Hell Is Other Internet People | Hacker News Reader

Hell Is Other Internet People

thebaffler.com

105 pointsclydethefrog52 comments

> By using informal writing to convey the regular dramas of human life, they also started reshaping informal writing into something that could deeply convey the full range of human emotions,” writes McCulloch. When we need a method of expression, language—or perhaps Lockwood’s abyssal portal—figures it out.

Exactly. Text doesn't quite have enough bandwidth for the emotional subcarrier, unless you're a superlative writer. So people need to hang some neon signposts on it.

Not to mention the role of in-jokes as group bonding. In my circle of friends one of the choice GIFs for frustration, especially with anything musical, is https://tenor.com/view/eric-morecambe-frustrated-gif-4687881 ; not just referencing Eric Morcambe's expressive comic acting, but the entire "Grieg's piano concherto by Grieg with him and him" sketch. We've gradually accumulated more of these from TV shows watched together and kibitzed over the Internet, so the reference is not just to the show but the time we watched it and reacted to it together.

Shaka, when the walls fell indeed.

(Referencing Patricia Lockwood is a positive to this essay, you might enjoy reading her work too, in the role of interlocutor between the literary world and the Extremely Online world.)

> so the reference is not just to the show but the time we watched it and reacted to it together.

But you're talking about actual friends and actually shared experiences, and I think internet memes are something else.

Often enough there is no "together" there at all: when someone reproduces an internet meme, they may mean something they can't or are too lazy to put into words, but it may get interpreted completely differently, or not at all (yet may still get "agreed to" for the sole reason of others also knowing the reference, or at least having it seen used a lot... as in "I don't understand this or know the origins, but I know it's 'official' and roughly know how to use it"). The point is, nobody cares enough to even follow up to check if the message was received, and generally many people just suddenly start saying things because everybody says them now, like a rash.

Sometimes, the message isn't even fully formed in the mind of the sender though, and "oh, you know what I mean" actually means "don't make me reflect on what I'm trying to say here, and if it makes any sense". That's not particular to interwebs memes, but there it's considered almost uncouth to call nonsense out, being a spoil-sport, or proving lack of humor by not finding funny what has been decreed objectively funny by the invisible hand of the hive mind.

> The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

-- George Bernard Shaw

Picture me in front of a diagram: "People are so lonely, they mindlessly repeat things this stupid just to belong." Harsh and obviously not 100% true, but sometimes it's really just that. Even just YouTube is a giant abomination of a testimony to people talking and listening on auto-pilot, if you just care to cast a cold enough glance.

I don't think language is solely a social phenomenon: the ability to reflect on it, and to use it precisely when thinking, when using it "between oneself and oneself", is just as important.

I think it was Ken White who I saw observe that the plot of the TNG episode "Darmok" seemed somewhat ridiculous until he observed modern twitter. When 50% of the replies to a tweet are those reaction gifs...it suddenly doesn't seem so crazy that a whole language would be built around cultural metaphors.

I've also gained a much deeper appreciation of hieroglyphs thanks to this.

I used to wonder how much meaning could really be encoded in them. It's a huge body of shared cultural knowledge that makes them work.

Also makes it so there are harder cultural edges to distinguish groups and people can't move between them as easily either.

It's plausible but holy hell will scientific papers be really imprecise in that language

There's a basic weapon that many people seem to forget: ignore what doesn't matter. That useless trendy language/tool/methodology that sometimes fills half of HN front page? Don't even click the link, of course don't go to the comments page, much less write a comment because someone's wrong in the Internet.

A community with strong ideas about how you should write? Don't even go there.

Respect people, other than that, write with your own voice and ignore everybody.

The point is these things reach a saturation and acceptable point such that you can't ignore it.

Because ubiquity.

Well, you can ignore it, and people can ignore you. Non participation works both ways.

What I'm saying is at a certain saturation it's impossible to ignore.

It's nice in theory but if something becomes ingrained in language you'll either use it or communication will suffer.

The fact that it's impossible to ignore it without consequences doesn't mean that it's impossible to ignore. Yes, communication with some people is likely to suffer. So be it.

That's right, but tracking what you can't ignore is effortless, the opposite to shooting a moving target.

>much less write a comment because someone's wrong in the Internet.

..but they're, wrong!

> As I was reading this chapter of Because Internet, Joe Biden announced his candidacy on Twitter. The tweet read: “The core values of this nation . . . our standing in the world . . . our very democracy . . . everything that has made America—America—is at stake. That’s why today I’m announcing my candidacy for President of the United States. #Joe2020.” Those pauses! So pregnant, so stressful, so Semi Internet, I thought. More likely, it signaled the perilous record-skips in Biden’s own thought. As if we didn’t already know, this message was targeted at a certain demographic of Pre or Semi Internet people.

I disagree that this is part of the evolution of internet speak. This is not lol vs LOL. I have done a fair bit of low level editing. The ellipse for pause is a generational thing that older (gray hair) types use who are otherwise bad at grammar. Commas work here, but I think it would be more internet-like to use whitespace like a newline or a gif to create tension and cadence.

My thoughts too. Whenever I see someone abuse ellipses I know reading the text is not worth my time - either the person is terrible at turning thoughts into type, or out of their mind, or both.

That seems like one step too far.

Commas would have been better. Ellipses are just weird.

Ellipses,,,,, made from commas,,,, are the best of both worlds.

I really hate those.

I just assumed someone was typing on a macbook pro with a butterfly keyboard when i see those

You are my kind of anarchist.

I don't know when ellipses started signalling an old person, I used to use ellipses in my teenage years all the time (25-38 demo here).

I'm in the same demo, and I wasn't aware of ellipses being seen as an habit of old people.

Biden's (or likely, his team's) usage is atypical; ellipses are usually only used when you're citing somebody, to indicate unintelligible segments or sentences that are not crucial to the thought being relayed, and when you're voicing some degree of surprise, doubt or reticence about the forthcoming sentence (e.g. "She thought I was ready... maybe I wasn't.")

(If they ever come for my semicolon, I'll take up arms.)

The example is correct usage... not perceived as old at all... but when grandpa replaces all punctuation... peppered in between disjointed fragments of thought... LOL! Very difficult to read!

They're just bad style. It comes back to basics. I believe basics/fundamentals still provide useful guidance, especially aesthetically. You notice ellipses because they're being misused and they stick out. It's an aesthetic thorn caught in a silk scarf. Taking the subsequent step of interpreting it and ascertaining what specific bad thing it means, and what kind of "old" the person is etc. is to some degree unnecessary: it's just bad style. Similar to how at work, both your boring story about your commute, and whatever sexist/discriminatory/offensive thing you were gonna say, are both non-work-related communication I don't want to hear. Or just like how most dangerous things you can do in traffic are also illegal. Just stick to best practices and you tend to avoid most of the pitfalls.

By the way, I remember people in the 90s overusing ellipses, and I found those people insufferably trendy or trying-to-be-mystical or something. "Like wow man... my thoughts... so freeform... and hard to capture in the ... framework, I guess?... of grammar and shit." There was a character on SNL recently, played by Beck Bennett, that was this exact type. I imagine his lines being filled with ellipses. "I just think... differently." Note the definitely-not-accidental reference to Apple's self-consciously iconoclastic marketing strategy of that time. (Edit: namely the 90s, though obviously they've ridden that wave clear on through to today!)

Hmm.

I remember the thing we used to do before this always-on-internet-in-your-pocket epoch.

Vocal communication.

Both more spontaneous and edited by fewer humans (zero in fact), it was also unrecorded and subject to interpretation by both parties.

Perhaps hell is the surveillance system we live in where a small misstep can be broadcast endlessly, or even changed or quoted out of context.

What we need here is to take a step back.

We are all human.

We are all fallible.

We are all changing and learning.

Allow those around you to make mistakes, and for the sake of all of us, allow people to move on.

I edited this message about a dozen times and it's still not right. I don't care.

You're spot on. To me this seems like an inevitable future caste system. Did you grow up anywhere less than pleasant (ie lower income)? You're probably going to have more "bad" things to say online when you're younger (or maybe even overall.) Because when you don't grow up with two high earning parents in a nice community odds are you're gong to be exposed to that stuff more and likely even have to adapt some of it to fit in. So then we'll see what we see now - elites raining down on the rest of society saying certain language is unacceptable - and strong arming a moral perspective to make opponents the bad guys.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not talking outright racism or threatening speech, im talking general fowl language, bitter truths that the privileged would rather not consider, etc. If you doubt this consider how much backlash trump gets for saying something like - Baltimore is a shit hole - and how the left spins it to say that makes him racist. Imagine that fire power directed at some humble small time politician in the future who could maybe actually solve local poverty issues because they know the reality of it, only to be pulled off the stage for using "bad language".

Maybe we'll collectively get over it on the individual basis but when major economies are hedging the behavior, I just see this as yet another tool for the haves to control the have nots and limit their ability to usurp power.

>Because when you don't grow up with two high earning parents in a nice community odds are you're gong to be exposed to that stuff more and likely even have to adapt some of it to fit in.

Even if you did, racism, sexism, transphobia, Islamophobia, anarcho-capitalism, etc. are very natural or intuitive things to fall into and then advocate.

That's why stupid people often advocate them; they're obvious, knee-jerk, simple explanations of reality. Why is every white country wealthy and every black country poor? Oh, simple: the races are inherently unequal. It takes some wisdom or observed context and thought to climb your way out of them. Oh, environment is actually a major determinant of IQ (insofar as that's an impartial standard). Oh, tropical environments are hell to live in (yet they look so pretty). Oh, there's a rich history of colonial exploitation that I never knew about.

Education helps, but, initially, you come into reality as a machine that tries to solve complicated problems impatiently and heuristically, not as a nuanced encyclopedia of knowledge. Therefore, you will inevitably enter (and perhaps never leave) a phase of boneheaded and harmful beliefs.

Embrace and encourage anonymity/pesudonymity. It's nice to have adults accountable for what they say, but it's misguided to hold kids to the same standard.

I like how complex relationships between many people with a rich history and daily awareness of their surroundings are nailed down to simple stupidity in your comment. A guy just tries to tell that a harsh language doesn’t define a person.

“nice to have adults accountable for what they say”

As an eastern bloc citizen, I don’t even.

Define "internet people":

1. sock puppet 1 sends meme X to sock puppet 2

2. bot 1...10000 send meme X to various other bots, sock puppets, and possibly human recipients

3. human 1 reads meme X from bot 1337

4. human 2 reads repost of meme X from human 1

Do the researchers have a methodology to keep these separate in their analyses?

Here's a simple example-- what would keep the researchers from counting "Samy is our hero" as an example of lightning speed message syncronization of social media users? If the answer is that a third party told them it wasn't that, their methodology seems quite brittle and subject to error.

Especially considering that today's manipulation is vastly more sophisticated, insidious, and weaponized.

I'll only chime in to say that the idea of when someone "joined social media" being an indicator for their language is a bit over simplistic, and won't hold up as a model over the test of time. Social circles and the development of culture is not a fixed thing. Nature vs nurture, and the rest.

I figure, if I avoid leaning new linguistic trends, after enough years pass, my writing will suddenly seem sophisticated. What's the payoff for mimicking internet slang and turns of phrase? A decade from now, you either sound like a has-been, or a person who can't let go of their youth.

Being able to code switch is important for many people. For example, the way I speak to my parents, my friends, the queer community, coworkers, and online are very different.

Language is a ingroup signifier. If you know the lingo, you will be more respected in that community.

You do have to keep up a bit, but maintaining in group status can make a lot of social interactions easier.

I, for one, would greatly respect a person who always speaks in the same way to everyone.

You would need to see that person communicate in at least two of their communities to begin to respect that person.

Hearing him talking to his boss and to a waiter would be no less informative.

I can imagine if such a person actually treated everyone like they were talking to a 2-year-old, you would actually find it disrespectful.

If I had a bounty program for finding vulnerabilities in my statement, you would've won a prize)

That's a privilege, unfortunately.

It might not be safe for me to drop into queer coded language in a public place, for instance. Or it might not be safe to be publicly out as non-binary somewhere and I can use coded language to signal to others in my community that I'm "on the level", so to speak.

And even then, I think it's pretty safe to say that most folks have a professional and personal tone at the least. (I swear a lot less in the office, for example.)

I wish it was the case that we could all just be who we want to be all the time, but we have different expectations put upon us in different places and times, and adapting our language is one of the ways that we cope with that.

You make a good point, though the next question is what constitutes a community or group, or what kind of community/group is it? Think of it as a continuum where on the one hand you have the fleeting, shallow kind of community (including, I would argue, most groups online) and on the other you have the stable, deep kind (an increasingly endangered species both on- and offline). The more a group tends toward the shallow end, that means by definition that it is about, and membership in it means, not much. So the signifiers we're talking about become all-important. Speak the code and you're in. Speak the wrong code and you're out. Whereas a "deeper" group based on some significant mutual interest (let's say at the extreme, a life-or-death interest) - that group is going to depend less on talking the talk, because everybody is visibly walking the walk. And as a result, they'll accept more of your natural native quirks and things that make you unique.

>A decade from now, you either sound like a has-been, or a person who can't let go of their youth.

We're at the point where almost nobody can let go of their youth, and even more so in the future, so I'm not sure that strategy is sound.

Mimicking it in another medium or even at another time is a waste of time; it's ephemeral and super context sensitive. Do your version of Twitter Joke Format Of The Day and move on.

Unless you end up as @dril and get quoted endlessly.

The book in question was also discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20496643

I hope everybody knows that the title is a Sartre reference. http://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2010/07/most-famous-thing-...

The author was also interviewed on the latest episode of Slate's "Lexicon Valley:"

https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/07/john-mcwhorter-and-...

> She imagines, for example, her future grandchild asking her why people called each other “binch.” “How could you explain it?” she asks rhetorically.

It's not that hard to explain "binch." Urban Dictionary managed to do it sufficiently in one sentence:

> What you call someone when you don't want to say the B-word.

Where are the examples? I skimmed the entire article and only found the veins example. What language in particular is the author even referring to? My own set of examples are the hand clapping emoji in between every word, “Im here for it” when you like something, the ubiquitous hold my beer meme in so many YT comments, “stanning”, and of course how could you forget using “toxic” or “cancer” for anything you vehemently disagree with.

If you rush over to Amazon to download the book on Kindle, you may find that it is broken on all Apple Kindle apps. (See the reviews there.) I found that I was able to get past the fatal error by going to the Table of Contents and clicking on the first page of text.

Surely, Amazon is going to fix this soon. I'm surprised that they seem to do no testing at all of their product on even the most common devices.

If the eBook is broken on Kindle, then it'll be up to the publisher (Riverhead Books) to fix it, not Amazon.

Though as the bookseller Amazon should (in theory) offer refunds to people who bought the defective eBook?

I've heard life on the internet called an acid trip..

https://www.google.com/search?q=brown+acid

..and if you run into a Himalayan guy with a funny focus on first letters, and vaguely a discreetly stored "Pinkadellic" something or another, who eyes a specific divot, hand-to-hand, say whatsup.

https://www.google.com/search?q=ymmv

,NAMASTE;

My github name is "Hellisotherpeople" which ideally would be lengthened as "Hell is other peoples code". Yet, I like the alternative variation in the title of the article

How come that our circa 35 group of guys text without these emoji, ellipsis, stop/nostop things, and yet we still understand each other perfectly?

TFA suggests "how [you] talk online is determined by [your] linguistic community, which in turn is largely determined by where [you] were when [you] first encountered social media".

So, I'd guess you and your group were online relatively early, and the places where you did that probably had a relatively straightforward, text-only communications culture.

It's likely that people in that group code-switch and use newer tools and embellishments in other places where they communicate.

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