
The Trouble with “Finding Your People” Online - longdefeat
https://tinyletter.com/lmsacasas/letters/the-convivial-society-no-17-arduous-interfaces
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narnianal
Is it still possible to "find your people online", though? Maybe I've missed a
few steps by now but I don't feel there's any place online that I would still
call "my people".

The old places where we met when we were 15-20 are almost empty. The new
place, HN being one of them, have been willingly sacrificed to the making of
money. And then there are places like FB, Instagram that aren't really places
of finding, more the spam mailbox turned into a feature.

Last but not least there are these isolated group meetings in whatsapp, slack
etc. But there I've only found ones that are mostly open and therefore lack
the finding part. You really need to know what you are looking for to have any
chance of finding such hidden places.

So where's that "finding your people online" place nowadays?

~~~
kowdermeister
Don't forget Reddit. The depths of specialized subreddits there is mind
boggling.

~~~
JansjoFromIkea
I'd say the upvoting nature of reddit makes sure it's always about the posts
(and only posts that are favourable towards a like/dislike binary metric) and
pretty much never about the people behind them.

Old forums would force you to understand the various characters in the place;
Reddit, by design, goes out of its way to hide them.

------
lmm
This is a little reminiscent of those who say childhood bullying is good
because it teaches people how to deal with bullies. Yes, if we are forced to
rub shoulders with people we don't have much in common with, we will get
better at doing it. I probably am less sociable with my physical neighbours
than I would be in a world where I didn't have any alternatives. But so what?
I would rather spend my limited time with those I choose to. The article
glosses over this idea that we all need to participate in something with our
local neighbours without really justifying it. Yes, we will occasionally need
to reach a political consensus about issues that affect the neighbourhood.
That doesn't mean we have to be friends, and I'm not sure that tighter
community ties would make for better politics - much of the nastiest, dirtiest
politics happens among close-knit groups.

If communities define themselves adversarially then that's a problem in
itself, and I'd stay away from platforms and environments that create that
football-match feeling (that is, twitter). But that's not at all inherent to
the notion of one's people. Taking an interest in trains (for example) is
something most people won't do, but being part of a community with that
interest is never about how much you're not one of the non-train-interested
public.

~~~
timdiggerm
> I would rather spend my limited time with those I choose to.

I think his point is that you _have_ to spend time with people not of your
choosing, whether you like it or not, by way of existing.

~~~
ksdale
I think two issues are being mixed up here. I think you're completely right
that we do have to spend time with people not of our choosing, and further, I
think that it's a very valuable skill to be comfortable around basically
everyone.

On the other hand, I think the parent is correct that having to spend time
with people not of our choosing does not entail having to subject ourselves to
anyone's crappy behavior.

Keeping with bullying as an example, during the time the author was talking
about, with boys sitting on the fence waiting to talk to someone, from what
I've heard from my elders, that was a time when people who acted
innappropriately enough got punched in the mouth.

Mouth punching isn't really an acceptable way to deal with most innappropriate
behavior anymore, especially somewhere like school. But we should at least
retain the ability to remove ourselves from the company of jerks. We shouldn't
extend the definition of jerk to include everyone who isn't like us, but we
also should be able to draw lines in the sand if need be.

------
fish-bowls
Oh, I dunno. There’s another angle of this business of relating to some and
not to others, bonding with birds of a feather, and fighting like cats and
dogs, separating like oil and water.

The premise requires discussing centralized media in the form of (sometimes
radio but mostly) television, a period which this article skips and ignores.

It goes like this: On TV, there were people you could watch and love and adore
and idolize. They seemed wonderful and perfect because the persona you were
exposed to was staged, rehearsed, pre-recorded. Call it the fish bowl effect.

The fish seem perfect as long as they stay on the other side of the glass.
They can’t eat you if you don’t swim with them. Sharks and piranhas can be
safely admired as long as you stay in your world, and they stay in theirs.

With the internet, this boundary is crossed, as soon as you adopt the
perspective of the internet as telephone calls. If the internet is always a
telephone call, the network is neutral, agnostic to the content of the call,
and thus dialed with the expectation of confidential conversations and
implicit privacy, then the fish bowl effect disappears.

But even the telephone call is an abstraction, because it ignored the one-to-
many or many-to-many relationships. Telephone calls are mostly one on ones.

So compartmentalized concepts no longer serve us. All options are on the table
now. None of this is democratizing. It’s not enough to just shrug and say “
_It’s the Internet_ ” anymore. It’s not going to bring us together. Not by
default. It’s hasn’t made things worse than the worst it’s ever been. It does
make some things easier, even if sometimes things shouldn’t be easy at all.

Now that we have packet switched networks, there’s no _One True Way_ for how
to use them. Try to think of it as a system of moving sidewalks and
escalators, but some of them drop into unmarked fish bowls.

~~~
fao_
> The fish seem perfect as long as they stay on the other side of the glass.
> They can’t eat you if you don’t swim with them. Sharks and piranhas can be
> safely admired as long as you stay in your world, and they stay in theirs.

I think this is a useful analogy, because it serves as a possible explanation
as to why there seems to be a 'generation gap' whereby previous generations
believe to a certain degree it is possible (and right, even) to separate the
artist from the art itself, and why modern progressives are rejecting that
(Although this gap is cleaner seen from a political perspective, I believe
that to some degree it is also generational).

Previously, culture was seen from mostly a consumptive perspective. The bad
people and their actions are 'on the other side of the glass' \-- so to speak.
Not only do the 'bad actions/opinions' not directly affect them, but they lack
any true meaningful ability to change things. Strongly worded letters can
really only achieve so much, and all of the information channels are
centralized.

I don't know if this makes much sense, it's 3am...

~~~
baltoo
Fascinating. I think I might be one of those of the older generation. Do you
have any pointers to get to start to learn more about the modern progressives?
I'd really like to learn more.

------
kickscondor
> McLuhan: "The closer you get together, the more you like each other? There
> is no evidence of that in any situation that we have ever heard of. When
> people get close together, they get more and more savage and impatient with
> each other."

To riff on this-- I think we are too close together in a massive news feed
('timeline'). Individual blogs gave us a healthy distance.

------
jdreyfuss
Good food for thought. A lot to consider there.

I think besides the dichotomy of finding your in-group necessitating more
clearly defining the out-groups and the harm that can come with that, there's
also an underlying question of whether or not being able to so easily "find
your people" is a positive thing in sum. It certainly seems positive for
marginalized people and for niche fandoms and geekeries and all the usual ways
we think about it, but on the flip side of the coin, the same ease also exists
for hate groups and those seeking to cause harm.

~~~
educomments
The KKK and the nazis managed to form and grow without the help of the
internet. Also, finding other people who enjoy talking about cars or writing
fan fic doesn't have this sort of harmful in-group/out-group dynamic.

So I'm a bit skeptical of the narrative of the piece, especially because
there's no actual evidence provided.

My skepticism extends to the broader narrative of this newsletter.

Illich's alternatives -- especially the conviviality stuff -- always struck me
as _dangerously_ Utopian: if only we were all the same, then everything would
be great.

He's like that well-meaning stoner who asks "why can't we all just get along"
and sort of shakes his head and tells you that you don't get it if you ask
how, concretely, we're supposed to "just get along" in Gaza or Darfur or
Kashmir or any other place where there's a lot of zero-sum resource/power
allocation underlying centuries of conflict. The dismissal of real and
concrete harms on both sides of conflict is at least unhelpful and possibly
harmful.

Conviviality is a nice sentiment, and the world would perhaps be a better
place if everyone shared that sentiment. But sentiment is a starting point,
not an actual solution. The world's problems are usually too complex to be
solved with pure sentiment, and things will go wrong in unexpected ways if you
try.

One concrete example: the modern commercial internet's ad-driven information
economy elucidates a major flaw with Illich's "Learning Webs" from Deschooling
Society: the company that owns the platform just happens to be an ad company.
It's a flaw that even the strongest critics of Illich could never have
anticipated in the 1970s.

The point is more general: convivial societies only work if everyone is
convivial, and there will always be insanely inventive non-convivial people.
Even people who are more-or-less decent folks and even people who adopt
slogans like "don't be evil" will end up throwing wrenches in your plan.

~~~
ruytlm
>Also, finding other people who enjoy talking about cars or writing fan fic
doesn't have this sort of harmful in-group/out-group dynamic.

Purely anecdotally, but I beg to differ. There is more than a little bit of
tribal hostility on e.g. Tumblr around various fandoms.

To me, the real issue is that surrounding yourself with like-minded people
only teaches you to interact with people you primarily agree with and are
comfortable with, rather than the more valuable skill of interacting (civilly)
with people you disagree with.

------
sisu2019
I think the author makes an important point.

\----- By contrast, membership in groups of necessity cultivate a rather
different set of habits and expectations, certain virtues are inculcated
because the group of necessity requires them to function. \-----

Thats really the problem with all these virtual activities "on the computer".
They beat the real thing by a mile while not providing the psychological
sustenance human beings need. Online porn is a million women at your finger
tips that will never reject you so why go talk to woman in real life? Why be
funny or interesting or well groomed, that's so hard.

Instagram is full of beautiful vistas you can see without breaking a sweat so
why go exploring in your back yard?

Games are full of achivments, ones you are certain to get so why work hard at
anything real where it might be for nothing?

The problem is that we need all of that real life friction to lead a full
human life and we really need to strive to find meaning. We need to sweat, we
need to fail and we need to get rejected every once in a while, too. That's
the real reason why if you live a mostly virtual life it feels so empty and
bad that you want to kill yourself.

~~~
Steve44
Wasn’t this premise part of the story in The Matrix where they initially
created a perfect work but the humans didn’t thrive in that. We needed a world
with some pain so we can enjoy living.

In discussions about what you’d change in your past I’m fairly unusual in that
I wouldn’t change anything, including the bad bits [0] because it’s all part
of what has formed the person I am now.

In the plant world a forest fire is often good in the long term as it helps
with the distribution of nutrients so allows fresh growth.

[0] I appreciate that for some people there will have been possibly
devastating events or rabbit holes they’ve been down from which they haven’t
been able to recover and they may well have a different view.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Wasn’t this premise part of the story in The Matrix where they initially
> created a perfect work but the humans didn’t thrive in that. We needed a
> world with some pain so we can enjoy living._

Be wary of arguing from fictional evidence. "Suffering is needed to appreciate
happiness" is a deep-sounding meme with not much of actual evidence for it.
The utopias described in fiction tend to be either purposefully dystopian
(because stories thrive on conflict), or mind-dumbingly boring (e.g. visions
of heaven in some religions). It's hard to design an utopia.

