If you crack open some of the mustier books about the Internet - you know the ones I’m talking about, the ones which invoke Roland Barthes and discuss the sexual transgressing of MUDs - one of the few still relevant criticisms is the concern that the Internet by uniting small groups will divide larger ones.
SURFING ALONE
You may remember this as the Bowling Alone thesis applied to the Internet; it got some traction in the late 1990s. The basic idea is: electronic entertainment devices grow in sophistication and inexpensiveness as the years pass, until by the 1980s and 1990s, they have spread across the globe and have devoured multiple generations of children; these devices are more pernicious than traditional geeky fares inasmuch as they are often best pursued solo. Spending months mastering Super Mario Bros - all alone - is a bad way to grow up normal.
AND THEN THERE WERE NONE
The 4 or 5 person Dungeons & Dragons party (with a dungeon master) gives way to the classic arcade with its heated duels and oneupsmanship; the arcade gives way to the flickering console in the bedroom with one playing Final Fantasy VII - alone. The increased graphical realism, the more ergonomic controllers, the introduction of genuinely challenging AI techniques… Trend after trend was rendering a human opponent unnecessary. And gamer after gamer was now playing alone.
Perhaps, the critic says, the rise of the Internet has ameliorated that distressing trend - the trends favored no connectivity at first, but then there was finally enough surplus computing power and bandwidth for massive connectivity to become the order of the day.
It is much more satisfactory and social to play MMORPGs on your PC than single-player RPGS, much more satisfactory to kill human players in Halo matches than alien AIs. The machines finally connect humans to humans, not human to machine. We’re forced to learn some basic social skills, to maintain some connections. We’re no longer retreating into our little cocoons, interacting with no humans.
WELCOME TO THE N.H.K.!
But, the critic continues, things still are not well. We are still alienated from one another. The rise of the connected machines still facilitates withdrawal and isolation. It presents the specter of the hikikomori - the person who ceases to exist in the physical realm as much as possible. It is a Japanese term, of course. They are 5 years further in our future than we are (or perhaps one should say, were). Gibson writes, back in 2001:
The hikikomori withdraws from all personal contact. The hikikomori does not hang out at the local pub, swilling down the brewskis as everyone cheers on the home team. The hikikomori is not gossiping at the rotary club nor with the Lions or mummers or Veterans or Knights. hikikomoris do none of that. They aren’t working, they aren’t hanging out with friends.
OPTING OUT
The point the critic wants to make is that life is short and a zero-sum game. You lose a third of the day to sleep, another third to making a living, and now you’ve little left. To be really productive, you can’t divide your energies across multiple cultures - you can’t be truly successful in mainstream culture, and at the same time be able to devote enough effort in the field of, say, mechanical models, to be called an Otaking. A straddler takes onto his head the overhead of learning and participating in both, and receives no benefits (he will suffer socially in the esteem of the normals, and will be able to achieve little in his hobby due to lack of time and a desire to not go overboard).
The otaku & hikikomori recognizes this dilemma and he chooses - to reject normal life! He rejects life in the larger culture for his subculture. It’s a simple matter of comparative advantage; it’s easier to be a big fish in a small pond than in a large one.
THE BIGGER SCREEN
With enough of these gaps, where is American or French culture? Such cultural identities take centuries to coalesce - France did not speak French until the 1900s (as The Discovery of France recounts), and Han China is still digesting & assimilating its many minorities & outlying regions. America, of course, had it easy in starting with a small founder population which could just exterminate the natives.
The national identity fragments under the assault of burgeoning subcultures. At last, the critic beholds the natural endpoint of this process: the nation is some lines on a map, some laws you follow. No one particularly cares about it. The geek thinks, Meh: here, Canada, London, Japan, Singapore - as long as FedEx can reach me and there’s a good Internet connection, what’s the difference? (Nor are the technically-inclined alone in this.)
You can test this yourself. Tell yourself - The country I live in now is the best country in the world for people like me; I would be terribly unhappy if I was exiled. If your mental reply goes something like, Why, what’s so special about the USA? It’s not particularly economically or politically free, it’s not the only civilized English-speaking country, it’s not the wealthiest…, then you are headed down the path of opting out.
This is how the paradox works: the Internet breaks the larger culture by letting members flee to smaller subcultures. And the critics think this is bad. They like the broader culture10, they agree with Émile Durkheim about atomization and point to examples like South Korea, and deep down, furries and latex fetishists really bother them. They just plain don’t like those deviants.
BUT I CAN GET A HIGHER SCORE!
In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.
Let’s look at another angle.
MONOCULTURE
Suppose there were only 1 worldwide culture, with no subcultures. The overriding obsession of this culture will be… let’s make it money. People are absolutely obsessed with money - how it is made, acquired, degraded, etc. More importantly, status is defined just by how much you have earned in your life; in practice, tie-breakers include how fast you made it, what circumstances you made it in (everyone admires a person who became a billionaire in a depression more than a good-times billionaire, in the same way we admire the novelist in the freezing garret more than the comfortable academic), and so on.
This isn’t too absurd a scenario: subjects feed on themselves and develop details and complexity as effort is invested in them. Money could well absorb the collective efforts of 7 billion people - already many people act just this way.
But what effect does this have on people? I can tell you: the average person is going to be miserable. If everyone genuinely buys into this culture, then they have to be. Their talents at piano playing, or cooking, or programming, or any form of artistry or scholarly pursuit are denigrated and count for naught. The world has become too big - it did not use to be so big, people so powerless of what is going on:
To put it another way: women suffer enough from comparing themselves to media images. If you want a vision of this future, imagine everyone being an anorexic teenager who hates her body - forever.
We all value social esteem. We need to know somebody thinks well of us. We’re tribal monkeys; ostracism means death.
by Gwern Branwen, Gwern.net | Read more:
SURFING ALONE
You may remember this as the Bowling Alone thesis applied to the Internet; it got some traction in the late 1990s. The basic idea is: electronic entertainment devices grow in sophistication and inexpensiveness as the years pass, until by the 1980s and 1990s, they have spread across the globe and have devoured multiple generations of children; these devices are more pernicious than traditional geeky fares inasmuch as they are often best pursued solo. Spending months mastering Super Mario Bros - all alone - is a bad way to grow up normal.
AND THEN THERE WERE NONE
The 4 or 5 person Dungeons & Dragons party (with a dungeon master) gives way to the classic arcade with its heated duels and oneupsmanship; the arcade gives way to the flickering console in the bedroom with one playing Final Fantasy VII - alone. The increased graphical realism, the more ergonomic controllers, the introduction of genuinely challenging AI techniques… Trend after trend was rendering a human opponent unnecessary. And gamer after gamer was now playing alone.
Perhaps, the critic says, the rise of the Internet has ameliorated that distressing trend - the trends favored no connectivity at first, but then there was finally enough surplus computing power and bandwidth for massive connectivity to become the order of the day.
It is much more satisfactory and social to play MMORPGs on your PC than single-player RPGS, much more satisfactory to kill human players in Halo matches than alien AIs. The machines finally connect humans to humans, not human to machine. We’re forced to learn some basic social skills, to maintain some connections. We’re no longer retreating into our little cocoons, interacting with no humans.
WELCOME TO THE N.H.K.!
But, the critic continues, things still are not well. We are still alienated from one another. The rise of the connected machines still facilitates withdrawal and isolation. It presents the specter of the hikikomori - the person who ceases to exist in the physical realm as much as possible. It is a Japanese term, of course. They are 5 years further in our future than we are (or perhaps one should say, were). Gibson writes, back in 2001:
The Japanese seem to the rest of us to live several measurable clicks down the time line. The Japanese are the ultimate Early Adopters, and the sort of fiction I write behooves me to pay serious heed to that. If you believe, as I do, that all cultural change is essentially technologically driven, you pay attention to the Japanese. They’ve been doing it for more than a century now, and they really do have a head start on the rest of us, if only in terms of what we used to call future shock (but which is now simply the one constant in all our lives).Gibson also discusses the Mobile Girl and text messaging; that culture began really showing up in America around 2005 - Sidekicks, Twitter etc. You can do anything with a cellphone: order food, do your job, read & write novels, maintain a lively sociallife, engage in social status envy (She has a smaller phone, and a larger collection of collectibles on her cellphone strap! OMG!)… Which is just another way of saying You can do anything without seeing people, just by writing digital messages. (And this in a country with one of the most undigitizable writing systems in existence! Languages are not created equal.)
The hikikomori withdraws from all personal contact. The hikikomori does not hang out at the local pub, swilling down the brewskis as everyone cheers on the home team. The hikikomori is not gossiping at the rotary club nor with the Lions or mummers or Veterans or Knights. hikikomoris do none of that. They aren’t working, they aren’t hanging out with friends.
The Paradoxical solitude and omnipotence of the otaku, the new century’s ultimate enthusiast: the glory and terror inherent of the absolute narrowing of personal bandwidth. –William Gibson, Shiny balls of Mud (TATE 2002)So what are they doing with their 16 waking hours a day?
OPTING OUT
But it’s better for us not to know the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so very good at one particular thing…the actual facts of the sacrifices repel us when we see them: basketball geniuses who cannot read, sprinters who dope themselves, defensive tackles who shoot up with bovine hormones until they collapse or explode. We prefer not to consider closely the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes in postcontest interviews or to consider what impoverishments in one’s mental life would allow people actually to think the way great athletes seem to think. Note the way up close and personal profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life – outside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what’s obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It’s farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child’s world, is very small…[Tennis player Michael] Joyce is, in other words, a complete man, though in a grotesquely limited way…Already, for Joyce, at twenty-two, it’s too late for anything else; he’s invested too much, is in too deep. I think he’s both lucky and unlucky. He will say he is happy and mean it. Wish him well. –David Foster Wallace, The String Theory (July 1996 Esquire)They’re not preoccupied with our culture - they’re participating in their own subculture. It’s the natural progression of the otaku. They are fighting on Azeroth, or fiercely pursuing their dojinshi career, or… There are many subcultures linked and united by the Internet, for good and ill. For every charitable or benevolent subculture (eg free software) there is one of mixed benefits (World of Warcraft), and one outright harmful (ex. fans of eating disorders, child pornography).
The point the critic wants to make is that life is short and a zero-sum game. You lose a third of the day to sleep, another third to making a living, and now you’ve little left. To be really productive, you can’t divide your energies across multiple cultures - you can’t be truly successful in mainstream culture, and at the same time be able to devote enough effort in the field of, say, mechanical models, to be called an Otaking. A straddler takes onto his head the overhead of learning and participating in both, and receives no benefits (he will suffer socially in the esteem of the normals, and will be able to achieve little in his hobby due to lack of time and a desire to not go overboard).
The otaku & hikikomori recognizes this dilemma and he chooses - to reject normal life! He rejects life in the larger culture for his subculture. It’s a simple matter of comparative advantage; it’s easier to be a big fish in a small pond than in a large one.
THE BIGGER SCREEN
Have you ever woken up from a dream that was so much more pleasant than real life that you wish you could fall back to sleep and return to the dream?…For some, World of Warcraft is like a dream they don’t have to wake up from - a world better than the real world because their efforts are actually rewarded –[Half Sigma, Status, masturbation, wasted time, and WoW]
EVE Online is unique in gaming in that we have always played on the same massive server in the same online universe since May 2003 when it first went live. We not only understand the harsh penalties for failure, but also how longevity and persistence is rewarded with success. When you have over 60,000 people on weekends dealing, scheming, and shooting each other it attracts a certain type of gamer. It’s not a quick fix kind of game. We enjoy building things that last, be they virtual spaceships or real life friendships that together translate into massive Empires and enduring legacies. Those of us who play understand that one man really can truly make a difference in our world. –Mark Seleene Heard, Vile Rat eulogy 2012As ever more opt out, the larger culture is damaged. The culture begins to fragment back into pieces. The disconnect can be profound; an American anime geek has more in common with a Japanese anime geek (who is of a different ethnicity, a different culture, a different religion, a different language…) than he does with an American involved in the evangelical Christian subculture. There is essentially no common ground - our 2 countrymen probably can’t even agree on objective matters like governance or evolution!
With enough of these gaps, where is American or French culture? Such cultural identities take centuries to coalesce - France did not speak French until the 1900s (as The Discovery of France recounts), and Han China is still digesting & assimilating its many minorities & outlying regions. America, of course, had it easy in starting with a small founder population which could just exterminate the natives.
The national identity fragments under the assault of burgeoning subcultures. At last, the critic beholds the natural endpoint of this process: the nation is some lines on a map, some laws you follow. No one particularly cares about it. The geek thinks, Meh: here, Canada, London, Japan, Singapore - as long as FedEx can reach me and there’s a good Internet connection, what’s the difference? (Nor are the technically-inclined alone in this.)
You can test this yourself. Tell yourself - The country I live in now is the best country in the world for people like me; I would be terribly unhappy if I was exiled. If your mental reply goes something like, Why, what’s so special about the USA? It’s not particularly economically or politically free, it’s not the only civilized English-speaking country, it’s not the wealthiest…, then you are headed down the path of opting out.
This is how the paradox works: the Internet breaks the larger culture by letting members flee to smaller subcultures. And the critics think this is bad. They like the broader culture10, they agree with Émile Durkheim about atomization and point to examples like South Korea, and deep down, furries and latex fetishists really bother them. They just plain don’t like those deviants.
BUT I CAN GET A HIGHER SCORE!
In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.
Let’s look at another angle.
MONOCULTURE
Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.One can’t opt out of culture. There is no view from nowhere. To a great extent, we are our cultural artifacts - our possessions, our complexes of memes, our habits and objects of disgust are all cultural. You are always part of a culture.
Suppose there were only 1 worldwide culture, with no subcultures. The overriding obsession of this culture will be… let’s make it money. People are absolutely obsessed with money - how it is made, acquired, degraded, etc. More importantly, status is defined just by how much you have earned in your life; in practice, tie-breakers include how fast you made it, what circumstances you made it in (everyone admires a person who became a billionaire in a depression more than a good-times billionaire, in the same way we admire the novelist in the freezing garret more than the comfortable academic), and so on.
This isn’t too absurd a scenario: subjects feed on themselves and develop details and complexity as effort is invested in them. Money could well absorb the collective efforts of 7 billion people - already many people act just this way.
But what effect does this have on people? I can tell you: the average person is going to be miserable. If everyone genuinely buys into this culture, then they have to be. Their talents at piano playing, or cooking, or programming, or any form of artistry or scholarly pursuit are denigrated and count for naught. The world has become too big - it did not use to be so big, people so powerless of what is going on:
“Society is composed of persons who cannot design, build, repair, or even operate most of the devices upon which their lives depend…In the complexity of this world people are confronted with extraordinary events and functions that are literally unintelligible to them. They are unable to give an adequate explanation of man-made phenomena in their immediate experience. They are unable to form a coherent, rational picture of the whole.
Under the circumstances, all persons do, and indeed must, accept a great number of things on faith…Their way of understanding is basically religious, rather than scientific; only a small portion of one’s everyday experience in the technological society can be made scientific…The plight of members of the technological society can be compared to that of a newborn child. Much of the data that enters its sense does not form coherent wholes. There are many things the child cannot understand or, after it has learned to speak, cannot successfully explain to anyone…Citizens of the modern age in this respect are less fortunate than children. They never escape a fundamental bewilderment in the face of the complex world that their senses report. They are not able to organize all or even very much of this into sensible wholes….“You can’t make a mark on it unless there are almost as many ways to make marks as there are persons.
To put it another way: women suffer enough from comparing themselves to media images. If you want a vision of this future, imagine everyone being an anorexic teenager who hates her body - forever.
We all value social esteem. We need to know somebody thinks well of us. We’re tribal monkeys; ostracism means death.
Jaron Lanier: I’d like to hypothesize one civilizing force, which is the perception of multiple overlapping hierarchies of status. I’ve observed this to be helpful in work dealing with rehabilitating gang members in Oakland. When there are multiple overlapping hierarchies of status there is more of a chance of people not fighting their superior within the status chain. And the more severe the imposition of the single hierarchy in people’s lives, the more likely they are to engage in conflict with one another. Part of America’s success is the confusion factor of understanding how to assess somebody’s status.
Steven Pinker: That’s a profound observation. There are studies showing that violence is more common when people are confined to one pecking order, and all of their social worth depends on where they are in that hierarchy, whereas if they belong to multiple overlapping groups, they can always seek affirmations of worth elsewhere. For example, if I do something stupid when I’m driving, and someone gives me the finger and calls me an asshole, it’s not the end of the world: I think to myself, I’m a tenured professor at Harvard. On the other hand, if status among men in the street was my only source of worth in life, I might have road rage and pull out a gun. Modernity comprises a lot of things, and it’s hard to tease them apart. But I suspect that when you’re not confined to a village or a clan, and you can seek your fortunes in a wide world, that is a pacifying force for exactly that reason.Think of the people you know. How many of them can compete on purely financial grounds? How many can compare to the chimps at the top of the financial heap without feeling like an utter failure, a miserable loser? Not many. I can’t think of anyone I know who wouldn’t be at least a little unhappy. Some of them are pretty well off, but it’s awfully hard to compare with billionaires in their department. There’s no way to prove that this version of subcultures is the right one (perhaps fragmenting the culture fragments the possible status), but when I look at simple models, this version seems plausible to me and to explain some deep trends like monogamy.
SUBCULTURES SET YOU FREE
It is a more manageable tribe. It’s closer to the Dunbar number, which still applies online. Even if I’m on the bottom of the Wikipedia heap, that’s fine. As long as I know where I am! I don’t have to be a rich elite to be happy; a master craftsman is content, and a cat may look at a king.
Leaving a culture, and joining a subculture, is a way for the monkey mind to cope with the modern world.
If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.Having a society in which an artist can mingle as social equals with the billionaire and admit the Nobel scientists and the philanthropist is fundamental to our mental health! If I’m a programmer, I don’t need to be competing with 7 billion people, and the few hundred billionaires, for self-esteem. I can just consider the computing community. Better yet, I might only have to consider the functional programming community, or perhaps just the Haskell programming community. Or to take another example: if I decide to commit to the English Wikipedia subculture, as it were, instead of American culture, I am no longer mentally dealing with 300 million competitors and threats; I am dealing with just a few thousand.
It is a more manageable tribe. It’s closer to the Dunbar number, which still applies online. Even if I’m on the bottom of the Wikipedia heap, that’s fine. As long as I know where I am! I don’t have to be a rich elite to be happy; a master craftsman is content, and a cat may look at a king.
Leaving a culture, and joining a subculture, is a way for the monkey mind to cope with the modern world.
by Gwern Branwen, Gwern.net | Read more:
[ed. Damn. Sometimes I stumble across a site that's just, indescribable... if you're up for taking a deep dive down the rabbit hole into some weird and exhiliarating essays, check this out.]
