What Ghosting Says About Society (and Why It Hurts So Much)
truthdig.com
truthdig.com
Imagine switching a dating conversation to ghostwrite mode. The AI will reply as you, coming up with some suitable phrases and polite excuses until the other side gets the hint.
Of course it would hurt even more when you get paranoid suspicions that you’ve already been handed over to the person’s ghost bot.
“It’s not you, it’s me. Well, technically not even me, it’s my LLM autoreply”
But what if your AI ghost got talking. And the other person's AI ghostwriter too.
And they hit it off.
You come back a week later and your two AI ghostwriters have exchanged phone numbers, gone on some dates and are planning on moving in together.
Man, it might get very messy.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/x8ow1s/these_tinder...
Then the adversary will make a bot that will try to defeat my bot's gatekeeping...
We are going to fuck our species up so hard with this shit.
I want this so much
And it will probably be interacting with their AI in some weird game.
Stop the world I want to get off!
[1, German language] https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/arbeitsmarkt/ghosting-b...
[2, German language] https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/16yxopw/ghosting_in_der...
Every company / team is different, and we never ghost applicants. If you're just gonna be an asshole because you had a negative experience yourself, it's a sign of a weak character and you can also really shoot yourself in the foot. That's not limited to job hunting either, but applies to any social relationship as well.
I generally agree with your "gonna be an asshole because you had a negative experience yourself" comment, but reading the comments it more seems like corporate HR (as a whole across virtually all companies) has fostered a culture of broadly ghosting job applicants. If you experienced this once, your comment applies, but if you experienced it a couple dozen times (as some people in the thread have), then I don't think your "weak character" judgement is accurate. It is more "learning how things are done here", with "here" being the job applications space.
It's the same with dating (which TFA is about). I couldn't look at myself in the mirror if I started ghosting people just because I get ghosted regularly (which I do).
Just be a decent person and don't let what others do affect you. It's dignified and much healthier for yourself as well if you're above others' bad behaviour.
From my experience, every company/HR/reviewer is different in culture/personality.
Also, the culture of the company is sometimes reflected in its outside behavior. "Glad they didn't hire me".
It makes an explicit promise of future communication which it then reneges on. It's cowardly, and shitty, and unfortunately normalised in corporate culture. And we've talked here on HN about whether it's acceptable to, in retaliation, simply ghost an employer who offered you a job after a better offer transpired.
I think the consensus generally is that taking the moral high-ground is the mark of a professional, indeed a decent and dignified person.
This arms race just degrades professionalism tbh
Exactly.
This is a complicated psycho-dynamic.
Prejudice against some member of group because another (perceived) member of that group wronged you is a road to ruins. As if "employers" were all of one mind.
It's like kicking some random car in the street because the one ahead of it honked at you.
However, behaviours are shared by example and through culture. (and lack of challenge). It becomes normal to simply lie to a jobseeker's face "We'll call you next week". And after a few experiences of that one cannot deny or begrudge negative expectations that emerge.
What is needed is adaptation and robust challenge that calls out the lie (everyone now knows it's a lie).
Something like:
Interviewer: "Hey great. We'll call you next week",
You: "So I didn't get the job?"
Interviewer: "Errr. What do you mean? I said we'd call you next week"
You: "Ah, but everybody knows what that means. You probably won't call me. Because you have 100 people to call. I can see you're a busy guy. If I agree to wait for your call, and you forget, that could make you look like a liar. And I don't want to think that about you."
Interviewer: "......"
You: "So how about I'll call you! If I still want the job. Plus that will save you money on the call. How about Wednesday morning at 10?"
If they balk, you can walk and at least know the score. But if they agree, even tacitly, stick to it and call-in on time.
When confronted with weak behaviour taking ownership and responsibility seems the only dignified way to avoid becoming jaded and prejudiced.
Take away their ability to lie to you, and you won't have to suffer diasppointment,
Sometimes.
I think that is probably the underlying point.
From my own experience it is no longer 'Sometimes' but seems to now the rule rather than the exception.
Even cold algorithms and coms protocols have a teardown phase.
Otherwise loose ends like half-filled buffers and outstanding packets can't be resolved. And the sudden cessation of a link is indistinguishable from a peer dying, or a medium failure.
You'd think that a technologically informed culture might actually tend toward more formal protocols of initiation and disengagement.
The problem for people seeking alignment, but who are emotionally immature and cannot negotiate, is that they err towards conflict avoidance.
Technology has reduced us all to abject fear of being "unacceptable" or "awkward". So we'd rather be brutally cruel than even seen as wrong.
[0] out next week
Insert rant here about bloat, deteriorationg user experiences, HN possibly turning into another little social network, the cognitive load of tending to notifications, of making the little numbers on top of inbox-icons go away
I find that such odd phrasing, like putting the cart before the horse.
Isn't the 'enabler' our increase in mediated communications, while in-person communication has become rarer?
Like in the 1980s, if I wanted to ghost someone, I'd basically have to move. If I want to ghost my flatmate, this is still the case today.
I would not ghost people who I have a relation with or I have some respect of them. Unfortunately sometimes you have to deal with not so nice people too.
If you ask my dad, I am 100% sure he would tell you I have ghosted him. In reality, I told him repeatedly, over the course of years, that if he would not speak to me with at least a base level of civility, I would stop talking to him, and then when I did stop, I ended with, "Because you continue to refuse to speak to me with at least a base level of civility..."
And it's not like I just put up with it for years. Each time, I would go slightly longer without speaking to him. But eventually I would guilt myself into, "But he's your father. You have to try again." But it didn't matter how long the break was. Nothing changed. So I finally realized there was no more good to come of being in touch, told him so, and cut contact.
I imagine a lot of people have this experience with narcissists. And if they see your action as "ghosting," so be it.
"A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement"
When you have people in your life that make false accusations, manipulate, lie, and cannot be reasoned with, ghosting them can be a quality of life improvement.
It is quite a bit different than someone ghosting because they’re bored with someone. The conflict is already out in the open.
But otherwise, I’ve always given a reason. Whether they can accept the reason is up to them.
As uncomfortable as can be, I find it almost unthinkable to not at least pick up the phone when I have news to deliver.
The idea of the conversation overwhelms us causing "fight or flight" and we "flight" into distracting ourselves and just pretending the problem doesn't exist.
Like in general, doesn't this go both ways? The ghoster has most likely a complementary psychological issue or whatever to the ghostee who is traumatized by the abandonment (or whatever). A relationship where somebody is significantly hurt by abandonment is particular and filled with intimate context, anything otherwise is necessarily an effect of false entitlement on some level.
The impulse to pathologize this as a kind of phenomenon, to try and universalize so many surely specific and nuanced relations between human beings is at best misguided, and at worst culture war bait.
Human relations are messy and charged necessarily by the expectations and conceptions of the cultural ideology you find yourself in. But they can also be the one beautiful thing in a life that need not be colored by Big Discourse or sweeping societal diagnoses. But this doesnt stop relationships from being the source of some of the greatest misery a person can feel. In fact, that very quality is actually what makes so great, it makes relationships precisely what they are. Friendship, love, companionship, etc are nothing without loss, betrayal, and even abandonment. Its a feature, not a bug!
I worry lines of thought like this can encourage people to be scientific and critical and optimizing-mindset about the one thing you really shouldnt be that about.
Even in professional settings, responding with a “no” often leads to unwanted further communication.
In a perfect world people would take a no for an answer and not cross boundaries but it’s not the case (you can call me an oversensitive zoomer)
There’s a certain lack of value for humanity endemic in huge parts of society right now that’s especially present in rich people, which leads to shit like that. Why do you think so many people are depressed and anxious right now?
(Yes, I know this isn't exactly the kind of ghosting that OP spends so many paragraphs talking about, but it's part of the same phenomenon and goes by the same name.)
It failed to talk about any form of ghosting outside of personal relationships.
The most shocking form in the modern world i would say is during job searches.
Companies routinely ghost applicants, sometimes after 3 or 4 interviews, they suddenly just stop commonicating.
It's one thing when people stop responding to sexual advances, it's totally another thing when corporations in the middle of businesss dealings suddenly terminate communication without closure of any kind.
I was totally confused when he reached out later telling me it had been on purpose and about issues between us that I hadn't even known were a problem.
Perhaps, but why should one have an obligation to keep in touch with someone they hardly even know?
I don't like it but sometimes it's better than available alternatives.
There’s your closure; they ghosted you because they’re abusive. Bullet dodged.
I assume the most common and potentially hurtful "ghosting" coincides with the ubiquitous use of dating apps, so I will focus on that.
Though it is possible to "ignore"/"ghost" someone you dated which you got to know from workplace, through mutual friends or through a regular activity you share (art, sport, church ...), it also may cost you because you have to potentially quit your job, lose some friends or find another place for your hobby. The club/bar/socially going out thing is a bit of a grey zone because the probability of someone looking for a "one-night stand" is pretty high which is normally regulated by giving a clear rejection or risking to suffer a rebuff.
Online dating changes the game field because without a social environment and therefore potential considerable personal cost (in the example above: the husband "ghosting" his pregnant wife would have gone through the lengths to leave his belongings, house, common friends, family members, the city, the state ...) ghosting is a very attractive strategy, the psychological consequences - as described in the article - you only tend to feel later and as a repeated ghostee you also start at some point to feel entitled to ghost in this sterile digital environment, too --> positive feedback loop.
As with the club context ("one night stand") in online dating "ghosting" is to be expected, I would reckon for a lot of people a hefty price for the ultra-convenience, they didn't fully consider when going in.
...
>Ghosters are just doing what good capitalists do, except within the domain of interpersonal relations: maximize the bottom line of personal gain without letting empathy, compassion, or kindness get too much in the way. If a partner must be “fired” because their “performance” is inadequate, then so be it. Nothing personal, it’s just business.
It boils down to social regulations as applied above. "Corporate capitalism" with elaborate mechanisms (in tandem with dozens of specialized law firms) to maximally "diffuse responsibilities". Yes. But I don't think in companies in which the boss knows his employees and their families. That is a very different talk.
Indeed, at some point conjuring up the dark triad is inevitable. But that's another highly loaded discussion and while it is a serious problem in the scale of our modern societies, it's often used as a boogeyman/strawman in isolated contexts to deflect from the enabling circumstances which are uncomfortable to acknowledge.