Does the social contract even exist any more?
The Weekly Scroll: Bad Apps, online drama, and the lack of social consequences.
A lot of things happened online in the last week. Politically, the No Kings protests drew more than 7 million protestors, while Donald Trump imposed additional tariffs on Canada for hurting his feelings and the government shutdown entered its third week. Last week we discussed racist Republican group chats and Democrat Graham Platner’s questionable social media history, and in an update that will scandalize and shock you, yet another Trump nominee was caught calling himself a Nazi in group chats and Platner was discovered to have a Nazi ‘Totenkopf’ skull tattoo. Non-politically, there’s a hurricane barreling towards the Caribbean, daring thieves stole some of the French Crown Jewels from the Louvre, and NBA players and coaches were accused of rigging poker games and manipulating sports bets.
And yet, even with all these big things going on the world, the items that I couldn’t stop thinking about were much smaller in scale. Perhaps because they’re small it’s easier to grasp them, easier to drill down into the core features that make me focus on them. I spent several hours yesterday in a doom spiral thinking about this tweet:
Though I didn’t see it until this week, the tweet is from March this year. The design of the app seems to be that you can turn the act of paying bills into a casino experience. Double down on whether or not you’ll have to pay that OnlyFans model! The app, like all gambling apps, uses the business model of luring you in with supposed freebies, getting you hooked, and selling you virtual cash to make wagers with incredibly poor odds.
Even to me, a guy who used to be a semi-professional gambler, the casinofication of everyday purchases is somewhere between gross and existentially horrifying. But that wasn’t the only app that caught my eye this week:
The TikTok of sports wagering! Targeted at teenagers! Control 1000s of AI social media bots at once! Never pay a human again! I’m an atheist, but there are times when I look at startups like these and wish that God was real so he could torture these people for eternity.
Beyond the obvious horror of ‘everything in life is gambling now’ and ‘it should be frictionless to control a swarm of impossible-to-detect bots for any purpose at all’, there’s a theme here. It seems like half the startups coming out of Silicon Valley these days are just “We found a way to monetize undermining the social contract!” In fact, that applies to most of the news I’m reading about, and it’s ultimately what fascinates me about so much of what’s going on right now.
I take pains not to be a luddite. I don’t think technology is evil, and I don’t think a RETVRN to some imagined, idyllic past would fix all of society’s problems. But at the same time, the social contract is real. Society is built around a set of unspoken, commonly understood norms. How should normal people act in a social situation? What’s an unethical business practice that will get you shunned from polite society? How should we respect others in public settings? Sometimes those norms are outdated, and should be replaced - for instance, it’s good that we got rid of the social expectation that women shouldn’t vote - but sometimes these conventions are vital to keep society running smoothly.
Maybe it’s a tech company making it frictionless to gamble on anything, or to deploy thousands of stealth AI bots to influence elections, or to create deepfake videos of anyone or anything (including fetish content of famous influencers without their consent). Maybe it’s a woman who blasts a FaceTime call at max volume on public transit and then assaults the people who complain. Maybe it’s the people bringing guns to Wikipedia conferences or assassinating their political enemies. Maybe it’s the President sharing an AI generated video of him dumping shit on protestors, or the incredible return of Nazism to political discourse. But basically every story today is some version of “There used to be an unspoken norm against doing this sort of thing - but now we’ve decided to kill that norm and do the thing anyways.”
Maybe it’s the depersonalized nature of the internet, or maybe it’s the waves of attention you get from being an asshole online. But social media seems to be at the heart of most of these stories. Something about the interaction between technology and people seems to undermine the social contract that says not to be an inconsiderate jerk in public, not to farm troll profiles for money, not to be a Nazi. These things used to come with swift consequences. You’d be expelled from public places, banned from communities, shunned from polite society. Today, the average course of action seems to be to never apologize, double down, scream louder and gain even more of a following from the weirdest freaks online. It’s the Babadook meme about being normal applied to our entire culture and politics at once:
Even high level AI founders are beginning to have cognitive dissonance about the forces they’ve unleashed. Keep this idea in mind as you read the following sections, and as you consume news the rest of the year. We need to stop digging ourselves into this hole. I have no idea how to get societal practices back to a place where we can all just be normal again, but I do know there’s only so far you can dig before you start unearthing monsters.
The Path Forward
Did Cheating Accusations Kill This Grandmaster?
Chess grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky died last week at age 29. Naroditsky’s family hasn’t made a formal announcement, but it seems fairly clear the cause of death was suicide. Naroditsky’s death is causing massive waves in the chess community, and not just because Naroditsky was a famous internet chess streamer and broadcaster with a large following on social media. Naroditsky was also involved in chess’s ongoing conversations around cheating, and it seems that cheating drama likely hastened his death.
Two features define modern chess - it’s more and more often played online, and computer programs are vastly superior to any human player. Combine those two features, add in a dash of chess’s newfound streaming popularity, and you get a perfect storm for cheating scandals. It’s not that hard to cheat, the rewards are potentially large, and accusations end up flying around amongst top players. You may remember a few years ago that world #1 Magnus Carlsen pseudo-accused fellow super grandmaster Hans Neimann of cheating.
Starting in late 2024, Naroditsky received repeated accusations from former world champion Vladimir Kramnik that he cheated in online chess tournaments. There is basically no evidence that this was true - Kramnik threw some slapdash statistics together that were roundly rejected by other experts - but Kramnik kept loudly repeating the accusations in interviews, on social media, and generally to anyone who would listen. As a former world champion, he had a large audience, and he specifically used it to harass Naroditsky without any real basis other than his own paranoia.
Nobody in the chess world took the accusations particularly seriously, but they seem to have impacted ‘Danya’ profoundly. He told world title challenger Fabiano Caruana on a podcast that the accusations were “...a sustained, evil, and absolutely unhinged attempt to destroy my life,” adding, “He is trying to ruin my life, he’s trying to inflict emotional harm, physical harm on me. He knows exactly what he’s doing.” Naroditsky, in recent weeks, had withdrawn from providing commentary on events and in his last ever stream appeared disheveled and disoriented. The accusations may have had an even bigger impact because growing up, Kramnik was one of Naroditsky’s chess idols:
Danya’s death is an incredibly sad end to a ridiculous saga, and the chess world is in full pitchfork mode when it comes to Kramnik.
Spurred by Naroditsky’s death, the chess community is demanding action. Some are calling for Kramnik to be investigated for ethics violations, stripped of his grandmaster title and kicked from FIDE, the sport’s governing body. Others are calling for the president of FIDE to resign or for FIDE to be disbanded entirely if they don’t remove Kramnik. Kramnik, for his part, has deflected to imply that Naroditsky was on drugs and threatened legal action against people criticizing him. It should also be noted that Kramnik has accused a number of top players including Hikaru Nakamura, Le Quang Liem, Nihal Sarin and others of cheating, each time with no more evidence than ‘they win too many games’ or ‘they play too precisely’.
Social contracts broken, bad behavior leads to more attention, keep doubling down, never apologize, etc - it’s the same playbook in every case. FIDE has been slow to act, but does seem to have opened an investigation into Kramnik’s behavior in the face of massive public backlash.1 It’s all very grim. But rather than end on a sour note, here’s a clip to celebrate Daniel Naroditsky’s personality and talent, where he tricks a stream sniper by leading them into a blunder on purpose.
Chess lost a talented player, a fun personality, and a great educator. RIP Danya.
Twitch Can’t Protect Streamers
TwitchCon is pretty much what it sounds like - a convention held by Twitch to highlight some of their largest and most popular streamers. There are updates from Twitch’s leadership, panels with celebrity influencers, esports competitions, and meet and greets with your favorite online personalities.
Unfortunately for streamer Emiru (real name Emily Schunk), security at TwitchCon was about as effective as a screen door on a submarine, and she was assaulted by a fan at her meet and greet, as the fan simply walked past barriers, grabbed her, and tried to grope/kiss her before being pushed away. The incident is frightening when you consider the following points:
Celebrities are increasingly being stalked, harassed and even shot at during public appearances.
This man was later discovered to have been carrying a knife.
If he wanted Schunk dead, she probably would be.
Twitch did absolutely nothing to prevent any of this.
Twitch is facing intense backlash because their security was essentially nonexistent. Emiru’s attacker walked straight past multiple barriers and event staff, attacked her, and then simply wandered away and was not detained or followed in any way. They didn’t add any extra security in response to the attack. No one from Twitch helped Emiru in the immediate aftermath of the attack. Their initial response was ‘we will ban this person from the website for 30 days’.
The meet and greet was a mandated appearance under Schunk’s partner contract with Twitch. She is, in effect, obligated to stand in public as a beacon for stalkers and weirdos for several hours in order to do her job. And Twitch banned her personal security team this year because they got too rough in forcing a stalker away from her at last year’s event. Which is, you know, the job they’re paid to do. Everything about the incident has become a fiasco and makes Twitch look terrible.
(side note - one of the most bizarre subplots of this drama is that as the outrage started building, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy ran to Taylor Lorenz of all people to do an obsequious, fawning interview. Clancy used the interview to victim-blame Emiru for not moderating her community well enough, after which Lorenz did not push back in the slightest and instead claimed “this has been such a secure event… like, you know, it is very secure”. He made it past security with a knife! With no resistance! We’ve talked about how Lorenz’s desire to be an influencer interferes with her journalism before, but it’s especially jarring to see a self-proclaimed feminist and leftist eagerly parroting a CEO’s PR spin in exchange for access.)
Frankly, I really don’t understand how popular female streamers are supposed to live with any sort of normalcy. When they attend conventions they’re attacked. When they go out in the world to do IRL streams, they’re stalked by strangers who threaten to kill them, some are groped, and some are stabbed to death. When they go out in the world incognito, they’re still stalked. When they stay at home, their homes are invaded and they’re robbed.
Being the female focus of parasocial men online is a legitimately dangerous and frightening job. There have always been deranged weirdos, but the internet is an accelerant that makes everything it touches bigger, faster and more extreme. Social media blurs the lines between digital and IRL, between disembodied parasocial interactions and embodied physical meetings, between the real and the surreal. And mentally ill losers end up stalking and harassing women, believing they’re entitled to something because of an algorithmic machine designed to make them feel special and suck every last ounce of their attention. The illusion of intimacy scales with audience size, but safety doesn’t. It’s yet another way in which social contracts are crumbling in front of us, and I honestly have no idea what I’d do about it if I was a woman who had to be on camera in front of the internet for my job.
Links
In a shocking accusation, the EU accuses TikTok and Meta of violating the Digital Services Act, much in the same way that the EU accuses every tech giant of violating every major tech regulatory bill they pass. I continue to believe that the EU’s regulatory regime is a form of rent-capture, where the EU has given up on developing a tech sector and is content to merely extract a few billion in fines each year from American and Asian tech giants.
Open AI is going to start allowing ChatGPT to create erotica. Surely this will have no downsides related to the main theme of this week’s post.
The latest trend in nightlife? Bars, events, and other spaces that ban cell phones.
Meta’s AI slop feed Vibes now has 2.7 million daily users.
Posts
Some of the inside gossip here - Chess’s governing body is notoriously corrupt, and it’s especially corrupt when it comes to a certain clique of old Russian dudes, of which Kramnik is part. Much of the FIDE bureaucracy is Russians looking out for Russians in a very old-school-cold-war sort of dynamic, and that likely explains their initial reluctance to take action against Kramnik at first.
I think the social contract breaking down is an excellent point. With that specific example of the woman using FaceTime on the bus, and just doubling down on it when confronted.. that sort of behavior has always existed, by the ubiquity of people having a cell phone/ radio in their back pocket has made it worse. Like, growing up, my high school did not have school buses, so we had to take public transportation to get to school everyday, so I have a lot of experience riding the bus, and there were always people who would sometimes play music too loud or something, but it was going to be one person on the bus, and it was every so often.
I'm like a proud capitalist, and a card carrying neoliberal, but I have noticed there being an increasing frequency that people look at you weird when you decline some opportunity to advance your own interests or get money because it might screw over someone else in a negative way. I told some person 20 years younger than myself the other day, "the best pillow is a clear conscience" and they looked at me like I just snapped a live animal up off the floor and taken a bite out of it.
Part of the challenge with re-establishing the social contract is that there have been many instances where someone stands up and challenges obnoxious behavior and is then labeled a "Karen" or is told that they're targeting the norm violator for some nefarious reason (racism, sexism, whatever). We can't hate on people who police norms and then be surprised when norms break down.