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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32062 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Collectivization of Suffering

Disclaimer: This might be better for the Fun Thread, as there's no deep point here, just an observation.

I've become aware of a vibe among my circle of professional peers: collectivization of suffering.

Look, for example, at this comment to an article about decreasing worker productivity on hackernews, a news aggregator site that's popular among techies, especially US ones: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33468735

When did it become popular to upload your emotions to a shared cloud? How does that even work? Like, when I eat a donut or stub my toe, does the collective feel a pang of pleasure or pain? This commenter and others in that thread bring up war, the pandemic, social upheavals, etc. It's like they're trying to say that these things affect them deeply... despite 99.99% of them being completely uninvolved. It sounds... preposterous: that most likely a tech worker that's most likely situated in the US of A is somehow suffering as much as a Ukrainian soldier in the Donbas or a woman protester in Iran.

This reminds me of a great collectivist, Hegel, who picked up Rousseau's idea of the national spirit, and molded it around the idea of the state. People who declaim being part of a great collectivized suffering sound to me like folks that are yearning to become ants in a great colony, extensions of a single organism, like what fingers are to a person.

I worry that people like this are ripe for exploitation. They just need an ideology to forge them into something violent--the poster writes as much: "I believe we are on the edge of a massive social upheaval".

Look at this Politico piece about the rift in the Democratic Party between the young(ish) people pushing for the left agenda:

He is the kind of person who, midway into his first cocktail, says, “I don’t want to sound insufferable, but I wake up every morning thinking about how I can reduce poverty, how I can reduce suffering.”

And of course it makes him sound insufferable, pompous, and up his own backside (the piece does some lovely stiletto in the back moments like this throughout).

These people do have privilege, which they have learned is bad. They are uneasily aware that they are The Enemy, as all their political thinking has informed them they must be, but they personally don't feel like The Enemy - they're not racist or sexist or transphobic! But they have both a privileged position, according to the Oppression Totem Pole, and they can't do anything about it - activism is all very well, but they're not in a position to make the decisions that lead to real change, because they don't have political or financial clout.

But what they can do, in order to relieve this sense of pressure about being part of the problem but not part of the solution, is to participate in it. They are suffering too! They are thinking about poverty and injustice and feeling bad! They share all this to reassure each other, and be reassured, that they are in fact not the bad guys, they're one of the good ones.

But what they can do, in order to relieve this sense of pressure about being part of the problem but not part of the solution, is to participate in it. They are suffering too! They are thinking about poverty and injustice and feeling bad! They share all this to reassure each other, and be reassured, that they are in fact not the bad guys, they're one of the good ones.

I think you hit the nail on the head.

For many, I suspect there's also an element of selling out.

Nerd culture, especially the US flavor, has a strong countercultural streak to it. By talking about these topics, signaling support, and wearing a hoodie, it's probably possible to mask (from yourself) the fact that you're making a boatload of money, writing design documents, and talking about KPIs, quarterly goals, and securing wins.

Nerd culture, especially the US flavor, has a strong countercultural streak to it. By talking about these topics, signaling support, and wearing a hoodie, it's probably possible to mask (from yourself) the fact that you're making a boatload of money, writing design documents, and talking about KPIs, quarterly goals, and securing wins.

That doesn't quite work... Counter cultural nerds were among the first victims of privilege-checkers. Even now, if a nerd even so much as mumbles "I didn't like that recent MegaCorp adaptation of Nerd Franchise" they get smeared as everything from Nazi to transphobe.

What if these nerds are not the Eric S. Raymond/Richard Stallman type, the initial bazaar dwellers, but the new crop of folks that entered the culture post-DomCom crash? The pragmatic ones who love the counter cultural aesthetic but just want a safe, cool job?

They can stop calling themselves nerds, and get off my lawn!

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