I feel in myself a growing distaste for ( internet ) culture.
I remember reading something in “Hackers and Painters” about how in school there’s a different hierarchy structure than in the real world, something along the lines of “Nerds aren’t bullied in the real world”, I feel like that’s not true anymore.
Since the real world’s “speaking and thinking” is now quite intertwined with the virtual world’s “consumption and creation”, it’s interesting to notice how some areas of it turned into an high school classroom.
The virtual world gives adults the permission to behave childishly, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this and it’s not the only place where this kind of thing happens, it’s just not for me, it turns any discussion around any topic into the same “us vs them” or, maybe worse, “cool vs uncool” arguments, nuance is no where to be found.
My twitter “For You” tab is filled with this easy to consume, engaging content, my “Following” tab contains instead a really tiny subset of that content and a lot of other mostly interesting information I wouldn’t have seen otherwise.
The people that post with a focus on engagement ( which can span any topic, not conventionally high noise topics like relationships or pop culture ) are fishing for strong reactions ( I predict this will now get worse because it’s subsidized ) and the discourse ends up being high school level in most cases ( this is independent of the original post content ) e.g. a recent debate involving Connor Leahy ( who has strong positions in favour of extreme caution regarding AI ) made skooks tweet this ( funnily enough, this tweet has since been deleted ) :
I wouldn’t call this bullying just yet, but it surely looks like it’s going in that direction.
There’s nothing particularly surprising about this kind of behavior from people, what I find fascinating is that even in my fairly geeky niche on twitter ( that spans both the “For you” and the “Following” tabs, that tweet comes from the FY tab of course ), people that were probably bullied when younger are now acting like this as adults and with each other, I think the reason is that they are filling the void left by the missed opportunity for teenage popularity in this way.
I can hear you saying “but that’s shitposting, he’s joking”. It’s getting more and more difficult, for me at least, to understand what is “shitposting” and what isn’t, so far as to say that I think “shitposting” is a gradient and not bounded clearly in any way.
To make this a bit more clear: I highly prefer something like 4chan where the culture is so etched in the platform that the language and modus operandi follow rules that are paradoxically more strict over something like twitter where even high profile individuals fall prey to that brittle and extremely unfocused discourse that does nothing if not entertain and enrage the people while feeding the author’s thirst for fame. Anonymity instantly puts everybody on the same level and surprisingly brings back the focus ( even if with colorful language and stereotypes ) to the topic at hand, semi-anonymous places like HN or Reddit fall in the middle and have issues and benefits from both extremes.
Now that after ~15 years from the beginning of my internet usage meme culture has officially reached the masses I realize the levels at which it oversimplifies comprehension and communication, amplifying noise to extreme levels.
Life now looks like nothing but the reenactment of a consumed or perceived vibe, pick the character closest to your quantization step: you’re that, little to no questioning involved.
Having fun and joking around is great, but it can’t be everything, all the time, abusing the culture enabled unseriousness dial when you’re plain wrong just sucks e.g. “I was joking”.
As I try to detach myself from this unwary mess I imagine somebody reacting to these thoughts with the canonical “you must be fun at parties” and that’s exactly the core of the problem.