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The newest issue of the Atlantic contains an article about our increasing social isolation titled: The Anti-Social Century (You can get behind the paywall here). The author of the article blames our information technologies: TV and more recently cell phones, destruction of third spaces like libraries, parks and neighborhood bars, national and international mobility, and a culture that chooses convience over forging genuine connections over time. In terms of solutions, the author posits that we need a national culture change towards a more skeptical attitude towards new technology like AI and deliberate attempts to be more social. He cites the rapid growth in independent bookstores and board game cafes as a cause for hope in this kind of change.
I'm directionally on board with the diagnosis and prognosis offered in the Atlantic article, but I worry about the vagueness and naivity of the solution. I had similar worries after reading a similar piece, the book Stolen Focus by Johann Hari, which highlighted the deleterious effects of phones on our attention spans. Hari spends a summer phone free in Provincetown, MA which he really enjoys, and manages to recover much of his attention span. However, upon returning to the "real world" he finds himself sucked right back into the vortex. Hari rightly recognizes that this is an issue he cannot tackle alone, and advocates for collective action on a national or international level. He draws inspiration from movements like women's suffrage, the fight for gay rights, and the campaign against CFCs. Perhaps I am cynical, but I find this level of optimism to be hopelessly naive for a number of reasons.
Firstly, those examples which I just listed were examples in which the forces of capital were neutral (CFCs, gay rights), or in fact in favor of the so-called revolution (women's suffrage). In this case, like that of the fight against climate change, or degrowth, capital is fundamentally against a system that would free our attention, as such a system would reduce profits.
Secondly, I'm not sure democratic change will actually work in this scenario. As we saw with prohibition & the failed war on drugs, people like their vices. I'm not sure my generation would be in favor of something like banning TikTok. Hari even states that his first week on Cape Cod was pretty difficult psychologically without the soothing mind-wipe of scrolling. Faith in democracy also misses the forces of capital arrayed against the interests of the common people who have so clearly been gaming our electoral system since the Civil War. If we can't stop Big Pharma from price gouging insulin, what makes the author think that we could upend the entire media ecosystem?
I think change fundamentally has to come from a level in-between the individual & the state (or global culture). I think many cultural critics miss the very existence of this level of culture, possibly because it has almost totally vanished from our world as an element of social change. I'm talking here about the family, the local community, and to some extent, the parishes/church.
Yet I think this new Atlantic article, and my experiences over the past few years has revealed how frustrating trying to affect change at this level can be. There might well be an explosion of board game bars and independent bookstores, but at least where I live in the US, even thriving institutions have problems with inconsistency and high turnover on the scale of years which makes it very difficult to build real community. A couple examples from my personal life might be helpful.
1). I'm pretty involved in the running community here in Baltimore and in some senses the running scene has never been better. Races are packed and the casual running clubs are seeing more people come out than ever. But the more serious running teams are doing very poorly. We can't get people out for organized workouts, or for important team races. It's very hard to build team camraderie or real friendships in this kind of environment where everyone is a flake.
2). With my local church the problem is similar. Plenty large mass attendence, but people my age aren't interested in the other ministries that the church offers: working with soup kitchen, church garden, and food pantry to help feed the homeless, book clubs, or even social events, many of which take place right after mass. In addition to the flakiness present in the running scene, there's also a geographic transience: many people are here for school or temporary work, and are not inclined to work towards any kind of more permenant community.
There are similar vibes in many of the other hobbies I take part in: gardening, swing dancing, reading: a trend towards pick-and-choose attendence of events, rather than attendence out of any sense of obligation to a particular community. I'm clearly guilty of this too: I would probably be a stronger running club participant or parishoner if I didn't have so many hobbies, although I like to think I lack the worst of the scrolling/TV vices.
I'm kind of at a loss about what we can do about all this. A big part of the problem is clearly the phones,which hopefully the upcoming Tik Tok ban will help with, but I think there's also a large element of constant geographic mobility at play at here too. I grew up in Chicago, went to college in Boston, and currently am doing my PhD in Baltimore. At each stage of life I built or was part of a community, which, in the case of the first two, I have gradually lost. The thought of the same happening with my friends here fills me with dread, but staying in Baltimore is not a rational economic prospect, and also requires that most of my friends here don't leave themselves. But if not going to stay, why would I ever want to sink my roots in deeper?
Any thoughts/advice appreciated. I also think there's a lot of value in online communities that I have found here at the Motte, in my philosophy book club (university friends), and on Substack, and I'm immensly grateful for their existence, but I don't think they can even come close to fulfilling many of the needs that meatspace does. But that's a whole seperate post.
Its funny, I'm an elder millennial, so I can remember a childhood without phones (and, barely, one without computers or internet), so I actually balk from blaming 'the phones' in the abstract. I was able to adapt from the old nokias to the slick flipphones to several different form factors for 'smartphones' and I think this gave me a practical view of the phone as a tool for organizing IRL activities and keeping in touch with distant friends. That's what we used it for originally.
BUT, I work with 20-21 year old Zoomers, and holy COW they treat their phones like an inseparable appendage, and you can catch them doomscrolling constantly. I can SEE that growing up with this influence leads to a qualitatively different relationship to/dependence on the gadget, which could be source of the other observable problems. Oh, and now they're used to having a semi-reliable AI assistant in their pocket at all times, so now they can use this machine to do a lot of their literal thinking.
And now there's been a couple decades of engineering and testing to optimize the apps for taking your money and sucking up your attention and otherwise making you dependent on various digital services that we previously lived without.
Tiktok being banned won't solve much, there are 50 other apps ready to jump in and replace it, but maybe, just maybe someone will produce reliable research to measure the impact of these apps and finally get towards some policy proposals aimed at cutting out the most harmful elements while retaining the benefits. I can dream, right?
Seen this issue a lot. You can't build a community without a core of dedicated people constantly showing up and doing the work to put together events, and that core of people will get frustrated and burn out or give up if there's too much turnover in membership or members are extremely flaky and unreliable. So hard to even get one off the ground.
My martial arts gym, which HAS an extremely dedicated core tries to hold social events every so often, with plenty of advance notice, and it still a crapshoot as to who will show up outside of that core group.
I've spent the past two years holding regular social gatherings at my house, which is cheap, low-pressure, and I can control the environment to 'guarantee' a pleasant experience. Wrangling adults to hang out together is HARD. Some can't find a babysitter, this one's busy with work or school, that one's just tired and wants to go to bed at 9. So you invite people on the assumption that there'll be a number of last minute dropouts.
Everyone has like 15 different commitments going on at any one time, so getting them to TRULY prioritize a commitment to one group over the other is nigh-impossible. And this also seems to have shifted how humans value individual relationships. There's billions of humans you can potential interact with, and if you aren't satisfied with the ones in your circle of friends, discarding them for new ones is easy. Even if you can't find local friends, your phone offers the potential to make 'infinite' friends! Parasocial relationships! You can spend all day chatting with an AI version of Hitler or Tony the Tiger if it strikes your fancy! Why value real-life relationships at all?
This becomes especially stark on the dating apps. Human connection is immensely devalued.
As somebody whose preferred method of making friends is to identify good people and then forge a deep, long-lasting bond with them (my best friend, whom I still talk to regularly, has been in my life since Kindergarden, literally 30 years), this world of ephemeral connections where people flit in and out of your life on a whim is a bit of a waking nightmare.
I can say for myself, I used to attend the soup kitchens, food pantries, and service to shut-in elderly folks to mow their lawns and such. It was fulfilling in its way.
But what I concluded is that this was basically burning up the manhours of competent people to provide modest benefits to people who simply aren't able to produce value on their own. It is literally more efficient to donate money to some professional org that will pay to provide these services than for me to go out and spend hours on a weekend mowing a lawn myself, and I could do something more enjoyable, to boot. I guess I was engaging in prototype effective altruist logic.
But I do think that engaging in activities that constantly expose you to the 'dregs' of humanity, and seeing that no matter how much money and effort is poured into these folks, at best you're basically just raising their standard of living by 2-3% temporarily, not dragging them permanently out of destitution and fixing the problems that put them there. If you're not a certain type of person, the futility of it probably burns you out. I even tried volunteering at a dog shelter, but that burned me out EVEN QUICKER because holy cow the problem of stray and abandoned dogs is intractable, and there will never be enough funds to shelter all those poor animals, just the few that we can locate, rehabilitate, and get adopted. Volunteering your time for such a sisysphean endeavor seems irrational unless you honestly do have a deep and abiding love for animals. Which some do.
Now, I'm not denying that engaging in acts of service is enriching, and exposing yourself to that side of humanity probably makes you a better-informed person. But its also easy to do it just for the virtue-signal points.
That might be another part of the equation. Sympathy for strangers seems to be on the wane, and this has pushed us ever deeper into our chosen ingroups, and built up a wall of suspicion against all outsiders who might want to forge a connection with us.
For about four years now, my thing has been trivia night. It helps that I enjoy it, so I’m almost always there. It’s super low-pressure, and I don’t have to overthink it. Meet a couple at a coffee shop who seem cool? No need to try setting something up, “I’m at the same place the same time every week. If you want to hang out, that’s where I’ll be.” You work through the chaff and start finding a core group of consistent people. Really this is what church was but that's just too much for most people to bite off.
Another key, though, is that if you want to develop a social circle, oneself has to show up when others put on events.
I think this is one thing people don't realize. With all the discussion about "third places" in recent years, it's almost like the writers complaining about them are essentially asking for bars without admitting they want bars. I'm a member of a local VFW post. I go several times a week. I don't go because I like drinking, I go because I like the people. If you're a regular at a bar, you know you can show up any time and you're friends will be there. Not all of your friends, but at least some of them. It's the ultimate low commitment social life, because there's never any obligation or expectation to show up, but it's always there if you want to do it. And if you just want to sit there and read or look at your phone, you can do that, too, because, even if you know everybody else in the bar, you didn't specifically go there to meet them specifically, so there's no obligation to entertain them.
For all this lack of obligation, though, it only really works if you commit to it; you have to go there often enough that everybody knows your name for it to have that kind of effect. If you only go a few times a year, you won't know anybody well enough for it to be worth it. The only time you can really get away from this is if you slowly back off after having gone regularly for years, at which point you can do the minimum to keep in touch. So when writers complain about the lack of some amorphous "third space" that I imagine they picture being like a college student union, I wonder if they realize that they don't work unless enough people are committed. Is there going to be a critical mass of people who show up several times a week solely out of routine to make it attractive for a stranger to want to join the community? What's the default activity? Bars have pool tables, dart boards, trivia nights, etc., but most people default to sitting around the bar bullshitting.
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Whoah now buddy, that could turn me into some kind of... extrovert?
More seriously, the type of friends I make tend to be introverted nerds so generally speaking they don't like planning and holding events, so I do most of the heavy lifting there. But when somebody is putting in the effort to coordinate something, be it trivia or just hanging out at a park and tossing a frisbee, I want to recognize that effort and show up for it.
I'll be honest, its a good way to sort high agency people from low agency ones. The sort who actually plan events and put out the word and do the legwork to 'make things happen' are generally high functioning and reliable, which is a signal correlated with other good traits, generally. That is the signal I'm trying to send.
In my experience, planning tends to go a lot smoother if it's the kind of event where your own personal attendance isn't contingent on other people showing up. If I'm trying to get a group together to ride bikes, and I make it clear that it's a group ride, if I don't get sufficient interest then the few people who are interested will probably drop out as well, if only because of a perception that we need some kind of critical mass. If I simply say that I'm going and if anyone wants to join they're welcome to, then it seems clear from the beginning that it wasn't intended as a big group blowout and if only one other person is interested they won't feel weird about showing up, and in turn pressure on the group isn't as much so more people will show up overall.
Yeah its almost paradoxical. On one end, if there is extremely high pressure to attend/not flake then attendance seems to be more reliable (maybe there's a nonrefundable charge of some kind or some other major cost for not attending). Or its an extremely desirable event that isn't repeated often, like a popular band's concert or similar.
On the other end, if its lowkey, minimal cost, and you just invite as many as possible and don't really put much pressure on attendance then you also get pretty decent turnout (although oftentimes people will happily arrive 'late' or leave 'early.'
Its the middle zone, where you invite people to an event with a CLEAR expectation that they will show up if they agree to, and where the main 'cost' of flaking is losing social points, and you put in at least a medium amount of effort to following up with people/'securing' commitments to come where people are most likely to cancel on the day of. Probably a combination of feeling pressured to accept at the time they're being asked, and then 'deciding' later that its really not that serious and cancelling.
There's also a particular dynamic with females. I specifically try to have mixed-gender gatherings (part of my goal is to get people of opposite sex to form connections and maybe create dates and relationships), but with females in particular, they tend to only want to come if they can 'know' that other females will be there. And if they aren't coordinating directly with other females but instead through me, the organizer, there's an information asymetry. If I tell them "oh yeah plenty of women are coming" how much do they trust my word? So last minute flakes are probably the rule there.
And the end result seems to be that usually NO (single) females attend an informal event unless there is some other major enticement. Some girls will attend with their boyfriend, and sometimes a lone female shows up and ends up being the only female there and hangs around somewhat awkwardly then leaves early, unless someone manages to engage her in a friendly conversation and puts her at ease. I've gotten decent at that.
The trick I've tried lately to some success is to try to invite two females at the same time (i.e. approach both simultaneously so they can both see/hear the other accept the invitation). And likewise if I have a female friend that I'm sure is coming I ask her to follow up with/confirm other females attending. It feels like an interesting game, trying to lure a woman who is extremely skittish about going to events with unfamiliar people out long enough to gain her trust.
I'm sure there are more secrets to getting women to attend but its a very consistent pattern at this point.
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