say that we are witnessing an organism that is built from people and that is elevated over the mind of just each of the individual people? In the same way that we people are made of what I will very scientifically refer to as “a bunch of smaller stuff” but yet we are more than just the individual bits of stuff we are made of because as a whole each of us have our self-awareness and all that. That is, something of higher general intelligence than its parts.
wwweston 7y ago
Q: How would one distinguish between IoB culture and a culture in which there is a meaningful conflict between ideas and values?
- omgwtfbyobbq 7y ago
  The resolution of that conflict. The author posits that the IoB tends to maximize conflict and avoid resolution.
  - wwweston 7y 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?
    - omgwtfbyobbq 7y ago
      If the architects of these conflicts behave in ways that maximize the duration of the conflicts and minimize the chance of resolution, then that sounds like beef-first thinking. If it's just two (or n-many) sides caught in an asymmetric struggle where they both want some sort of resolution and neither one has the resources to get there, then I see that as a stalemate. Most wars to me don't seem to be beef-first because they resolve eventually. Even when they go on for a while, it's usually because one or more faction/s isn't able to end it and the other/s aren't okay with the costs of ending it. If a war could be ended at a reasonable cost to someone, and they decide they would rather have it continue indefinitely, then that's closer to beef-first thinking.
tlb 7y 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 7y ago
  "missiles in a beef war" I love this phrase.
- bproven 7y 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_be 7y 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 7y ago
  It is impossible to really express any prominent thinking on Twitter. Wrong medium.
kick 7y 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.
- alanbernstein 7y ago
  I suppose you could have shortened your comment here to "Why is this article so long?". Why all the extra words?
  - kick 7y 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?"
  - claudiawerner 7y 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.
jaredcwhite 7y ago
TL;DR: Here's my beef with all the people on the internet with beefs.
dsalzman 7y ago
"the term freelancer comes from mercenary knights, with no fixed loyalties, in the medieval era" - Great TIL
anonu 7y 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 7y 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.
- godDLL 7y 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.
thebiglebrewski 7y 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.
- mc3 7y 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 7y ago
  Surely BaaS would be for sheep.
  - thebiglebrewski 7y ago
    Legit
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narrator 7y 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.
- pjc50 7y 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.
  - narrator 7y ago
    You're beefing right now. I will try to explain it to you another way. Maybe you'll get it. See, this is why we can't have nice things. I put that in there to purposefully trigger any beefers and you popped off like a firework. I could have changed it to "... and then Trump becomes president" and you would have smiled approvingly like a good mook. Unfortunately, you're just another robot. Heck, an AI can just play madlibs with you for days and hit all your buttons because you can't think deeper than identity the opponents argument and pick an associated emotion to feel. You throw out the whole rest of the argument and focus on the emotion producing sentence fragment because you got triggered. This is the problem with online social discourse in the 21st century.
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pochamago 7y 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_j 7y ago
  Well it is part of anti-fragile thinking really. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile 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_be 7y 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.
onceUponADime 7y 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.
chadcmulligan 7y 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 7y 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.
  - chadcmulligan 7y ago
    Could be, maybe these conflicts are fundamental to being human and no resolution is possible? This is the new normal?
- godDLL 7y 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.
DoreenMichele 7y 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 7y 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?")
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
dluan 7y ago
Throw in Nadia Eghbal's Tyranny of Ideas (https://nadiaeghbal.com/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.
- Yhippa 7y ago
  Sometimes I love arguing just to argue. I wonder how many other people there are like me?
  - godDLL 7y 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 7y ago
Fascinating and thoughtful article. I loved this short poignant sentence: "To participate is to lose." It's so true and so sad.
ggm 7y 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 7y ago
  Should be "observe".
samatman 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
https://samzdat.com/2017/06/28/without-belief-in-a-god-but-never-without-belief-in-a-devil/ https://samzdat.com/2017/06/28/without-belief-in-a-god-but-n... samzdat makes similar points in this article -- esoteric but insightful
monadic2 7y 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.
deleted 7y ago
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taurath 7y ago
My only thought is that this article falls into the same trap it’s describing by oversubscribing to conflict and outlying activity.
nsainsbury 7y 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 7y ago
4 times is not enough. maybe post it again?
aazaa 7y 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.
- deleted 7y ago
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mark_l_watson 7y 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.
yusef555 7y ago
lol ur a retard
vasilipupkin 7y 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 7y 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.
  - vasilipupkin 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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.
dsalzman 7y ago
The best tangible community example of the IoB is Nutrition. Cesspool.
yosito 7y 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 7y ago
This all sounds like a japanese role-playing game.

513 points by rinze 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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.
  - ghayes 7y ago
    I've noticed this pattern emerge more than ever on the front page of reddit. The vast majority of generally public posts tend to be deeply negative, for example, from right now: 1. Joe Biden calls game developers "little creeps" who make titles that "teach you how to kill" 3. Father tackles son’s opponent after illegal move at high school wrestling match 4. Jaylen Brown murders LeBron 5. Puerto Rico fires two more officials after Hurricane Maria aid found unused ... 6. This is how a grown woman decided to act toward someone peacefully protesting a fur store 8. Joe Biden calls game developers "little creeps" who make titles that "teach you how to kill" 9. Breaktester gets what he deserves (/r/instantkarma) 11. Just another day in Texas (/r/idiotsincars) More than half of the front page is about the "other side" losing, and this is on one of the most browsed websites on the Internet.
- deleted 7y ago
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- wtmt 7y 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.
12xo 7y 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 7y 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjMPJVmXxV8 talks about the sort of thing I'm referring to.
aglavine 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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.
- deleted 7y ago
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zojirushibottle 7y 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 7y 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.
danharaj 7y 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.

Multiplayer 7y ago

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

dt3ft 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
what is cozyweb?

kalalala024 7y ago

https://twitter.com/superbowl2020hd?lang=en https://twitter.com/superbowl2020hd?lang=en

jcoffland 7y 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.

mrspeaker 7y 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 7y 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.
  - dt3ft 7y ago
    That is also true offline. Does Debbie downer ring a bell, for example?
- humanrebar 7y 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.
  - 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

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alexis_fr 7y 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.

Lammy 7y 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_signal 7y 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>.
- spappletrap 7y 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.
  - codetrotter 7y ago
    I think this way of looking at it is interesting and I don’t see why your comment is currently being downvoted. Sun Tzu wrote about humans acting as a bigger organism when an army work together as one. And with that in mind, and with your comment on top of that, I wonder: We generally agree that self-awareness is a sign of general intelligence, right? So if a group of people see them selves as one, in some sense, and act as one in some sense, then could we say that we are witnessing an organism that is built from people and that is elevated over the mind of just each of the individual people? In the same way that we people are made of what I will very scientifically refer to as “a bunch of smaller stuff” but yet we are more than just the individual bits of stuff we are made of because as a whole each of us have our self-awareness and all that. That is, something of higher general intelligence than its parts.

wwweston 7y ago

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

omgwtfbyobbq 7y ago
The resolution of that conflict. The author posits that the IoB tends to maximize conflict and avoid resolution.
- wwweston 7y 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?
  - omgwtfbyobbq 7y ago
    If the architects of these conflicts behave in ways that maximize the duration of the conflicts and minimize the chance of resolution, then that sounds like beef-first thinking. If it's just two (or n-many) sides caught in an asymmetric struggle where they both want some sort of resolution and neither one has the resources to get there, then I see that as a stalemate. Most wars to me don't seem to be beef-first because they resolve eventually. Even when they go on for a while, it's usually because one or more faction/s isn't able to end it and the other/s aren't okay with the costs of ending it. If a war could be ended at a reasonable cost to someone, and they decide they would rather have it continue indefinitely, then that's closer to beef-first thinking.

tlb 7y 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 7y ago
"missiles in a beef war" I love this phrase.
bproven 7y 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_be 7y 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 7y ago
It is impossible to really express any prominent thinking on Twitter. Wrong medium.

kick 7y 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.

alanbernstein 7y ago
I suppose you could have shortened your comment here to "Why is this article so long?". Why all the extra words?
- kick 7y 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?"
- claudiawerner 7y 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.

jaredcwhite 7y ago

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

dsalzman 7y ago

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

anonu 7y 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 7y 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.

godDLL 7y 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.

thebiglebrewski 7y 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.

mc3 7y 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 7y ago
Surely BaaS would be for sheep.
- thebiglebrewski 7y ago
  Legit

deleted 7y ago

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narrator 7y 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.

pjc50 7y 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.
- narrator 7y ago
  You're beefing right now. I will try to explain it to you another way. Maybe you'll get it. See, this is why we can't have nice things. I put that in there to purposefully trigger any beefers and you popped off like a firework. I could have changed it to "... and then Trump becomes president" and you would have smiled approvingly like a good mook. Unfortunately, you're just another robot. Heck, an AI can just play madlibs with you for days and hit all your buttons because you can't think deeper than identity the opponents argument and pick an associated emotion to feel. You throw out the whole rest of the argument and focus on the emotion producing sentence fragment because you got triggered. This is the problem with online social discourse in the 21st century.

deleted 7y ago

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pochamago 7y 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_j 7y ago
Well it is part of anti-fragile thinking really. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile 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_be 7y 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.

onceUponADime 7y 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.

chadcmulligan 7y 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 7y 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.
- chadcmulligan 7y ago
  Could be, maybe these conflicts are fundamental to being human and no resolution is possible? This is the new normal?
godDLL 7y 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.

DoreenMichele 7y 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 7y 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?")
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

dluan 7y ago

Throw in Nadia Eghbal's Tyranny of Ideas (https://nadiaeghbal.com/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.

Yhippa 7y ago
Sometimes I love arguing just to argue. I wonder how many other people there are like me?
- godDLL 7y 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 7y ago

Fascinating and thoughtful article. I loved this short poignant sentence: "To participate is to lose." It's so true and so sad.

ggm 7y 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 7y ago
Should be "observe".

samatman 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago

https://samzdat.com/2017/06/28/without-belief-in-a-god-but-never-without-belief-in-a-devil/ https://samzdat.com/2017/06/28/without-belief-in-a-god-but-n... samzdat makes similar points in this article -- esoteric but insightful

monadic2 7y 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.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

taurath 7y ago

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

nsainsbury 7y 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 7y ago

4 times is not enough. maybe post it again?

aazaa 7y 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.

deleted 7y ago
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mark_l_watson 7y 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.

yusef555 7y ago

lol ur a retard

vasilipupkin 7y 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 7y 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.
- vasilipupkin 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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.

dsalzman 7y ago

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

yosito 7y 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 7y ago

This all sounds like a japanese role-playing game.