Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution | Hacker News Reader

Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution

meaningness.com

72 pointsrbanffy35 comments

Discussion from 2018:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17433487

And 2015:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9632751

This is one of those article so riddled with the cliches that people normally believe anyway that's truth is hard to measure. Not saying it's wrong but...

Either an article that gave some objective measure of these things would be interesting or a book that gave a lot of anecdotes and details around a particular phenomena like this might worth the read. But for an article like this I can only shrug.

I mean, you'd expect some heavy cliches seeing as it's describing a pretty well-known social phenomenon - usually called entryism. And the really sad thing about it all is that it isn't even sociopaths doing it. It's your average "cool" kids, basically MOP's who are just a tiny bit better at the popularity-contest game. Actual sociopaths wouldn't know what to do with your average geeky subculture, even one where the normies have started to show up pretty heavily. So the "filter" is working quite well actually (it's one of the things that attract savvy normies to geeky subcultures in the first place!), it's just not nearly enough.

I mean, you'd expect some heavy cliches seeing as it's describing a pretty well-known social phenomenon - usually called entryism.

Yes but the point is that the things that people think they already know and understand are the things whose truth we should be most dubious about. These kinds of reactions could just as much be our own automatic, reflexive sorting of people into in and out groups rather than the way things are actually happening at any one time.

And MOP never heard that one in the UK

Isn't this just Crossing the Chasm seen from a different angle?

Underrated comment.

Really interesting article as I've seen this at a second degree level for one of my friends.

She was really a "fanatic" (as the article names them) for some "geeks" until the number of "mops" started getting larger and larger and at some point I guess the "sociopaths" also showed up, and the New Thing became the Lite Thing (and I'm imagining that in another 2-3 years it will be run into the ground by said "sociopaths", milked of everything that they can).

It's interesting that at some point said friend was indeed offered the role of a "actual service worker" (to quote the article), presumably by one of the "sociopaths", but she refused it. At that moment I couldn't understand why ("my friend really likes this Thing! why isn't she willing to get more involved with it and even get paid for the privilege?"), but reading articles like this one I can understand why that happened and why the decision she took was for the best.

Later edit: Because I've seen the subculture mentioned in the article's comments, I might as well also mention it here, that is that the New Thing for my friend was in fact a local EDM variant (if you follow ResidentAdvisor religiously you've probably heard of it by now).

It would also be interesting to hear from people a little older than me and who have lived through those times how exactly the same thing happened to the punk scene back in the '80s (at least I suppose that's when punk became mainstream and the "sociopaths" took control over it). A similar history for grunge could also be interesting, even though I guess Cobain's suicide precipitated some things.

Bob Dylan: LAST THOUGHTS ON WOODY GUTHRIE

The ones that wheel and deal and whirl and twirl

And play games with each other in their sand-box world

And you can't find it either in the no-talent fools

That run around gallant

And make all rules for the ones that got talent

And it ain't in the ones that ain't got any talent

but think they do

And think they're foolin' you

The ones who jump on the wagon

Just for a while 'cause they know it's in style

To get their kicks, get out of it quick

And make all kinds of money and chicks

http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/last-thoughts-woody-guthrie/

I think the main issue is that you are not entitled to compensation for being really into something. If you want to receive value that you create, you have to consciously extract it. A small portion of the population is extremely uncomfortable with this: those with high trait agreeableness. The author is probably a member of this population. These people need to suck it up, or find a less agreeable partner to work with them and help them get money / get laid.

> The muggles who invade and ruin subcultures come in two distinct flavors, mops and sociopaths, playing very different roles.

Alternative theory-- subcultures already include at least one sociopath and get ruined when sunlight exposes the ways in which they abused others in the subculture. (And probably also the ways in which apologists helped them to cover up the abuse.)

>A slogan of Rao’s may point the way: Be slightly evil. Or: geeks need to learn and use some of the sociopaths’ tricks. Then geeks can capture more of the value they create (and get better at ejecting true sociopaths).

That sounds a lot like what's happening to open source. Mops are happy that they get things for free, creators are living on starvation wages, sociopaths at the cloud companies are making hundreds of billions.

>At best you can charge them admission or a subscription fee, but they’ll inevitably argue that this is wrong because capitalism is evil, and also because they forgot their wallet.

Yes, open source mops to a t.

Although notice here that it's the cloud companies making hundreds of billions off of free labour, not the "mops".

If your take away from that is "we need to charge people money for open source" instead of "use less business friendly licenses like the AGPL" you should really ask yourself why you're doing open source in the first place.

We don't really need more SaaS freemium open source stuff.

Yes? That's the point of the article.

The mops nickle and dime you to death "Why aren't you using the MIT license? The GPL isn't really an open source license. How can it be about freedom when it forces me to do things?".

The psychopaths just extract all the value.

At any rate all the current open source licenses are meant for the 80s or 90s. Freedom zero is only for people, not corporations.

The only sane license I've seen for the modern world was this rework of the MIT license:

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any natural person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software to other natural persons without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit natural persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

> Subcultures were the main creative cultural force from roughly 1975 to 2000, when they stopped working. Why?

I suspect the author was 25 at some point in that range of time. It's hard to keep going when an essay starts out that way.

Care to explain why that would impact the essay?

Subcultures are young people's game, and something you usually grow out of.

But if subcultures are dead, and the author was a young person in their heyday; would they not be perfectly qualified to write a postmortem of sorts?

But they're really not dead, they're just different. Writing a postmortem on something that isn't dead is difficult.

Further down the author acknowledges that subcultures are not in fact really dead, but that they’ve lost the cultural importance they had between 1975-2000 (to use his time interval). Which I think it’s a fair point to make.

They're not dead. The author just outgrown their own, and doesn't notice current subcultures, which target contemporary youngsters.

they're 'dead' in the sense that they have a lifecycle that is predictable and eventually peters out into meaningless consumerism; they still arise but they aren't seen as a potentially liberating or revolutionary social mode in the way that they might have been in eg the 80s, because we see them follow the same course every time.

And I'm sure that when we were living through our own youth subcultures, all the people who remembered greasers and beatniks thought the same way.

Definitely, and I also think that many of the "sociopaths" are simply grownup geeks.

Most people outgrow their subculture, they have full time jobs, families, or simply lost interest. What remains is nostalgia. But some of them don't quit, and they too have bills to pay. And the best way to do so is to use their deep knowledge of the subculture for profit.

They are exceptions, sometimes the skills of the subculture are highly marketable so there is no need to be a "sociopath". And some people can manage the impressive feat of having a good job leaving them enough free time and money for their hobby.

A cynic would say that Stan Lee was the ultimate sociopath: a real creator, but also a self-promoter and all about the Benjamins in the end.

According to the article, that would classify him as a genius. Which checks out.

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