I don’t want to be an internet person
palladiummag.com
palladiummag.com
I'm pretty sure a bit of googling will turn up a long history of articles of this nature dating all the way back to the BBS days. Having attended BBS meetups I know that the vibe of these gatherings hasn't changed.
Rave people are "brightly colored and fidgety" ?? A polished entrepreneur is incapable of ordering in a low class bar?
Jesus F Christ.
Nor did I say having a deep, single or inflexible identity or persona is necessarily a bad thing.
Raves are social events by definition. So someone who goes to them is likely to have at least some capacity for in-person interaction.
(Beer is often sold at raves btw - although many really serious raver types won't touch alcohol at a rave.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20753535 (Aug 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20330020 (July 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18621993 (Dec 2018)
That's not cool.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
It's possible to generalize too much:
1. The size of the different context and the extent to which someone feels like a fish out of water matters. It's one thing to say that someone might feel a bit out of place if they were suddenly dropped into an unfamiliar festival in another country. It's another to say that many people in a particular subculture are almost incapable of having normal human interactions in any offline context.
2. Sub-cultures aren't all equal, and it's possible for certain subcultures to encourage behavior that most people would consider anti-social or unhealthy.
I'm fully a raging California leftie now, but whenever I go back East to my rural hick home town full of rifle ranges, defunct coal mines, and Trump flags, I can still pass as a local and somehow manage to not irritate everyone around me. You have to read the room and be adaptable. You have to set aside differences and find / focus on the commonalities. This is not dark wizardry, it's just part of being a N-dimensional human being. I didn't see N-dimensional humans in the article.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/23/revealed-cal...
I heavily suspect there's a reason for that: the author didn't write them that way.
Even people who had internet access back then used BBSs to communicate with people near them on topics that were either local or which generally interested them.
Most boards had spaces which allowed general discussion of anything, even if the BBS was created with a specific subject in mind (computers, warez, occult stuff, photography, etc).
Lots of the people I saw at meetups were a bit on the shy/awkward side, which wasn't too uncommon for people who were into computers in general those days, but they were able to get along fine at meetups because they already knew many (if not most) of the other people there. They'd spent hours talking, and debating, and sharing ideas with them. They could go to a meetup and talk about all the same things they talked about online and they already had some idea of how people would react to them.
A local BBS was a great place to meet friends because it gave people a safe space to get to know each other at their own pace with carefully chosen words before being forced into real-time face to face interaction, and once they already had relationships established the transition to hanging out in real life was made much easier.
Teenagers with nerdish interests (me and my crowd), hippie physicists from the local university, BDSM people, swingers (a lot of swingers, probably party people by nature), a few Hitler-was-right Nazis here and there, some pagan types, conspiracy theorists, gay & lesbian folks, and on and on. There was a some overlap in the crowds, and at the bashes everyone mixed and matched just fine. Fun was had by all.
I later dated someone from those bashes for a few years, and a couple of people from back then are good friends to this day. Still in touch with a few more, all of whom are doing interesting things.
I can imagine places I would stand out - but it's within other niche subcultures like a Biker Bar or homeless encampment.
I'm also not sure the world of multiple anime-girl edgelord personas with NFTs necessarily generalises that well to the "very online". She could probably have had a quite different experience at a party of gushingly earnest activists or the sort of nerds who stop being shy and awkward when someone asks them about their favourite MMORPG or open source project.
In other words, you might make choices how to behave in the situation that you might not have made earlier in life.
I've noticed many of my friends have mindfully chosen more things in their life. They have chosen relationships and behaviors, or more importantly avoided certain relationships and behaviors to allow other things.
I love this. I got a similar vibe from people who were "too good at IRC," way back in the day. They had a constant, sarcastic, tired energy about them. They had difficulty being genuine about anything. They knew so much and yet they were so stuck in their life somehow. And that sucked the life out of them.
It's like they were too tied to this vague idea of being online that they weren't willing to sacrifice it to have a better life.
The Internet is a tool, not an endpoint.
Not to be pedant about such things, but there may be a reason it's a common scifi trope that people are hooked to machines and live in virtual worlds. It is not out of question that the internet eventually becomes an endpoint in itself.
From the article:
> You can close the computer, but the world will go on without you.
Even if culture decides that the Internet is tantamount to real life, I'm happy to keep the Internet at arm's length. It is profoundly weird to me that the private online life I led in the 90s was something shameful and to be hidden and now it's okay to be so addicted you become awkward in real life, constantly on your phone, and that I should give a fuck about my follower count.
Besides, accepting that the world will go on without you is part of adulthood.
That's the issue with the qualifier "as much as possible". That will always be sliding towards increasing levels of digitalization that the qualifier becomes meaningless.
It is a useful medium for sharing things and I'm always open to contributing more good content online. But being Extremely Online? No thank you.
People don't need the internet to be narcissistic, they've done that fine for thousands of years without it.
pressing a button to have something fall into reality is another thing that creates narcissism. You don't see any of the people involved in getting that thing to you. You can start seeing the world as your personal slave at your bidding. Now for centuries, yes, there have been rich people that can do that. If we make that accessible to a LOT more people - everyone has a butler that they don't need to even talk to.
I don't know what I'm saying right now other than - the world is vastly different than it was pre-internet. It can't go back. Things are forever changed for the worst in some (most?) categories.
Aristocracy in some parts of the world didn't talk to staff, they would just announce in the presence of the servant that something was needed and expect that it be provided.
Cultures, people, and attitudes change. They've been changing for millenia and they'll continue to change.
Most traditional social media doesn’t work as well for me. I need an underlying common goal.
One of the lawyers: How did you meet Fredrik and Gottfrid?
Peter Sunde: I don't remember, but I assume it was in a chat room on the internet.
One of the lawyers: When was the first time you met IRL?
Peter Sunde: We don't use the expression IRL. We say AFK. But that's another issue. But, I don't remember that either.
Tomas Norstrom - District Court Judge: Got to know each other IRL? What is that?
One of the lawyers: In Real Life.
Peter Sunde: We don't like that expression. We say AFK - Away From Keyboard. We think that the internet is for real.
I knew such a guy on IRC back in 2003. We all kind of looked up to him on the channel. He was quite eloquent and had (what seemed to us) an enormous knowledge of history and philosophy. His sarcasm bordered on sophisticated nihilism. He spoke to us like Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now. His occupation was nebulous.
Now, 20 years later, a former channel member and I (both in our mid-30ies now, with families and jobs) exchange a few nostalgic mails every 1-2 months in the typical lingo of our channel. We still make fun of this guy as the personification of nihilistic evil, a kind of mythical uber-mephisto of the internet. But in reality, we all realized decades ago that he was just this strange, bitter, unemployed guy in his late 30ies or early 40ies (older than we are now), who spent his entire life in front of mIRC. His history knowledge and nihilism boiled down to repeated Nazi jokes, and his philosophy knowledge was based on a few Nietzsche texts he must have read. We were a bunch of pubertal school kids on some Quakenet channel, and he, more than twice our age, was a kind of tribal god to us. He clearly enjoyed it. It was pathetic.
Some of the people described in this (excellent) article very strongly reminded me of him.
> This man probably didn't have a great life and found his only refuge and belonging to be in IRC. The alternative may have been to confront harsh reality and realize you're nobody to noone
I think this fits the bill
God I wish more would.
I think that understanding this is the first step of putting yourself in a position of power. Self-importance is very blinding.
It's power in a place they are comfortable with. The issue is when that impacts actual human relationships, or is turned for purposes that are (for lack of a better way to quantify it) bad.
Power mods using their influence to make sure the subreddits follow the individual sub rules, and ensuring that nothing nefarious slips into the general consciousness- it gives that person a sense of worth and meaning. Great!
Power mods using their influence to sell products, market products surreptitiously, squash stories they don't personally agree with, or otherwise abuse said power - bad bad bad. Not Great!
Hmm, pathetic doesn't mean harmful. It's closer by meaning to "feeble", which I agree with in the case of Reddit moderators. I don't think they are very influential at all.
A schoolteacher's job is different. However, I suppose some could be called pathetic at it, just as workers in any discipline.
In my experience even the "respectable" cliques are like this too. Artists, journalists, the honest-to-god English aristocracy. Any scene of "cool" people ends up being kind of pathetic once you get close enough to see the details, however many drugs they're taking or pictures they're putting up in galleries or whatever.
That sounds quite pathetic to me.
'Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for. That's what made the early postmodernists great artists. The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates. The virtuous always triumph? Ward Cleaver is the prototypical fifties father? "Sure." Sarcasm, parody, absurdism and irony are great ways to strip off stuff’s mask and show the unpleasant reality behind it. The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, "then" what do we do? Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone. Once everybody knows that equality of opportunity is bunk and Mike Brady’s bunk and Just Say No is bunk, now what do we do? All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.'
Similar observations can be found in the following essay https://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf.
Literary types occasionally called this New Sincerity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Sincerity).
synonymous to HN (comments section) vibe of 2020s.
Topics and conversational style amongst my D&D group was very different than amongst my other high school classmates and very different than when at my summer jobs.
This is just an article about people who never learned that skill.
I'm reminded of a few moments in my life that drove this home ...
A coworker (60 year old railway worker) who said "You shouldn't use ten dollar words in a twenty-five cent conversation."
A girlfriend who described the difference as "Weird is when you know you're weird and compensate when needed, strange is when you don't know you're strange."
Then in my undergraduate degree, I learned about code switching in the context of Mexican-American children of immigrants. And it hit hard.
I was code-switching, but within dialects inside of one language instead of within languages. I also learned in that class that EVERY student who grew up rural, poor, minority, or anything other than middle- to upper-middle class white had extremely similar experiences. It was absolutely shocking to 20 year old me.
To your point - this article absolutely reads like people who just never learned how to navigate different groups.
I grew up feeling very outcast. I grew up in a town of less than 50, in a super poor, rural part of the US. My interests were outdoors related, but not guns and god like everyone around me. I was more interested in learning about natural systems and the interplay of wild plants and animals and humans in the world. I never 'fit in' anywhere. None of the school clubs, none of the classes, everywhere I went I felt that I had to 'be someone else'.
Then I went to college and learned that, for many people, they literally get to do that every day, and that there was a name for it! It felt validating that someone else in the world experienced what I experienced (even if it was whole-language based instead of just dialect/cultural norm based).
Nor did I suffer abuse or humiliation from classmates or coworkers that made me change my behaviour.
Is it? I read part and skimmed part, admittedly, but I got the impression this was just an article portraying a particular subculture, one the author wasn't not at all fond of. The author seems to actually take the opposite of your tolerant view that people naturally can use multiple "topics and conversation styles" in multiple social context. I would agree with you but it seems For the author, the topics and conversation styles of the people at this event are the primary evidence that they couldn't be normal in any other context. That and one guy having "shifty eyes".
It's paid dividends as an adult because in most situations I can guess there's at least something I have in common with others even if it doesn't seem obvious at first. I can go most places and feel (or at least look) like I fit in. It's also allowed me to have a broad range of interests as an adult that I may not have had had I stayed more insular.
Reading about it was a bit of a light bulb moment for me, as it offered some explanation for why I'd always made friends with people from varying social circles, who often seemed to not get along with each other, while finding it relatively easy myself to get along with most any social group.
Edit: To make it explicit, which Palladium notably fails to do: this person is a reactionary and has a history of encouraging young girls to commit suicide.
[1]: https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=founder-of-milady-nft-proje...
Uh-huh. Fascinating. Do go on.
I would put them more in the neo-Nazi / pseudo-Esoteric Hitlerist archetype (https://archive.ph/qlYqD):
>How to save a nation in 5 steps:
>First, you kill the Jews, who always seek to ruin and exploit other nations.
>Then, you remove any peoples who are not native to the country in question*.
>Then, you remove any vestigial influence left by the Jews, either by re-education, physical removal or otherwise. This includes everything under the cultural marxist platform: feminism, homosexuality, "sexual revolution," etc.
>Then, you will work to re-coup and re-discover any heritage that may have been lost due to Jewish influence. You will work to carefully modernize your country based on the principles traditional to its native culture.
>Now you may allow non-natives into the country but with limited rights on a temporary basis. Other peoples and countries will not be discriminated against, they will each be considered meritable under their own culture; but nothing will be done to draw their influence into the country's own identity.
And before one argues this was edgy rusing and meming and LARPing and all that, CharlotteFang/Miya was an active, long-time moderator and owner of several 8chan /pol/ offshoot imageboard websites and boards, as well as a heavy poster on the original 8chan /pol/, all of which have connections to neo-Nazi mass shootings, including one attempted mass shooting of a synagogue (who Miya and friends affectionately refer to as "doorcuck" because he failed to breach the door of the synagogue and resigned himself to murdering some nearby civilians instead).
Plus a perusal of their old Twitter makes it very obvious exactly where their sympathies lie. It's all Savitri Devi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savitri_Devi) type stuff.
- calls for the extermination of Jews
- calling homosexuality an "epidemic" and perversion
- saying that "since we gave vote to *** we should give to gorillas too"
- things like "a husband is to his wife what a parent is to their child"
- asking counsel for "mind controlling an egirl slave harem"
- boasting about bullying persons about their weight
How is that "close to reactionary" ? This is extremely grave behavior. I have friends that have suffered a lot from this community, have witnessed their posts myself at the time they were made, and I cannot even begin to comprehend how could someone call that "close to reactionary if your IQ is low [...]" and end that with "DYOR". It hurts a lot to see that comment, and it makes me feel extremely uneasy to see these posts, especially one on "I don't want to be an Internet person" upvoted to the front page of HN. I don't know how to describe it, but there's something really nasty going on here.
[1]: https://mobile.twitter.com/CharlotteFang77/status/1527987970... [2]: https://github.com/0xngmi/milady
Another thread, describing how Yuga Cali pushed kids into committing suicide, as well as other NSFL activities.
I think that's in fact a reason why, and even the article itself is aware of this, these subcultures and the commentary on it seem so banal in real life. In reality it's more or less an economic grift to get funded by ideologically motivated venture capitalists, and everything centers around this. In Germany we call it "Hofberichterstattung". something like royal court reporting.
Like, I’m pretty sure I’m from the poorest district in the state/area.
Vance is a fucking loser any of the even mildly intelligent around despise.
This is such concise and brutally accurate way to sum it up, I salute you for this brilliant description. I could not agree more, such a spot-on assertion!
It's bad enough that some people have anxious, provocative, and attention seeking personality that comes out as fringe tech elitism. Yet it's even worse that this is nothing new.
The key question is "so what?", for example "so what they all have these fake personalities", which somehow takes years to understand.
* have lots of free time, e.g. teenagers, students, the unemployed. People with an average job and kids don't have the time to constantly be active on social media. Hence, you're reading a lot of teenage angst and people with non-traditional lifestyles. * have some reason to spend more time socializing online rather than in real life, e.g. because of niche interests, neurodivergency, specific personality traits... * have a job where a presence on social media is required, e.g. politicans, celebs, journalists. These are more likely to post provocative stuff(?)
The reason nobody is calm or cool is because those people don't post on social media. Everything is an episode of whatever that thing is you mentioned, because the target audience is 14-22 year olds that have plenty of free time to be online.
The part at the very end about the internet people winning is the part that freaks me out (and drives my own middlingly unhealthy doom-scrolling). Just the other day I saw Curtis Yarvin is now some minor Rasputin figure for Peter Thiel, and I couldn't help but think "that lunatic monarchist edgelord from years ago is now influencing where real real political money gets spent?" I don't want to be an internet person, or even pay as much attention as I do, but it feels kind of like even if you don't believe in the internet, it believes in you and it'll eventually show up anyways.
Anyway, if you like that sort of dives into a weird subculture let me recommend Sam Fussell's Muscle. Here's an interview with the author that got me to read the book: http://www.drmichaeljoyner.com/sam-fussell-an-interview-with...
For example, "Science Needs Sovereigns": https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/10/03/science-needs-sovere...
Edit to add: after a brief read of Samo’s work I’m now somewhat concerned that he’s a much less insane yarvin with indistinguishable goals and a much higher chance of nudging things in his direction.
It's not hard to not be an internet person. You just have to decide to actually study something, anything, and to a deep level. Once you do that the grounding manifests itself and then you have more important priorities that preclude drifting around like that.
But anyway, there’s something to what you say but I think that analogy doesn’t go very far.
Every year the hosts have, in their intro keynote, urged attendees to be more outgoing than normal. So yeah there are lots of introverts.
But the promise is that being more outgoing will pay off - because XOXO is curated to be entirely nice nerds. And it’s very anti-grifting. The scene the OP portrayed of e-girls and NFT guys seems like a polar opposite of their vibe. It’s more literature nerds showing off their board game about Pride & Prejudice, or an indie game about a mischievous goose. The whole point of XOXO, I think, was to find people who were doing internet stuff for the love of it.
A few people mentioned the article's subject matter being Gibsonish, but if I recall (haven't read him in a while), Gibson's cyber-characters were not just online-cool, but were generally backed by richly complex humans. The influencers and Twitterati the author describes have barely any human personality behind them--they're all boring, vacuous, superficial.
"You're really not that interesting."[1]
Because no body actually cares, no body will use your made up pronouns.
> use of the words "normal people" and infiltrating a group only to neg them to be more problematic than anything.
Isn't it obvious that the people in this group are clearly not normal?, they even admit themselves!
A journalist writing about someone they've interviewed ... as part of doing the best they can for the people they serve, the readers, perhaps in some cases it's reasonable for them to ignore the preferences of the interviewee?
Through the article, this happens in various forms.
If the point of the article is to criticise someone's behaviour for being an "internet cool person"; opening by your opinion piece by stating you were too cool to bother to do something; and later stating that you as the writer are a normal person, and that you feel sick after infilitrating a group, there is a level of hypocrisy there.
I agree with you there are legitimate cases for ignoring someone's preferences to improve the quality of information imparted. However, the author doesnt state any apart from "didnt bother".
I get why people don't want to misgendered. But making up a new pronoun comes across as aggressive attention seeking.
This is why some transgender and nonbinary people have stopped trying to reason with their friends and family about their gender identity, and have resorted to clicker-training them like dogs to use the appropriate pronouns and pay them basic human respect and dignity.
> have resorted to clicker-training them like dogs...
I doubt thats going to help with the human dignity of your family either.
If one decides to change their first name, they have every right for their friends and family to respect that. If I wanted to be called, for instance, Vladimir instead of Richard, it would be really bloody rich if my mom insisted on the name _she_ thinks fits me better. Same with sex/gender transition (I am not up to date on terminology here, but you know what I mean) - there is nothing more than showing basic respect for choices an individual does for themselves.
In my experience, this “clicker-training” consists of childishly threatening to kill themselves if others don’t give them what they want.
There are probably more genderqueer people out there whose families wish them dead, than there are ones who try to manipulate their families by "childishly threatening to kill themselves".
I'm reminded of the fragilely masculine fulminating about false rape accusations when so many actual rapists never even get reported.
It's a video of a girl who demands to be referred to as "they" for whatever fashionable reason, and has decided to use a dog-training clicker to remind her family members of this imposition whenever they use "she" as they normally would.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/06/07/about-5-of-...
Similar rates in other countries:
https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_depart...
You might not do it when you meet someone. But think about the sheer number of web forms, systems or standards that are about to have to go down a rabbit hole of whether they are modeling biological sex (medical systems), terms of address (people focused systems), etc.
Would you turn away 5% of your customer base because you didnt add a third option (ie: i prefer another term) when capturing someone's details?
Also, just to play devil's advocate, there are some people from the other side who could theoretically be annoyed by new pronouns as options and refuse to use your service because of it
"I scored 3 goals in last weekend's game".
That's wonderful! (nobody truly cares, but it's still recognized and celebrated.)
"I got 40 likes on my last tweet"
???
"Wait, it gets better: 20 people watched me play a game. Had to stay up until 4AM but still, worth it."
???
Truly, nobody gives a shit. It means so little that people will not even pretend to recognize it. It's more like a negative accomplishment that gets people worried that you have poor judgement in life.
Nitpick: this is great way to test the hypocrisy in how people treat/view the online and offline world. It's not a inherent difference between them.
When you do well in a sport, I may not care one bit about this sport myself, but I understand what a sport is, that it's played in the real world, is competitive, and that you had success in it. Hence, every possible demographic recognizes your accomplishment without question.
This is not the same thing as streaming a game nobody ever heard of and having 20 spectators nobody knows. It's not or poorly understood, not seen as a relatable achievement, also not in an absolute sense, and at times may even be seen as an anti-accomplishment: do something useful with your life.
You can try to intellectually smudge these two things together as being the same, but that's nothing but semantics. My point stands that online accomplishments are not accomplishments unless they are extreme (I made a 100K from Youtube).
"I kicked a ball against a wall 10 times in a row yesterday".
Nobody cares.
I know many, many people who have fallen into this trap of being an Internet "coolguy" and are absolute boring, anxious and insecure nerds in meatspace. Ironically they often yearn to connect their irl popularity with their internet personality. It's as if they realize the Internet moves fast with or without them.
I dropped off the internet while I was in the military and deployed, the answer is yes.
That said, I'd like to turn this on its head. It's normal for friends to go out of touch, reconnect in somewhat of a cycle. Some people stay constantly in touch, but not everyone. That isn't normal, and to be quite honest, would be super stressful for me. It's like juggling a dozen hot plates with pancakes being formed on them. You're eventually going to burn one or let it all burn spectacularly. My conclusion was that losing touch with a lot of my high school and college friends wasn't historically abnormal - staying in touch with them forever was.
It's also normal to have different depths of friendships. Not everyone needs to hear your deepest inner thoughts. This kind of summarizes what I think is wrong with social media.
Internet culture and it's subcultures are weird. That's to say, though, that any deeply entrenched culture is kinda weird. They have their own language, memes, attitudes, etc formed and influenced by the adjacency of it's members. That's to say, I look at sports people the way this person looks at the weird assortment they followed to a ketamine party. If you're going to a giant parking lot, ripping your shirt off, screaming, getting black out drunk, screaming at players, devoting precious memory to niche sports and player statistics - are you not mechanically the same as these folks? The difference being that your community is physical.
Point is, I think if we zoom out this is just normal human behavior. To be something to talk about, to perceive yourself as someone, to have a common language, to have quirks and oddities. It's more about what you fit in with that describes what you find "weird". This author doesn't fit into this culture, but probably fits in to another culture that others on this post would find "weird".
I do however agree with your second paragraph that subcultures generally have their own norms which can be rigid and off-putting and rigidity is generally annoying. That said, in line with my contention, certain subcultures do genuinely correlate with certain social groups who do in fact have power in society and so it is a equivocation to presume that all subcultures can be judged on the same terms.
Now, the apt term for people who are "too online" is "terminally online". The terminally online are more like a cancer than an interesting sub-culture. Since social media has allowed them to gain some semblance of following in a hyper-niche subgroup they think they can take their absurd opinions, styles, ideas, etc into the real world and expect it to work. These people are easily identified. When placed in an uncomfortable situation they become cry bullies. You might know many of them as your current HR department.
Maybe this particular subculture is just fairly boring and shallow, mostly fabricated by moneyed interests (NFTs...) and there's just not much to say about it? Kind of sad, has the USA turned into a cultural wasteland?
In any case, I noticed the Thompson similarities as well. This kind of reportage flicks the light switch in a dark room, in which then the cockroaches run for the corners.
BUT: I have much more vivid memories, and better bonds, with my friends. This is partially because we spent a lot of time together in school, and because we actually bonded.
Although I had online friends, and I took the time to meet some other BBS people IRL, I never developed any real bonds with them. One of my very active BBS users attended the same college as me. We met a few times, but never rekindled our online bond.
This made me realize that my online bonds are more like a hobby than a real lifelong friendship; much like at-work friendships that fizzle out after a job change.
Needless to say, a few years ago I generally dropped out of Facebook; the hobby (Facebook) was getting in the way of my relationships. The people I care about either don't post on Facebook, or Facebook seems to make me angry at them.
Yes. But they really weren't your friends to begin with, so it doesn't matter.
Friendships are built on a shared interest / shared activities, and frequent contact.
When you stop using the communication medium your friends use, then you just added friction to reach you, which stops frequent contact.
you slowly go from a friend to an old friend or a distant old friend.
There is a reason that when you move, its a lot harder to keep up with your old neighbors.
Which raises an interesting question. Is it possible at all to have a relationship that purely takes place on a web platform that will continue after you leave the platform?
"The" communication medium your friends use seemingly shouldn't matter. A person you only interact with when there is no friction involved isn't much of a friend.
Similarly to work and school friends who are very proximal and spend a bit of time with us, online friends tend to be very distant physically but the interactions we have with them can be intense (like gaming) and frequent. So these pseudo-friendships can have some elements of a strong (substitute for the word "real") friendships, but don't have all of them.
I'm not an 'internet person', but the social selection near me just doesn't gel with who I grew up to be. Interests/hobbies/politics etc. Hopefully I can get money together to move soon and find people with whom I fit.
A friend online can still be friendship, but more limited in what it can offer. There's no replacement for being with people, it's a fundamental human need. I've been in close-knit online communities in the past and never once did it fulfill social needs. At best it was entertaining.
I find it's much easier to make friends online. But we seem to have different definitions for friendship.
Now there is a certain avant garde playing with the narrative thing going on, which is part of it, so the story that you can find out about the thing is changed at the time its going on and after its happened. The lore is recorded by people within the culture and they are in on it. Certain of the interactions with the author and the characters she met were on the whole staged, or intentional trolling of the author. "some young writer is coming so let's tease her".
The trolling, anti-cancel culture, the pro-autism always-online which may have come from the chans is almost 100% opposite from the "white pilled", positive, almost over the top caring messages that the subculture is putting out. But it's not the same as the we are all going to make it greed-optimism of crypto.
As we see in these fellow comments, most people who have encountered internet people have found them to be nihilistic, anti-social, maladjusted and negative. This sub culture is trying to be the opposite of it, but it exists along side a kind of schizoid-side - it's very odd.
Compared to other NFT young people meet ups (the author previously wrote a popular article about the Bored Yacht Club parties) - this subculture appears to have more women.
Compared to other NFT projects, this art project does not prioritize holding or purchasing an actual NFT image, and seems to value a kind of plagiarism, "just download the png" or anti ownership in a way. It reminds of of plunderphonics/vaporwave from last decade.
The traditional and social politics of the founders seem at odds with a rave and taking drugs. puzzling to me! Someone here says that the drug - Ketamine is apparently chosen as reduced social anxiety?
"Ginevra Davis studied Symbolic Systems at Stanford and now works in art and design. She writes about technology and youth culture."
One step would be to stop using your state-issued name on the internet. "Cr4zyBoy4eva" is a bit better than the Facebook/LinkedIn-mandated "real name", but rather childish, hence why an arbitrary UUID string might be a better fit. "There are no girls on the internet" and "on the internet men are men, women are also men, and children are FBI agents" point to a deeper truth, which will only be amplified by the post-Turing test chatbots, beyond ChatGPT: the internet is not for humans, there are no humans on the internet, don't be a human on the internet.
I'm what country does the state decide what your name is?
I thought that was always the province of someone's parents.
https://www.germany.info/us-en/service/04-FamilyMatters/name...
Amusing but alas, from when I looked into it it seemed like it was made up.
I've had multiple names over the course of my life (and notes linking them together in various documents should I ever need to prove to someone that the person with name A is the same as the person with name B; to date, I never have). It's pretty common.
Moreover, people can use whatever name they want in whatever places they want on the internet, and don't have to be obvious about it when it's not the same name they use in other places online or offline. If I tell someone my name is John Smith, 99.9% of the time all they need that information for is to know that I am the same person they interacted with previously; they don't need to know or care what my bank or my family call me, nor is there any reason for me to tell them.
But these are not the Internet's problem, rather edge forums/social media problems, however I recognize that for many people, the internet is just social media at this point.
A true internet person should be one who uses it frequently, that would probably be a software developer, yet most of the time they aren't as crazy as these people.
> He slouched in his chair and told me, unprompted, that he doesn’t have many friends
Wow.
These people are just mentally ill at this point, its impressive that they were able to attract girls to this shitshow.
Also how do they make money? Do they all just sell NFTs ?
> I don’t want to be anything like these people. I don’t want to be an internet person.
Amen.
Correct, they sell NFTs of mass-generated cartoon art.
As cartoonish as it is, I buy that distinction. But usually, when people make it, they're making a plea for the old internet. The writer of this article, however, doesn't seem to be doing that. The milady community feels, "a little bit, like that internet from 1995"; it is unlike social media communities where you are "constantly performing your personality" and "Liking is a personal endorsement." Again, when people make that distinction, they're usually writing against likes, personality, and "iPhone photography of yourself."
So regarding the title: does she not want to be either type of internet person? Or is "normie" social media engagement ok?
- Some people don't know it yet. - Some people choose to pretend it hasn't happened. - Some people, like her, wish that it hadn't happened and are peering into the void, struggling to come to terms with it. - And the people she's writing about have realized it has happened and are running toward the singularity.
She feels that our culture is defined by those going the fastest, long before the rest of society catches up to it. But we'll all get there eventually, and the avant garde will be further away from the unaware than ever before.
I don't think she's making an argument about whether we should fall in any particular bucket. She doesn't want to be in the avant garde though. Maybe she's sad about that, because she pictured herself as being an avant garde kind of person.
I was poking around some of the content and it's just so blah, in terms of how they're just taking a laundry list of every hot button issue and then asking, "okay, how can I troll it?" -- revealing no core underneath.
If you think being an online person is some horrible thing or a marker of being a bad person, you just value different things. The kinds of people in TFA are selected for by merit of not living up to your offline standards in one way or another.
For anyone who read all the way through - does it get anywhere close to making a point or is it mostly about how ugly people the author doesn't like are?
The fact that you have longer to think about your messages and modify them before publishing, that you have to think carefully so as not to multi-text (which seems desperate), that you don't have access to non-verbal cues for context, can't smile etc. all contribute to this.
[1] https://psychology.stackexchange.com/questions/4415/current-...
i was online from my pre teens time. i actually had to wait a 'few' years to get my own email address. back then, there was no "social media", no algorithm and you were taught to not give your real "A/S/L" because people could track you down and hurt you and all that. oh the days.
i adopted this randomuser handle, not linking my accounts from one service with another, not reusing handles, not having google/FB/apple accounts, it takes time and energy.
anonymity on the internet is a wonderful thing really. forget the abusers and stuff, moderation is for that. when you consider the real problem of doxing, you appreciate the benefits of using anoymous handles.
>Everyone knows, abstractly, that the internet is not real life. But you can’t picture it, not really, until you sit across from the real people behind the screen. Even the darkest online personalities are just people on their phones. It is oddly disappointing to meet the “worst person on the internet” and find that they are nothing at all.
we call if "AFK" and not "IRL"
You don't need to give out your name and address to be doxxed, there's enough information from your comments across your accounts to reasonably identify you if someone wanted.
MIT did a study on 'anonymised' data and found out it only took something like 2 data points to identify someone.
Oh, if a comment needs a personal detail it's randomized. Sometimes I'm married, sometimes I'm straight, sometimes I'm American, etc.
Lets say you borrow your dads computer to post and it's logged in under his name. You log into a site with an incognito browser and post a message in Chrome and then close it out.
Well due to a bug in that version of Chrome the full path of user folder Chrome was in was added to the request logs on the server 'C:\users\ronald.t.devito\appdata\....'. This gets put in the servers logs with your username. That server had bad security and the logs leaked to everyone on the internet. A hacker realizes that 'belli' is also use 'causi', and a few other profiles. They see that username is pretty unique to a 54 year old male from the west coast, but the writing style is of a much younger, likely male, person which points at Ronald's son Jonny.
You are at risk of being disclosed/doxx on the internet because of security issues everywhere in the stack and its exceptionally difficult to cover all the bases.
I don't have a second account so I checked stylometry and it gave me bunch of names that I know are not me. Maybe I will try with a new second account and confirm.
Second, stylometry can dox me how? My current handle is not attached to anywhere else on internet and even if someone did HN/reddit/twitter stylometry analysis, how will that reach my home and or identity of my passport? Its not like I post anything online in my own name. Haven't in actual years.
So assuming an adversary was trying to find me and did see my reddit or active twitter account, so... What? Short of breaking into it and checking the 2fa number (which I avoid at all costs) how ? Maybe amazon but I don't write reviews so ..... How would you go about this?
By themselves, none of the things we discuss are inherently bad. They are just tools. I open with this, because it is important to understand that stylometry by itself uncovers only a small facet of your online persona, by possibly identifying your footprint and allowing for ingestion and analysis for OTHER identifying information.
Using your example your passport may not be online, but lets say you link self-hosted project, your website may be registered to your company and, depending on how you set it up, your information may be relatively trivial to run against information broker database ( LX, TR ).
It is surprisingly easy to slip even if you are privacy conscious of it and it really only takes one time since internet does remember ( and it is saved somewhere ). I guess what I am saying is I would not dismiss it outright, but at the very least I would check the link parent added; it actually is kinda amazing.
The only thing changed by the Internet is accessibility. Previously people tended to know each other personally. Now they can mix it up online. This makes their presence a little more obvious and a little harder to ignore.
But there must be hundreds of these micro-scenes with their nano-gurus and micro-leaders, and most people will still never come across them.
They only become dangerous when they grow - or are grown - to the point where the groups stop being small and insignificant, and where the messaging is carefully and deliberately tailored to trigger irrationality and self-harm in mass audiences.
That's not a good thing. But it's no worse - and often less effective and less toxic - than some of the nonsense pumped out by supposedly respectable mainstream media.
You might be an internet person, my friend.
More like this article, plz. Or we could go back to our usual high brow, attention worthy content of "I asked GPT about a thing and you won't believe what it said"
Funny, for me the internet was always where I'd let down the barriers and drop the facade, the place where you could actually find the "real me". Then again I don't think I'm the type of person described by "scrolls mindlessly"...
So why is she writing an article about how terrifying he is that he scared her off the Internet?
Over half of those 99.9% of people use the Internet.
> When I got back from New York, I logged out of my Twitter account on my computer and deleted the app from my phone.
And then immediately logged back in to Tweet about her article.
That's funny considering BPD_GOD already sounds like bootleg CHOBITCOIN. There is nothing new under the sun (and here's why that's a GOOD thing!!)
She feels noticeably superior to people that prefer the online reality for unclear reasons.
As other commenters have noted, the subject of the article is apparently also a terrible person and possibly a psychopath. Which again, runs true to type; he's found the largest possible community where he capable of being enough of a Big Deal to abuse people with impunity. Which, as it turns out, is pretty small and esoteric.
A fascinating article.
I still don't why or how to direct kids towards having this "internal compass" to avoid weird or dangerous stuff.
Do you care to elaborate?
Probably like the author of the comment you are responding to, I also grew up with the early pre-y2k internet. As a kid, I've seen some extremely disturbing thigns online that are burned into my memory until today. And yet they do not have as much impact on my life today as the terminally online society does.
It's hard to exactly quantify how our lives would be different if the internet never developed past it's 1990s state. But I feel strongly that they would be very different. Would my life be much different if I didn't see one or two unsavory images as a kid online? Probably not. Even when I was young, I had functional mental/emotional boundaries for that. On the other hand, as an adult, I still have to consciously stay away from doomscrolling because I know my brain has never evolved for that kind of abuse.
To sum up, moderation doesn't seem to target threats online that are actually dangerous. And they seem to have impacted our society tremendously from my perspective.
The popular thing on the news is of course grampa going right wing into facebook rabbit holes or whatever but that's just one example. Teens going left/right going down whatever rabbit holes, eating disorders, other political beliefs, body issues, need I go on. Your kid ends up in some discord group of strangers and sorry but you can pretty much forget about getting him or her back to reality. It's all the same mechanism.
Sure there are nice things too like hobbies but the internet is filled with the freaks and weirdos. They have nowhere else to go to. Why put your child in a pit with them?
Maybe it was because the writing style seemed similar, but that this is the let down review article rather than the hyped preview articles.
IIRC, iam.bmezine was in 1994. Granted, it was a lot more esoteric/niche because you either had to pay or submit an image of a body modification to their gallery.
The take would be a lot more interesting if the targets weren't so utterly, predicably, boringly safe to criticize either. I guess dissecting a counterculture that isn't predominantly young white men into NFT's would take a bit more courage. though.
I think a lot of these very-online people will come to regret it, especially because the Internet never forgets and they'll never be able to shake the reputation they've established.
>his tiny frame perched a few feet away on an oversized leather chair...
>a crooked smile that reveals a row of nubby teeth
>disappointing to meet the “worst person on the internet” and find that they are nothing at all
I think the author has missed the point about why Charlie is the way he is, why he has spent so much of his social life online, she did apparently reveal how this Charlie is looked upon by "normal" people in real life through no fault of his own.
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
So pretty much like TFA... Which is basically a virtue signalling hit piece (the target even asks "if they're planning to write a hit piece").
"The content of his work would repel, or simply confuse, a traditional viewer"
... and then the author points to a screenshot of a tweet (the "drop out of college, default on your student loans" etc (of which the most controversial part is about not getting the covid vaccine) that would seem totally quaint under lots of pretty tame contexts (from 60s counter-culture and 70s punk fanzines all the way to modern leftists), as if the average Joe is the standard after which anything becomes scary...
>To 99.9 percent of the population, Charlie is nobody
So just like the author?
At some point you realise the writer is doing the same kind of thing as the people described, their criticisms make a low effort to understand and declare the "other side" wrong, for reasons that are basically "I didnt like it".
From other comments here, I've since learned there is plenty to criticise about the speech, actions, behaviour of this individual, which is trivial to discover.
Rather, I read the whole thing, and grasped its tone, intention, and structure.
>That Charlie is likely in the small group of people today who are setting the norms for tomorrow?
Charlie and his "influence" is insignificant to the "norms of tomorrow", and if you take away the jabs at "weirdos" like Charlie from the article, the only thing that remains is a tired old "online vs offline" diatribe, the kind of which has been written 200 times a day since 1997 or so.