The Internet of Beefs

This is an excellent analysis of the state of the modern internet, though I don&#x27;t entirely agree with his diagnosis of the cause; I think it&#x27;s more down to two main things:<p>1. We are all, at heart, covetous xenophobic apes, and we&#x27;ve been doing the same basic thing (arbitrarily define an in-group and an out-group and proceed to wage total war on the out-group) since before we were even human. This is just the latest iteration of the thing we&#x27;ve always done.<p>2. For more than a decade now, people have been spending fortunes building platforms and algorithms that rely on ever-increasing user &#x27;engagement&#x27;, often without really knowing what that is. As it turns out, conflict is the most engaging kind of engagement. Twitter especially is a machine for conflict - it funnels anger-inducing information to the user and makes it trivial to strike back at the source of the anger. I really don&#x27;t think anybody did this on purpose, but it&#x27;s what we ended up with.

This article resonates with me and my experiences online to a startling degree. Specifically:<p>“We are not beefing endlessly because we do not desire peace or because we do not know how to engineer peace. We are beefing because we no longer know who we are, each of us individually, and collectively as a species.”<p>I think we are seeing a genuine lack of strong family, social, and organizational ties among most people, myself (sadly) included. I don’t think I or any of my peers fully grasp what we’re missing and how isolated we truly are. I think we as a cohort had very good reasons for participating in that change, such as me (an LGBT person) leaving the Catholic church I was raised in rather than bury that other part of myself to fit in. The problem is that I replaced it with nothing, and I think the same pattern has repeated across many other people and many other traditions. The temptation is to suggest MeetUps and other things built to connect people, but those suggested replacements don’t come with the same assumption of trust built in like many traditional organizational and family ties do.

This framework helps me understand why prominent thinkers on Twitter get so much content-free hate in their replies. Most replies aren&#x27;t even disagreements with the thing they&#x27;re replying to. They&#x27;re missiles in a beef war, against some perceived elite group. So it&#x27;s not necessary to understand the claim and make a detailed refutation. They can just reply with a generic personal attack, and that keeps the culture war going. And generic personal attacks get multiplied by the crowd more than specific nuanced ones, because they&#x27;re easy to imitate.<p>Also:<p>&gt; You can only predict it by trying to understand it as the deliberate perpetuation of a culture of conflict by those with an interest in keeping it alive.<p>ie, the warriors are playing an infinite game that they enjoy. You can&#x27;t win by out-arguing them. The only way to win is not to play.

I&#x27;ve always thought anonymous imageboards were excellent training grounds for how to deal with all of this. When there&#x27;s no upvoting or ability to filter people by name, you have to learn how to deal with people who often truly are only posting to make you mad. There are two good responses, both of which are extremely difficult if you have no practice: ignoring it; engaging sincerely and with the assumption that the other person is doing the same. If you persist with the first they&#x27;ll eventually go and bother someone else, but this is doubly hard because it requires everyone to ignore them, and that only really happens when the bait has grown stale. The second often results in them switching from the troll persona to actual sincerity, but it requires several back and forths of responding with goodwill to bile, and I think it&#x27;s even harder to accomplish in forums where people have tied their name to their opinions.

HN is pretty good at moderating discussions. Which is the main reason I come here. Still, I&#x27;ve seen plenty of beef only thinking here and I too have been guilty at times.<p>It can be quite frustrating when you make an observation about someone&#x27;s comment only to have them automatically assume you were in disagreement. It&#x27;s good to assume a generous interpretation. Since tone is so hard to gauge on the Internet, discussions quickly devolve otherwise.

At some point people will realize that Twitter doesn&#x27;t matter. The sooner that happens the better.<p>For whatever reason, our elites and media are convinced Twitter is <i>very important</i>. Nothing is worse than getting criticized by the peanut gallery. Twitter can end careers, cancel television shows, bring down elected officials.<p>That power quickly turned from, &quot;complain about lost baggage on Twitter and get an airline ticket voucher for $50&quot; to &quot;I demand anyone I disagree with be exiled to Elba.&quot;<p>The truth is Twitter already doesn&#x27;t matter, like, <i>at all</i> to almost everyone. Ask your aunt or brother-in-law about what&#x27;s trending on Twitter and you&#x27;ll get a blank stare. But journalists and elites continue to be terrified of, and enthralled by Twitter. They&#x27;ve collectively forgotten that &quot;sticks and stones may break my bones...&quot;

Throw in Nadia Eghbal&#x27;s Tyranny of Ideas (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nadiaeghbal.com&#x2F;ideas" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nadiaeghbal.com&#x2F;ideas</a>) and you&#x27;ll realize it&#x27;s not humans beefing, but ideas. Posting is praxis, and the internet is a series of tube battlegrounds for the best ideas.<p>I&#x27;m a multitour veteran of the scarred hellscape where modern and historic ideas struggle - 4chan, TEDx conferences, irc, VC conference rooms, local candidate door-knocking campaigns, reddit, and of course twitter. The brawling is better there than in academic journals and library shelves. Today I proudly do my duty fighting off the bad ideas with the Good Ones.<p>Jokes aside, this is a horribly lame and out of touch take, saying that people&#x27;s righteous anger is in fact not because of their legit complaints about society, but because <i>they just want to argue</i>. It&#x27;s a both sides false equivalence, equal to PG implying he&#x27;s better off being an &quot;accidental centrist&quot;, whatever the hell that means.

Is it though? or is it the disenfranchised finally are able to have their opinion heard? We also get to see the emperors now and we realise they have no clothes - they&#x27;re just like us.<p>My hope is this is a brief period of education of everyone to see each others opinions and something better can come of it. As always there are those at work trying to maintain their positions.<p>For myself I have learnt a lot about the belief systems of other people from the internet. I can only hope others are doing the same, we all have to get along.<p>Edit: I think of it as the great flattening, to coin a term, previous societies were hierarchical with people in charge handing down dogma. There were some dissenters - they were called antisocial at one stage. Now everyone is at the same level, I&#x27;ve had conversations on forums with people who invented tech, wrote books I&#x27;ve read, I could if I was so inclined seek out other fields - everything is open now. This is bound to cause some &#x27;beefing&#x27;. End of beef.

I&#x27;m not going to be able to wade through this entire article. If this is at all an accurate characterization of Twitter, that might explain why I have so few followers.<p>I don&#x27;t engage in this stuff on Twitter. I&#x27;ve overall had fairly positive experiences on Twitter. I continue to try to figure out how to connect positively on Twitter and on the internet generally.<p>I don&#x27;t agree that the only antidote is to go seek out walled gardens and the like. The real solution is to be the change you want to see.<p>Don&#x27;t go looking for beefs.<p>Try to bring solutions, not complaints.<p>Try to have some empathy for people and assume &quot;They must be having a bad day&quot; or &quot;Wow, they must have a lot of baggage on this topic&quot; and politely decline to get into some shitshow with them.<p>Remember that having empathy for others (instead of just assuming everyone is simply intentionally being an asshole) doesn&#x27;t mean being a doormat. Respect yourself. Don&#x27;t kiss their ass to mollify them or something. Instead, just shut up and quit putting out the fire with gasoline.

Q: How would one distinguish between IoB culture and a culture in which there is a meaningful conflict between ideas and values?

Venkat is enjoyable as always, but the central conceit of this essay is an insult to crash-only programming.<p>The crash-only approach to feuding online is to <i>stop responding when someone beefs with you</i>. Don&#x27;t try to mollify, don&#x27;t flame back, don&#x27;t explain yourself, just: close the tab, do something else, and reboot Twitter later, in a known-good state.

I think this article captures the Zeitgeist of this internet era perfectly.<p>I&#x27;m a bit surprised at the hasty conclusion though:<p>&gt; The conclusion is inescapable: the IoB will shut down, and give way to something better, only when we know who we want to be — individually and collectively — when the beefing stops, and regenerate into that form. Only that will allow history to be rebooted, and time to be restarted.<p>The IoB is driven by human nature. It&#x27;s demise would only lead to beefing in some other arena that we cannot postulate yet...

I&#x27;m not quite sure what to make of this, but I think I agree with this conclusion:<p>&gt; We are not beefing endlessly because we do not desire peace or because we do not know how to engineer peace. We are beefing because we no longer know who we are, each of us individually, and collectively as a species. Knight and mook alike are faced with the terrifying possibility that if there is no history in the future, there is nobody in particular to be once the beefing stops.<p>&gt; And the only way to reboot history is to figure out new beings to be. Because that’s ultimately what beefing is about: a way to avoid being, without allowing time itself to end.<p>What this era calls for is us to discover new ways of being human. It sounds grandiose, but I think that&#x27;s where we are.

I hesitate to criticize this person, because they&#x27;re presumably writing for an audience that already knows them, and probably are following for this style of writing, but I have to ask: What is it with think-pieces that state obvious and widespread conclusions while using jargon and jokes to obscure how basic of conclusions they really are?<p>I can&#x27;t fault people who do this because they&#x27;re paid by the word and taking 5,000 of them to describe the color of the sky brings them a nice amount, but I don&#x27;t see why it&#x27;s done here, where that doesn&#x27;t seem to be a consideration.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;samzdat.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;06&#x2F;28&#x2F;without-belief-in-a-god-but-never-without-belief-in-a-devil&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;samzdat.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;06&#x2F;28&#x2F;without-belief-in-a-god-but-n...</a><p>samzdat makes similar points in this article -- esoteric but insightful

I&#x27;ve already retreated to mostly cozyweb! It&#x27;s great here.

&gt; Importantly, unless you do something dumb that makes you vulnerable to being drawn into the mook-manorial economy against your will, such as saying something that can be used against you while in a position of authority in an important institution, the IoB is an opt-in conflict arena. You only opt-in to the Internet of Beefs driven by a sincere grievance if you are mook enough to want to.<p>I find this vert true. The particularity of HN is that they did not gather by beef but by learning about the startup scene and skills.

Undoubtedly, some of what this article describes, routinely takes place on twitter. However, I find that something else takes place on twitter much more, or at least as frequently. It goes something like this:<p>1) Something somewhere happens.<p>2) A person who may be famous or well know for some accomplishments, perhaps even super impressive accomplishments in a particular field of business or creative endevours, decides to comment on 1) on Twitter<p>3) Note that this person usually has no particular expertise or knowledge in the area of 1) despite having overall success and fame and lots of followers<p>4) It turns out that because of 3) their opinion expressed in 250 characters often ( not always ) is either somewhat silly, potentially offensive to some, outright dumb&#x2F;misinformed or simply lacks sufficient nuance.<p>5) because of 4) lots of &quot;mooks&quot; and &quot;knights&quot; come out of the woodwork and attack this famous person, along with all kinds of legitimate critics<p>6) said person feels under attack and&#x2F;or cancelled and bemoans the state of Twitter, the world and the internet<p>Now, it may be unfortunate that Twitter mobs attack these people simply for their opinions. But if you opine on something you have no expertise in to a very large audience in public, then I think you should grow thicker skin and prepare to also weather some criticism just on the off chance you actually say something dumb.<p>It&#x27;s as if only these people, with their declarations of their opinions have the right to say something controversial, but nobody else has any right to respond to that controversial thought with any criticism or disagreement.

Good article, resonated with me.<p>I think the problem is people care both too much about other people’s opinions and also are too forceful pushing their opinions at other people.<p>I think it was the stoic philosopher Epictetus who said people love themselves more than other people but value other people’s opinions about themselves more than they value their own opinions about themselves. Don’t worry so much about what other people think and say.

What&#x27;s interesting about this as well is that participating in this economy of beefs makes people deeply unhappy right to the core, and yet they can&#x27;t seem to step away.<p>Take any Twitter user with over 20k followers, and almost to a T they appear to be extremely unhappy, depressed, and anxious wrecks who use Twitter to put on a happy face and pretend they&#x27;re not.

Man was I really hoping this was an API for cows in a field and sensor data attached to each beef. BaaS, or Bovine as a Service.

Imagine two curves, ressources, and population growth, one bouncing against the other, deminishing it. Imagine a blind force, trying to adapt to this circumstances.<p>How would a neuro-typus look like, that adapts to strife? How would its build up look like?<p>What would be the treshold to bring it out of hibernation in hiding out in the open? What could return it to hibernation?<p>Would it try to create a everlasting thirty year war, if it could? What re-purpose could such a neuro-typus have in peace times? Is something that is adapted to its surrounding even sick- can you call someone who traumatizes and revels in it, in its environment even sick?<p>Is religion - the maximum production of genetic lotterys for the great lottery of war- at cost of liberty, just another peace time adaption to this adaption to the perfect cycle of strife? How many neuro-typuses are there? Can diffrent neuro-typus form a social machinery?<p>Has the peacefull humanity, this idealized version ever existed? Or is this just some luxery delusion, created by science? Give me energy in abundance, give me fertilizer, give me fresh-water, give me forrests, i shall devour them, and call myself peacefull.<p>Will virtual violence (games) allow to hack&#x2F;circumvent the cycle of strife behaviour?<p>Will self-surveilance gadgetry allow us to behave, even when the state collapses?<p>We live in intersting times.<p>We could feed this regressive behaviour for another thousand years, if we had fusion and spaceflight- but then, we would be exponential up and out there, holding the rocks of gods. Maybe its better to resolve this down here.<p>To harden the roots of the scenario-tree, give it all the chances to self-control, learned in a thousand years of repetition.<p>Dang, I wish you could invest kharma in a point, with a dividend, depending on investment. And with insolvency goes away all your posts to the underworld.

Some of the requirements for a durable beef:<p>1. The two sides are evenly matched.<p>2. There is no way to objectively decide the merits of the beef.<p>3. Each side of the beef has at least one skilled Knight capable of &quot;eviscerating&quot; Knights of the other side.<p>4. Knights who do not care one way or another about the ideas involved in the beef. Only the conflict matters to a good Knight.<p>5. Mooks on each side are plentiful and eager to please the Knight they serve.<p>6. Knights view their own Mooks as a necessary evil.<p>7. Mutual dislike between Mook clans must be real.<p>8. Knights seek balanced matches with no clear outcome. Only the conflict matters.<p>Remove any of these elements and the beef loses its appeal and participants.

I often ask myself why Facebook, Twitter and Instagram say &quot;follow&quot; instead of link or associate.<p>People who seek followers give me cause for concern.

This is an interesting framework in which to analyse the Internet and the communication that occurs on the Internet, but I don&#x27;t think all parts of the analysis are correct. Or at least, I think many assumptions about the reasons for people behaving as they do have been made, that are not necessarily correct. I think the observations of behaviour are fairly accurate for some significnat proportion of those involved though.<p>Could it be, that the Internet has simply magnifed what humans have already been doing for hundreds (thousands?) of years? The rise of the Internet has also coincided with a large portion of the English speaking world (where the Internet first originated) being at the highest point of literacy and education in history. This simply means that the ability of each human to express their own ideas to another human is at an all time high. Now, add to that the ability to: * Observe the large numbers of people that agree with you (social media) * Broadcast your opinions on other groups of people to everybody that agrees with, and to everybody that disagrees with you (social media) * Carry the ability to make these broadcasts with you at all times (smartphones, tablets) * Be able to get instant feedback on your broadcasts (real time messaging, notifications)<p>... and you have simply magnifed existing human conflicts, desires for attention and belonging, opinionatedness, and so on, by many orders of magnitude.<p>What we are seeing on the Internet is simply the human experience and human nature on steriods.<p>---<p>The writer raises some doubt about how much of what they call the Internet of Beef is actually a culture war. But I have no doubt in my mind that it is a culture war. What is culture? The collective views, values, customs, art, morals, and beliefs of a large somewhat cohesive group of people. This is exactly what is being constantly debated, influenced, changed, synthesized, refined, and convoluted by the on-going Internet wars. It is shaping our culture.<p>Internet culture - due to the prevalence of smartphones and other devices - has begun (it begun a while ago) leaking into everyday culture. It makes sense then, that the politics of the day would be influenced by what happens online too. You can no longer separate the online world from the &quot;real&quot; world. The real world is made up in large part by the Internet world. Our culture has simply been given superpowers if you like, in order to rapdily evolve and shift and change at unprecedented speed.

&quot;the term freelancer comes from mercenary knights, with no fixed loyalties, in the medieval era&quot; - Great TIL

Fascinating and thoughtful article.<p>I loved this short poignant sentence: &quot;To participate is to lose.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s so true and so sad.

I think it’s something like group solipsism. Nothing can be trusted except what “I” decide. Which is only helpful in so far as maybe we can address this internet backed societal problem with rhetoric similar to how we would address solipsism.

The internet is a large amplification device, everyone single expressed feeling or thought is amplified to be the most important topic of our time. Including this post and my comment, people should stop being so serious and enjoy living.

My only thought is that this article falls into the same trap it’s describing by oversubscribing to conflict and outlying activity.

This was one of the most entertaining and insightful pieces I&#x27;ve read in a long time. In general, I think it seems like a pretty accurate understanding of the state of the world&#x2F;internet. But I think it stops short at the end where it talks about moving on from the beefs into new ways of being that will be significant to the future. I think plenty of people have rejected the beefing and moved on to new, positive ways of being. Many people are focusing their energy and lives on science, art and lifestyles that are completely removed from the constant conflict of the modern internet and instead focused on human progress. While plenty of beef can be thrown around about humanism, humanitarianism, the human progress movement and sustainable development goals, those focused on those things seem to have removed themselves entirely from the internet of beefs. I&#x27;d suggest Bill Gates as one prominent example.

The best tangible community example of the IoB is Nutrition. Cesspool.

This all sounds like a japanese role-playing game.

4 times is not enough. maybe post it again?

In my experience, the vast majority of people have triggers that shut down reasonable communication. For instance, economics is a touchy subject on this forum. It takes a great deal of patience to put up with people who may end up wasting a large amount of your time.<p>In reality, I think the understanding that people should avoid conflict can only exist in periods of increasing consumption to distract from an understanding that societal engagement depends on more than voting. This is why voting does not require an explanation, especially in online forums: to silence minority opinions without actually confronting contradicting ideals.

Jesus, people making a big deal out of twitter again. Newsflash: twitter is the comments section you took out of your website. It&#x27;s a shitty version of Usenet; unlike Usenet or the comments section, it lacks any way of subdividing into interest groups and commonalities, so it&#x27;s one giant global puke fest. Journalist types love it because ... they&#x27;re narcissistic wingnats and are addicted to stroking their nerd dildoes. It has nothing to do with social atomization; I&#x27;m pretty sure North Korean twitter would be the same thing, because arguing on the internet appeals to people&#x27;s lizard brains.<p>TLDR: twitter isn&#x27;t real and you are mentally ill.

TL;DR: Here&#x27;s my beef with all the people on the internet with beefs.

In the same way that Spark turns a program into a plan for cluster computation, there&#x27;s some sort of process by which an idea and a bunch of talking points gets compiled into a big distributed staged media campaign through all channels and institutions that forces culture change that no one asked for. The canonical and somewhat &quot;innocent&quot; example of this is a major advertising campaign for a new pharmaceutical like Prozac for example, where the company pushing it has to explain it through ads, articles, movies (Prozac Diary) and so forth to the general public over a number of years so that people get it as a new element of the social landscape.<p>Related to this is a question that has bugging me is how is the social justice <i>&quot;ideological pipeline&quot;</i> constructed and operated? How does an idea, become an obscure scientific journal article, become a slew of newspaper editorials and human interest stories, which forms a twitter mob, in which the ideological program has been installed on all the &quot;beef only&quot; thinker nodes, then it&#x27;s own Netflix show, and super hero movie and then becomes a law where you get put in prison for using the wrong pronoun.