Faux Friendship (2009)

Except then you get World War 2, when suddenly everyone was dropping bombs on each other, and countries needed that surplus manufacturing capacity, and the winner ended up being the one that had the most. Or when 3M introduced six sigma, they found a dramatic decrease in creativity and innovation, because those require waste and variability.

Friendship is wasted when times are good, because you don't need your friends, and they take up time and attention that could be devoted to more productive pursuits. But if you suffer a bad breakup or suddenly get sick, it's awful nice to have somebody who's got your back unconditionally. There's a trade-off between efficiency and reliability, and someone who is always perfectly efficient is usually pretty unreliable when unexpected events occur.

I think you hit on a great insight though. Common goals are what form deep friendships, and in the modern world our commonalities are very superficial (same workplace, same bars you hang out, shared hobbies, etc). You either gotta undergo severe adversity together, raise children together, or do a startup together to have that deep bond. Even religion isn't good enough.. you really do need to fight a "war".

This article really is the middle of a lot of genres. You can also look at this from an evolutionary psychology view... we're meant to live in tribes, and the move to urban societies isn't socially healthy for us. Rather than a feeling of "we're in it together", most of us want to keep up with the Jones' and comparing against each other. There's nobody to compare with when you're in a tribe, and the more successful tribes aren't bragging about their wealth in their Facebook feed.

Perhaps human psychology is conditioned to expect having a few war buddies in its network, similar to how human physiology is conditioned to expect a great deal of physical movement. (http://www.businessinsider.com/sitting-can-kill-you-2011-4)

The Greeks thought that there were two levels of humanity: zoon bios (biological life) and zoon politicon (political life).

With our current (post)modern civilization, we are in many ways going back to an even more primitive (ie Neolithic) stadium of existence, where political life ceases to exist and life is more playful/hedonistic.

One example: the institution of monogamy is something that didn't really exist in Neolithic times (there are some indications that only 40% of men reproduced). It was something that arose with agriculture and today we are in many ways back to a hunter-gatherer world.

I think Sweden is at the forefront of this neo-Neolithic trend, having often been termed a country of "state individualism", where the individual is free to decouple from social relations and depend on the State as a safety net.

Just like other (what we see as distinct) entities in nature do not see themselves as separate from anything else. They go about their business, transform energy to their bodies (eat). If and when they cease to exist, then it's not a big deal.

I suspect that an urban ancient Greek would adjust to a western urban world pretty well.

I'd expect the shift from hunter/gatherer tribes to agriculture-enabled large scale cultures is much harder psychologically.

That's just society though, that's not friendship. Going out on a hunting party requires me to be friendly, cordial at least, with those I hunt with. Being friends would probably help as it implies a better understanding and ability to predict action, compensate for inaction and so work better toward the goal. You can do useful work with people you don't get on with at all.

>> As some people say, we're already in a Singularity relative to ancient Grecians, inasmuch as they couldn't understand our world at all... and I think it's true in the opposite direction, too.

This reminded me immediately of a line of thought from Bernard Williams[1]. He's discussing relativism, and he argues that there is some truth to it (roughly: relativism, understood in a very specific way makes sense for ethics, but not for science). In order to make this argument, he considers what it would mean for two or more systems of belief to come into contact. (As a shorthand, he calls a system of belief an S throughout the paper.) He wants to make the claim that relativism is coherent in cases where Ss can to some extent understand one another, but there is no real possibility of a person with S1 giving that up in favor of S2 (or vice-versa).

This is already very long, but my point is that I think it's not so much that "they couldn't understand our world at all" or that we can't understand theirs. It's rather that however well we understand it, we simply could not give up our S and take up theirs - not without massive false consciousness.

Here's the key quote you made me think of:

>> [M]any Ss which have been held are not real options now. The life of a Greek Bronze Age chief, or a mediaeval Samurai, and the outlooks that go with those, are not real options for us: there is no way of living them. This is not to say that reflection on those value-systems may not provide inspiration for thoughts about elements missing from modern life, but there is no way of taking on those Ss. Even Utopian projects among a small band of enthusiasts could not reproduce that life: still more, the project of re-enacting it on a societal scale in the context of actual modern industrial life would involve one of those social or political mistakes, in fact a vast illusion. The prospect of removing the conditions of modern industrial life altogether is something else again -- another, though different, impossibility.[2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams

[2] "The Truth in Relativsm" Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, Vol. 75, (1974 - 1975), pp. 215-228, on page 224. It's here on JSTOR, in case people have access to that: http://www.jstor.org/stable/view/4544875. It's also collected in Bernard Williams Moral Luck.

Seriously? And people in the Midwest are still somehow the "ignorant ones" ... Stay classy.

(This wasn't a thread about fanfic, btw).

I actually think your statement - while ultimately needing more argument behind it - is actually true of just about all of the analysis I read these days. It's all thoroughly atavistic - without a particularly well explained explanation as to what exactly is the value of the thing being lost.

This article is actually better than most... but it's not great. It intimates that the strength of friendship comes from the intimacy that allows for critique as well as support.

But then the author goes on to focus on the elements of social networking which are actually entirely compatible with the account of friendship that he praises - namely the drop in signalling costs associated with online social networking.

Backward looking authors such as these are usually confused in this way - they fret over the seeming 'cheapness' of online social networking - but confuse this with the corresponding superficiality of those relationships.

To dispel this confusion I like to use the following analogy. Back when were apes - we used to signal allegiance by grooming - an expensive and time consuming activity. Now imagine that we developed language within the space of generation (not true - but bear with me) - imagine what the grand parents would have thought of their grandchildren signalling to each other cheaply to one another using language. they would have thought it cheap - and insincere.

But of course - the use of language in and of itself is not constitutive of a shallow relationship. What they would be reacting to is a sudden drop in the cost of signalling - and would mistrust it because of the costs that they were used to.

The upshot is that there is nothing essential in the nature of social networking that leads to a lack of intimacy. You can't blame the tech here.

Having said that - there is a danger posed to intimacy by some of the uses being made of the tech. But it will come from the ability to trade out your established intimacy for economic reward.

I find no sweeping generalizations on his part, he deals with modern society as a whole and maybe that requires him to make general comments.

Which parts of the article are you specifically referring to in your comment?

How does this make social networking less superficial?

It would be good to recognise that he is controversial and is an English Lit professor, not a historian or anthropologist.