Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Internet of Beefs

ribbonfarm.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 342 posts

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#121

Post by edflsafoiewq »

rexpop wrote: post #105
spappletrap wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost like our social bonds are being broken in the same way chemical bonds get broken when we digest food. Like our capitalist society is a higher-order organism that is extracting energy from our societal bonds.

What a fascinating analogy. There's certainly a well-explored conception of Capitalism's benefiting from particularly "alienating social relations," but as I conceive if it, that benefit's not so much about deriving "energy" from breaking social bonds, as it is about lowering the cost of coercion. After all, social bonds can give us the self-confidence to stand up to our bosses orders, and to re-organize our work alo…

It's a commonplace today that people are defined by what they choose to consume; that one asserts their personal identity by what brands they buy and what media they watch. The ones who are selling membership in these "sub-cultures" therefore stand to gain from the destruction of any form of belongingness that they cannot sell as a commodity.

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#122

Post by JauntyHatAngle »

rriepe wrote: post #113
watwut wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People like you who did not created ties to a group like that are quite better and less scary then people who have strong loyal unquestioning ties to groups - whether nationalist, traditionalist or radical Christians (some of Catholics in my country lately tie themselves to extremists). Membership and trust in these apparently feels great. That feeling is dangerous. That trust is not build on truths being told, it is…

Everyone is the same amount of religious in my experience. The people who join an established religion gain the quality of being predictable.

I really don't see that one.

There are people willing to drink poison for their cult - I don't see that level of religious fervour from the vast majority of people.

People who join an established religion also vary wildly. Gangsters and pedophiles sit next to soccer mums and librarians at church services.

I don't see the predictability or religious-(ity) being at all normalised.

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#123

Post by pjc50 »

narrator wrote: post #59

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 P…

> then becomes a law where you get put in prison for using the wrong pronoun

You were going so well until this point, because I guarantee you won't be able to find the story to back this up; it will turn out that the "wrong pronoun" was part of a sustained campaign of harassment or part of a death threat or suchlike.

> how is the social justice "ideological pipeline" constructed and operated?

I could talk about how this works, but only if you're genuinely interested and willing to take it seriously. And not as part of a beef.

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#124

Post by pjc50 »

watwut wrote: post #95
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,…

People like you who did not created ties to a group like that are quite better and less scary then people who have strong loyal unquestioning ties to groups - whether nationalist, traditionalist or radical Christians (some of Catholics in my country lately tie themselves to extremists). Membership and trust in these apparently feels great. That feeling is dangerous. That trust is not build on truths being told, it is…

Indeed. A lot of the modern internet "beefs" remind me of football "ultras"; the sport is really a pretext for the punchup, or at least the singing of death threats at each other.

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#125

Post by Lammy »

wayoutthere wrote: post #109
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,…

Hello fellow LGBT person! We actually have it a lot better than many marginalized groups -- if you want community, you can find it. You just have to put yourself out there in an offline sense and disabuse yourself of any ideas that you are somehow better than anyone else in the community. Go on a bunch of coffee dates and you'll make plenty of friends. It's not organized per se, but in many cities the queer people al…

I appreciate your comment, but my experience has sadly been the opposite of what you describe. Perhaps I've just been unlucky, or maybe I just come off as an asshole, but people in Bay Area LGBT circles have been quicker to find disagreement and ghost me from their lives than any other group of people I've ever met. After the third or fourth time losing what I thought was a close friend over what felt like a petty disagreement I have become very disillusioned with the entire concept of "queer community". I feel like I've grown more as a person through my friendships with the handful of self-described religious people I've met here by accepting and being able to discuss issues where we disagree.

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#126

Post by Thorentis »

This is an interesting framework in which to analyse the Internet and the communication that occurs on the Internet, but I don't think all parts of the analysis are correct. Or at least, I think many assumptions about the reasons for people behaving as they do have been made, that are not necessarily correct. I think the observations of behaviour are fairly accurate for some significnat proportion of those involved though.

Could it be, that the Internet has simply magnifed what humans have already been doing for hundreds (thousands?) of years? The rise of the Internet has also coincided with a large portion of the English speaking world (where the Internet first originated) being at the highest point of literacy and education in history. This simply means that the ability of each human to express their own ideas to another human is at an all time high. Now, add to that the ability to: * Observe the large numbers of people that agree with you (social media) * Broadcast your opinions on other groups of people to everybody that agrees with, and to everybody that disagrees with you (social media) * Carry the ability to make these broadcasts with you at all times (smartphones, tablets) * Be able to get instant feedback on your broadcasts (real time messaging, notifications)

... and you have simply magnifed existing human conflicts, desires for attention and belonging, opinionatedness, and so on, by many orders of magnitude.

What we are seeing on the Internet is simply the human experience and human nature on steriods.

---

The writer raises some doubt about how much of what they call the Internet of Beef is actually a culture war. But I have no doubt in my mind that it is a culture war. What is culture? The collective views, values, customs, art, morals, and beliefs of a large somewhat cohesive group of people. This is exactly what is being constantly debated, influenced, changed, synthesized, refined, and convoluted by the on-going Internet wars. It is shaping our culture.

Internet culture - due to the prevalence of smartphones and other devices - has begun (it begun a while ago) leaking into everyday culture. It makes sense then, that the politics of the day would be influenced by what happens online too. You can no longer separate the online world from the "real" world. The real world is made up in large part by the Internet world. Our culture has simply been given superpowers if you like, in order to rapdily evolve and shift and change at unprecedented speed.

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#127

Post by humanrebar »

mrspeaker wrote: post #86
humanrebar wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all Because pleasantness isn't a virtue in every context? Some unpleasant things need to be done and said sometimes. In fact, saying no in certain contexts is good , though it can often be unpleasant. That being said, some people find it pleasant to be unpleasant. Certainly self-censor if you sense that urge arising. Getting drunk on anger or righteousness isn'…

Unpleasant things very rarely need to be done or said, but people (me included) are addicted to doing and saying them. We all feel the need to desperately type the first thing that pops into our head (like the sentence I just typed, and I'd argue the reply you gave). If I wasn't allowed to reply to your response for, say, 24 hours - then I might write something useful and interesting. But the internet of beefs doesn'…

> Unpleasant things very rarely need to be done or said...

There are teachers out there giving kids deserved bad grades on a regular basis. Hospital workers change bedpans. Veterinarians have to euthanize family pets.

Do you want more examples?

But, yeah, sometimes the adults in the room have to correct a misconception or ask the trolls to leave.

For tips? Consider others as more important than yourself, even when you need to do something unpleasant. You'll find that teachers, hospital staff, and vets all find ways to do that when "nice" isn't possible.

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#128

Post by devchix »

CommieBobDole wrote: post #2

This is an excellent analysis of the state of the modern internet, though I don't entirely agree with his diagnosis of the cause; I think it's more down to two main things: 1. We are all, at heart, covetous xenophobic apes, and we've been doing the same basic thing (arbitrarily define an in-group and an out-group and proceed to wage total war on the out-group) since before we were even human. This is just the latest…

>conflict is the most engaging kind of engagement

This doesn't feel right. I ask myself, do I go places to look for people to fight with? Emphatically no. Do you? Probably not. I just read this great|hateful book|movie|thing. I want to talk about it with people who have experienced this book|movie|thing, would be great if they saw it the way I did, also great if they disagreed but we could discuss it with a shared language and experience. I feel we are too far apart and too lonesome to go around picking fight, do picking fights form groups? I don't usually engage because 1) strangers on the Internet mean little to me; 2) I think I hold an unpopular opinion; 3) I'm not driven to articulate every thought I have. Conflict drives a good story, I think that's true in a narrative sense, but I don't think it's true we humans go looking for it. I want to believe we are more cooperative creature than a belligerent one. The whole Twitter/Facebook "like" culture is a testament, we want to belong.

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#129

Post by chadcmulligan »

4thwaywastrel wrote: post #111
chadcmulligan wrote: post #93

Is it though? or is it the disenfranchised finally are able to have their opinion heard? We also get to see the emperors now and we realise they have no clothes - they're just like us. My hope is this is a brief period of education of everyone to see each others opinions and something better can come of it. As always there are those at work trying to maintain their positions. For myself I have learnt a lot about the…

I don't think the posted conception of the culture war as a "holding pattern of conflict" is incompatible with the idea that it's also a legitimate outpouring of the voice of the disenfranchised. Some might say that we've become stuck in that outpouring, and enamoured with conflict rather than any kind of coherent vision for how to be.

Could be, maybe these conflicts are fundamental to being human and no resolution is possible? This is the new normal?

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#130

Post by Lammy »

watwut wrote: post #95
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,…

People like you who did not created ties to a group like that are quite better and less scary then people who have strong loyal unquestioning ties to groups - whether nationalist, traditionalist or radical Christians (some of Catholics in my country lately tie themselves to extremists). Membership and trust in these apparently feels great. That feeling is dangerous. That trust is not build on truths being told, it is…

I've experienced plenty of that dangerous unquestioning extremist fervor from progressive/LGBT circles too.
Post reply on HN