I am going to be a little harsh with this piece. I'm choosing to do this because it struck a nerve with me. It uses a tactic I've seen repeatedly, particularly on the left, and I think we can do...
Exemplary
I am going to be a little harsh with this piece. I'm choosing to do this because it struck a nerve with me. It uses a tactic I've seen repeatedly, particularly on the left, and I think we can do better.
If this article is a lived experience, the author would greatly benefit from dropping the perspective into first-person and just owning the story outright. Without that, the narrative distance just makes this feel like an elaborate strawman.
I could write a similar narrative about someone who learns the power of supremacy tactics by experiencing their negative, oppressive effects first hand. In order to combat these and improve the lives of others, they learn ideologies and frameworks that are centered on dismantling the very power structures that damaged them. However, in attempting to enact these measures, the individual ends up using some of the same supremacy tactics that were used against them. The person insulates themselves from criticism by putting their actions at the bottom of a hierarchy, allowing their sterotyping, dismissals, and lack of human courtesy to go unchecked only because they are aiming up the ladder, rather than down. This person could realize that actions of this type not only need the hierarchy to function but also continue to perpetuate it, but they won't come to that conclusion because so many of their online buddies will pat them on the back for "checking the privileged."
If that constructed narrative feels unfair, good! It is supposed to be! That is not my story to tell, nor do I even agree with its assertions. I'm doing it to show how easy it can be to make a cascading argument in the manner of the article by contextualizing it as someone's experience.
Even if I'm being completely charitable and assuming the best possible intent for this article, it's clear this article isn't just about Gamma alone. If I'm even the slightest bit uncharitable, and I allow my cynical side the faintest grip of my thinking, I'd argue that the author is using Gamma as a deliberate caricature of a "tech bro." This isn't something I'm comfortable with not because I'm a tech bro nor because I aspire to be one. I have an issue with it because a single person's story (particularly one that is likely fabricated to be a parable) should not be used as a stand-in for an entire identity. Doing so encourages us to make lazy dismissals of an entire category of people, which is something we're only willing to do if we, either consciously or unconsciously, are comfortable with denying entire classes of individuals their personhood, which is a fundamental building block of a kyriarchy, which is what we're trying to fight against in the first place! Rebuilding discrimination around a new axis is not the same as eradicating discrimination! Argh!
The reason this strikes a nerve is because I spent the formative years of my life living under the hell that was homophobia. Rampant, unchecked, toxic homophobia. What were the tactics that homophobia relied on? The same tactics most other forms of discrimination use! Denying me my personhood. Stereotyping my existence. Predetermining my worth or lack thereof based on my identity. Vilifying me not for who I was but for who others assumed me to be. Seeing me only through lenses of individual and shared prejudices.
These are unjust tactics. Inverting them to use them against others is not social justice. I don't know how many more times I can stand aside as I watch someone who is coming from a place I know and is fighting for a goal I believe in willfully deny people their personhood simply because of their identities. It feels completely incongruous. The social justice I believe in affords personhood regardless of identity, privilege, or status. It is not a Robin Hood-style redistribution from the highest to the lowest. Everyone, no matter who they are, has a right to their own individual personhood. That is what makes it just in the first place! It's the very foundation. If I believed otherwise I would fight instead for social revenge.
I realize I'm ranting, and I'm actually putting more on this article than I really should, as my target is a broader behavior that I've witnessed many, many times before. This particular post became my sounding board, but I certainly wouldn't have written this much if it were the only focus. I'm getting at something bigger that has bothered me for a long time. Curiously enough, this makes me guilty of one of the very things I'm decrying at the moment: trying to generalize a criticism based on the actions of a single individual.
I say this not to take the wind out of my sails (although, honestly, it should) but to point out that I get why this person wrote this. They're probably equally frustrated. They've probably seen a pattern of behavior and wanted to address it. They're probably tired of the same old shit, over and over again, and that probably built up to a point where they just had to let it out, like I'm doing now. I believe I've got this all figured out, so why wouldn't I assume they feel the same way? I believe they have blind spots, and I'm sure they could identify some in me.
What this boils down to is that, despite my pointed criticism for this article, the author and I still have a lot in common. This person is not my enemy. Nevertheless, I didn't think about that when I finished reading what they wrote and instead chose to put them in my verbal line of fire. And, honestly, I was about ready to leave things that way, posting a strongly worded takedown with a punchy ending before closing the thread and going on my merry way.
That's what years of internet arguments have trained me to do, but that's not the kind of person I want to be anymore. I don't want to feel like a sniper, taking stategic shots at distant faceless targets. Mostly, I need to not let anger and frustration guide me down that path. I walked into this thread heated. Angry. Pissed off because yet another person on my side was using identity as a cudgel, without ever interrogating the irony in that. So I came in here with the goal to out-cudgel them at their own game, using the leftist beliefs and language we share to shut them down.
But if I do that and only that, I've done more harm than good. A real person wrote that piece. Someone who is as real and human as I am and is no less deserving of dignity. And even in spite of my criticisms of the piece at large, there's a major thesis in it that I do agree with: if you meet someone's ideas with nothing but a cudgel, they're more likely to double down than they are to kindly reconsider. A stranger with a weapon looks a lot more enemy than friend--especially if they're hitting you. If I'm going to be the kind of person I want to be, I need to train myself to stop posting takedowns. Critique is valid, but it needs to be constructive, and I need to always keep in mind that, for any internet commenter out there, we have more in common than we do in conflict.
Our shared humanity is our commonality, so as long as I'm talking to an actual person, not a bot, and as long as they're acting in good faith, not a troll, then there is ground that we share. It's on me to make sure I don't lose sight of that, like I almost did here.
hi, one of tildes's token minorities here: if an individual person can't handle minorities being 'mean' to them or criticizing them and holding them to account without turning into a...
If you, reader, can't see why so many young cis het white men like me turn towards noxious ideologies like the Red Pill, I daresay you might be slightly less good at empathy than your woke opinions would have you believe.
hi, one of tildes's token minorities here: if an individual person can't handle minorities being 'mean' to them or criticizing them and holding them to account without turning into a crypto-fascist or a redpiller i'm going to say that maybe the "progressive wokes" that "abuse" them aren't actually the problem, but rather the problem is that they are the "white moderate" that MLK railed in birmingham jail that supports minorities and their struggle but isn't prepared to actually cede any kind of structural or political or social power to those people because it'd inconvenience them. also, that kind of person can genuinely fuck right off.
are there actual abuses sometimes against white people by leftists and progressive types? sure, the "left" is by no means politically homogeneous and there will be people like that, as is true of every position or political belief. but the notion that this is some sort of actually common thing is at best an overexaggeration and at worst actively disingenuous, and there's a difference between things like holding people to their stated views of caring about minorities and things like calling for the genocide of white people.
You're basically threatening that people should stop being mean to you or you'll stop fighting the good fight. As @Whom said downthread this is as nonconfrontational as an article about privilege...
You're basically threatening that people should stop being mean to you or you'll stop fighting the good fight. As @Whom said downthread this is as nonconfrontational as an article about privilege gets. All people are asking is that you be patient and considerate. No one with influence is calling for cishet white men to be treated the way women and people of color and LGBT people have been and are still treated. Little things like watching how far you sit with your legs apart are things the rest of us already have to do, and it sucks but the alternative can be being ostracized, fired, or even killed if you don't watch what you do.
I don't see him threatening anything like that. Nor is he critiquing the article. He may be giving too much credit to the radicalized by means of not outright condemning them, but all that's being...
I don't see him threatening anything like that. Nor is he critiquing the article. He may be giving too much credit to the radicalized by means of not outright condemning them, but all that's being said is that cis het white men have a lot of mud flung their way. That doesn't justify clinging to hate, but it's an important factor in the thought processes of the hateful.
If I said "If you can't see why so many women / LGBT people / PoC hold attitudes you consider fascist you might be less egalitarian than you think" I would be rightly considered hostile.
If I said "If you can't see why so many women / LGBT people / PoC hold attitudes you consider fascist you might be less egalitarian than you think" I would be rightly considered hostile.
Part of this, I think, is just how short form social media works. You only ever see the contrary opinions that have been amplified by sharing, so everyone you see holding perspective you disagree...
Part of this, I think, is just how short form social media works. You only ever see the contrary opinions that have been amplified by sharing, so everyone you see holding perspective you disagree with happens to be a ridiculous caricature who is extremely poorly suited to arguing their position persuasively.
If you spend enough time there, and especially if this is your primary way of encountering and developing your political opinions and identity, it’s really easy to just assume you’re the only reasonable person around.
It’s similar to the filter bubble argument, but I think the idea that filter bubbles keep you from encountering people who don’t think like you was always dumb. I see plenty of people who don’t think like me, but they’re all so dumb. And not because they disagree with me, they just happen to be the dumbest possible people who hold these opinions.
And this is true even of many of the people who agree with me. I feel like my own political opinions have been getting dumber just through lack of being critically challenged or reinforced because almost everyone is either a dumbass or a disingenuous sophist.
The logical conclusion to that is pieces like this, where you can’t even build a convincing character with another perspective that doesn’t look like a straw man.
I think the whole modern social media model is broken. It’s designed to serve ads, which are a form of mass broadcast. But they don’t actually work well for socializing. Socializing involves interacting with people, not atomized, context free snippets of “content.” So even the fediverse, despite not being in hoc to advertisers, still has advertising logic embedded into its interaction patterns and manifests many of the same problems because it’s just trying to recreate as platforms without adds. It’s like trying to have a conversation via billboards, that’s not what billboards are for.
Thank you for your comment! It made the time I spent reading the article worthwhile. I can imagine how writing a comment like that would make you wish hit delete in the end because it is not as...
Thank you for your comment! It made the time I spent reading the article worthwhile. I can imagine how writing a comment like that would make you wish hit delete in the end because it is not as punchy anymore. So thanks for not deleting it :)
So I skimmed your comment, then read the rest here, then went back to the article to re-read it, then I went to the author's mastodon(?) to find where their perspective is coming from, then I...
Exemplary
So I skimmed your comment, then read the rest here, then went back to the article to re-read it, then I went to the author's mastodon(?) to find where their perspective is coming from, then I started writing a comment that was similar to yours. But you have captured how I feel reading this blog post. I will proceed my ranting!
Even if I'm being completely charitable and assuming the best possible intent for this article, it's clear this article isn't just about Gamma alone. If I'm even the slightest bit uncharitable, and I allow my cynical side the faintest grip of my thinking, I'd argue that the author is using Gamma as a deliberate caricature of a "tech bro." This isn't something I'm comfortable with not because I'm a tech bro nor because I aspire to be one. I have an issue with it because a single person's story (particularly one that is likely fabricated to be a parable) should not be used as a stand-in for an entire identity. Doing so encourages us to make lazy dismissals of an entire category of people, which is something we're only willing to do if we, either consciously or unconsciously, are comfortable with denying entire classes of individuals their personhood, which is a fundamental building block of a kyriarchy, which is what we're trying to fight against in the first place! Rebuilding discrimination around a new axis is not the same as eradicating discrimination! Argh!
This is pretty much how I felt. The author spends this article writing about a stereotype that may or may not exist. Maybe there is someone in their life that meets the description of "Gamma" that they are talking about, and then projecting this onto a whole group of people of unknown population size.
I see this far too often in sections of the internet that are right and left wing. A stereotype is built, if someone meets a small undefined amount of similarities to that stereotype, then everything else about the person is stripped from them. It doesn't matter if the person agrees on 99% of all other issues, but because you disagreed with them on this one issue, you are no longer part of the solution, rather you become a member of the group that's causing the problem. This ends up leading to toxic environments to discuss issues that are "hot". I think this phenomenon plays out even on Tildes, where I have noticed a couple of topics end up getting locked because the opinions between users aren't aligning and it brings out hostility between the two people.
These are unjust tactics. Inverting them to use them against others is not social justice. I don't know how many more times I can stand aside as I watch someone who is coming from a place I know and is fighting for a goal I believe in willfully deny people their personhood simply because of their identities. It feels completely incongruous. The social justice I believe in affords personhood regardless of identity, privilege, or status. It is not a Robin Hood-style redistribution from the highest to the lowest. Everyone, no matter who they are, has a right to their own individual personhood. That is what makes it just in the first place! It's the very foundation. If I believed otherwise I would fight instead for social revenge.
(and more...)
This I very much agree with. I think because a lot of our interactions with people online aren't face to face, its much more difficult to have conversations with people on difficult issues. I see more often than not, when someone disagrees with an opinion online, they aren't talking about the issue with the person, but they instead argue with the stereotype they are unconsciously believing the person is. I notice that the more time a user spends online railing against certain groups of people they have stereotyped, their online personality becomes more of a reaction to the thing they are perceiving to be fighting against, rather than something founded on their own morals, principles. For all my time that I have spent in left leaning online forums, I have yet to come across their stereotypes everyday in my life. There are a few people that I have met that were truly filled with ignorance and hate, but I don't allow them to define who I am as a person. And likewise, the same goes for the stereotypes that the right projects to the left. There may have been a handful that may fit the bill, but the vast majority of people, left or right leaning, are good, decent people with their own individual flaws and their own individual needs. I haven't really met a person, left or right, that I couldn't at least have a conversation with regarding politics that escalated to the level of hate/anger that comes across online. Eventually, I got to the point where I don't want to read opinions on a hot button issue from either side online. I would rather read the article, internalize it with my own belief system, and then skip the comments because they end up talking about these abstract groups that live in their own minds, rather than the living, breathing person that they are talking with online.
I may have gotten off track a little bit in the last paragraph, but essentially I feel real communication is lost online. I don't know what it is but I think its something to do with the lack of connection or shared experiences that one can rely on to fall back to when it comes to disagreements. But to me it just feels like everyone (including me!) is reading and responding to the internet based off of a made up voice in their head (a stereotype) rather than to someone who is real. Sometimes this voice changes from site to site, or even opinion-expressed to opinion-expressed, but regardless, its still a voice that's based off of <1% understanding while the remaining 99%+ is made up.
If we can't handle a piece on privilege (or really just unexamined assumptions) which is this sanitized and nonconfrontational without going down the road of blaming things like it for the red...
If we can't handle a piece on privilege (or really just unexamined assumptions) which is this sanitized and nonconfrontational without going down the road of blaming things like it for the red pill or asking "what if we said this about some other group??" as if context didn't exist and all situations are equal, maybe Gareth shouldn't come to Tildes. It seems to be about as much of a monoculture with a limited range of views, just one that's a bit more generally socially acceptable.
Unless "hey, when you're challenged on a platform that you're not used to and has users who consider 'reasonable' to be different from what you do, maybe think about why that is and engage with that instead of calling them stupid and leaving" is such a vile and hateful idea that it isn't allowed in the range of opinion Gareth is looking for, maybe this isn't the place to come right now. Clearly there's little room for it here.
Short of moonbathers, whose comment did not exist at the time, each of the top level comments (particularly the one I replied to) has some sort of content problem with the article. I'm replying to...
Short of moonbathers, whose comment did not exist at the time, each of the top level comments (particularly the one I replied to) has some sort of content problem with the article. I'm replying to that stuff.
If what we had was a comment section that was just marking up the paper with red ink for its stylistic choices and such then at most I'd have an off-hand comment about how no one's engaging with it and is just nitpicking...but more than likely I would say nothing and that's not what we have here anyway.
Style matters, though. You can't separate the way of presentation from the content; notice that even @jgb's somewhat passive aggressive one mocks the style more intensely than the content. Tildes...
Style matters, though.
You can't separate the way of presentation from the content; notice that even @jgb's somewhat passive aggressive one mocks the style more intensely than the content.
Tildes has had threads on privilege before that've gone just fine; the problem with this article is that the person presenting their opinion is an asshole.
It does matter, but again that's not all that's being talked about and that's why I didn't reply to that stuff. This, as well as their suggestions that tech workers are exposed to different ideas...
It does matter, but again that's not all that's being talked about and that's why I didn't reply to that stuff.
In joining Mastodon, he expected to encounter a refreshingly diverse range of intelligent and thoughtful people to interact with †, but soon found that it was largely monocultural; packed full of borderline-fanatical left-wingers, killing time between their critical theory lectures by attempting to cancel celebrities who said 'fag' on livejournal in 2004 and branding anyone politically right of Keir Starmer a cryptofacist chud. Therefore, he leaves Mastodon, not because of an immature inability to handle criticism of his ideas, but because he found it overwhelmingly populated with people who considered his opinions tantamount to hate speech and who would sooner punch him in a face and call it praxis than debate him civilly.
This, as well as their suggestions that tech workers are exposed to different ideas more often, that abuse against cishet white dudes is written off, the complaining about having to consider things like how they spread their legs, and ultimately that stuff like that leads to redpillers is all strongly grounded in the points the author makes.
I'm not going to continue bumping this thread for this argument though, there's critiques of content there and I'm replying to it, it's not the comment section you get from an article everyone agrees with but which is written poorly. I could get into it about the style, but I'm not and it's disingenuous to act like there's no points about the piece's points being made here. You can tell there were because I replied to them.
I'm really disappointed in the reactions to this article. Of all the articles about privilege and power dynamics, this is the one people are taking a stand against? All it's really doing is...
I'm really disappointed in the reactions to this article. Of all the articles about privilege and power dynamics, this is the one people are taking a stand against? All it's really doing is calling out the average tech guy for being in an echo chamber. There are tons of articles claiming every demographic sits in an echo chamber and they're all probably true to some extent, and here in this thread progressives are being called fascists, accused of calling everyone else fascists, accused of dehumanizing everyone else, and effectively being blamed for young cishet boys and men becoming radicalized. Yes, there are absolutely shitty people who are progressive, left-wing, feminists, etc., because there are shitty people in any group, but the reaction here to an 1100-word essay on a blog none of us have probably heard of before is disproportionate.
I realise this is basically me you're talking about, so let me respond... Because it's the one that got posted to Tildes and therefore is the one I happened to read this weekend. Would you rather...
I realise this is basically me you're talking about, so let me respond...
Of all the articles about privilege and power dynamics, this is the one people are taking a stand against?
Because it's the one that got posted to Tildes and therefore is the one I happened to read this weekend. Would you rather I read something else?
All it's really doing is calling out the average tech guy for being in an echo chamber.
I simply don't believe that's true. My honest belief is that, on average, tech guys encounter a much larger range of viewpoints than the average netizen (do we still say 'netizen'?) - by virtue of being somewhat more aware of the dynamics of Internet forums than the average person. Is there a large subset of tech guys who only ever hang out in centre-right libertarian forums and thus never encounter social justice ideas? I don't personally think so (although I'd be very open to hearing any evidence to the contrary).
progressives are being called fascists
As far as I can see no one has said this. I certainly didn't - if you got that impression perhaps my comment didn't quite come across as clearly as I would've liked.
effectively being blamed for young cishet boys and men becoming radicalized
Blame is too strong a word, but there's a reason we use the phrase 'reactionary'. It's fairly clear as I see it that Gamergate, TRP, and Incel culture are in many ways the equal-and-opposite reaction to modern progressivism. I'm not saying that progressives should be held accountable for Incels by any means - that would be absurd - but we should interrogate the reasons why young men are attracted to these quite evident self-destructive ideologies instead of simply mocking and decrying them.
but the reaction here to an 1100-word essay on a blog none of us have probably heard of before is disproportionate
Sorry to be blunt - but why are you so riled that people are discussing an essay on a forum for discussing thought provoking content such as essays?
Fair. Reddit has a pretty large anti-social justice contingent that consists of tech guys who hang out in right-wing places. I won't say they never encounter social justice ideas, but it seems...
Because it's the one that got posted to Tildes and therefore is the one I happened to read this weekend. Would you rather I read something else?
Fair.
Is there a large subset of tech guys who only ever hang out in centre-right libertarian forums and thus never encounter social justice ideas?
Reddit has a pretty large anti-social justice contingent that consists of tech guys who hang out in right-wing places. I won't say they never encounter social justice ideas, but it seems pretty clear to me that even those of us who hang out on forums all day aren't necessarily more enlightened because of it.
As far as I can see no one has said this. I certainly didn't - if you got that impression perhaps my comment didn't quite come across as clearly as I would've liked.
I got that impression from your saying that " a key part of woke progressivism is saying things and holding attitudes about people like me that would be considered practically facist if they were directed at 'oppressed' classes instead".
we should interrogate the reasons why young men are attracted to these quite evident self-destructive ideologies instead of simply mocking and decrying them.
I agree completely that we should look into why they are the way they are, but they deserve to be called out and decried. All the rest of us are called out all the time.
Sorry to be blunt - but why are you so riled that people are discussing an essay on a forum for discussing thought provoking content such as essays?
If writing a paragraph in two different places in this thread is being riled, then yes, I'm riled. I decided to comment because the top thread literally wrote more words about why they didn't like the article than the article itself and that the consensus in this thread when I commented was that woke progressives are no better than their oppressors.
I absolutely agree with the argument that most white guys in tech are generally echo-chambered (though I'd disagree that twitter actually is the thing that's making them so; the person writing...
I absolutely agree with the argument that most white guys in tech are generally echo-chambered (though I'd disagree that twitter actually is the thing that's making them so; the person writing this piece most assuredly hasn't used twitter as even a moderately-sized account; the difference between twitter and ActivityPub is that the protocol is smaller than the site, not because of anything, algorithmic or otherwise, that comes with the corporation-status of twitter).
With this in mind, the author's piece is lazy, poorly thought-out, and most of all, wrong. Everything from the condescending tone to the lazy insertion of a second-wave term is draining.
If you want to criticise something common, absolutely go for it! The trend-spotting isn't wrong, it's just...every single other part of the piece, including the steps you took to get there, happen to be wrong.
I am going to be a little harsh with this piece. I'm choosing to do this because it struck a nerve with me. It uses a tactic I've seen repeatedly, particularly on the left, and I think we can do better.
If this article is a lived experience, the author would greatly benefit from dropping the perspective into first-person and just owning the story outright. Without that, the narrative distance just makes this feel like an elaborate strawman.
I could write a similar narrative about someone who learns the power of supremacy tactics by experiencing their negative, oppressive effects first hand. In order to combat these and improve the lives of others, they learn ideologies and frameworks that are centered on dismantling the very power structures that damaged them. However, in attempting to enact these measures, the individual ends up using some of the same supremacy tactics that were used against them. The person insulates themselves from criticism by putting their actions at the bottom of a hierarchy, allowing their sterotyping, dismissals, and lack of human courtesy to go unchecked only because they are aiming up the ladder, rather than down. This person could realize that actions of this type not only need the hierarchy to function but also continue to perpetuate it, but they won't come to that conclusion because so many of their online buddies will pat them on the back for "checking the privileged."
If that constructed narrative feels unfair, good! It is supposed to be! That is not my story to tell, nor do I even agree with its assertions. I'm doing it to show how easy it can be to make a cascading argument in the manner of the article by contextualizing it as someone's experience.
Even if I'm being completely charitable and assuming the best possible intent for this article, it's clear this article isn't just about Gamma alone. If I'm even the slightest bit uncharitable, and I allow my cynical side the faintest grip of my thinking, I'd argue that the author is using Gamma as a deliberate caricature of a "tech bro." This isn't something I'm comfortable with not because I'm a tech bro nor because I aspire to be one. I have an issue with it because a single person's story (particularly one that is likely fabricated to be a parable) should not be used as a stand-in for an entire identity. Doing so encourages us to make lazy dismissals of an entire category of people, which is something we're only willing to do if we, either consciously or unconsciously, are comfortable with denying entire classes of individuals their personhood, which is a fundamental building block of a kyriarchy, which is what we're trying to fight against in the first place! Rebuilding discrimination around a new axis is not the same as eradicating discrimination! Argh!
The reason this strikes a nerve is because I spent the formative years of my life living under the hell that was homophobia. Rampant, unchecked, toxic homophobia. What were the tactics that homophobia relied on? The same tactics most other forms of discrimination use! Denying me my personhood. Stereotyping my existence. Predetermining my worth or lack thereof based on my identity. Vilifying me not for who I was but for who others assumed me to be. Seeing me only through lenses of individual and shared prejudices.
These are unjust tactics. Inverting them to use them against others is not social justice. I don't know how many more times I can stand aside as I watch someone who is coming from a place I know and is fighting for a goal I believe in willfully deny people their personhood simply because of their identities. It feels completely incongruous. The social justice I believe in affords personhood regardless of identity, privilege, or status. It is not a Robin Hood-style redistribution from the highest to the lowest. Everyone, no matter who they are, has a right to their own individual personhood. That is what makes it just in the first place! It's the very foundation. If I believed otherwise I would fight instead for social revenge.
I realize I'm ranting, and I'm actually putting more on this article than I really should, as my target is a broader behavior that I've witnessed many, many times before. This particular post became my sounding board, but I certainly wouldn't have written this much if it were the only focus. I'm getting at something bigger that has bothered me for a long time. Curiously enough, this makes me guilty of one of the very things I'm decrying at the moment: trying to generalize a criticism based on the actions of a single individual.
I say this not to take the wind out of my sails (although, honestly, it should) but to point out that I get why this person wrote this. They're probably equally frustrated. They've probably seen a pattern of behavior and wanted to address it. They're probably tired of the same old shit, over and over again, and that probably built up to a point where they just had to let it out, like I'm doing now. I believe I've got this all figured out, so why wouldn't I assume they feel the same way? I believe they have blind spots, and I'm sure they could identify some in me.
What this boils down to is that, despite my pointed criticism for this article, the author and I still have a lot in common. This person is not my enemy. Nevertheless, I didn't think about that when I finished reading what they wrote and instead chose to put them in my verbal line of fire. And, honestly, I was about ready to leave things that way, posting a strongly worded takedown with a punchy ending before closing the thread and going on my merry way.
That's what years of internet arguments have trained me to do, but that's not the kind of person I want to be anymore. I don't want to feel like a sniper, taking stategic shots at distant faceless targets. Mostly, I need to not let anger and frustration guide me down that path. I walked into this thread heated. Angry. Pissed off because yet another person on my side was using identity as a cudgel, without ever interrogating the irony in that. So I came in here with the goal to out-cudgel them at their own game, using the leftist beliefs and language we share to shut them down.
But if I do that and only that, I've done more harm than good. A real person wrote that piece. Someone who is as real and human as I am and is no less deserving of dignity. And even in spite of my criticisms of the piece at large, there's a major thesis in it that I do agree with: if you meet someone's ideas with nothing but a cudgel, they're more likely to double down than they are to kindly reconsider. A stranger with a weapon looks a lot more enemy than friend--especially if they're hitting you. If I'm going to be the kind of person I want to be, I need to train myself to stop posting takedowns. Critique is valid, but it needs to be constructive, and I need to always keep in mind that, for any internet commenter out there, we have more in common than we do in conflict.
Our shared humanity is our commonality, so as long as I'm talking to an actual person, not a bot, and as long as they're acting in good faith, not a troll, then there is ground that we share. It's on me to make sure I don't lose sight of that, like I almost did here.
hi, one of tildes's token minorities here: if an individual person can't handle minorities being 'mean' to them or criticizing them and holding them to account without turning into a crypto-fascist or a redpiller i'm going to say that maybe the "progressive wokes" that "abuse" them aren't actually the problem, but rather the problem is that they are the "white moderate" that MLK railed in birmingham jail that supports minorities and their struggle but isn't prepared to actually cede any kind of structural or political or social power to those people because it'd inconvenience them. also, that kind of person can genuinely fuck right off.
are there actual abuses sometimes against white people by leftists and progressive types? sure, the "left" is by no means politically homogeneous and there will be people like that, as is true of every position or political belief. but the notion that this is some sort of actually common thing is at best an overexaggeration and at worst actively disingenuous, and there's a difference between things like holding people to their stated views of caring about minorities and things like calling for the genocide of white people.
You're basically threatening that people should stop being mean to you or you'll stop fighting the good fight. As @Whom said downthread this is as nonconfrontational as an article about privilege gets. All people are asking is that you be patient and considerate. No one with influence is calling for cishet white men to be treated the way women and people of color and LGBT people have been and are still treated. Little things like watching how far you sit with your legs apart are things the rest of us already have to do, and it sucks but the alternative can be being ostracized, fired, or even killed if you don't watch what you do.
I don't see him threatening anything like that. Nor is he critiquing the article. He may be giving too much credit to the radicalized by means of not outright condemning them, but all that's being said is that cis het white men have a lot of mud flung their way. That doesn't justify clinging to hate, but it's an important factor in the thought processes of the hateful.
If I said "If you can't see why so many women / LGBT people / PoC hold attitudes you consider fascist you might be less egalitarian than you think" I would be rightly considered hostile.
That seems like a fair statement to me. I see your point though.
Part of this, I think, is just how short form social media works. You only ever see the contrary opinions that have been amplified by sharing, so everyone you see holding perspective you disagree with happens to be a ridiculous caricature who is extremely poorly suited to arguing their position persuasively.
If you spend enough time there, and especially if this is your primary way of encountering and developing your political opinions and identity, it’s really easy to just assume you’re the only reasonable person around.
It’s similar to the filter bubble argument, but I think the idea that filter bubbles keep you from encountering people who don’t think like you was always dumb. I see plenty of people who don’t think like me, but they’re all so dumb. And not because they disagree with me, they just happen to be the dumbest possible people who hold these opinions.
And this is true even of many of the people who agree with me. I feel like my own political opinions have been getting dumber just through lack of being critically challenged or reinforced because almost everyone is either a dumbass or a disingenuous sophist.
The logical conclusion to that is pieces like this, where you can’t even build a convincing character with another perspective that doesn’t look like a straw man.
I think the whole modern social media model is broken. It’s designed to serve ads, which are a form of mass broadcast. But they don’t actually work well for socializing. Socializing involves interacting with people, not atomized, context free snippets of “content.” So even the fediverse, despite not being in hoc to advertisers, still has advertising logic embedded into its interaction patterns and manifests many of the same problems because it’s just trying to recreate as platforms without adds. It’s like trying to have a conversation via billboards, that’s not what billboards are for.
Thank you for your comment! It made the time I spent reading the article worthwhile. I can imagine how writing a comment like that would make you wish hit delete in the end because it is not as punchy anymore. So thanks for not deleting it :)
So I skimmed your comment, then read the rest here, then went back to the article to re-read it, then I went to the author's mastodon(?) to find where their perspective is coming from, then I started writing a comment that was similar to yours. But you have captured how I feel reading this blog post. I will proceed my ranting!
Side Note: This author does tarot reading as a service?
This is pretty much how I felt. The author spends this article writing about a stereotype that may or may not exist. Maybe there is someone in their life that meets the description of "Gamma" that they are talking about, and then projecting this onto a whole group of people of unknown population size.
I see this far too often in sections of the internet that are right and left wing. A stereotype is built, if someone meets a small undefined amount of similarities to that stereotype, then everything else about the person is stripped from them. It doesn't matter if the person agrees on 99% of all other issues, but because you disagreed with them on this one issue, you are no longer part of the solution, rather you become a member of the group that's causing the problem. This ends up leading to toxic environments to discuss issues that are "hot". I think this phenomenon plays out even on Tildes, where I have noticed a couple of topics end up getting locked because the opinions between users aren't aligning and it brings out hostility between the two people.
This I very much agree with. I think because a lot of our interactions with people online aren't face to face, its much more difficult to have conversations with people on difficult issues. I see more often than not, when someone disagrees with an opinion online, they aren't talking about the issue with the person, but they instead argue with the stereotype they are unconsciously believing the person is. I notice that the more time a user spends online railing against certain groups of people they have stereotyped, their online personality becomes more of a reaction to the thing they are perceiving to be fighting against, rather than something founded on their own morals, principles. For all my time that I have spent in left leaning online forums, I have yet to come across their stereotypes everyday in my life. There are a few people that I have met that were truly filled with ignorance and hate, but I don't allow them to define who I am as a person. And likewise, the same goes for the stereotypes that the right projects to the left. There may have been a handful that may fit the bill, but the vast majority of people, left or right leaning, are good, decent people with their own individual flaws and their own individual needs. I haven't really met a person, left or right, that I couldn't at least have a conversation with regarding politics that escalated to the level of hate/anger that comes across online. Eventually, I got to the point where I don't want to read opinions on a hot button issue from either side online. I would rather read the article, internalize it with my own belief system, and then skip the comments because they end up talking about these abstract groups that live in their own minds, rather than the living, breathing person that they are talking with online.
I may have gotten off track a little bit in the last paragraph, but essentially I feel real communication is lost online. I don't know what it is but I think its something to do with the lack of connection or shared experiences that one can rely on to fall back to when it comes to disagreements. But to me it just feels like everyone (including me!) is reading and responding to the internet based off of a made up voice in their head (a stereotype) rather than to someone who is real. Sometimes this voice changes from site to site, or even opinion-expressed to opinion-expressed, but regardless, its still a voice that's based off of <1% understanding while the remaining 99%+ is made up.
If we can't handle a piece on privilege (or really just unexamined assumptions) which is this sanitized and nonconfrontational without going down the road of blaming things like it for the red pill or asking "what if we said this about some other group??" as if context didn't exist and all situations are equal, maybe Gareth shouldn't come to Tildes. It seems to be about as much of a monoculture with a limited range of views, just one that's a bit more generally socially acceptable.
Unless "hey, when you're challenged on a platform that you're not used to and has users who consider 'reasonable' to be different from what you do, maybe think about why that is and engage with that instead of calling them stupid and leaving" is such a vile and hateful idea that it isn't allowed in the range of opinion Gareth is looking for, maybe this isn't the place to come right now. Clearly there's little room for it here.
(Fuck! It's "nonconfrontational!)
There are plenty of decent pieces on privilege; it's that this is a poorly and amateurishly-written piece.
Short of moonbathers, whose comment did not exist at the time, each of the top level comments (particularly the one I replied to) has some sort of content problem with the article. I'm replying to that stuff.
If what we had was a comment section that was just marking up the paper with red ink for its stylistic choices and such then at most I'd have an off-hand comment about how no one's engaging with it and is just nitpicking...but more than likely I would say nothing and that's not what we have here anyway.
Style matters, though.
You can't separate the way of presentation from the content; notice that even @jgb's somewhat passive aggressive one mocks the style more intensely than the content.
Tildes has had threads on privilege before that've gone just fine; the problem with this article is that the person presenting their opinion is an asshole.
It does matter, but again that's not all that's being talked about and that's why I didn't reply to that stuff.
This, as well as their suggestions that tech workers are exposed to different ideas more often, that abuse against cishet white dudes is written off, the complaining about having to consider things like how they spread their legs, and ultimately that stuff like that leads to redpillers is all strongly grounded in the points the author makes.
I'm not going to continue bumping this thread for this argument though, there's critiques of content there and I'm replying to it, it's not the comment section you get from an article everyone agrees with but which is written poorly. I could get into it about the style, but I'm not and it's disingenuous to act like there's no points about the piece's points being made here. You can tell there were because I replied to them.
I'm really disappointed in the reactions to this article. Of all the articles about privilege and power dynamics, this is the one people are taking a stand against? All it's really doing is calling out the average tech guy for being in an echo chamber. There are tons of articles claiming every demographic sits in an echo chamber and they're all probably true to some extent, and here in this thread progressives are being called fascists, accused of calling everyone else fascists, accused of dehumanizing everyone else, and effectively being blamed for young cishet boys and men becoming radicalized. Yes, there are absolutely shitty people who are progressive, left-wing, feminists, etc., because there are shitty people in any group, but the reaction here to an 1100-word essay on a blog none of us have probably heard of before is disproportionate.
I realise this is basically me you're talking about, so let me respond...
Because it's the one that got posted to Tildes and therefore is the one I happened to read this weekend. Would you rather I read something else?
I simply don't believe that's true. My honest belief is that, on average, tech guys encounter a much larger range of viewpoints than the average netizen (do we still say 'netizen'?) - by virtue of being somewhat more aware of the dynamics of Internet forums than the average person. Is there a large subset of tech guys who only ever hang out in centre-right libertarian forums and thus never encounter social justice ideas? I don't personally think so (although I'd be very open to hearing any evidence to the contrary).
As far as I can see no one has said this. I certainly didn't - if you got that impression perhaps my comment didn't quite come across as clearly as I would've liked.
Blame is too strong a word, but there's a reason we use the phrase 'reactionary'. It's fairly clear as I see it that Gamergate, TRP, and Incel culture are in many ways the equal-and-opposite reaction to modern progressivism. I'm not saying that progressives should be held accountable for Incels by any means - that would be absurd - but we should interrogate the reasons why young men are attracted to these quite evident self-destructive ideologies instead of simply mocking and decrying them.
Sorry to be blunt - but why are you so riled that people are discussing an essay on a forum for discussing thought provoking content such as essays?
Fair.
Reddit has a pretty large anti-social justice contingent that consists of tech guys who hang out in right-wing places. I won't say they never encounter social justice ideas, but it seems pretty clear to me that even those of us who hang out on forums all day aren't necessarily more enlightened because of it.
I got that impression from your saying that " a key part of woke progressivism is saying things and holding attitudes about people like me that would be considered practically facist if they were directed at 'oppressed' classes instead".
I agree completely that we should look into why they are the way they are, but they deserve to be called out and decried. All the rest of us are called out all the time.
If writing a paragraph in two different places in this thread is being riled, then yes, I'm riled. I decided to comment because the top thread literally wrote more words about why they didn't like the article than the article itself and that the consensus in this thread when I commented was that woke progressives are no better than their oppressors.
I absolutely agree with the argument that most white guys in tech are generally echo-chambered (though I'd disagree that twitter actually is the thing that's making them so; the person writing this piece most assuredly hasn't used twitter as even a moderately-sized account; the difference between twitter and ActivityPub is that the protocol is smaller than the site, not because of anything, algorithmic or otherwise, that comes with the corporation-status of twitter).
With this in mind, the author's piece is lazy, poorly thought-out, and most of all, wrong. Everything from the condescending tone to the lazy insertion of a second-wave term is draining.
If you want to criticise something common, absolutely go for it! The trend-spotting isn't wrong, it's just...every single other part of the piece, including the steps you took to get there, happen to be wrong.