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The Internet of Beefs

ribbonfarm.com

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Re: The Internet of Beefs

#51

Post by twic »

quacker wrote: post #43
kick wrote: post #17

I hesitate to criticize this person, because they're presumably writing for an audience that already knows them, and probably are following for this style of writing, but I have to ask: What is it with think-pieces that state obvious and widespread conclusions while using jargon and jokes to obscure how basic of conclusions they really are? I can't fault people who do this because they're paid by the word and taking…

Agree. Out of context, this takes a ton of effort to understand. Some examples - Great Weirding morphs into the Permaweird - underground Internet that I’ve previously called the CozyWeb - unflattened Hobbesian honor-society conflict - Mookcoins are mined by knights through acts of senpai-notice-me - retreat into what I call waldenponding or to the CozyWeb Several of these link to other essays which, in turn, use ever…

It reads LessWrong's cooler brother.

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#52

Post by kick »

twic wrote: post #51
quacker wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. Out of context, this takes a ton of effort to understand. Some examples - Great Weirding morphs into the Permaweird - underground Internet that I’ve previously called the CozyWeb - unflattened Hobbesian honor-society conflict - Mookcoins are mined by knights through acts of senpai-notice-me - retreat into what I call waldenponding or to the CozyWeb Several of these link to other essays which, in turn, use ever…

It reads LessWrong's cooler brother.

Cooler? It reads like LessWrong's twin that decided to play D&D for an afternoon instead of Shadowrun.

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#53

Post by jslabovitz »

kick wrote: post #17

I hesitate to criticize this person, because they're presumably writing for an audience that already knows them, and probably are following for this style of writing, but I have to ask: What is it with think-pieces that state obvious and widespread conclusions while using jargon and jokes to obscure how basic of conclusions they really are? I can't fault people who do this because they're paid by the word and taking…

I enjoy and appreciate Venkatesh’s Ribbonfarm writings, and other writings like his. While the cultural situations he’s writing about may be obvious, I appreciate his discovery and naming (‘jargon’) of the patterns he finds. You could look at it as developing an intellectual framework. I consider it a sort of contemporary philosophy, which tries to be both conceptual and actionable. Some of his essays have made me rethink major outlooks on my own life, and make important decisions. I think it’s important writing for our time.

Often his essays are essentially experiments in structures and definitions, a kind of ‘what if we looked at things this way?’ methodology. In answer to your question of jargon/jokes, yes, that’s his methodology. There’s a lot of serious stuff in there too, but he likes to have fun with the ideas, as well as try to integrate his words into modern (online) culture in useful ways.

Venkatesh wrote a related article a couple of years ago: ‘A Quick (Battle) Field Guide to the New Culture Wars’ (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/03/06/a-quick-battle-field-g...). He essentially proposes that the only way to understand the the culture wars is to see them as actual wars, fought using the logic of warfare, not of, say, diplomacy or social rationalism. This essay has been extraordinarily useful to me, and has helped me develop very different political stances and associated actions.

As this article itself suggests, I enjoy an information diet in moderation — some short, some medium, some long. Ribbonfarm is part of the medium/long diet, and I feel much better having read there.

EDIT: removed unnecessary criticism of parent]

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#54

Post by itronitron »

kick wrote: post #17

I hesitate to criticize this person, because they're presumably writing for an audience that already knows them, and probably are following for this style of writing, but I have to ask: What is it with think-pieces that state obvious and widespread conclusions while using jargon and jokes to obscure how basic of conclusions they really are? I can't fault people who do this because they're paid by the word and taking…

the jokes are there to build a bond with the reader through identification of shared knowledge ... specifically, if the reader 'gets' the joke then they feel a sparkle knowing they have a special shared insight with the author.

I got the permaweird joke but the rest went over my head, naturally I stopped reading about a third of the way through as it is long-winded.

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#55

Post by Lammy »

kick wrote: post #49
rngAcc56 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the sad truth about fast and rapidly changing social norms. this lack of identity and community.

What rapid changes have we seen lately? The change in that person's comment has been in the making for over a hundred years. The first thing I personally can think of (in the context of America, as one of the last Western countries to accept GLBT people, not in the context of the wider world, which has been accepting for much longer than America) is American GLBT communes in the 1780s. Given where we are in GLBT acce…

I think the gutting of middle America is a big part of it. The most talented people are forced to leave for the coasts to make the most of their capabilities. This hurts both the leavers (like me) who have to built roots from scratch in their new home and hurts the remaining population due to the resulting brain drain. The us-versus-them attitude is then worsened by classist attitudes toward those entire areas based on the population who remain by my fellow “progressives” who will endlessly mock “flyover states” and anybody in them.

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#56

Post by virtuous_signal »

kick wrote: post #49
rngAcc56 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the sad truth about fast and rapidly changing social norms. this lack of identity and community.

What rapid changes have we seen lately? The change in that person's comment has been in the making for over a hundred years. The first thing I personally can think of (in the context of America, as one of the last Western countries to accept GLBT people, not in the context of the wider world, which has been accepting for much longer than America) is American GLBT communes in the 1780s. Given where we are in GLBT acce…

Albeit I didn't know about those communes, but I think LGBT acceptance was extremely rapid. The only other change I'm ready to compare it to was slavery and black civil rights: consider that the first state to legalize same sex marriage was Massachusetts in 2004. Over the next 11 years, we reached 37/50 states total, and then in 2015 with the supreme court decision we reach all 50/50.

For civil rights: we had slavery since the arrival in 1619 (which is the date I hear); we get the emancipation proclamation in 1863 ending slavery; but there are still Jim Crow laws until the civil rights and voting rights acts in 1964 and 1965.

To me that makes the road to LGBT acceptance sound extremely rapid, but someone with more awareness of historical trends in the US should put these into context. In particular when might we say various struggles began seriously, or entered the public consciousness.

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#57

Post by MisterTea »

virtuous_signal wrote: post #19
Lammy wrote: post #12

This article resonates with me and my experiences online to a startling degree. Specifically: “We are not beefing endlessly because we do not desire peace or because we do not know how to engineer peace. We are beefing because we no longer know who we are, each of us individually, and collectively as a species.” I think we are seeing a genuine lack of strong family, social, and organizational ties among most people,…

This is spot on. I wonder if this exodus has resulted in people trying to make workplaces their "religious community"; but obviously people who happen to be at the same company don't have any reason to agree on important issues. So then the mission becomes trying to make everyone at work care about and agree on .

I have spoke to many people who have said that they feel that work has replaced their social life, myself included to a degree. It also means that people don't want to move on in their careers as they get too comfortable with their work family and pass on better opportunities. I have a coworker who passed on a great opportunity just because he really likes working with everyone. A close friend had to be prodded by his wife to apply for better positions in other areas to advance his salary. Another friend's wife refuses to get a better job because she likes her coworkers so much.

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#58

Post by derp_dee_derp »

sebastos wrote: post #45
Lammy wrote: post #12

This article resonates with me and my experiences online to a startling degree. Specifically: “We are not beefing endlessly because we do not desire peace or because we do not know how to engineer peace. We are beefing because we no longer know who we are, each of us individually, and collectively as a species.” I think we are seeing a genuine lack of strong family, social, and organizational ties among most people,…

I read this article a few days ago and said almost exactly the same thing. The mook stuff is fun, but the line you quoted: >“We are not beefing endlessly because we do not desire peace or because we do not know how to engineer peace. We are beefing because we no longer know who we are, each of us individually, and collectively as a species.” is the important part of the piece for me, and I'm happy to see you and othe…

> In 2016, I flew home to PA from Boston specifically to vote against Trump in a place that mattered

this is illegal if your residence is Boston.

Congratulations, you committed a felony.

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#59

Post by narrator »

In the same way that Spark turns a program into a plan for cluster computation, there's some sort of process by which an idea and a bunch of talking points gets compiled into a big distributed staged media campaign through all channels and institutions that forces culture change that no one asked for. The canonical and somewhat "innocent" example of this is a major advertising campaign for a new pharmaceutical like Prozac for example, where the company pushing it has to explain it through ads, articles, movies (Prozac Diary) and so forth to the general public over a number of years so that people get it as a new element of the social landscape.

Related to this is a question that has bugging me is how is the social justice "ideological pipeline" constructed and operated? How does an idea, become an obscure scientific journal article, become a slew of newspaper editorials and human interest stories, which forms a twitter mob, in which the ideological program has been installed on all the "beef only" thinker nodes, then it's own Netflix show, and super hero movie and then becomes a law where you get put in prison for using the wrong pronoun.

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