I'm pretty sure this generalizes to everything. People who cultivate a persona in any sub-culture or domain seem to be a fish out of water when confronted in a different context. Take someone from the rave scene and plop them down in a microbrewery bar and everyone will gawk at the brightly colored fidgety person that has no idea what to order. Take a polished SV entrepreneur and deposit them in an Idaho roadhouse and observe as they struggle to communicate with patrons that don't speak pitch-deck. Extremely online people generally don't practice the skills necessary to communicate well in person like eye contact, conversation, or manners so you'll get predictable results when gathering them in meat-space.
I'm pretty sure a bit of googling will turn up a long history of articles of this nature dating all the way back to the BBS days. Having attended BBS meetups I know that the vibe of these gatherings hasn't changed.
> People who cultivate a persona in any sub-culture or domain seem to be a fish out of water when confronted in a different context.
It's possible to generalize too much:
1. The size of the different context and the extent to which someone feels like a fish out of water matters. It's one thing to say that someone might feel a bit out of place if they were suddenly dropped into an unfamiliar festival in another country. It's another to say that many people in a particular subculture are almost incapable of having normal human interactions in any offline context.
2. Sub-cultures aren't all equal, and it's possible for certain subcultures to encourage behavior that most people would consider anti-social or unhealthy.
There are sub-cultures and there are insular sub-cultures that form someone's entire identity. These Internet people would be a fish out of water anywhere, whereas the Silicon Valley entrepreneur might just be able to blend in, socialize, and find some common ground in that Idaho roadhouse. You need to have at least some kind of personality and be capable of a little flexibility. The subjects of the article were neither.
I'm fully a raging California leftie now, but whenever I go back East to my rural hick home town full of rifle ranges, defunct coal mines, and Trump flags, I can still pass as a local and somehow manage to not irritate everyone around me. You have to read the room and be adaptable. You have to set aside differences and find / focus on the commonalities. This is not dark wizardry, it's just part of being a N-dimensional human being. I didn't see N-dimensional humans in the article.
Head higher up North. There's still some right leaning stuff, which for some reason SF newspapers like to call Far-right extremism. But when you're actually here, it's probably exactly like your rural rifle-range town.
Then again, some of the leadership of those towns are so far gone that they take obviously nonsense Facebook posts, have their sheriff hold press conferences lying that they've verified the posts, and then expend a ton of time/money/energy looking for "antifa busses" while passing around far-right newsletters encouraging the police to prepare for attacks on officers by these same mythical antifa adherents. Also going so far as to express support for the Washington militia that terrorized the random family of campers who made the mistake of visiting their shitty little town.
tbh it seems like the author herself is the one that's the fish out of water. I doubt the people in question are remotely as interesting, avant-garde or important online as the gushing intro suggests, but the rest of it seems to mostly be a story of how a clique were nonplussed by the complete stranger (a female one too!) turning up to their party asking lots of questions about online stuff. Sounds like half the people attending weren't "very online" (the attendees that don't know what the NFT is but are here because a friend invited them, and the scantily-clad girls that aren't normally seen at such events but seem very much to the tastes of the people organizing this one) and the ones that do know about the NFT apparently weren't interested in talking to strangers who aren't buying...
I'm also not sure the world of multiple anime-girl edgelord personas with NFTs necessarily generalises that well to the "very online". She could probably have had a quite different experience at a party of gushingly earnest activists or the sort of nerds who stop being shy and awkward when someone asks them about their favourite MMORPG or open source project.
The article is easier to read when you assume it's a hitpiece and that the author is an unreliable narrator. Not fond of terminally online people either but they are shaping the culture.
Yeah, this is the kind of article that should be written by an open-minded anthropologist, not a Stanford grad intent on being opinionated. Unfortunately, every time a "hit piece" like this gets published, it makes the Internet just a little bit less weird and amenable to interesting subcultures.
I don't think they were necessarily being literal, I think they meant more, "with the mindset of an anthropologist". You don't have to be an anthropologist or submit work to a journal to approach a situation with an open mind and the goal of understanding without passing judgement. But if you're looking to understand what makes a culture tick, they're probably the people to look to for techniques and inspiration.
I agree, it's an old notion, and reads somewhat Gibson-ish. I am enjoying the article. In a way the narrative matters less to me than the fact that it feels like the old days, and I'm glad this kind of zeitgeist is still clacking around the tubes.
BBS meetups are filled with BBS people who may seem mismatched to outsiders, but their community is the BBS, and for some, their life is online on the BBS
In my experience most people who joined a BBS didn't have any problems with email or IM, but at that time most didn't have access to either of those things outside of the BBS systems they used.
Even people who had internet access back then used BBSs to communicate with people near them on topics that were either local or which generally interested them.
Most boards had spaces which allowed general discussion of anything, even if the BBS was created with a specific subject in mind (computers, warez, occult stuff, photography, etc).
Lots of the people I saw at meetups were a bit on the shy/awkward side, which wasn't too uncommon for people who were into computers in general those days, but they were able to get along fine at meetups because they already knew many (if not most) of the other people there. They'd spent hours talking, and debating, and sharing ideas with them. They could go to a meetup and talk about all the same things they talked about online and they already had some idea of how people would react to them.
A local BBS was a great place to meet friends because it gave people a safe space to get to know each other at their own pace with carefully chosen words before being forced into real-time face to face interaction, and once they already had relationships established the transition to hanging out in real life was made much easier.
Our BBS meetups ("bashes" in our lingo) were a wide range of outside the mainstream people.
Teenagers with nerdish interests (me and my crowd), hippie physicists from the local university, BDSM people, swingers (a lot of swingers, probably party people by nature), a few Hitler-was-right Nazis here and there, some pagan types, conspiracy theorists, gay & lesbian folks, and on and on. There was a some overlap in the crowds, and at the bashes everyone mixed and matched just fine. Fun was had by all.
I later dated someone from those bashes for a few years, and a couple of people from back then are good friends to this day. Still in touch with a few more, all of whom are doing interesting things.
I remember the family type bbses with different people of all ages male/female but I also remember my hacker group meetup where 4 of us shared a 6 pack. Each bbs was it's own scene
I can't help but think it might be more like putting a married person in a singles bar.
In other words, you might make choices how to behave in the situation that you might not have made earlier in life.
I've noticed many of my friends have mindfully chosen more things in their life. They have chosen relationships and behaviors, or more importantly avoided certain relationships and behaviors to allow other things.
Probably a side-effect of growing up in a place where I disagreed with basically everyone around me but still got along, but, you can plop me basically anywhere with any group of people and I’m going to have a good time.
We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. If it were just one comment, I'd post a warning instead, but you've been doing it a lot, and it seems to have been a problem for years:
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I enjoy how you jump to the defense of ravers and entrepreneurs and in the same sentence call a roadhouse located in Idaho "low class". There's something very poetic about this cognitive dissonance.
I'm intentionally using extreme examples of people who are highly committed to the scene they have embedded themselves in just like TFA interviewed the most extreme members of "internet people" they could find. Take a minute to think before immediately reacting with your anti-bias bias.
Most ravers I know are perfectly capable of ordering a beer. If they're getting stared at in that scenario it's purely due to their appearance and mannerisms, not their inability to interact socially.
Raves are social events by definition. So someone who goes to them is likely to have at least some capacity for in-person interaction.
(Beer is often sold at raves btw - although many really serious raver types won't touch alcohol at a rave.)
I think you need to get in more. These types of characters certainly exist, and incongruous juxtapositions are often entertaining and sometimes enlightening.
people are also prismatic in identity and adaptation. though, playing against type is also commonly performative. you're both suggesting a kind of simplistic human form
You're right, instead of using hyperbole to emphasize their point they should have just highlighted how every human being is complex and nuanced instead. Surely that would have done it.
The point as it stands is inappropriate and ultimately wrong. Or are you saying rationalization of poorly-thought-out lines of argument trumps respecting people in all their complexity?
You're missing the point; the hyperbole is used to illustrate how "person of Domain A" and "person of Domain B" may not have even basic levels of overlap within a given domain.
> I don’t want to be anything like these people. I don’t want to be an internet person.
I love this. I got a similar vibe from people who were "too good at IRC," way back in the day. They had a constant, sarcastic, tired energy about them. They had difficulty being genuine about anything. They knew so much and yet they were so stuck in their life somehow. And that sucked the life out of them.
It's like they were too tied to this vague idea of being online that they weren't willing to sacrifice it to have a better life.
> They had a constant, sarcastic, tired energy about them. They had difficulty being genuine about anything.
I knew such a guy on IRC back in 2003. We all kind of looked up to him on the channel. He was quite eloquent and had (what seemed to us) an enormous knowledge of history and philosophy. His sarcasm bordered on sophisticated nihilism. He spoke to us like Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now. His occupation was nebulous.
Now, 20 years later, a former channel member and I (both in our mid-30ies now, with families and jobs) exchange a few nostalgic mails every 1-2 months in the typical lingo of our channel. We still make fun of this guy as the personification of nihilistic evil, a kind of mythical uber-mephisto of the internet. But in reality, we all realized decades ago that he was just this strange, bitter, unemployed guy in his late 30ies or early 40ies (older than we are now), who spent his entire life in front of mIRC. His history knowledge and nihilism boiled down to repeated Nazi jokes, and his philosophy knowledge was based on a few Nietzsche texts he must have read. We were a bunch of pubertal school kids on some Quakenet channel, and he, more than twice our age, was a kind of tribal god to us. He clearly enjoyed it. It was pathetic.
Some of the people described in this (excellent) article very strongly reminded me of him.
I wouldn't say it's pathetic. People try and get power/control/ a sense of meaning anywhere they can. This man probably didn't have a great life and found his only refuge and belonging to be in IRC.
The alternative may have been to confront harsh reality and realize you're nobody to noone.
>This man probably didn't have a great life and found his only refuge and belonging to be in IRC. The alternative may have been to confront harsh reality and realize you're nobody to noone.
It's exactly like Reddit power mods, or that one guy that edits half of wikipedia or whatever the statistic is. It's pathetic to some people, sure, but if it isn't hurting anyone and the person chooses that life, not simply falls into it for lack of options, what's the harm?
It's power in a place they are comfortable with. The issue is when that impacts actual human relationships, or is turned for purposes that are (for lack of a better way to quantify it) bad.
Power mods using their influence to make sure the subreddits follow the individual sub rules, and ensuring that nothing nefarious slips into the general consciousness- it gives that person a sense of worth and meaning. Great!
Power mods using their influence to sell products, market products surreptitiously, squash stories they don't personally agree with, or otherwise abuse said power - bad bad bad. Not Great!
> It's exactly like Reddit power mods, or that one guy that edits half of wikipedia or whatever the statistic is. It's pathetic to some people, sure, but if it isn't hurting anyone and the person chooses that life, not simply falls into it for lack of options, what's the harm?
In my experience even the "respectable" cliques are like this too. Artists, journalists, the honest-to-god English aristocracy. Any scene of "cool" people ends up being kind of pathetic once you get close enough to see the details, however many drugs they're taking or pictures they're putting up in galleries or whatever.
> It's pathetic to some people, sure, but ... what's the harm?
Hmm, pathetic doesn't mean harmful. It's closer by meaning to "feeble", which I agree with in the case of Reddit moderators. I don't think they are very influential at all.
"pathetic" means pitiable, from the greek "pathos"
> This man probably didn't have a great life and found his only refuge and belonging to be in IRC. The alternative may have been to confront harsh reality and realize you're nobody to noone
Most people are much too self-important. If you think at the global scale, each of our existence (except those in position of extraordinary decision-making power) is pretty unimportant/inconsequential outside of the realm of chaos theory.
I think that understanding this is the first step of putting yourself in a position of power. Self-importance is very blinding.
David Foster Wallace, whom some might sneer at, had a number of observations on the phenomenon you've described. For example, from the book "Conversations with David Foster Wallace":
'Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for. That's what made the early postmodernists great artists. The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates. The virtuous always triumph? Ward Cleaver is the prototypical fifties father? "Sure." Sarcasm, parody, absurdism and irony are great ways to strip off stuff’s mask and show the unpleasant reality behind it. The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, "then" what do we do? Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone. Once everybody knows that equality of opportunity is bunk and Mike Brady’s bunk and Just Say No is bunk, now what do we do? All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.'
Not to be pedant about such things, but there may be a reason it's a common scifi trope that people are hooked to machines and live in virtual worlds. It is not out of question that the internet eventually becomes an endpoint in itself.
That's not pedantic at all. I've consciously decided I will favor Real Life over the Internet as much as possible. I really believe the meme that Nothing Happens On The Internet; it's a projection of the Real World and as people we are very susceptible to confusing the map for the territory.
From the article:
> You can close the computer, but the world will go on without you.
Even if culture decides that the Internet is tantamount to real life, I'm happy to keep the Internet at arm's length. It is profoundly weird to me that the private online life I led in the 90s was something shameful and to be hidden and now it's okay to be so addicted you become awkward in real life, constantly on your phone, and that I should give a fuck about my follower count.
Besides, accepting that the world will go on without you is part of adulthood.
Why not reverse it, I push a button on the computer and something falls out of the sky IRL. Your smart electric meter turns off. The water company shuts off your service. The internet is real life as much as you cannot tow a leaking oil tanker 'out of the environment'.
People don't need the internet to be narcissistic, they've done that fine for thousands of years without it.
no, when you meet many grounded people they're helpful, want to help fix your tire, see if you're ok. Things have changed towards narcissism and unless you're older than 35 you probably can't see that.
pressing a button to have something fall into reality is another thing that creates narcissism. You don't see any of the people involved in getting that thing to you. You can start seeing the world as your personal slave at your bidding. Now for centuries, yes, there have been rich people that can do that. If we make that accessible to a LOT more people - everyone has a butler that they don't need to even talk to.
I don't know what I'm saying right now other than - the world is vastly different than it was pre-internet. It can't go back. Things are forever changed for the worst in some (most?) categories.
"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers." -- Socrates
Cultures, people, and attitudes change. They've been changing for millenia and they'll continue to change.
> everyone has a butler that they don't need to even talk to.
Aristocracy in some parts of the world didn't talk to staff, they would just announce in the presence of the servant that something was needed and expect that it be provided.
The bigger impact here when it comes to internet/real life schism is the fact that employers will utilize any digital footprint to make judgments about you, and subsequently fire you or refuse to hire you because of it. At the same time, having a follower count beyond a certain threshold also gives you access to a lot of real life resources. Both of these have tremendous impact on people in many ways, as an example one of the careers kids have most wanted to become in several decades now has been internet-focused (youtubers, tiktokers, influencers, etc).
That's the issue with the qualifier "as much as possible". That will always be sliding towards increasing levels of digitalization that the qualifier becomes meaningless.
It certainly has an influence on one's life, but I refuse to make it the center point. I also refuse to be anxious about the fire/no-hire potential it can pose.
It is a useful medium for sharing things and I'm always open to contributing more good content online. But being Extremely Online? No thank you.
There's some real value in social circles around games. Even if accomplishing things in game might be seen as a nothing, those social ties can be real.
Yes. Because the game is the medium for connection, and overcoming challenges in a group of people who want to do that is pretty magical. GitHub is similar in the sense that people have a shared, common goal. I love stuff like that.
Most traditional social media doesn’t work as well for me. I need an underlying common goal.
> a constant, sarcastic, tired energy ... difficulty being genuine about anything. They knew so much and yet they were so stuck in their life somehow. And that sucked the life out of them.
synonymous to HN (comments section) vibe of 2020s.
Oof, that’s a little too relatable. I’ve spent the better part of a decade recovering from that. It has very much colored who I am today but I do my best to not allow it to define me.
I grew up a geek in a rural area, learning how to filter conversations for your audience was a critical skill.
Topics and conversational style amongst my D&D group was very different than amongst my other high school classmates and very different than when at my summer jobs.
This is just an article about people who never learned that skill.
I'm reminded of a few moments in my life that drove this home ...
A coworker (60 year old railway worker) who said "You shouldn't use ten dollar words in a twenty-five cent conversation."
A girlfriend who described the difference as "Weird is when you know you're weird and compensate when needed, strange is when you don't know you're strange."
I grew up very geek in a VERY rural area. I knew that there were places that I could be me, where I could be "country" me, and where I could be me "for adults". I learned that the me what I was, was also super unacceptable once I entered the world of higher education. I had to be "smart" me.
Then in my undergraduate degree, I learned about code switching in the context of Mexican-American children of immigrants. And it hit hard.
I was code-switching, but within dialects inside of one language instead of within languages. I also learned in that class that EVERY student who grew up rural, poor, minority, or anything other than middle- to upper-middle class white had extremely similar experiences. It was absolutely shocking to 20 year old me.
To your point - this article absolutely reads like people who just never learned how to navigate different groups.
Code switching is completely natural to me, I would not know how to express myself with just one language to some people. What did you learn about it that impacted you the most?
Honestly, just that it existed and was a common feature of some peoples' lives.
I grew up feeling very outcast. I grew up in a town of less than 50, in a super poor, rural part of the US. My interests were outdoors related, but not guns and god like everyone around me. I was more interested in learning about natural systems and the interplay of wild plants and animals and humans in the world. I never 'fit in' anywhere. None of the school clubs, none of the classes, everywhere I went I felt that I had to 'be someone else'.
Then I went to college and learned that, for many people, they literally get to do that every day, and that there was a name for it! It felt validating that someone else in the world experienced what I experienced (even if it was whole-language based instead of just dialect/cultural norm based).
Masking seems to have a negative connotation. Usually, and indeed in the Wikipedia article above, it's presented as a boundary or defence mechanism against societal pressures. But interestingly, etiquette involves a lot of masking and the aim is to make interactions more pleasant for all parties.
This is similar to masking but also very different. I just don't talk about geek stuff with family and friends back home because they are not interested. They do, however, know I'm a geek so I'm not "hiding" that from them.
Nor did I suffer abuse or humiliation from classmates or coworkers that made me change my behaviour.
Yup, also a nerd that grew up in a poor rural area. Some of my friends struggled with this but for me it really taught me how to be a chameleon. It also taught me to keep an open mind. While I wasn't into sports (like most nerds) I did find I really liked bowling and was on a league with many of the other redneck kids I wouldn't normally hang out with. I learned I had more in common with people than I thought, even if I really only opened up with my small nerdy crew of friends.
It's paid dividends as an adult because in most situations I can guess there's at least something I have in common with others even if it doesn't seem obvious at first. I can go most places and feel (or at least look) like I fit in. It's also allowed me to have a broad range of interests as an adult that I may not have had had I stayed more insular.
This is just an article about people who never learned that skill.
Is it? I read part and skimmed part, admittedly, but I got the impression this was just an article portraying a particular subculture, one the author wasn't not at all fond of. The author seems to actually take the opposite of your tolerant view that people naturally can use multiple "topics and conversation styles" in multiple social context. I would agree with you but it seems For the author, the topics and conversation styles of the people at this event are the primary evidence that they couldn't be normal in any other context. That and one guy having "shifty eyes".
We were introduced to the concept of "self monitoring"^ in social psychology classes in college, which attempts to describe this phenomenon.
Reading about it was a bit of a light bulb moment for me, as it offered some explanation for why I'd always made friends with people from varying social circles, who often seemed to not get along with each other, while finding it relatively easy myself to get along with most any social group.
I thought this sounded familiar, and sure enough[1].
Edit: To make it explicit, which Palladium notably fails to do: this person is a reactionary and has a history of encouraging young girls to commit suicide.
As someone who has recently discovered my neurodivergence, the first few paragraphs strike me as being very cruel towards people who are different. The internet, and niche social spaces, have given those who can't fit in a means to build community.
I did not know, but am not surprised, that Palladium takes Thiel funding. That greatly clarifies this article’s purpose for me. It seemed odd to see another think piece about the NFT trend when it has already largely burned itself out, but Davis here is acting as something of a “party whip” for Thiel’s nascent political movement. The message of the article is much more aimed at the people being described in the article than it is at you or I: be less like these insipid Twitter personalities, be more like JD Vance and Blake Masters.
Sorry if I’ve misinterpreted something you’ve stated - but as somebody from the “area”, I just wanted to mention JD Vance is an astroturfed loser in the most major way & absolutely nobody should aspire to be like him.
Like, I’m pretty sure I’m from the poorest district in the state/area.
Vance is a fucking loser any of the even mildly intelligent around despise.
I think the person you are responding to's point isn't that these are people to look up to, but it's how Peter Thiel would prefer people acted. Thiel was a major sponsor of Vance's campaign.
I think that's in fact a reason why, and even the article itself is aware of this, these subcultures and the commentary on it seem so banal in real life. In reality it's more or less an economic grift to get funded by ideologically motivated venture capitalists, and everything centers around this. In Germany we call it "Hofberichterstattung". something like royal court reporting.
This person admitted[1] to being the same person behind the Miya account. The posts made by that Miya account (they are public record, and has been archived since a long time by different accounts, see [2]) include :
- calls for the extermination of Jews
- calling homosexuality an "epidemic" and perversion
- saying that "since we gave vote to *** we should give to gorillas too"
- things like "a husband is to his wife what a parent is to their child"
- asking counsel for "mind controlling an egirl slave harem"
- boasting about bullying persons about their weight
How is that "close to reactionary" ? This is extremely grave behavior. I have friends that have suffered a lot from this community, have witnessed their posts myself at the time they were made, and I cannot even begin to comprehend how could someone call that "close to reactionary if your IQ is low [...]" and end that with "DYOR". It hurts a lot to see that comment, and it makes me feel extremely uneasy to see these posts, especially one on "I don't want to be an Internet person" upvoted to the front page of HN. I don't know how to describe it, but there's something really nasty going on here.
>While CharlotteFang may be termed something close to reactionary (if your IQ is low and you can only think of 3 or 4 political archetypes)
I would put them more in the neo-Nazi / pseudo-Esoteric Hitlerist archetype (https://archive.ph/qlYqD):
>How to save a nation in 5 steps:
>First, you kill the Jews, who always seek to ruin and exploit other nations.
>Then, you remove any peoples who are not native to the country in question*.
>Then, you remove any vestigial influence left by the Jews, either by re-education, physical removal or otherwise. This includes everything under the cultural marxist platform: feminism, homosexuality, "sexual revolution," etc.
>Then, you will work to re-coup and re-discover any heritage that may have been lost due to Jewish influence. You will work to carefully modernize your country based on the principles traditional to its native culture.
>Now you may allow non-natives into the country but with limited rights on a temporary basis. Other peoples and countries will not be discriminated against, they will each be considered meritable under their own culture; but nothing will be done to draw their influence into the country's own identity.
And before one argues this was edgy rusing and meming and LARPing and all that, CharlotteFang/Miya was an active, long-time moderator and owner of several 8chan /pol/ offshoot imageboard websites and boards, as well as a heavy poster on the original 8chan /pol/, all of which have connections to neo-Nazi mass shootings, including one attempted mass shooting of a synagogue (who Miya and friends affectionately refer to as "doorcuck" because he failed to breach the door of the synagogue and resigned himself to murdering some nearby civilians instead).
Plus a perusal of their old Twitter makes it very obvious exactly where their sympathies lie. It's all Savitri Devi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savitri_Devi) type stuff.
The worst thing about these people isn't that they're shitty edgelords spouting nonsensical gobbledygook about NFTs like they've discovered fire. The worst thing about them is that they're uniformly boring in every conceivable way. Great, some submillennial has made his own version of ZooTV on a dying social network. That must be terribly exciting if you've never seen any media ever that came out before Gossip Girl. Yaaaaaawwwwwn.
As a Millennial who spends a decent chunk of time on the internet, but not on social media sites, your words are incomprehensible to me and I’m not sure why.
It's bad enough that some people have anxious, provocative, and attention seeking personality that comes out as fringe tech elitism. Yet it's even worse that this is nothing new.
I'm just sick of seeing everyone have these obxious, stupid "extra" personalities. Nobody can be calm or cool, nobody ever wants to channel any kind of zen, everything has to have the energy of an episode Pee-Wee's Playhouse. It's like we never advanced past 3 years old.
The most active people on reddit/Twitter/social media:
* have lots of free time, e.g. teenagers, students, the unemployed. People with an average job and kids don't have the time to constantly be active on social media. Hence, you're reading a lot of teenage angst and people with non-traditional lifestyles.
* have some reason to spend more time socializing online rather than in real life, e.g. because of niche interests, neurodivergency, specific personality traits...
* have a job where a presence on social media is required, e.g. politicans, celebs, journalists. These are more likely to post provocative stuff(?)
The reason nobody is calm or cool is because those people don't post on social media. Everything is an episode of whatever that thing is you mentioned, because the target audience is 14-22 year olds that have plenty of free time to be online.
It's not the fake personalities that's so bothersome, it's the energy level. I hated it then and I still hate it now. People need to chill the fuck out.
> they're uniformly boring in every conceivable way
This is such concise and brutally accurate way to sum it up, I salute you for this brilliant description. I could not agree more, such a spot-on assertion!
Your comment sounds almost Seuss-like somehow. Partly that description and assertion is a slant rhyme, but it also feels like there's some kind of (un)intentional pentameter going on
I like the piece. The tone kinda gives me the same vibes as Neil Strauss' The Game (vibe heavy anthropology trip into the distasteful, or at least unnerving, subculture).
The part at the very end about the internet people winning is the part that freaks me out (and drives my own middlingly unhealthy doom-scrolling). Just the other day I saw Curtis Yarvin is now some minor Rasputin figure for Peter Thiel, and I couldn't help but think "that lunatic monarchist edgelord from years ago is now influencing where real real political money gets spent?" I don't want to be an internet person, or even pay as much attention as I do, but it feels kind of like even if you don't believe in the internet, it believes in you and it'll eventually show up anyways.
Interesting on several fronts. The article you linked is a uh, lot to unpack haha. I get where they’re coming from but unless they come out and say thiel is our wise philosopher king so we needn’t worry about men not being angels and such, it’s hard to see what relationship between science and power couldn’t be justified. They nod at Lysenko and basically say “yeah but this bureaucracy is really a drag”. In industry there’s benefit in mad little dictators telling the establishment to stuff it, cause damage is limited and gains are outsized. But it really seems like they dismiss the scientific method as burdensome. Unorthodox thinking is still alive and well but yeah they have to put up or shut up just like the mere mortals who don’t have an easy answer to hard questions.
Edit to add: after a brief read of Samo’s work I’m now somewhat concerned that he’s a much less insane yarvin with indistinguishable goals and a much higher chance of nudging things in his direction.
I found XOXO conference to be much the same way. The attendees were capable of some basic social grace, but having manifested from the context of "internet people," they lacked substance in person.
It's not hard to not be an internet person. You just have to decide to actually study something, anything, and to a deep level. Once you do that the grounding manifests itself and then you have more important priorities that preclude drifting around like that.
Back in the day, I went and attended a "Fark Party". Remember Fark? Well, they actually had meatspace events, and they were as pasty and awkward as you could possibly imagine! Mostly a bunch of 20-year-olds who were much less interesting than they thought they were. Fortunately, the one I went to was in Vegas, so it was easy to ditch the edgelords and go have fun.
A few people mentioned the article's subject matter being Gibsonish, but if I recall (haven't read him in a while), Gibson's cyber-characters were not just online-cool, but were generally backed by richly complex humans. The influencers and Twitterati the author describes have barely any human personality behind them--they're all boring, vacuous, superficial.
I suspect this is an attempt to troll us all into fighting, by bringing up a beloved conference that some might classify as “woke”.
But anyway, there’s something to what you say but I think that analogy doesn’t go very far.
Every year the hosts have, in their intro keynote, urged attendees to be more outgoing than normal. So yeah there are lots of introverts.
But the promise is that being more outgoing will pay off - because XOXO is curated to be entirely nice nerds. And it’s very anti-grifting. The scene the OP portrayed of e-girls and NFT guys seems like a polar opposite of their vibe. It’s more literature nerds showing off their board game about Pride & Prejudice, or an indie game about a mischievous goose. The whole point of XOXO, I think, was to find people who were doing internet stuff for the love of it.
The pattern here is not the internet but these people being severely autistic and so they are probably forced to thrive online where they aren't having to deal with eye contact or other social queues that they can't really process. Not even sure what this was meant to be, but it should probably be rewritten to "I don't want to be an autistic person" and it would have read the exact same way. Even down to the preferred drug use being a straight up dissociative...
I found the author's pointed lack of bothering to ask about pronouns when the subject of their investigation posts under different ly gendered pseudonyms; use of the words "normal people" and infiltrating a group only to neg them to be more problematic than anything.
The subject of the article might be a real shitheel. But the author doesnt do us any favours by cloaking themselves in being a Voice of the Normal while being themselves a shitheel.
> Because no body actually cares, no body will use your made up pronouns.
This is why some transgender and nonbinary people have stopped trying to reason with their friends and family about their gender identity, and have resorted to clicker-training them like dogs to use the appropriate pronouns and pay them basic human respect and dignity.
It's a video of a girl who demands to be referred to as "they" for whatever fashionable reason, and has decided to use a dog-training clicker to remind her family members of this imposition whenever they use "she" as they normally would.
I meant actual clicker training, with the clickers they use to train dogs. It's ridiculous, but so is the lack of respect shown when people stubbornly refuse to use the correct pronouns.
There are probably more genderqueer people out there whose families wish them dead, than there are ones who try to manipulate their families by "childishly threatening to kill themselves".
I'm reminded of the fragilely masculine fulminating about false rape accusations when so many actual rapists never even get reported.
Refusing to play ridiculous pronoun games is not hurting your respect and dignity. It is not anybody else's problem or responsibility to participate in this.
There is a difference between the usage of 'xer' by an edgy teenager who identifies as something incomprehensible vs, for instance, using 'she/her' to refer to a biological male that made a conscious, adult decision to transition to female.
If one decides to change their first name, they have every right for their friends and family to respect that. If I wanted to be called, for instance, Vladimir instead of Richard, it would be really bloody rich if my mom insisted on the name _she_ thinks fits me better. Same with sex/gender transition (I am not up to date on terminology here, but you know what I mean) - there is nothing more than showing basic respect for choices an individual does for themselves.
How are peoples' names less made up than their pronouns? It seems just as rude to refuse to use someone's preferred name as you would their preferred pronouns.
Outside of a small set of Twitter/Tumblr/TikTok bubbles (which overlap in userbase), pronouns are fixed: he/she/they (rarely they). Xe/Xir is not something average people will honor or use.
I mostly agree with that: if someone is a participant or a potential participant in the conversation then we should refer to them in a way they find acceptable, provided their demands are reasonable and in good faith. On the other hand, if someone is speaking or writing about me in a language I don't understand then it's hardly my job to tell them what pronouns to use and I can't even reasonably tell them how to pronounce, and perhaps decline, my name. (Try looking up some internationally famous people in the Latvian or Lithuanian Wikipedias. Obviously I'm not famous enough to be in there, but if I were, would I have any right to be treated differently from Rišī Sūneks?)
A journalist writing about someone they've interviewed ... as part of doing the best they can for the people they serve, the readers, perhaps in some cases it's reasonable for them to ignore the preferences of the interviewee?
My problem is the author deliberately states they didnt bother to ask, and does so in a way that is almost bragging about it.
Through the article, this happens in various forms.
If the point of the article is to criticise someone's behaviour for being an "internet cool person"; opening by your opinion piece by stating you were too cool to bother to do something; and later stating that you as the writer are a normal person, and that you feel sick after infilitrating a group, there is a level of hypocrisy there.
I agree with you there are legitimate cases for ignoring someone's preferences to improve the quality of information imparted. However, the author doesnt state any apart from "didnt bother".
Outside a college campus in California, nowhere else in the world do people ask for pronouns when they meet a person. It's not a normal human interaction.
You might not do it when you meet someone. But think about the sheer number of web forms, systems or standards that are about to have to go down a rabbit hole of whether they are modeling biological sex (medical systems), terms of address (people focused systems), etc.
Would you turn away 5% of your customer base because you didnt add a third option (ie: i prefer another term) when capturing someone's details?
...isn't 5% almost exactly the Lizardman Constant? (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...) [Edit: my point being that the percent of people with strong non-standard gender preferences might well be less than 5%, so I doubt you'd be turning 5% of your user base away.]
Also, just to play devil's advocate, there are some people from the other side who could theoretically be annoyed by new pronouns as options and refuse to use your service because of it
There's a fun game I like to play with people who talk about Language Rules: they tell me the construction they think is "ungrammatical", and I show them a well-respected author who uses that construction.
Starting sentences with conjunctions, splitting infinitives, and the Oxford Comma Debate are easy mode; I can normally find an example in any given book. It's a bit harder with pronoun use – that's a per-work thing, not a per-paragraph one; and it's single words, so I can't cheat with a search engine – but I haven't lost yet. Want to play?
A great way to test the difference between the online and offline world is to boast about something you accomplished in a family gathering, say thanksgiving.
"I scored 3 goals in last weekend's game".
That's wonderful! (nobody truly cares, but it's still recognized and celebrated.)
"I got 40 likes on my last tweet"
???
"Wait, it gets better: 20 people watched me play a game. Had to stay up until 4AM but still, worth it."
???
Truly, nobody gives a shit. It means so little that people will not even pretend to recognize it. It's more like a negative accomplishment that gets people worried that you have poor judgement in life.
Agree. This has nothing to do with online vs offline. The distinction here works just as well between sharing two offline events. Some people care about some things, but not others, with seemingly no reason other than because some things are more culturally accepted as being important.
The difference I was aiming at is that the offline events are widely understood, relatable and recognized.
When you do well in a sport, I may not care one bit about this sport myself, but I understand what a sport is, that it's played in the real world, is competitive, and that you had success in it. Hence, every possible demographic recognizes your accomplishment without question.
This is not the same thing as streaming a game nobody ever heard of and having 20 spectators nobody knows. It's not or poorly understood, not seen as a relatable achievement, also not in an absolute sense, and at times may even be seen as an anti-accomplishment: do something useful with your life.
You can try to intellectually smudge these two things together as being the same, but that's nothing but semantics. My point stands that online accomplishments are not accomplishments unless they are extreme (I made a 100K from Youtube).
I have a few streamers and Twitter personalities in my friend and family groups and so we do actually recognize these things. I grew up with a more "traditional" low-brow blue-collar upbringing and find it frustrating that my friends aren't following more of the World Cup, basketball, American football, etc etc. Funny how niches work right?
I appreciate this article. First, it is well written. Second, it is well-versed.
I know many, many people who have fallen into this trap of being an Internet "coolguy" and are absolute boring, anxious and insecure nerds in meatspace. Ironically they often yearn to connect their irl popularity with their internet personality. It's as if they realize the Internet moves fast with or without them.
> Will people forget about me if I am not on the internet?
I dropped off the internet while I was in the military and deployed, the answer is yes.
That said, I'd like to turn this on its head. It's normal for friends to go out of touch, reconnect in somewhat of a cycle. Some people stay constantly in touch, but not everyone. That isn't normal, and to be quite honest, would be super stressful for me. It's like juggling a dozen hot plates with pancakes being formed on them. You're eventually going to burn one or let it all burn spectacularly. My conclusion was that losing touch with a lot of my high school and college friends wasn't historically abnormal - staying in touch with them forever was.
It's also normal to have different depths of friendships. Not everyone needs to hear your deepest inner thoughts. This kind of summarizes what I think is wrong with social media.
Internet culture and it's subcultures are weird. That's to say, though, that any deeply entrenched culture is kinda weird. They have their own language, memes, attitudes, etc formed and influenced by the adjacency of it's members. That's to say, I look at sports people the way this person looks at the weird assortment they followed to a ketamine party. If you're going to a giant parking lot, ripping your shirt off, screaming, getting black out drunk, screaming at players, devoting precious memory to niche sports and player statistics - are you not mechanically the same as these folks? The difference being that your community is physical.
The point of my text was to flip what it is to be "socially acceptable" in the modern era on its head. Grotesque manliness at football events to many people is so off-putting they won't be near those events or people. Same can be said for these new internet subcultures.
Point is, I think if we zoom out this is just normal human behavior. To be something to talk about, to perceive yourself as someone, to have a common language, to have quirks and oddities. It's more about what you fit in with that describes what you find "weird". This author doesn't fit into this culture, but probably fits in to another culture that others on this post would find "weird".
In response to your first paragraph, you say that, but so-called "grotesque manliness" is not only socially acceptable, it was literally the gender norm for centuries in the west. May be today or in some corners, such behavior is off-putting, but it definitely is far more the norm than nerd culture was until about ten or so years ago.
I do however agree with your second paragraph that subcultures generally have their own norms which can be rigid and off-putting and rigidity is generally annoying. That said, in line with my contention, certain subcultures do genuinely correlate with certain social groups who do in fact have power in society and so it is a equivocation to presume that all subcultures can be judged on the same terms.
In the past being an "internet person" brought you into interesting sub-cultures. You had shibboleths (like quoting bash.org) that would identify you. Since the internet was small you would meet genuine often interesting people. I still have friends from the "wild west" days of the internet. The time period, I think, was the absolute best time to be alive and on the internet (though terminally online lamers and cry bullies demanding censorship may disagree).
Now, the apt term for people who are "too online" is "terminally online". The terminally online are more like a cancer than an interesting sub-culture. Since social media has allowed them to gain some semblance of following in a hyper-niche subgroup they think they can take their absurd opinions, styles, ideas, etc into the real world and expect it to work. These people are easily identified. When placed in an uncomfortable situation they become cry bullies. You might know many of them as your current HR department.
Your description is very accurate, but I would suggest that they are often the types to complain most fiercely about HR departments in general, not specific organizations per se but rather about the existence of HR as a social class that sets cultural norms. Terminally online folks dwell on both sides of the pro- and counter-establishment cultural divide.
I'm not sure if the sociological experiment that the author conducted was really immersive enough to produce a good take on the subculture. It's fairly obvious this was intended along the lines of Hunter S. Thompson's "Hell's Angels" - which may have spawned an entire genre of sub-culture literature (I don't know if Thompson really originated it or not, there may be earlier examples, perhaps Zora Neale Hurston). The theme is pretty consistent: a writer inserts self into subculture, gets the full experience, writes magazine articles/books that others can gawk at.
Maybe this particular subculture is just fairly boring and shallow, mostly fabricated by moneyed interests (NFTs...) and there's just not much to say about it? Kind of sad, has the USA turned into a cultural wasteland?
Raymond Williams has theorized the nature of subcultures (residual and emergent), which are almost always incorporated into the mainstream in one form or another. I'm afraid that because this culture is so incredibly toxic that the effects of this incorporation will be like a collective poisoning. This can already be seen in the resulting superstructure (art, politics, finance) and mainstream social relations, all of which are deteriorated and confused more than ever it seems.
In any case, I noticed the Thompson similarities as well. This kind of reportage flicks the light switch in a dark room, in which then the cockroaches run for the corners.
Yeah, I can't really blame the author for not wanting to go any further down that particular rabbit hole. From what I've read, it also sounds unpleasantly similar to conditions in the FTX/Alameda warren.
I was very active in my local dial-up BBS scene in the mid-late 1990s, when I was a teenager. I even ran a dial-up BBS. Outside of school, I estimate that I probably spent more time online than socializing with my friends IRL. (In real life.)
BUT: I have much more vivid memories, and better bonds, with my friends. This is partially because we spent a lot of time together in school, and because we actually bonded.
Although I had online friends, and I took the time to meet some other BBS people IRL, I never developed any real bonds with them. One of my very active BBS users attended the same college as me. We met a few times, but never rekindled our online bond.
This made me realize that my online bonds are more like a hobby than a real lifelong friendship; much like at-work friendships that fizzle out after a job change.
Needless to say, a few years ago I generally dropped out of Facebook; the hobby (Facebook) was getting in the way of my relationships. The people I care about either don't post on Facebook, or Facebook seems to make me angry at them.
I think it is more implying that friends that you have exclusively online are more of psuedo-friends than real friends. Especially if they make no effort to continue communication after you stop using whatever form of social media you were using before.
There's a difference between a real friend and someone you have some affinity with and currently happen to share a community of some sort. It's fairly common to meet a friend while attending a particular elementary school, going to a church, playing a sport, but when you finish school, stop going to that church, stop playing the sport, you remain friends. It's obviously common to lose touch with a bunch of people and never talk to them again, either. Those were not your true friends.
Which raises an interesting question. Is it possible at all to have a relationship that purely takes place on a web platform that will continue after you leave the platform?
"The" communication medium your friends use seemingly shouldn't matter. A person you only interact with when there is no friction involved isn't much of a friend.
Jack Shafer in their book "The Like Switch" says that there are 4 elements in building a friendship: proximity, intensity, frequency and duration of interaction.
Similarly to work and school friends who are very proximal and spend a bit of time with us, online friends tend to be very distant physically but the interactions we have with them can be intense (like gaming) and frequent. So these pseudo-friendships can have some elements of a strong (substitute for the word "real") friendships, but don't have all of them.
I don't really have friends anymore. The random strangers on HN and other boards are the closest thing I have to friends now. I have a handful of on-off DMs with strangers on instagram.
I'm not an 'internet person', but the social selection near me just doesn't gel with who I grew up to be. Interests/hobbies/politics etc. Hopefully I can get money together to move soon and find people with whom I fit.
So, who are "real" friends? Only people who you interact in face to face? Does the same thing also extend to family? If I move countries and can only meet my extended family over the web, they become "not my real" family?
This weirdly ignores that no one wants or expects to interact with their family solely virtually indefinitely owing to distance, and that long-distance friendships made also entailed having met face-to-face before keeping in touch.
A friend online can still be friendship, but more limited in what it can offer. There's no replacement for being with people, it's a fundamental human need. I've been in close-knit online communities in the past and never once did it fulfill social needs. At best it was entertaining.
This article has been eye opening for me, I too spent a lot of my time on the internet but thankfully never came across the deep end. Made me realize that there's no point in keeping up with memes and stuff and made me think about what actually matters
Eh, this article really touches on nothing new and if I bothered I could find many others like in in the past X00 years based on people that dive head first into things and make it their lives. "I don't want to be 'religious fanatic group' person" , "I don't want to be 'music trend people", ad infinitum. It turns out that people that tend to focus on one subsection of culture are not well rounded and generally boring superficial people. Nothing about this has to do with the 'internet', it's just that HN is eating it up because the word internet is in it and many of us have a strange magical reverence to it.
I went down the rabbit hole after reading this, as I love sub cultures and yearn to see some new ones. Some learnings:
Now there is a certain avant garde playing with the narrative thing going on, which is part of it, so the story that you can find out about the thing is changed at the time its going on and after its happened. The lore is recorded by people within the culture and they are in on it. Certain of the interactions with the author and the characters she met were on the whole staged, or intentional trolling of the author. "some young writer is coming so let's tease her".
The trolling, anti-cancel culture, the pro-autism always-online which may have come from the chans is almost 100% opposite from the "white pilled", positive, almost over the top caring messages that the subculture is putting out. But it's not the same as the we are all going to make it greed-optimism of crypto.
As we see in these fellow comments, most people who have encountered internet people have found them to be nihilistic, anti-social, maladjusted and negative. This sub culture is trying to be the opposite of it, but it exists along side a kind of schizoid-side - it's very odd.
Compared to other NFT young people meet ups (the author previously wrote a popular article about the Bored Yacht Club parties) - this subculture appears to have more women.
Compared to other NFT projects, this art project does not prioritize holding or purchasing an actual NFT image, and seems to value a kind of plagiarism, "just download the png" or anti ownership in a way. It reminds of of plunderphonics/vaporwave from last decade.
The traditional and social politics of the founders seem at odds with a rave and taking drugs. puzzling to me! Someone here says that the drug - Ketamine is apparently chosen as reduced social anxiety?
"Ginevra Davis studied Symbolic Systems at Stanford and now works in art and design. She writes about technology and youth culture."
One step would be to stop using your state-issued name on the internet. "Cr4zyBoy4eva" is a bit better than the Facebook/LinkedIn-mandated "real name", but rather childish, hence why an arbitrary UUID string might be a better fit. "There are no girls on the internet" and "on the internet men are men, women are also men, and children are FBI agents" point to a deeper truth, which will only be amplified by the post-Turing test chatbots, beyond ChatGPT: the internet is not for humans, there are no humans on the internet, don't be a human on the internet.
While you're technically correct that the state does not pick the specific name you are given, in many cases they restrict which names you can register. Germany has restrictions on both given names and surnames. State-given name is a misnomer for the concept though, they should have said state-registered name.
And how did your parents became Mr. and Mrs. Smith? In all the countries the "family" name for the hoi polloi was mandated once the state consolidated. Before, your father's grand^x-father, who was a blacksmith, was simply known, for the Dunbar's number of people who knew him, as 'John, the blacksmith', maybe 'John, Mary's son' if there were two Johns around. Look at how most of the Scandinavian "family" names end in "sen" or "datter" meaning, well, son and daughter.
This may come as a surprise, but in most western countries, to a first approximation, people can change the name they use when interacting with the state to whatever they want, whenever they want. The process does involve a small bit of tedium, but really isn't particularly onerous or expensive.
I've had multiple names over the course of my life (and notes linking them together in various documents should I ever need to prove to someone that the person with name A is the same as the person with name B; to date, I never have). It's pretty common.
Moreover, people can use whatever name they want in whatever places they want on the internet, and don't have to be obvious about it when it's not the same name they use in other places online or offline. If I tell someone my name is John Smith, 99.9% of the time all they need that information for is to know that I am the same person they interacted with previously; they don't need to know or care what my bank or my family call me, nor is there any reason for me to tell them.
There's an amusing anecdote that does the rounds about Napoleon mandating a national register in the Netherlands, and the Dutch not taking kindly to that by registering using all kinds of silly names. Unfortunately for them the register stuck and centuries later there's people going through life being called "John Big Buttocks" and such.
Amusing but alas, from when I looked into it it seemed like it was made up.
Not amusing, but true, is the story of Willem Arondeus [1], who in 1943 destroyed 800,000 identity cards from the Municipal Office for Population Registration in Nazi-occupied Netherlands in order to increase the efficiency of forged documents. The state power, murderous or not, is the sole beneficiary of the "family" name.
> You hear it all the time—“the internet is horrible, but.” But I can learn so much. I need it for work. All my friends are online
But these are not the Internet's problem, rather edge forums/social media problems, however I recognize that for many people, the internet is just social media at this point.
A true internet person should be one who uses it frequently, that would probably be a software developer, yet most of the time they aren't as crazy as these people.
> He slouched in his chair and told me, unprompted, that he doesn’t have many friends
Wow.
These people are just mentally ill at this point, its impressive that they were able to attract girls to this shitshow.
Also how do they make money? Do they all just sell NFTs ?
> I don’t want to be anything like these people. I don’t want to be an internet person.
I'm a bit perplexed by the title. The article distinguishes between an early, anonymous, unregulated internet culture -- which the NFT club seems to resemble -- and contemporary internet people who "decided to make the internet boring."
As cartoonish as it is, I buy that distinction. But usually, when people make it, they're making a plea for the old internet. The writer of this article, however, doesn't seem to be doing that. The milady community feels, "a little bit, like that internet from 1995"; it is unlike social media communities where you are "constantly performing your personality" and "Liking is a personal endorsement." Again, when people make that distinction, they're usually writing against likes, personality, and "iPhone photography of yourself."
So regarding the title: does she not want to be either type of internet person? Or is "normie" social media engagement ok?
My understanding is that she feels like the pseudonymous internet is a black hole from which we can't escape and we've already passed the event horizon.
- Some people don't know it yet.
- Some people choose to pretend it hasn't happened.
- Some people, like her, wish that it hadn't happened and are peering into the void, struggling to come to terms with it.
- And the people she's writing about have realized it has happened and are running toward the singularity.
She feels that our culture is defined by those going the fastest, long before the rest of society catches up to it. But we'll all get there eventually, and the avant garde will be further away from the unaware than ever before.
I don't think she's making an argument about whether we should fall in any particular bucket. She doesn't want to be in the avant garde though. Maybe she's sad about that, because she pictured herself as being an avant garde kind of person.
Author seems a little too close? For me, the big takeaway is how it represents the superficiality that happens here? Like, this whole thing wants to be genuinely cool/Gibson-ish, but I can't get over the banality of it all.
I was poking around some of the content and it's just so blah, in terms of how they're just taking a laundry list of every hot button issue and then asking, "okay, how can I troll it?" -- revealing no core underneath.
Other commenters have already articulated how internet subcultures are comparable to other historical examples social subcultures. I think the first order bit is to ask the question if being an internet person produces a imminent threat to human civilization. Personally I perceive physical decay in our well being, happiness, and an overall reduction in the quality of live. I often am reminded how people use to spend their time in the physical space and wonder if we just spent 5% of the time on the internet supporting our local communities we would have a objectively better human experience. It's not that I perceive the internet inherently bad. However, as a tool for psychological distraction, it is incredibly effective and often used against our personal best interests.
It's fine whether or not you want to be "online" or "offline" - you just need to understand that the basic currency is different.
If you think being an online person is some horrible thing or a marker of being a bad person, you just value different things. The kinds of people in TFA are selected for by merit of not living up to your offline standards in one way or another.
Never heard of the guy he's talking about, but started getting strong "weirdo" vibes wrt the author after the third paragraph of character assassination, largely based around this persons appearance.
For anyone who read all the way through - does it get anywhere close to making a point or is it mostly about how ugly people the author doesn't like are?
I actually find that I'm more awkward online/in chats than IRL.
The fact that you have longer to think about your messages and modify them before publishing, that you have to think carefully so as not to multi-text (which seems desperate), that you don't have access to non-verbal cues for context, can't smile etc. all contribute to this.
This article is interesting but it seems determined to reach its conclusion. I have a hard time believing that everyone seemed so cold and lifeless to those who weren't looking through the author's lens. I'd expect people to be a little awkward at any internet gathering. I feel like this piece seeks to "expose" them for not being as cool as their Twitter personalities, but we already knew that, and there are better things to criticize them for than their posture or red eyes.
Behind "Creepy is the new cool" lies ambivalence [1]. Author Ginevra
Davis writes a voluminous 4300 words that revel in, celebrate and exalt
a culture which, in her parting sentence, she reveals to be the sum
of all her fears.
i was online from my pre teens time. i actually had to wait a 'few' years to get my own email address. back then, there was no "social media", no algorithm and you were taught to not give your real "A/S/L" because people could track you down and hurt you and all that. oh the days.
i adopted this randomuser handle, not linking my accounts from one service with another, not reusing handles, not having google/FB/apple accounts, it takes time and energy.
anonymity on the internet is a wonderful thing really. forget the abusers and stuff, moderation is for that. when you consider the real problem of doxing, you appreciate the benefits of using anoymous handles.
>Everyone knows, abstractly, that the internet is not real life. But you can’t picture it, not really, until you sit across from the real people behind the screen. Even the darkest online personalities are just people on their phones. It is oddly disappointing to meet the “worst person on the internet” and find that they are nothing at all.
I have a terminal application that i wrote that rewrites all text that i plan to write to have a neutral tone. so i type the comment, put it into the terminal application, it rewrites the comment, and then i post that instead.
I don't have a second account so I checked stylometry and it gave me bunch of names that I know are not me. Maybe I will try with a new second account and confirm.
Second, stylometry can dox me how? My current handle is not attached to anywhere else on internet and even if someone did HN/reddit/twitter stylometry analysis, how will that reach my home and or identity of my passport? Its not like I post anything online in my own name. Haven't in actual years.
So assuming an adversary was trying to find me and did see my reddit or active twitter account, so... What? Short of breaking into it and checking the 2fa number (which I avoid at all costs) how ? Maybe amazon but I don't write reviews so ..... How would you go about this?
By themselves, none of the things we discuss are inherently bad. They are just tools. I open with this, because it is important to understand that stylometry by itself uncovers only a small facet of your online persona, by possibly identifying your footprint and allowing for ingestion and analysis for OTHER identifying information.
Using your example your passport may not be online, but lets say you link self-hosted project, your website may be registered to your company and, depending on how you set it up, your information may be relatively trivial to run against information broker database ( LX, TR ).
It is surprisingly easy to slip even if you are privacy conscious of it and it really only takes one time since internet does remember ( and it is saved somewhere ). I guess what I am saying is I would not dismiss it outright, but at the very least I would check the link parent added; it actually is kinda amazing.
Someone could use my writing style to link my online identities together. How does that help them doxx me when there is nothing written under my real name?
See, here's the problem with the internet, you have to assume your data is out there forever. You may have fastidiously ensured that your personal information has been posted as of today, but it doesn't matter, one mistake tomorrow and the entire house of cards collapses.
Lets say you borrow your dads computer to post and it's logged in under his name. You log into a site with an incognito browser and post a message in Chrome and then close it out.
Well due to a bug in that version of Chrome the full path of user folder Chrome was in was added to the request logs on the server 'C:\users\ronald.t.devito\appdata\....'. This gets put in the servers logs with your username. That server had bad security and the logs leaked to everyone on the internet. A hacker realizes that 'belli' is also use 'causi', and a few other profiles. They see that username is pretty unique to a 54 year old male from the west coast, but the writing style is of a much younger, likely male, person which points at Ronald's son Jonny.
You are at risk of being disclosed/doxx on the internet because of security issues everywhere in the stack and its exceptionally difficult to cover all the bases.
You don't need to give out your name and address to be doxxed, there's enough information from your comments across your accounts to reasonably identify you if someone wanted.
MIT did a study on 'anonymised' data and found out it only took something like 2 data points to identify someone.
You don't need to give out your name and address to be doxxed, there's enough information from your comments across your accounts to reasonably identify you if someone wanted.
Oh, if a comment needs a personal detail it's randomized. Sometimes I'm married, sometimes I'm straight, sometimes I'm American, etc.
Perhaps, but the site above doesn't seem particularly effective. I have an alt for reasons of convenience I use about equally regularly to my main. It's not even listed on the set of likely candidates. Meanwhile I've five spurious correlations above .6.
It might have if I had used an algorithm that wasn’t the easiest to implement on stylometry.net. Unless you are varying your writing style across accounts a more sophisticated algorithm could very likely figure out your alts given enough comments. Which is not to say that you should give up everything and stop posting on HN but just something to consider depending on who your adversaries are.
That's kind of ignoring my original point that it doesn't matter how many of your accounts they ID if you never put your personal details on the internet.
Use different slang on different accounts. Don’t bother with capitalisation on some. Use British English on some. Etc. The speaking style aligns with the username.
If HN will permit a bit of old-man-shakes-fist-at-cloud I think the internet was better before we went and let so many people on it. It was small and poorly organized and weird and mostly authentic. The hyperactive and over-exaggerated always-on 'youtube personality' wasn't a thing and people talked about interesting things from time to time.
This seems quite silly. Adolescent nihilism and alienation, scatter-shot irrationality, and calculated transgressions for attention are ancient. As is cynical opportunism. They've been part of (mostly) youth movements for centuries.
The only thing changed by the Internet is accessibility. Previously people tended to know each other personally. Now they can mix it up online. This makes their presence a little more obvious and a little harder to ignore.
But there must be hundreds of these micro-scenes with their nano-gurus and micro-leaders, and most people will still never come across them.
They only become dangerous when they grow - or are grown - to the point where the groups stop being small and insignificant, and where the messaging is carefully and deliberately tailored to trigger irrationality and self-harm in mass audiences.
That's not a good thing. But it's no worse - and often less effective and less toxic - than some of the nonsense pumped out by supposedly respectable mainstream media.
Flagged the post as I don't think a person engaging in the behaviour discussed in this[0] thread needs a greater audience or needs to be paid any attention whatsoever.
I'd argue that this is a misuse of flagging. This isn't spam or an endorsement of their worldview in any way. In fact, it goes out of their way to make the person seem somewhat pathetic. The dialogue taking place about the Internet People is fairly robust, indicating there's value in the content to the HN community.
It's up to the mods to decide whether they think it's acceptable content or not - flagging simply brings it to their attention. I don't think the HN audience needs to spend their time adding such a horribly-acting person to their consciousness. There could be any number of other, non-problematic "internet people" to focus on in an article, and I would welcome such an article being written and/or linked to in place of this one.
Leaving comments to boast about what you flag and moralizing about what kind of content is worthy of attention?
You might be an internet person, my friend.
More like this article, plz. Or we could go back to our usual high brow, attention worthy content of "I asked GPT about a thing and you won't believe what it said"
That story is about a fake-cancellation that Charlie created with his friends against himself. It is some kind of commentary on this very situation of you trying to get this taken down.
We have long since moved from notion that the internet is an opt in tool. I fondly remember when Mac OS 9 would prompt you about the internet on first boot and you could pick "my computer does not connect to the internet". Looking at you Windows 11.
What a boring article. Let people live how they want to live. Just because you don't like their lifestyle/personality/way of living doesn't mean you get to act like you're better than them.
That was absolutely my take when I read this, but reading the comments it sounds like there's some background to the character study that isn't elaborated on here. The criticisms in the article itself felt petty to me, but apparently Charlotte Fang has said some really terrible things in the past, and if I had to guess I'd say that's where the tone of disgust in this article is coming from, rather than them being a boring person.
Off-topic. Does it bother anyone else this style of writing which starts by describing the physical traits of the characters? At this stage I just skip when an article starts like that.
> Internet culture used to be something you engaged with in private. You have your public self, your real self, and then the part of your brain that scrolls mindlessly at the end of the day.
Funny, for me the internet was always where I'd let down the barriers and drop the facade, the place where you could actually find the "real me". Then again I don't think I'm the type of person described by "scrolls mindlessly"...
I don't really think this is a new or interesting phenomenon just because it involves the internet; since the first subculture existed, people have sought them out and/or molded them in order to be a big fish in an incredibly tiny pond. This guy doesn't represent "online" or "the internet" any more than Bob Smith, who rules the entire North Boise Yu-Gi-Oh community (all seven members of it) with an iron fist, represents the physical world and human interaction in it.
As other commenters have noted, the subject of the article is apparently also a terrible person and possibly a psychopath. Which again, runs true to type; he's found the largest possible community where he capable of being enough of a Big Deal to abuse people with impunity. Which, as it turns out, is pretty small and esoteric.
I was also (I got online at the age of 4 in 1993) and I think a lot of avoiding the pitfalls was being around adults in real life who understood how the internet worked. Not just my parents, but other adults as well. For example, I understood very young that there was a lot of overlap between people I talked to online and the awkward adult men I met at computer shows. I also got to listen to my mom's complaints about existing as a female geek in IRL geek spaces. It prevented me from putting internet people on a pedestal. I always knew we were all weirdos.
I'm not entirely sure I agree. I mean, maybe I do. I think one could argue that the internet is a lot more moderated in this day and age, but maybe you were referring more to the addictive and destructive effects of social media.
Moderation seems to be best at getting rid of low-hanging fruit. There is much less easily accessible gore, shock and radical content online these days. But thanks to the very large scope of the internet, there's plenty of more insidious threats of the cultural (unsavory, doomer), physiological (dopamine-bombing scroll media, attention-grabbing content, personalized emotional manipulation by ads), and societal (dating/friendships moving online, echo-chambers, etc) nature.
Probably like the author of the comment you are responding to, I also grew up with the early pre-y2k internet. As a kid, I've seen some extremely disturbing thigns online that are burned into my memory until today. And yet they do not have as much impact on my life today as the terminally online society does.
It's hard to exactly quantify how our lives would be different if the internet never developed past it's 1990s state. But I feel strongly that they would be very different. Would my life be much different if I didn't see one or two unsavory images as a kid online? Probably not. Even when I was young, I had functional mental/emotional boundaries for that. On the other hand, as an adult, I still have to consciously stay away from doomscrolling because I know my brain has never evolved for that kind of abuse.
To sum up, moderation doesn't seem to target threats online that are actually dangerous. And they seem to have impacted our society tremendously from my perspective.
It's so incredibly easy these days to go down some internet rabbit hole and end up with some extreme beliefs.
The popular thing on the news is of course grampa going right wing into facebook rabbit holes or whatever but that's just one example. Teens going left/right going down whatever rabbit holes, eating disorders, other political beliefs, body issues, need I go on. Your kid ends up in some discord group of strangers and sorry but you can pretty much forget about getting him or her back to reality. It's all the same mechanism.
Sure there are nice things too like hobbies but the internet is filled with the freaks and weirdos. They have nowhere else to go to. Why put your child in a pit with them?
> The first social media platform, called SixDegrees
IIRC, iam.bmezine was in 1994. Granted, it was a lot more esoteric/niche because you either had to pay or submit an image of a body modification to their gallery.
I think another one of the themes of that setting was that the Sabbat or the Anarchs were themselves LARPing as rebels against the Camarilla while creating their own petty kingdoms to control. A rebel today is a warlord tomorrow. Perhaps the same could be said of keyboard warriors.
The irony here is that bloggers were a big part of internet counterculture not so long ago, and now we've got these long screeds written on blogs that exude a sort of boomer-ish "back in my day (6 years ago)...".
The take would be a lot more interesting if the targets weren't so utterly, predicably, boringly safe to criticize either. I guess dissecting a counterculture that isn't predominantly young white men into NFT's would take a bit more courage. though.
I really, really think that negative feedback needs to make a comeback. Anything besides a hugbox counts as bullying now, even when _people desperately need to change_. The people in this article are horror shows who need introspection, not encouragement.
Well it's fair to debate the best way to bring about change that I agree they need. I certainly don't mean to encourage them to continue on this path. Everyone needs a kick in the ass now and then but I would bet money that kind of approach here would just push them further into their shells.
I don't want to be an internet person either, but I'm fascinated by them, including people like Charlie Fang. I love listening to Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog's "Blocked and Reported" podcast, which covers a lot of very-online people, drama in communities you wouldn't have expected (like knitters, or the battle between the "prag libertarians" and the "Mises Libertarians"), and how much "mainstream" press gets completely wrong or lazily reports.
I think a lot of these very-online people will come to regret it, especially because the Internet never forgets and they'll never be able to shake the reputation they've established.
>his orthopedic sneakers couldn’t touch the floor...
>his tiny frame perched a few feet away on an oversized leather chair...
>a crooked smile that reveals a row of nubby teeth
>disappointing to meet the “worst person on the internet” and find that they are nothing at all
I think the author has missed the point about why Charlie is the way he is, why he has spent so much of his social life online, she did apparently reveal how this Charlie is looked upon by "normal" people in real life through no fault of his own.
There is no requirement for HN submissions to be journalistic, so I don't know why you were expecting that.
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
>Like most online culture, it all feels so profound until you realize that he hasn’t said anything at all.
So pretty much like TFA... Which is basically a virtue signalling hit piece (the target even asks "if they're planning to write a hit piece").
"The content of his work would repel, or simply confuse, a traditional viewer"
... and then the author points to a screenshot of a tweet (the "drop out of college, default on your student loans" etc (of which the most controversial part is about not getting the covid vaccine) that would seem totally quaint under lots of pretty tame contexts (from 60s counter-culture and 70s punk fanzines all the way to modern leftists), as if the average Joe is the standard after which anything becomes scary...
>To 99.9 percent of the population, Charlie is nobody
So clearly all you did was get angry about a couple of lines in the article that were disparaging to Charlie. Did you not read the whole thing and understand the larger point? That Charlie is likely in the small group of people today who are setting the norms for tomorrow?
>So clearly all you did was get angry about a couple of lines in the article that were disparaging to Charlie.
Rather, I read the whole thing, and grasped its tone, intention, and structure.
>That Charlie is likely in the small group of people today who are setting the norms for tomorrow?
Charlie and his "influence" is insignificant to the "norms of tomorrow", and if you take away the jabs at "weirdos" like Charlie from the article, the only thing that remains is a tired old "online vs offline" diatribe, the kind of which has been written 200 times a day since 1997 or so.
Picture this article being written a vi/vim user; about all of those "freaks who use emacs".
At some point you realise the writer is doing the same kind of thing as the people described, their criticisms make a low effort to understand and declare the "other side" wrong, for reasons that are basically "I didnt like it".
From other comments here, I've since learned there is plenty to criticise about the speech, actions, behaviour of this individual, which is trivial to discover.
I'm pretty sure a bit of googling will turn up a long history of articles of this nature dating all the way back to the BBS days. Having attended BBS meetups I know that the vibe of these gatherings hasn't changed.