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.
A few theories about the social contract's decline:
The "Fish rots from the head" theory: This is a story about how our well-known elites increasingly act like conspicuous supervillains and never appear to suffer any consequences, and this makes the average person more inclined to act like a villain too. Donald Trump is president, the richest man in the world is an overt racist who pushes nazi ideology through his social media platform and calls for an end to any kind of empathy. We're in a world where all our greatest samurai have been killed by ronin, and no one's willing to commit sepuku anymore when they ought to. Individuals might increasingly understand from this that doing the moral thing is a sucker's game and that the real path to success is acting like their idea of a movie villain and performatively not caring about anyone else.
The "Everyone is Twelve Now" theory: this is a story you can tell about technology and human psychology, and how it's really adversity that drives us into adulthood. In this story, technology has removed the negative friction of social situations and it's led to a nation of twelve-year-old children who have forgotten social grace. Previously, you would have been socially censured or gone through major hardship if you were consistently evil to the people around you. Now, it's easy to just join a different online community, or double-down and be performatively mean for your following, or even just use an unthinking AI bot as a substitute for the real friends your behavior would have lost. All of these forces creates individuals without any real maturity or adult values, or erodes maturity and values in individuals who previously had it or who are psychologically vulnerable to it.
The "Social Contagion" theory: Think of this as working like the right's Great Replacement, except specifically for online discourse. Maybe illiberal societies, when given free access to the discourse of liberal societies in large numbers, are capable of poisoning them. It's a common story on social media now for some right-wing racist influencers to play the part of a rich and successful, only to be unmasked as a foreign agitator farming clicks. Russia has seemed to have enormous success with its bot farms causing influence into other country's elections and social media, with liberal society appearing to be both uniquely vulnerable and unprepared for those kinds of attacks. The ability to to invent your own internet identity severs the link that once existed in liberal societies between liberal behavior and apparent success, and this has led to foreign attacks from more violent cultures against our own becoming hugely numerous and successful.
All of these do tie back to social media to some extent (doesn't anything), though they all suggest some different solutions. I do think that if liberal society is going to survive, it's going to be vitally important to solve this problem somehow. The people with the best understanding of the dynamics of online internet discourse need to find a solution. The Argument Mag recently had an article about treating Big Tech like Big Tobacco with some specific solutions, but are they the right ones? What might the right rules in liberal society to control social media look like? I'd be fascinated by a future post that explores what some of our options here might look like.
Parasociality goes both ways. If something bad happens to you and your first instinct is to go live, cry, and vent to your fans about your contract situation, etc, you’re treating them like friends and I think you should stop doing that.
When a Jodie Foster stalker shot the president of the United States and claimed to do so for her, that must have really sucked for her. She never talked about it publicly though. She probably had a circle of actual friends to vent to. This is the way.
One thing about Danya's death and the response is that the chess community(at least on streams and Reddit) loves going after suspected cheaters with little to no evidence. Danya just happens to be popular and Kramnik unpopular.
Han's anal beads jokes were very common at least up until the last week.
Danya had the overwhelming majority of community support and the accusations still affected him deeply.
Danya was well loved so the community is very upset but they are glossing over their complicity in similar situations that (fortunately) haven't ended the same way.
As someone outside the chess world, I didn't even know the anal beads thing wasn't real until recently. There was a video essay that came out a few months ago about the (extensive) history of people cheating at competitive chess, and there's a whole section about Kramnik's history of accusation slinging starting around an hour in:
I think that video was okay but given it seemed to be aimed at a non-chess audience there was a lot of context missing.
Particular around Hans(the anal bead guy, not really) it would be hard to capture the full wave of scrutiny he was under after Magnus accused him in the time she had.
It seems clear to me that the general social contract collapsing comes from there no longer being many, if any, gatekeeping mechanisms. to use gambling - there used to be formal gates (it was illegal) and informal (it was disreputable and you'd have a hard time getting loan) gates to be kept
Earlier in the internet, those gates still existed. Even if you could legally say whatever you wanted, you had to be smart enough to understand how to host, design, and publish a website or blog. But now social media sites will do that part for you. Hell, with AI you don't even have to do the writing anymore!
to give a real world analogy - Starbucks. In 2018 a Philadelphia store manager called the police on two black men who were sitting in the store waiting to meet somebody. It became a national story, lots of outrage, and Starbucks responded with a new policy - anyone can come into the store for any reason at any time. A previous gate (you have to buy something to sit in Starbucks) was gone
It was predictably a disaster. Starbucks locations often became homeless shelters, the same people would steal merchandise day in and day out, Starbucks bathrooms became "safe" injection sites. filth, violence, drug use, etc. A friend's girlfriend managed a location, and she found four dead bodies in her store from 2018-2021. Starbucks has belatedly reversed this, but a lot of damage was done
the gatekeepers were not perfect. But the alternative has been far worse
I'm fixated on this sentence: "there used to be an unspoken norm against this sort of thing, but then we killed that norm and did the thing anyway."
The reason I can't get it out of my head is that *this is exactly how social progress has been made historically*. There used to be "unspoken social norms" against open homosexuality, or advocating for the rights of slaves, but then we killed those norms and society is better off as a result.
Clearly, at some point, breaking down unspoken norms went from being mostly a good thing to mostly a bad thing. When, and how, did that happen? Is the mass democratisation of the internet, and the collapse of elite gatekeeping, responsible?
And I have to say it is telling that both startups are backed by andressen Horowitz considering how politics of Marc andressen has turned out…
And another thing is, I feel like the culture of Silicon Valley has become extremely akin towards Wall Street or even more extreme I feel like with whole 996 culture and this embrace of “hack the social stability for money is actually a sign of IQ” type of mentality (and increasingly their obsession with IQ gives me a massive ick btw).
At least everyone knows Wall Street has toxic work culture but they don’t openly brag about it.
I feel like the work culture of big techs used to be like “maybe SF is boring but at least we treat you like human and the pay is so good! Come work with us!”, which absolutely doesn’t apply rn I feel…
And part of this is my cope but I feel like some of Silicon Valley figures who openly embraced this culture started to look more miserable - like whatever monster they unleashed doesn’t seem to make them happier tbh
The social contract didn’t vanish. It was pawned for engagement metrics and repackaged as “community guidelines.” Every click now comes with plausible deniability and a referral code for chaos. The founders of civilization had oaths; the founders of platforms have ad tiers. Blessed be the ones still apologizing when no one’s watching.
RE: chatGPT allowing erotica, I have to imagine they are looking for more subscribers to help plug the money drain this stuff is and a good way to make money is to turn this into a porn machine and or woman punishing/harassment machine.
I think the problem is not so much that the social contract is breaking down (this is happening, but this is the effect, not the cause), but that human beings' brains are being rewired by the internet/social media to experience reality soley via the internet/social media.
Nothing is real unless posted. Nothing happened if it wasn't videoed. Nothing matters unless "they" think it does. Who are "they"?
I'm strongly considering an internet fast. It's difficult because I have a desk job with internet access - sort of like being an alcoholic that works at a distillery.
I get a bit annoyed at the "security did not detain him" thing RE twitchcon. Private security cannot detain people. They can issue citizen's arrests, but that is an entirely different process. Private security has no legal authority that you as an individua do not have.l
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.
A few theories about the social contract's decline:
The "Fish rots from the head" theory: This is a story about how our well-known elites increasingly act like conspicuous supervillains and never appear to suffer any consequences, and this makes the average person more inclined to act like a villain too. Donald Trump is president, the richest man in the world is an overt racist who pushes nazi ideology through his social media platform and calls for an end to any kind of empathy. We're in a world where all our greatest samurai have been killed by ronin, and no one's willing to commit sepuku anymore when they ought to. Individuals might increasingly understand from this that doing the moral thing is a sucker's game and that the real path to success is acting like their idea of a movie villain and performatively not caring about anyone else.
The "Everyone is Twelve Now" theory: this is a story you can tell about technology and human psychology, and how it's really adversity that drives us into adulthood. In this story, technology has removed the negative friction of social situations and it's led to a nation of twelve-year-old children who have forgotten social grace. Previously, you would have been socially censured or gone through major hardship if you were consistently evil to the people around you. Now, it's easy to just join a different online community, or double-down and be performatively mean for your following, or even just use an unthinking AI bot as a substitute for the real friends your behavior would have lost. All of these forces creates individuals without any real maturity or adult values, or erodes maturity and values in individuals who previously had it or who are psychologically vulnerable to it.
The "Social Contagion" theory: Think of this as working like the right's Great Replacement, except specifically for online discourse. Maybe illiberal societies, when given free access to the discourse of liberal societies in large numbers, are capable of poisoning them. It's a common story on social media now for some right-wing racist influencers to play the part of a rich and successful, only to be unmasked as a foreign agitator farming clicks. Russia has seemed to have enormous success with its bot farms causing influence into other country's elections and social media, with liberal society appearing to be both uniquely vulnerable and unprepared for those kinds of attacks. The ability to to invent your own internet identity severs the link that once existed in liberal societies between liberal behavior and apparent success, and this has led to foreign attacks from more violent cultures against our own becoming hugely numerous and successful.
All of these do tie back to social media to some extent (doesn't anything), though they all suggest some different solutions. I do think that if liberal society is going to survive, it's going to be vitally important to solve this problem somehow. The people with the best understanding of the dynamics of online internet discourse need to find a solution. The Argument Mag recently had an article about treating Big Tech like Big Tobacco with some specific solutions, but are they the right ones? What might the right rules in liberal society to control social media look like? I'd be fascinated by a future post that explores what some of our options here might look like.
Parasociality goes both ways. If something bad happens to you and your first instinct is to go live, cry, and vent to your fans about your contract situation, etc, you’re treating them like friends and I think you should stop doing that.
When a Jodie Foster stalker shot the president of the United States and claimed to do so for her, that must have really sucked for her. She never talked about it publicly though. She probably had a circle of actual friends to vent to. This is the way.
One thing about Danya's death and the response is that the chess community(at least on streams and Reddit) loves going after suspected cheaters with little to no evidence. Danya just happens to be popular and Kramnik unpopular.
Han's anal beads jokes were very common at least up until the last week.
Danya had the overwhelming majority of community support and the accusations still affected him deeply.
Danya was well loved so the community is very upset but they are glossing over their complicity in similar situations that (fortunately) haven't ended the same way.
As someone outside the chess world, I didn't even know the anal beads thing wasn't real until recently. There was a video essay that came out a few months ago about the (extensive) history of people cheating at competitive chess, and there's a whole section about Kramnik's history of accusation slinging starting around an hour in:
https://youtu.be/ZtN-i-IkRWI
I actually watch Sarah Z a good amount.
I think that video was okay but given it seemed to be aimed at a non-chess audience there was a lot of context missing.
Particular around Hans(the anal bead guy, not really) it would be hard to capture the full wave of scrutiny he was under after Magnus accused him in the time she had.
It seems clear to me that the general social contract collapsing comes from there no longer being many, if any, gatekeeping mechanisms. to use gambling - there used to be formal gates (it was illegal) and informal (it was disreputable and you'd have a hard time getting loan) gates to be kept
Earlier in the internet, those gates still existed. Even if you could legally say whatever you wanted, you had to be smart enough to understand how to host, design, and publish a website or blog. But now social media sites will do that part for you. Hell, with AI you don't even have to do the writing anymore!
to give a real world analogy - Starbucks. In 2018 a Philadelphia store manager called the police on two black men who were sitting in the store waiting to meet somebody. It became a national story, lots of outrage, and Starbucks responded with a new policy - anyone can come into the store for any reason at any time. A previous gate (you have to buy something to sit in Starbucks) was gone
It was predictably a disaster. Starbucks locations often became homeless shelters, the same people would steal merchandise day in and day out, Starbucks bathrooms became "safe" injection sites. filth, violence, drug use, etc. A friend's girlfriend managed a location, and she found four dead bodies in her store from 2018-2021. Starbucks has belatedly reversed this, but a lot of damage was done
the gatekeepers were not perfect. But the alternative has been far worse
I'm fixated on this sentence: "there used to be an unspoken norm against this sort of thing, but then we killed that norm and did the thing anyway."
The reason I can't get it out of my head is that *this is exactly how social progress has been made historically*. There used to be "unspoken social norms" against open homosexuality, or advocating for the rights of slaves, but then we killed those norms and society is better off as a result.
Clearly, at some point, breaking down unspoken norms went from being mostly a good thing to mostly a bad thing. When, and how, did that happen? Is the mass democratisation of the internet, and the collapse of elite gatekeeping, responsible?
And I have to say it is telling that both startups are backed by andressen Horowitz considering how politics of Marc andressen has turned out…
And another thing is, I feel like the culture of Silicon Valley has become extremely akin towards Wall Street or even more extreme I feel like with whole 996 culture and this embrace of “hack the social stability for money is actually a sign of IQ” type of mentality (and increasingly their obsession with IQ gives me a massive ick btw).
At least everyone knows Wall Street has toxic work culture but they don’t openly brag about it.
I feel like the work culture of big techs used to be like “maybe SF is boring but at least we treat you like human and the pay is so good! Come work with us!”, which absolutely doesn’t apply rn I feel…
And part of this is my cope but I feel like some of Silicon Valley figures who openly embraced this culture started to look more miserable - like whatever monster they unleashed doesn’t seem to make them happier tbh
The social contract didn’t vanish. It was pawned for engagement metrics and repackaged as “community guidelines.” Every click now comes with plausible deniability and a referral code for chaos. The founders of civilization had oaths; the founders of platforms have ad tiers. Blessed be the ones still apologizing when no one’s watching.
RE: chatGPT allowing erotica, I have to imagine they are looking for more subscribers to help plug the money drain this stuff is and a good way to make money is to turn this into a porn machine and or woman punishing/harassment machine.
I think the problem is not so much that the social contract is breaking down (this is happening, but this is the effect, not the cause), but that human beings' brains are being rewired by the internet/social media to experience reality soley via the internet/social media.
Nothing is real unless posted. Nothing happened if it wasn't videoed. Nothing matters unless "they" think it does. Who are "they"?
I'm strongly considering an internet fast. It's difficult because I have a desk job with internet access - sort of like being an alcoholic that works at a distillery.
"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."
Priceless
If you want to see a society obsessed with gambling, Australia would be the place to start
I get a bit annoyed at the "security did not detain him" thing RE twitchcon. Private security cannot detain people. They can issue citizen's arrests, but that is an entirely different process. Private security has no legal authority that you as an individua do not have.l