
The Hierarchy of Cringe - longdefeat
https://aelkus.github.io/culture/2019/10/21/hierarchy-of-cringe
======
rjknight
The author is using "cringe" as something of a euphemism here. "Cringe" in
this case is _anything_ that a person could say that would cause other people
to think badly of them, including highly offensive things, so long as the
person saying it doesn't fully understand why. It doesn't have to be
universally cringey, like watching someone do really bad karaoke. It might
only be cringey within a small subculture.

Say you're used to discussing programming languages. You and your fellows have
developed a well-understood notion of why static typing is better than dynamic
typing. Then along comes some fool who has watched too many Rich Hickey videos
who wants to tell you that types are just guard rails and nobody would
navigate by bouncing off the guard rails when they could just drive to their
destination. This is cringey because you've heard this argument before, the
interloper ought to know that you've heard this before and taken it into
account, and it's clear that they're just repeating some argument that they've
heard somewhere else.

One could have a "stupid things dynamic typers say" bingo-card, with the guard
rail argument on it. One could regard the dynamic typer as a kind of NPC bot,
popping up to spout the scripted phrases of his kind of person. And it's
cringey to watch someone do that.

This phenomenon is what the OP is trying to describe, except that on Twitter
the subject matter is unlikely to be static vs. dynamic types, but something
political which covers much larger categories of people.

The fact that so many commenters here are baffled by this suggests that the
phenomenon, or at least this intuitive understanding of it, is not quite as
widespread as the OP (and I!) might assume, though.

~~~
vintermann
I usually think of "cringe" as vicarious embarrassment. You look at someone
doing something that you would have felt deeply embarrassed about having done
(Maybe you have done it, or something uncomfortably close to it, in the past).

I think it's a kind of involuntary empathy in a strictly mechanical sense -
feeling as if you were that person when you look at them. Because when you
think about it coldly, it's not obvious why you should care that other people
are embarrassing themselves.

So it's not empathy in the ethical sense. On the contrary, people who talk
about "cringe" are often fiercely angry at the people making them feel this
way.

~~~
antonvs
> Because when you think about it coldly, it's not obvious why you should care
> that other people are embarrassing themselves.

It has to do with enforcing and confining oneself to acceptable social
behavior, and reinforcing those boundaries for oneself.

As you say, it's involuntary, or instinctive, like many social behaviors.

> On the contrary, people who talk about "cringe" are often fiercely angry at
> the people making them feel this way.

Aside from blaming them for the discomfort, this is also part of the
enforcement aspect.

------
Thorentis
Is it just me, or was there no actual hierarchy discussed? I was expecting a
pyramid of cringe, or at least a list of varying levels of cringe. Instead I
got a lengthy discussion about how he doesn't like that people stereotype
other people on the Internet (as if that is unique to the Internet). Low
quality and poorly named post in my opinion (nice looking blog though).

~~~
t0astbread
I'm not sure if you're serious but I like how meta that was.

------
whoisjuan
Cringe humor is extremely popular within the meme culture and that's not
surprising. Memes are so incredibly fascinating from whatever angle you want
to analyze them. It is so bizarre that this concept of producing and composing
images that capture/represent a feeling, a historic moment, a situation, a
thought, etc, can create this massive meta-culture with its own rules and
social implications.

Social media wouldn't be what it is if it wasn't for the meme culture. Just
think about it. How many companies exist because of these memes that we share.
Reddit, Imgur, Giphy, Gfycat, 9Gag, Kapwing, the hundreds of thousands of meme
accounts on Instagram... All these companies and organized entities exist
because of memes. That is so surreal.

What was the creative outlet of regular people before the meme culture? It
feels so massive and unhinged that it almost makes me think that we didn't
have anything equivalent before.

~~~
repler
> What was the creative outlet of regular people before the meme culture? It
> feels so massive and unhinged that it almost makes me think that we didn't
> have anything equivalent before.

I was just thinking about this yesterday.

In the 80s and 90s it was popular to parrot moments from movies. Quoting them,
mimicking them, or simply pointing at someone and drawing a parallel. In the
early/mid 90s my friends and I used to make our own WAV files and we would
even photoshop pictures every now and then.

Political memes are kind of like modern-day political cartoons in that they
distill key points down into a very relatable and shareable form.

Human nature is human nature - I think it's always been around just using
different tools and distribution methods. Kind of cool actually!

------
omosubi
I think the topic of cringe is a interesting one that the internet really
amplifies but I can't for the life of me figure out what he's trying to say in
this post

~~~
larnmar
I think what he’s saying is that cringe humour appeals mostly to those who
know that they are pretty cringeworthy themselves.

While everyone can enjoy an occasional piece of cringe humour, the sort of
person who spends a lot of time on /r/cringe is the sort of person that others
would find embarrassing, working hard to reassure themselves that others are
worse off than they.

Kinda like how /r/fatpeoplehate was mostly filled with secretly fat people
laughing at the really fat people.

~~~
DagAgren
I think that's the wrong angle to take.

People who obsess over cringe are people who desperately need to find someone
to feel better about. It's a symptom of low self esteem and self-loathing,
amplified by internet-powered vicious cycles.

That MAY mean that that person is also "cringey" by someone's reckoning, but
that framing traps you in the same framework of self-loathing.

This is an extremely toxic mindset, and it is something that you should always
work hard to break yourself out of.

~~~
AstralStorm
Did you know that judging is the other way to achieve the same end, feeling
better about yourself while reducing other's stature?

It's really hard to examine such blind spots in oneself. I fail at it often as
well. Human nature of you will.

------
mirimir
> In a later post, I will look at a different side of this problem – how
> Internet subcultures are obsessed with evading negative social judgment and
> why this obsession can go too far.

I'm looking forward to that.

It's another reason to use multiple well-isolated personas.

~~~
yowlingcat
One of the main reasons I stopped posting on Facebook and scrubbed my IG
presence. I feel like this has gotten pretty commonplace, actually.

~~~
mirimir
Not long after I discovered Usenet and email lists, I decided that anonymous
coward was the way to go. And more so after hanging out on various web forums.

We didn't call it "social media" back then, but people did get doxed
occasionally. And online anger did sometimes spill over into meatspace.

I did not want my professional reputation to be damaged because of something
(even something truly cringeworthy) that I'd posted somewhere. And then there
was the FBI investigation of Jim Bell, which involved subpoenas to several
cypherpunks contributors.

There was also an investigation of some truly crazy itinerant folksinger, who
had posted some of the most amazing rants that I've ever read.

Edit: It was Carl Edward Johnson aka Toto aka TruthMonger.

See
[https://people.well.com/user/declan/toto/](https://people.well.com/user/declan/toto/)

I'd quote some, but it's definitely cringeworthy.

~~~
ParadigmaShift
You really should worry about the FBI.

------
positr0n
> Being blocked by someone you never heard of is a common experience online,
> as is the recognition that they likely have no idea that they are blocking
> you.

What is this talking about? I've never experienced that (I don't think).

It sounds like people share adblock-style blocklists of social media accounts?

~~~
devin
There was an effort to do something like what you’re describing some years
back. I think I heard about a volunteer effort to build something like this
around the time of gamergate.

~~~
byuu
Block Together. A list blocking 100,000 people belonging to group X sometimes
sweeps up people outside the group for the crime of eg following a friend who
is part of said group. There is also intentional sabotage in adding someone
innocent that a maintainer dislikes to such lists.

------
dashwav
Man I absolutely love this theme he is using. Took a while to find the post
but here is the info on the current design.
[https://aelkus.github.io/site/2019/09/10/design-
sources](https://aelkus.github.io/site/2019/09/10/design-sources)

Honestly the design is so nice it makes me want to get around to finishing
setting up a blog

~~~
pyronite
I find the font hard to read... I feel like fixed-width fonts are better
suited for coding or terminals. The width of the columns are also a bit larger
than recommended for web typography (whatever that's worth to you). At full
width, the blog shows about 120 characters per line. I've seen the optimal
line length suggested as 50-80 characters. Compare...

Default (1160px):
[https://i.imgur.com/6I33kYB.png](https://i.imgur.com/6I33kYB.png)

Constrained (800px):
[https://i.imgur.com/lcb6Qd6.png](https://i.imgur.com/lcb6Qd6.png)

It definitely tracks better to me at a reduced width, but your mileage may
vary.

What is it that appeals to you the most about the blog's design? Admittedly it
looks different and lots of sites look the same now. Someone like me would
probably push to make it look more like Medium.

~~~
dashwav
It being a different cut by a different cloth is a big draw for me if I'm
honest (I am getting tired of reading image heavy medium blogs), and I really
dig the overall aesthetic it gives off. I personally like the wider text, I
wish more sites did it, although I would agree that maybe 80-100 chars per
line would be more readable overall after seeing that comparison instead of
the full 120. I also like how minimal the header and footers are, instead of
being greeted by a full 1920x1080 image and having to scroll a whole page to
the content it's right there ready for me.

Not that I think every blog should adapt to this style specifically, but I
really appreciate it being what it is myself.

------
swiley
I have to say while subreddits like /r/cringe bother me in some ways I’m
thankful for them because after growing up homeschooled and relatively
isolated there where a lot of subtle social ideas I really didn’t understand.
I think without them I probably would be a lot less pleasant to be around.

------
AgentME
I think many internet communities can be understood by figuring out their in-
group/out-group standards. 4chan's /g/ board will make fun of "normies" that
can't assemble a computer, and /v/ will make fun of normies that aren't
willing to embrace something as fun as videogames. Progressive subreddits will
make fun of easily-debunkable political misinformation and the kinds of people
that peddle it, and sciencey subreddits will call out various other kinds of
misinformation and its peddlers. In some places, the out-group is "SJWs", and
in other places, the out-group is the kind of person that spends too much time
complaining about "SJWs". There's an in-group/out-group dynamic being used in
all of these situations that can feel fun to be in on. (Not trying to say all
of these divisions are equally arbitrary. Many people have their own reasons
for preferring specific setups rather than others, but someone in any of these
setups will automatically get a feel-good bonus from the tribal part of their
mind.)

Cringe humor is a quick way to bring up the in-group/out-group dynamic or to
temporarily spawn a new instance of the dynamic.

Places with predefined in-group/out-group dynamics are attractive to people
not just so people can experience being in an in-group, but also because as
long as you're not part of the out-group, you're unlikely to be randomly
targeted as an example of cringe/out-group. (I think this part explains a lot
of the popularity of Trump despite scandals: Some of his fans know or will
acknowledge he's doing bad things, but it's just considered much less
important than the belief that Trump will never punch in the direction of his
fans but the other side will. -- Hopefully a connection to politics doesn't
feel too out of place here. In-group/out-group dynamics seem like something
common to human psychology that we should expect to see in many places.)

~~~
leftyted
I think you're dead-on. The cringe analysis is mostly subsumed by in-
group/out-group analysis.

> (I think this part explains a lot of the popularity of Trump despite
> scandals: Some of his fans know or will acknowledge he's doing bad things,
> but it's just considered much less important than the belief that Trump will
> never punch in the direction of his fans but the other side will. --
> Hopefully a connection to politics doesn't feel too out of place here. In-
> group/out-group dynamics seem like something common to human psychology that
> we should expect to see in many places.)

I don't think this is accurate. I think that Trump's popularity is mostly due
to his "realness". He's the exact opposite of a career politician. He doesn't
talk like a lawyer and, despite being rich, he has an everyman quality to him.
He's incredibly unpretentious.

Trump reminds me of something from Notes from a Dead House. Dostoevsky
describes a prison warden who was beloved by the inmates due to his homespun
character despite the fact that he took pleasure in beating them:

> There are men who are far from being kind, and who have yet the talent of
> making themselves popular; they do not despise the people who are beneath
> their rule. That, I think, is the cause of this popularity. They do not give
> themselves lordly airs; they have no feeling of "caste;" they have a certain
> odour of the people; they are men of birth, and the people at once sniff it.
> They will do anything for such men; they will gladly change the mildest and
> most humane man for a very severe chief, if the latter possesses this sort
> of odour, and especially if the man is also genial in his way. Oh! then he
> is beyond price.

> Lieutenant Smekaloff, as I have said, ordered sometimes very severe
> punishments. But he seemed to inflict them in such a way, that the prisoners
> felt no rancour against him. On the contrary, they recalled his whipping
> affairs with laughter; he did not punish frequently, for he had no artistic
> imagination.

That's Trump as far as I'm concerned.

~~~
AstralStorm
Unlike certain other far past politicians, his image is impeccably crafted,
not grown. (Easy, look into his past. He's not a man of an image he is
projecting. People don't change this much.)

He is a very good actor, specifically a comedian, and there's a species of
logic behind his actions, not actual raw or even lightly filtered emotions as
far as I can tell, but gives a great appearance he does so. (He does not seem
to be a sociopath, but it's not a requirement.)

That said, by acting consistently, one does become their mask to a degree.

------
idonotknowwhy
I guess I'm getting old. I read the article and the comment here, and have no
idea what you're all talking about.

~~~
pferde
Yep, me neither. The best I can tell is that it's a new children's term. If a
kid says "that's cringe", it means "I don't like that".

~~~
throwawaylolx
Feels like OP spends significant time in some sorts of Twitter bubble ("Being
blocked by someone you never heard of is a common experience online" ?) and
either overestimates how prevalent his situation is or the post was not
intended for a general audience.

------
nicky0
One of the most interesting things I have read for a while. It puts the finger
on a lot of perhaps unconscious thoughts about experiences I have had on line.
Why even partake in online communities, is a good question. It seems to lead
to pain and self-loathing.

------
ArtWomb
Can't comment on the relevance of "cringe" culture. But I like the site design
very much. Font family is called "Inconsolata" ;)

[https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Inconsolata](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Inconsolata)

------
motohagiography
The topic is covered more rigorously in the book, "Yuck! The Nature and Moral
Significance of Disgust"
([https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/yuck](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/yuck))
When you look at the policing of discourse, you can see cringe as exploiting
the much deeper sentiment of disgust, where there is a bunch of prior art
discussing it.

------
currymj
when your brain gets to this point, just log off and go look at a tree or
something. this is serious overexposure to twitter.

~~~
rchaud
This is all over Reddit as well unfortunately. I don't spend much time at all
on Twitter, but I recognized what the author was talking about as I'm on
Reddit.

"Cringe" really doesn't require or merit this level of philosophical analysis.
Since Reddit banned subreddits built around mocking/shaming minority groups
and overweight people, "cringe" became its replacement.

It's a way to signal to other people whose lives revolved around abusing
people online, that something is a target to pile on against. A 20-second
video of someone playing rap music from a BT speaker in the subway? " _Cringe_
", aka "let me use this to make a broad generalization about the lifestyle and
career prospects of this person".

I don't know how old the average Reddit user who posts on those subs are, but
I sincerely hope they grow out of it once they get out a bit more and meet
people not exactly like themselves.

------
tzebby49
Well it exists in a evolutionary process. What people were cringing about in
the early 2000s are now no longer cringworthy. I think this is part of what
Baudrillard terms the simulacrum. What was cringeworthy thousands of years
ago? Was there a concept or cringe? These are interesting questions.

------
baked_ziti
Can someone tell me what the Mishima quotation has to do with the content of
the article.

------
naringas
I've started to think that we, as individual humans, are far more of a
statistical phenomenon than we would like.

I predict that at some point, once the mathematics have been distilled out
from quantum mechanics, and extended to n-dimensional "particles", that humans
behavior will be predicted by some sort of a n-dimensional wave equation (with
values of n in the thousands or hundreds of thousands).

------
balt_s
Based article.

~~~
spacesuitman2
Based and redpilled.

------
706f7bfa0c5b
Cringe.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF2uHwOg2kk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF2uHwOg2kk)

------
jstewartmobile
Using a monospaced font for prose, and putting Mishima anywhere near a "cringe
hierarchy" are the most cringe-worthy things I've seen today. And boy howdy
have I seen some cringe!

------
some_furry
> If you say “that furry is a degenerate” you will be accused of
> discrimination. Don’t slut-shame, don’t kink-shame, don’t gatekeep.

More specifically, because of the demographics of the furry fandom, most
people who hate furries do so because it lets them be homophobic without the
social consequences of being clearly homophobic.

~~~
lagadu
You're saying that there are higher rates of homosexuality among furries or am
I misinterpreting that? If so, what makes you think so?

~~~
DagAgren
Furries tend to be a lot more open-minded about the entire queer spectrum.

~~~
kls
So do people in the arts but that does not mean all or a significant
percentage of artist are homosexual. It just means that group tends to attract
a more liberal mindset on sexuality. There was a period when the arts where
looked on as deviant.

