19 ms·

The reputation economy is turning us into conformists (2017) [video]

216 points by dotcoma 5y ago

aogaili 5y ago
Mixing and inventing words for existing well-known concepts add more confusion to an already confusing space, but it surely helps the author to give new TED talks. Beside, the tech amplify what is a human nature, humans manage and keep track of each other reputation since the dawn of humanity. The outliers will always face resistance and some will find a new way.
cmrdporcupine 5y ago
Conformity has been a stronger pressure in North American society ever since 9/11.
- eigengrau5150 5y ago
  Longer than that. Think back to the 1950s and McCarthyism. https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/educational-resources/age-of-eisenhower/mcarthyism-red-scare https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/educational-resource... It's back, only it isn't just about rooting out Communists anymore.
hoppyhoppy2 5y ago
The presenter's website on Social Cooling is at https://www.socialcooling.com/ https://www.socialcooling.com/ , for anyone who wants a quick overview or prefers text to video.
- cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  Thank you for this
- bilbo991 5y ago
  Man that website is anti-friendly to use.
  - chias 5y ago
    Ironically, it's as though the experience was designed to be as video-like as possible.
alecco 5y ago
(2017)
Melting_Harps 5y ago
Was social media ever really anything but an echo chamber that sought to recreate the mob mentality of collective lynching for dissenting voices? I mean cancel culture and wokeness have made it clear that seems like the means and methods to create (coerced) consensus amongst an incredibly vocal minority. I'm less troubled with conformity, many Societies throughout the World have made that a part of the Social Contract where the unity and harmony of the whole is greater than one individuals happiness. At least the reputation economy in it's current state, is mainly limited to online so you can opt out, where I think you can see how pervasively terrifying this can escalate to just look at China's Social Credit System. The guilt of association in one's social circle ensures that not just conformity is re-enforced, but that actively marginalizing those who dissent are made into 2nd class citizens as it impacts everything from access to capital/loans, employment opportunities, and travel restrictions.
- 100011_100001 5y ago
  You make it sound like this only happens on the democratic side. Republicans have similar echo chambers. I think conformity happens within circles. Then it's a question how big the circle is. I agree with your main concern though, online vs real life credit systems.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    I am a non-American who is right of centre, and I can see "my" people adapting cancel culture tactics as well, and I resent it. IMHO such victories are rotten to the core. "Shall there be two cities of Minas Morgul, grinning at each other across a dead land filled with rottenness?" The only thing I can do about it is to interact civilly with like-minded people of totally different political persuasions and hope that others will be inspired not to enter the cesspool.
    - 100011_100001 5y ago
      I live in the States but wasn't raised here. One of the things you might not know is that unless you live in a middle east or China, right of center is left in the States.
snarf21 5y ago
We've always been followers and joiners. Look back 1000 years, we talked to very few people and our sphere of influence was small. Look at the changes the printing press had, influence could be cheaply disseminated. The newspapers took an out sized role and increased our sphere of influence. Today, with social media, our sphere is the entire world. It isn't curated (well, except to favor things that will cause outrage to sell ads) and it is information overload. This pushes us even further down the follower path. The world is too big and too complicated. It is impossible to be truly informed on a single issue. How could we possibly be objective on everything? Especially, when there are so many people purposefully trying to deceive for "eyeballs". Instead, we tend to pick a "trusted anchor" who we are in complete alignment with on a specific issue and then just trust them on everything else. It is quicker and makes us feel safe to be part of the group. We'll trust that person to loop us in as to what we should care about. IMO, the only way out of this cycle is a tax on digital advertising revenue. Right now this media is extremely profitable and the only way to stop it is to make that not true.
- pfisch 5y ago
  That might exacerbate the problem. When the profit margins are reduced companies will go even further to chase the limited revenue and allow even more outrageous content. The main thing that is very obvious, is that the content that does best is outrage content full of false information.
ceilingcorner 5y ago
The upvote / downvote system is at fault here too, at least with online discussion forums. Everything that doesn’t match the local culture and norms is immediately downvoted. It’s a self-reinforcing echo chamber. Reddit is notoriously bad at this. I preferred the old forum style, where even unpopular or strange messages were still placed in chronological order.
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  Making show dead the default would be a nice step.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    After setting "show dead" to "on", I am rarely more enlightened than before. It seems that HN moderators are an order of magnitude better at their jobs than average and recognize value or its absence fairly well.
    - greesil 5y ago
      Seconded. The dead posts are always uninformative and/or toxic.
    - germinalphrase 5y ago
      I agree, generally; however, I still find it (sometimes) useful to hear strong outsider views, even if only to see what patterns of thinking are propagating. The mods here are solid.
    - gnicholas 5y ago
      I believe comments die due to sufficient flagging/downvoting, and that moderator intervention is not required.
    - shkkmo 5y ago
      Comments become dead due to user voting and can also be resurrected if people vouch for them. I usually read the dead comments and occaisonally do vouch for them if I feel they were constructive and accurate but unpopular. There is a seperate system of flagging comments which does usually lead to moderator review amd potential account action. It is extremely rare for me to see a flagged and dead comment that doesn't obviously merit it.
caeril 5y ago
Pretty rich, coming out of an organization that assaulted and chased Vincent Canfield out of CCC for . . . . owning trollish domain names. I'm sure the presenter doesn't necessarily share the Congress's values, but it's funny nonetheless.
- blueflow 5y ago
  Bonus Point: The CrewCrew (Congress Security) is a barely documented all-female "security" gang. Men are not allowed to join. There are rumors that the President of the CCC controls it directly. Questions of accountability are still not answered.
  - jstanley 5y ago
    Are you sure? I couldn't find any relevant results for "CrewCrew" in the context of the Chaos Communications Congress.
    - blueflow 5y ago
      Thats why i said "barely documented". Its mentioned on https://help.ccc.de/security/index.html https://help.ccc.de/security/index.html and definitely present at the congress and related events like the camp, they wear characteristic shirts.
    - rndgermandude 5y ago
      I am not agreeing with the tinfoil "controlled by the CCC president" rhetoric, but a lot of CCC events including their Congress indeed use an all female (identity) volunteer group calling itself "CrewCrew" as security. They are known to be a bit "paranoid" sometimes, can act "overly aggressive" sometimes and like to disguise their faces during "enforcement". That said, I did not have first hand interactions with them, so that's just my impression of them seeing them around and some hearsay from people who had minor interactions with them. But they do not seem very accountable, and they are in my humble opinion a bit of a sore on the otherwise very well organized Congress. Especially considering this in the context of the CCC, who for years ran and runs campaigns for more police accountability.
wonderwonder 5y ago
Social media has massively amplified the penalty for making a mistake or offhand remark. People used to make tasteless jokes all the time and it was treated as it was, just a joke and life continued. Now anything out of the pale that catches the attention of some sort of influencer spells doom. Anyone caught at a bad moment on camera is pilloried, made out to be the anti christ and have people actively seeking out their employer in an attempt to cost them their job. No one is allowed to have a bad moment anymore where as before we were all acknowledged as flawed beings and that was ok. Publicly espousing an unpopular opinion now can be career suicide even if done outside of the work environment.
- InitialLastName 5y ago
  > Publicly espousing an unpopular opinion now can be career suicide Let's not pretend this is new: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist The difference now is that visibility is more uniformly distributed across the population.
  - mc32 5y ago
    No normal person will deny this. But there is no comparison to a small population being affected (ironically in the USSR, lots of artists and authors got not only blacklisted but sent to the Gulags --gee, I wonder if they wrote to Stalin on behalf of their brethren) to potentially anyone and everyone being a potential subject at any moment for something otherwise innocuous. What’s more this is much worse. It’s not about a singular subject (communist sympathizer) but just about anything at any moment. It's a shifting landscape so much so that there is internecine sniping among all groups. Today you can’t even make a genuine faux pas without the risk of someone coming down on you and risking your livelihood. That’s quite different. If Pelosi said off handedly, you know Trump did a couple of things right, or you know I don’t agree 100% with everything BLM she’ll be in trouble and she’s the top politician outside the president. Imagine a school teacher…
    - shadowgovt 5y ago
      Modern bidirectional communications tools make it easy to wide-cast a message and then have that message responded to by potentially millions of receivers. I think we don't respect the power we wield often enough. That's a terrible capability to provide via a system that also encourages you to blurt something out in 280 characters or less. Every single tweet is a shout from a mountaintop (and since it's time-stamped and on the timeline forever, that shout echoes perpetually). Additionally, that infrastructure incentivizes gravitation towards some flat-mass-"centroid" of acceptable cultural practice, and there's no particular guarantee that such a thing across the bulk of humanity is either possible or desirable.
nonameiguess 5y ago
While I don't think this is a positive trend by any means, I try to take a broader historical view of this. It is only after the second industrial revolution and the invention of affordable long-range transportation technologies like automobiles and trains, that non-conformity and privacy and true individualism were ever a realistic expectation of anyone, and even then you're talking a tiny global elite. Meanwhile, for the rest of human history and in less privileged societies, people have been living in tiny groups where everyone knows everyone, and your entire life has always been based on social credit and relied upon conformity to your particular kin group's cultural traditions and expectations. Relative to this historic norm, I don't think globalization and data hoovering is resulting in social cooling. The real issue is people are now being asked to conform not to the social norms of their parents that they were indoctrinated in from birth, but whatever becomes dominant in their online communities, and those norms may be less familiar and less stable, so conforming to them is less comfortable and more difficult. You can sort of see this effect in the existing comments. "It used to be fine to say X, now you can't." We've always been conformists. That's how communities work. But people expect somewhat stable rules they can conform to. The unique aspect of the chilling effect we're seeing today is that people can believe they did something perfectly in line with norms, but then the norms change or they become part of a new community with different norms and some record of what they already did thinking it was okay is now no longer okay. The thing that is unsettling to people is the rate of social change. It's not that they're being held to some standards of behavior. Everyone does that and everyone expects that. We never have been and never will be free to just ignore all laws and norms.
- spiralx 5y ago
  I don't think individualism became the norm until the early 1980s to be honest. Outside of niche sub-groups and the youth you see massive conformity when looking at footage from before then.
analyst74 5y ago
It seems hypocritical to me to value truth and transparency, aka journalism and dislike how the internet made everyone journalist.
- nsonha 5y ago
  There is nothing transparent about "everyone's a journalist". People quoting each other out of context isn't transparency, neither it's journalism.
calebm 5y ago
When "smart is the new cool", and everyone wants to be seen as smart, many people (out of fear of being seen as dumb) will be pressured into agreeing with the dominant position.
nixpulvis 5y ago
Let's use Gender as a quick example, why not? A few years ago, I couldn't have said I thought about it at all. For better and for worse, it wasn't part of the discourse. Now, I'm not all that different, yet it comes up again and again. I'm often forced to choose a side, even when it's all hypotheticals and virtues. I feel forced because online media is permanent, each statement is my closing argument. When the litigation tries to bend toward actual experience, the thorny truths are much too thorny to accept. I've seen this play out time and time again, on a vast number of subjects. We summarize the sad state of things as "lacking nuance". It seeps into my personal life as well now, having become a part of my personality. Fact is, it's not just a lack of nuance and it's not just conformity. It's hard boiled fear. Fear of the repercussions, fear of the judging eyes, fear of any reaction at all. Conformism requires something of a leader to follow, but with "social cooling" it's simply following nothing into the depths of atrophy and despair. Many don't even notice. So there's those who challenge and those who accept, like always. The winners will be the charismatic and successful, but I have still yet to hear one from any side I'd follow. Am I blind? Am I missing something critical to living in this fucked up world? Am I being too rhetorical, too demanding, too focused on the issue outside my control? At the end of the day I sleep poorly, wake restlessly, and like anyone still holding on to sanity, I find my own distractions.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  These people always existed, it is just an uncomfortable change. It used to be holier than thou people at church now it’s holier than thou suburban teenagers on social media. It’s uncomfortable because many people did and still do think these people are liberal and “on their side” and don’t get that this toxic human behavior has existed forever and goes between groups.
  - nixpulvis 5y ago
    The Atlantic's "The New Puritans [1] Mob Justice Is Trampling Democratic Discourse" is a good read (or listen) on the subject: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/10/new-puritans-mob-justice-canceled/619818/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/10/new-pur...
newbamboo 5y ago
I feel like feminism is the root problem.
- twiddling 5y ago
  So giving agency to women is bad?
echopurity 5y ago
HN is a shining example of banning any viewpoint outside the echo chamber. And of course most comments here blame women. Gross AF.
AlwaysRock 5y ago
I think pressure has always been high to conform. Maybe even more so in the past. But if you decided you didnt care you could relocate and your past wouldnt follow you around as much. Now the worst moment of your life could be the first thing anyone who googles you finds and it will never go away. It's an incredible time we live it.
nicbou 5y ago
In my opinion, this social cooling is the strongest argument in favour of privacy. Imagine there's a camera in your living room. You don't know if it's turned on, whether anyone is watching, or why they would be. However, I guarantee that air guitar solos will be fewer and further between. You won't walk around naked, pick your nose or watch questionable content anymore. You might even avoid certain conversations. Even without known consequences, you will police your own behaviour, just in case. Digital surveillance is a lot like that, but you know that someone is watching. You just don't know whether they are paying attention, or what their motives are. Even worse, if the people who watch get greedy, if the government forces their hand, or if their security is breached, there's no telling how your data will be used. This sword will always dangle over your head.
- clairity 5y ago
  that’s the concept of the panopticon, as described (but not originated) by foucault, who recognized that self-discipline is the most powerful force shaping our behaviors, especially as it actualizes our perceptions of external coercion into internalized self-discipline.
bingohbangoh 5y ago
Things like this is why its important that people can be anonymous on the internet. It gives you the way out to properly criticize people without fearing needless repercussions. And yes, I'm aware of the risks of it being abused by trolls. It is a tradeoff we are better off making.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
I have always thought this idea has merit (It's not new, as the 2017 date indicates). But whenever it gets posted, it always ends up turning into an ideological mud-wrestling match.
jollybean 5y ago
The West is undergoing a form of authoritarian monitoring - a minority of people, from various groups, are waiting for someone to step out of line in the smallest way and then pouncing on them for the benefit of themselves or their group. This really only works with a complicit media, who are willing to engender clicks and engagement over the ensuing discussion wherein context is usually lost. This seems to be happening across political and social contexts.
mostertoaster 5y ago
It’s why Kanye’s Donda album is somewhat genius. He has a song “Jail”, talking about how someone got pulled over and is going to jail simply because they have priors. I see this as a reference somewhat alluding to the aftermath of George Floyd, if you’ve been convicted of a crime it is now ok in our society for police to treat you poorly. A right winger might cringe at that, but then applaud that in a remix of the song he brings in Da Baby, to give the finger to cancel culture. What he is doing though is pointing out how tRey are related. Essentially saying if you think cancel culture is wrong then you should also be opposed to someone’s prior convictions causing them to be treated poorly, and if you think it is wrong what happens to those with priors, you shouldn’t be promoting a cancel culture.
m3kw9 5y ago
Shallow things like humans love for symmetry, bigger, more, shinier makes it easy to rank. Humans or life in general love easy
ladyattis 5y ago
This is why I don't use my legal name or talk about my offline life all that much in social media. I never name drop myself just because I don't want some weirdo online stalking me or combing over my family's own social media posts for some "juicy deets" or whatever to get attention bucks on Twitter or Facebook. It's this kind of thing that really annoys me about the modern internet. Too many people try to know what others are doing when they shouldn't care even in the best of times. I don't wanna know that James Gunn did tasteless jokes about kids and I definitely don't wanna see someone's nudes they sent to their BF/GF. I think at some point social media needs to be forced back into the smaller kind of groups of the late 90s where you either knew folks by their handle or just knew them in real life so you talked online from time to time just as a convenience. Other than that, I don't want my life to be intersecting with strangers online who constantly look to have their two minutes of hate. And I say this as a leftist, trans, and a non-Christian. I'm just not up for the social media nonsense of today.
heywherelogingo 5y ago
My accounts are disposable and disposed of - my "reputation" means nothing to me, and I think people who bought into gamified reputation are suckers. Liberty.
newbamboo 5y ago
Historically speaking, this problem can be traced from me-too movement back through gamergate as its come to be known. Some will deny a uniquely gendered aspect to this phenomenon but that only speaks to the successful rebranding of cancel-culture from the original purveyors as they were known only a few year’s prior. The roots of this problem can be delineated even though we no longer seem to recognize the culprit, sjw’s as they were accurately described, indeed were self described as such. The warfare lives on but now we’ve allowed it to be rebranded as the reputation economy or some such foolish newspeak. Perhaps this is another example of history being rewritten by the victors but those of us who have aggregated more than a decade or so of experience on the net, know that this was a recent change and that things were not always this way. For sure there are people, a specific interest, that have brought us to this juncture.
yesenadam 5y ago
That ccc.de page was taking forever to load for me. Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0Yo5NdrVto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0Yo5NdrVto

216 points by dotcoma 5y ago

Mixing and inventing words for existing well-known concepts add more confusion to an already confusing space, but it surely helps the author to give new TED talks. Beside, the tech amplify what is a human nature, humans manage and keep track of each other reputation since the dawn of humanity. The outliers will always face resistance and some will find a new way.

cmrdporcupine 5y ago

Conformity has been a stronger pressure in North American society ever since 9/11.

eigengrau5150 5y ago
Longer than that. Think back to the 1950s and McCarthyism. https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/educational-resources/age-of-eisenhower/mcarthyism-red-scare https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/educational-resource... It's back, only it isn't just about rooting out Communists anymore.

hoppyhoppy2 5y ago

The presenter's website on Social Cooling is at https://www.socialcooling.com/ https://www.socialcooling.com/ , for anyone who wants a quick overview or prefers text to video.

cmrdporcupine 5y ago
Thank you for this
bilbo991 5y ago
Man that website is anti-friendly to use.
- chias 5y ago
  Ironically, it's as though the experience was designed to be as video-like as possible.

alecco 5y ago

(2017)

Melting_Harps 5y ago

Was social media ever really anything but an echo chamber that sought to recreate the mob mentality of collective lynching for dissenting voices? I mean cancel culture and wokeness have made it clear that seems like the means and methods to create (coerced) consensus amongst an incredibly vocal minority. I'm less troubled with conformity, many Societies throughout the World have made that a part of the Social Contract where the unity and harmony of the whole is greater than one individuals happiness. At least the reputation economy in it's current state, is mainly limited to online so you can opt out, where I think you can see how pervasively terrifying this can escalate to just look at China's Social Credit System. The guilt of association in one's social circle ensures that not just conformity is re-enforced, but that actively marginalizing those who dissent are made into 2nd class citizens as it impacts everything from access to capital/loans, employment opportunities, and travel restrictions.

100011_100001 5y ago
You make it sound like this only happens on the democratic side. Republicans have similar echo chambers. I think conformity happens within circles. Then it's a question how big the circle is. I agree with your main concern though, online vs real life credit systems.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  I am a non-American who is right of centre, and I can see "my" people adapting cancel culture tactics as well, and I resent it. IMHO such victories are rotten to the core. "Shall there be two cities of Minas Morgul, grinning at each other across a dead land filled with rottenness?" The only thing I can do about it is to interact civilly with like-minded people of totally different political persuasions and hope that others will be inspired not to enter the cesspool.
  - 100011_100001 5y ago
    I live in the States but wasn't raised here. One of the things you might not know is that unless you live in a middle east or China, right of center is left in the States.

snarf21 5y ago

We've always been followers and joiners. Look back 1000 years, we talked to very few people and our sphere of influence was small. Look at the changes the printing press had, influence could be cheaply disseminated. The newspapers took an out sized role and increased our sphere of influence. Today, with social media, our sphere is the entire world. It isn't curated (well, except to favor things that will cause outrage to sell ads) and it is information overload. This pushes us even further down the follower path. The world is too big and too complicated. It is impossible to be truly informed on a single issue. How could we possibly be objective on everything? Especially, when there are so many people purposefully trying to deceive for "eyeballs". Instead, we tend to pick a "trusted anchor" who we are in complete alignment with on a specific issue and then just trust them on everything else. It is quicker and makes us feel safe to be part of the group. We'll trust that person to loop us in as to what we should care about. IMO, the only way out of this cycle is a tax on digital advertising revenue. Right now this media is extremely profitable and the only way to stop it is to make that not true.

pfisch 5y ago
That might exacerbate the problem. When the profit margins are reduced companies will go even further to chase the limited revenue and allow even more outrageous content. The main thing that is very obvious, is that the content that does best is outrage content full of false information.

ceilingcorner 5y ago

The upvote / downvote system is at fault here too, at least with online discussion forums. Everything that doesn’t match the local culture and norms is immediately downvoted. It’s a self-reinforcing echo chamber. Reddit is notoriously bad at this. I preferred the old forum style, where even unpopular or strange messages were still placed in chronological order.

germinalphrase 5y ago
Making show dead the default would be a nice step.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  After setting "show dead" to "on", I am rarely more enlightened than before. It seems that HN moderators are an order of magnitude better at their jobs than average and recognize value or its absence fairly well.
  - greesil 5y ago
    Seconded. The dead posts are always uninformative and/or toxic.
  - germinalphrase 5y ago
    I agree, generally; however, I still find it (sometimes) useful to hear strong outsider views, even if only to see what patterns of thinking are propagating. The mods here are solid.
  - gnicholas 5y ago
    I believe comments die due to sufficient flagging/downvoting, and that moderator intervention is not required.
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    Comments become dead due to user voting and can also be resurrected if people vouch for them. I usually read the dead comments and occaisonally do vouch for them if I feel they were constructive and accurate but unpopular. There is a seperate system of flagging comments which does usually lead to moderator review amd potential account action. It is extremely rare for me to see a flagged and dead comment that doesn't obviously merit it.

caeril 5y ago

Pretty rich, coming out of an organization that assaulted and chased Vincent Canfield out of CCC for . . . . owning trollish domain names. I'm sure the presenter doesn't necessarily share the Congress's values, but it's funny nonetheless.

blueflow 5y ago
Bonus Point: The CrewCrew (Congress Security) is a barely documented all-female "security" gang. Men are not allowed to join. There are rumors that the President of the CCC controls it directly. Questions of accountability are still not answered.
- jstanley 5y ago
  Are you sure? I couldn't find any relevant results for "CrewCrew" in the context of the Chaos Communications Congress.
  - blueflow 5y ago
    Thats why i said "barely documented". Its mentioned on https://help.ccc.de/security/index.html https://help.ccc.de/security/index.html and definitely present at the congress and related events like the camp, they wear characteristic shirts.
  - rndgermandude 5y ago
    I am not agreeing with the tinfoil "controlled by the CCC president" rhetoric, but a lot of CCC events including their Congress indeed use an all female (identity) volunteer group calling itself "CrewCrew" as security. They are known to be a bit "paranoid" sometimes, can act "overly aggressive" sometimes and like to disguise their faces during "enforcement". That said, I did not have first hand interactions with them, so that's just my impression of them seeing them around and some hearsay from people who had minor interactions with them. But they do not seem very accountable, and they are in my humble opinion a bit of a sore on the otherwise very well organized Congress. Especially considering this in the context of the CCC, who for years ran and runs campaigns for more police accountability.

wonderwonder 5y ago

Social media has massively amplified the penalty for making a mistake or offhand remark. People used to make tasteless jokes all the time and it was treated as it was, just a joke and life continued. Now anything out of the pale that catches the attention of some sort of influencer spells doom. Anyone caught at a bad moment on camera is pilloried, made out to be the anti christ and have people actively seeking out their employer in an attempt to cost them their job. No one is allowed to have a bad moment anymore where as before we were all acknowledged as flawed beings and that was ok. Publicly espousing an unpopular opinion now can be career suicide even if done outside of the work environment.

InitialLastName 5y ago
> Publicly espousing an unpopular opinion now can be career suicide Let's not pretend this is new: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist The difference now is that visibility is more uniformly distributed across the population.
- mc32 5y ago
  No normal person will deny this. But there is no comparison to a small population being affected (ironically in the USSR, lots of artists and authors got not only blacklisted but sent to the Gulags --gee, I wonder if they wrote to Stalin on behalf of their brethren) to potentially anyone and everyone being a potential subject at any moment for something otherwise innocuous. What’s more this is much worse. It’s not about a singular subject (communist sympathizer) but just about anything at any moment. It's a shifting landscape so much so that there is internecine sniping among all groups. Today you can’t even make a genuine faux pas without the risk of someone coming down on you and risking your livelihood. That’s quite different. If Pelosi said off handedly, you know Trump did a couple of things right, or you know I don’t agree 100% with everything BLM she’ll be in trouble and she’s the top politician outside the president. Imagine a school teacher…
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    Modern bidirectional communications tools make it easy to wide-cast a message and then have that message responded to by potentially millions of receivers. I think we don't respect the power we wield often enough. That's a terrible capability to provide via a system that also encourages you to blurt something out in 280 characters or less. Every single tweet is a shout from a mountaintop (and since it's time-stamped and on the timeline forever, that shout echoes perpetually). Additionally, that infrastructure incentivizes gravitation towards some flat-mass-"centroid" of acceptable cultural practice, and there's no particular guarantee that such a thing across the bulk of humanity is either possible or desirable.

nonameiguess 5y ago

While I don't think this is a positive trend by any means, I try to take a broader historical view of this. It is only after the second industrial revolution and the invention of affordable long-range transportation technologies like automobiles and trains, that non-conformity and privacy and true individualism were ever a realistic expectation of anyone, and even then you're talking a tiny global elite. Meanwhile, for the rest of human history and in less privileged societies, people have been living in tiny groups where everyone knows everyone, and your entire life has always been based on social credit and relied upon conformity to your particular kin group's cultural traditions and expectations. Relative to this historic norm, I don't think globalization and data hoovering is resulting in social cooling. The real issue is people are now being asked to conform not to the social norms of their parents that they were indoctrinated in from birth, but whatever becomes dominant in their online communities, and those norms may be less familiar and less stable, so conforming to them is less comfortable and more difficult. You can sort of see this effect in the existing comments. "It used to be fine to say X, now you can't." We've always been conformists. That's how communities work. But people expect somewhat stable rules they can conform to. The unique aspect of the chilling effect we're seeing today is that people can believe they did something perfectly in line with norms, but then the norms change or they become part of a new community with different norms and some record of what they already did thinking it was okay is now no longer okay. The thing that is unsettling to people is the rate of social change. It's not that they're being held to some standards of behavior. Everyone does that and everyone expects that. We never have been and never will be free to just ignore all laws and norms.

spiralx 5y ago
I don't think individualism became the norm until the early 1980s to be honest. Outside of niche sub-groups and the youth you see massive conformity when looking at footage from before then.

analyst74 5y ago

It seems hypocritical to me to value truth and transparency, aka journalism and dislike how the internet made everyone journalist.

nsonha 5y ago
There is nothing transparent about "everyone's a journalist". People quoting each other out of context isn't transparency, neither it's journalism.

calebm 5y ago

When "smart is the new cool", and everyone wants to be seen as smart, many people (out of fear of being seen as dumb) will be pressured into agreeing with the dominant position.

nixpulvis 5y ago

Let's use Gender as a quick example, why not? A few years ago, I couldn't have said I thought about it at all. For better and for worse, it wasn't part of the discourse. Now, I'm not all that different, yet it comes up again and again. I'm often forced to choose a side, even when it's all hypotheticals and virtues. I feel forced because online media is permanent, each statement is my closing argument. When the litigation tries to bend toward actual experience, the thorny truths are much too thorny to accept. I've seen this play out time and time again, on a vast number of subjects. We summarize the sad state of things as "lacking nuance". It seeps into my personal life as well now, having become a part of my personality. Fact is, it's not just a lack of nuance and it's not just conformity. It's hard boiled fear. Fear of the repercussions, fear of the judging eyes, fear of any reaction at all. Conformism requires something of a leader to follow, but with "social cooling" it's simply following nothing into the depths of atrophy and despair. Many don't even notice. So there's those who challenge and those who accept, like always. The winners will be the charismatic and successful, but I have still yet to hear one from any side I'd follow. Am I blind? Am I missing something critical to living in this fucked up world? Am I being too rhetorical, too demanding, too focused on the issue outside my control? At the end of the day I sleep poorly, wake restlessly, and like anyone still holding on to sanity, I find my own distractions.

colechristensen 5y ago
These people always existed, it is just an uncomfortable change. It used to be holier than thou people at church now it’s holier than thou suburban teenagers on social media. It’s uncomfortable because many people did and still do think these people are liberal and “on their side” and don’t get that this toxic human behavior has existed forever and goes between groups.
- nixpulvis 5y ago
  The Atlantic's "The New Puritans [1] Mob Justice Is Trampling Democratic Discourse" is a good read (or listen) on the subject: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/10/new-puritans-mob-justice-canceled/619818/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/10/new-pur...

newbamboo 5y ago

I feel like feminism is the root problem.

twiddling 5y ago
So giving agency to women is bad?

echopurity 5y ago

HN is a shining example of banning any viewpoint outside the echo chamber. And of course most comments here blame women. Gross AF.

AlwaysRock 5y ago

I think pressure has always been high to conform. Maybe even more so in the past. But if you decided you didnt care you could relocate and your past wouldnt follow you around as much. Now the worst moment of your life could be the first thing anyone who googles you finds and it will never go away. It's an incredible time we live it.

nicbou 5y ago

In my opinion, this social cooling is the strongest argument in favour of privacy. Imagine there's a camera in your living room. You don't know if it's turned on, whether anyone is watching, or why they would be. However, I guarantee that air guitar solos will be fewer and further between. You won't walk around naked, pick your nose or watch questionable content anymore. You might even avoid certain conversations. Even without known consequences, you will police your own behaviour, just in case. Digital surveillance is a lot like that, but you know that someone is watching. You just don't know whether they are paying attention, or what their motives are. Even worse, if the people who watch get greedy, if the government forces their hand, or if their security is breached, there's no telling how your data will be used. This sword will always dangle over your head.

clairity 5y ago
that’s the concept of the panopticon, as described (but not originated) by foucault, who recognized that self-discipline is the most powerful force shaping our behaviors, especially as it actualizes our perceptions of external coercion into internalized self-discipline.

bingohbangoh 5y ago

Things like this is why its important that people can be anonymous on the internet. It gives you the way out to properly criticize people without fearing needless repercussions. And yes, I'm aware of the risks of it being abused by trolls. It is a tradeoff we are better off making.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

I have always thought this idea has merit (It's not new, as the 2017 date indicates). But whenever it gets posted, it always ends up turning into an ideological mud-wrestling match.

jollybean 5y ago

The West is undergoing a form of authoritarian monitoring - a minority of people, from various groups, are waiting for someone to step out of line in the smallest way and then pouncing on them for the benefit of themselves or their group. This really only works with a complicit media, who are willing to engender clicks and engagement over the ensuing discussion wherein context is usually lost. This seems to be happening across political and social contexts.

mostertoaster 5y ago

It’s why Kanye’s Donda album is somewhat genius. He has a song “Jail”, talking about how someone got pulled over and is going to jail simply because they have priors. I see this as a reference somewhat alluding to the aftermath of George Floyd, if you’ve been convicted of a crime it is now ok in our society for police to treat you poorly. A right winger might cringe at that, but then applaud that in a remix of the song he brings in Da Baby, to give the finger to cancel culture. What he is doing though is pointing out how tRey are related. Essentially saying if you think cancel culture is wrong then you should also be opposed to someone’s prior convictions causing them to be treated poorly, and if you think it is wrong what happens to those with priors, you shouldn’t be promoting a cancel culture.

m3kw9 5y ago

Shallow things like humans love for symmetry, bigger, more, shinier makes it easy to rank. Humans or life in general love easy

ladyattis 5y ago

This is why I don't use my legal name or talk about my offline life all that much in social media. I never name drop myself just because I don't want some weirdo online stalking me or combing over my family's own social media posts for some "juicy deets" or whatever to get attention bucks on Twitter or Facebook. It's this kind of thing that really annoys me about the modern internet. Too many people try to know what others are doing when they shouldn't care even in the best of times. I don't wanna know that James Gunn did tasteless jokes about kids and I definitely don't wanna see someone's nudes they sent to their BF/GF. I think at some point social media needs to be forced back into the smaller kind of groups of the late 90s where you either knew folks by their handle or just knew them in real life so you talked online from time to time just as a convenience. Other than that, I don't want my life to be intersecting with strangers online who constantly look to have their two minutes of hate. And I say this as a leftist, trans, and a non-Christian. I'm just not up for the social media nonsense of today.

heywherelogingo 5y ago

My accounts are disposable and disposed of - my "reputation" means nothing to me, and I think people who bought into gamified reputation are suckers. Liberty.

newbamboo 5y ago

Historically speaking, this problem can be traced from me-too movement back through gamergate as its come to be known. Some will deny a uniquely gendered aspect to this phenomenon but that only speaks to the successful rebranding of cancel-culture from the original purveyors as they were known only a few year’s prior. The roots of this problem can be delineated even though we no longer seem to recognize the culprit, sjw’s as they were accurately described, indeed were self described as such. The warfare lives on but now we’ve allowed it to be rebranded as the reputation economy or some such foolish newspeak. Perhaps this is another example of history being rewritten by the victors but those of us who have aggregated more than a decade or so of experience on the net, know that this was a recent change and that things were not always this way. For sure there are people, a specific interest, that have brought us to this juncture.

yesenadam 5y ago

That ccc.de page was taking forever to load for me. Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0Yo5NdrVto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0Yo5NdrVto