some of the most pressing problems in big chunks of the United States may show up in economic data as low employment levels and stagnant wages but are also evident in elevated rates of depression, drug addiction and premature death. In other words, economics is only a piece of a broader, societal problem.
.. “Once economists have the ears of people in Washington, they convince them that the only questions worth asking are the questions that economists are equipped to answer,”
.. while economists tend to view a job as a straightforward exchange of labor for money, a wide body of sociological research shows how tied up work is with a sense of purpose and identity.
.. But what social values can do is say that unemployment isn’t just losing wages, it’s losing dignity and self-respect and a feeling of usefulness and all the things that make human beings happy and able to function.”
.. in the United States, his subjects viewed their ability to land a job as a personal reflection of their self-worth rather than as an arbitrary matter. They therefore took rejection hard, blaming themselves and in many cases giving up looking for work. In contrast, in Israel similar unemployed workers viewed getting a job as more like winning a lottery, and were less discouraged by rejection.
.. the industrial economy offered blue-collar men a sense of identity and purpose that the modern service economy doesn’t.
.. “When no one asks us for advice, there’s no incentive to become a policy field,”
Map of gang territories in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley
Google maps
Help Vampires: A Spotter’s Guide
Help Vampires are virtual bedouins. They move into a community—as soon as they sense its vibrancy and intelligence. Often they leave (“give up,” in their eyes) when they have exhausted all the resources, leaving the community itself drained and adrift.
This gypsy-like behavior incurs a secondary effect which further cripples the community, and persists even after the Help Vampire problem has passed. Often the “best and brightest,” sensing the outflux of decent conversation, retreat into Walled Garden communities which the Help Vampire can rarely penetrate. In this way the individuals are sheltered from the painful effects of Help Vampire attacks, but they also make themselves inaccessible to non-Help Vampire users as well. This effect can be the last straw that leaves the community devoid of experts and utterly without hope.
How the Internet Has Brought Us Too Close Together (and the Wisdom of Trolls)
Girard argues that the more that social differences and hierarchies are broken down and the more people become equal and closely connected to each other, the more at risk a society is of dangerous mimetic contagion.
.. What both Girard and Friedman highlight is the extreme importance of the factors that arrest or prevent the movement of impulses and emotions from one person to another, those structures, traits, and practices that enable us to create boundaries and distance between ourselves and others, to resist the pull of empathy, and to establish a well-defined—‘differentiated’—sense of ourselves and our own ‘response-able’ agency (as opposed to reactivity).
.. In its very structure, the Internet tends to bring us too close together in a number of ways that invite dysfunctionality.
.. How exactly does the contemporary Internet decrease differentiation? Here are a few ways. The Internet is fast, diminishing the differentiating factor of time. When everything moves at such a pace, we tend to react rather than taking the necessary pause for reflection necessary in order to respond.
.. The early forum and blogging communities that I participated in had relatively similar demographics to those described by the research above and enjoyed the vigorous yet collegial culture of discourse that tends to come with that. These communities worked so well in large part because they weren’t very fraught by gender differences in cultures of discourse or by racial or class tensions, and because almost every participant had some socialization into the standards of argumentation and discourse that one expects of those with higher education. The demographics of contexts and communities are very significant in determining the sorts of discourses that they can sustain and the demographics of the early Internet were demographics that encouraged the ‘broad engagement and diversity of ideas’ that Pao mentions.
.. In contrast to ‘crowdpounders’, trolls tend to be far more independent personalities, with a deep antipathy for groupthink, who love to antagonize people and exploit the dynamics of groupthink, people’s emotional reactivity, and lack of differentiation to get a rise from them. Trolls disrupt communities, and especiallycommunities that are dysfunctionally reactive or non-differentiated.
.. Trolls are more often than not highly dysfunctional—though often extremely intelligent—people themselves (other forms of trolling are shrewd uses of communities’ reactivity for a somewhat worthier purpose, such as the Apostle Paul’s trolling of the Jewish council in Acts 23).
.. Nonetheless, they can—generally inadvertently—perform positive social good in the course of their trolling. By exposing dysfunctions and making non-differentiated communities and reactive persons look ridiculous, they can save us all the trouble of taking these persons and groups as seriously as they would like to be taken, even if the troll themself appals us.
.. This is why trolls prey upon communities that tend to operate with herd dynamics, rather than upon self-aware communities. Their wry appreciation of triggering herd dynamics is often a coping mechanism for or a means of venting their deep frustration with the prevalence of such dynamics more generally and the ways that these dynamics impinge upon their lives.
.. To put it crudely, trolls can sometimes be the a**holes that societies need to expel the s**t that they otherwise can become full of.
.. Trolls can take many different forms and some trolls are decidedly unpleasant personalities. However, at their best, trolls can greatly enrich our online world, ensuring that the Internet never fully succumbs to the state of the sleepy settlement or to corporate colonization, but always retains something of the strangeness and unpredictability of the frontier, where people need to keep their wits about them, where they must develop thicker skins and take responsibility for themselves, and where startling and illuminating discovery can still occur. At their very best, trolls, like Socratic gadflies or biblical prophets, can serve to unsettle societies’ and individuals’ groupthink and their complacent relation to the truth. Such irritants can be some of the most important members of society.
.. They often exemplify the value of a thick skin for substantial discussion; they are wonderfully non-reactive, so one can speak forthrightly with them, without tiptoeing around sensitivities.