Plausibly Deniable hosts the essay "Five Geek Social Fallacies" (2003), about how social habits in geek communities go wrong.
HN commenters cite it as the classic reference on geek social dynamics, bringing it up when discussing abrasive communities and who gets driven out.
Honestly, do you want a BigCo job? Would it make you happy? The experience of being a tiny cog in an unthinkingly vast machine is more alienating than you might think, even if you like the money.
I think lots of those who stay on long-term in that environment, say >3-4 years, effectively become institutionalised, condemned to spend the rest of their life philosophising about whether they can ever be L8 material. These are people who are, by and large, smart but not wise. Yes, the money is good, for an employee, but it barely equals what even a small business owner could make - and these are people whose smarts would allow them to thrive in the software niche, at least with a minimal amount of commercial nous.
The truth is that FAANG (or FAAG, considering what's going on at Netflix?) keeps these people there by creating a value system. If you've ever read the internet-classic 'Five Geek Social Fallacies' post (https://plausiblydeniable.com/five-geek-social-fallacies/), you'll know that people like us - frankly - are suckers for taxonomy. If you tell them that they are the best because they work for you, and the only thing that can make them any better as an engineer is creating maximum returns for the Borg, and surround them with others who mirror and validate that behaviour, they will fall for it for the rest of their lives.
Don't fall for it. There are a fuck ton of smart people at FAANG companies – that's one of the few marketing points which is unvitiated in its merit,…
Yeah, I found that blog post really thought provoking.
I think the core idea was that "it is a virtue to tolerate the outgroup" often means, in American middle-class culture, "if you are on Team Republican, do not stop associating with members of Team Democrat, no matter how much your friends and media tell you all those people are evil idiots" and vice versa.
This is an interesting normative take on what you might call the "filter bubble moral panic" of the 2000s, a growing fear that people who don't agree with each other are experiencing totally separate and disconnected realities.
The thing everyone's afraid of seems to be that in this new world, democracy will effectively become impossible because the ruling majority party will always be ignorant of (or totally unsympathetic to) the interests of the minority. Is the risk overblown? I dunno; how actually bad is a government shutdown, a half-year delay in Zika containment funding, etc.? Hard to say if these times are really worse and if "ignoring the other team" is really to blame.
Some other content in this vein that was interesting reading:
* The Shadow University -- a 1999 nonfiction book of essays about how, at American universities, concepts like "academic freedom" and "the marketplace of ideas" have entered a tension with other concepts (https://www.amazon.com/dp/0060977728)
* The Five Geek Social Fallacies -- a 2003 essay influential among some software-as-a-lifestyle people I know, which argues most memorably…
The premise of the post I replied to is that the mailing list moderation is currently not great and that it allows people to be abusive. It suggest that we should crowdsource this moderation. I assume they think this will lower the burden.
I myself do not think that this is the actual problem. I think the actual problem is that many FOSS communities have fostered an idea that cracking down on certain types of behavior is censorship. Of course they might all agree to ban somebody who is saying certain well known explicit words or being really really aggressive, but there's a lot of behavior that I would consider bannable but they do not.
I'm trying to avoid mentioning specific cases because I don't wanna either reopen old wounds or cause another similar dustup. I can say that it reminds me a lot of the really old post about the 5 geek social fallacies https://plausiblydeniable.com/five-geek-social-fallacies/ In particular social fallacy #1
Obviously we're not talking about geek culture here (in general anyways). After rereading it, I saw something else that we actually do a see a lot even today.
This in particular has happened on many a mailing list, including the ones I'm not specifically mentioning
>> <SNIP> when nothing smacking of social selectiveness can be discussed in public, people inevitably begin to organize activities in secret. </SNIP>
Well-known annoyances get tolerated for years, and the people who do the work start moving their discussions to bug…
I suspect it looks cheap simply because culture has changed in the 16 years since this was published. Remember that in 2003, the only way you're going to be reading an essay online is if you're devoting the time to sit down at a desktop to do so.
Do you feel your criticism would still apply with the same force if it was clear that the author was considered to be a geek by himself and others?
*Edited to add a quote from http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/fifteen.html regarding this point:
> First up is the issue of what "geek" means. It's an ill-
> defined subculture at the best of times, but I generally
> see two loose and overlapping superfamilies. On the one
> hand, those geeks whose common denominator is a passion
> for technical pursuits of all sorts -- OS geeks, coding
> geeks, sysadmin geeks, etc.; on the other, those whose
> common denominator is a passion for media -- comic book
> geeks, film geeks, anime geeks, gaming geeks, etc. I'm a
> game designer with a degree in performance studies. You
> can probably guess where I fall. I wasn't thinking espe-
> cially rigorously when I wrote 5GSF (or, for that matter,
> Why Geeks Like Anime), so while I defined my terms, I
> used the media-geek definition throughout. This caused
> problems for some readers coming from the other side of
> the tracks -- like, say, Metafilter.
However, are "your people" actually transitively closed? My impression is this isn't really the case for most people (or at least not if you like to talk about more than one thing).
I'm reminded of this article I saw several years ago
https://plausiblydeniable.com/five-geek-social-fallacies/
which suggests that we shouldn't assume friendship is transitive.
I know I have friends whom I would never want to introduce to one another or have in the same conversation or social gathering!
I agree with your suggestion that being able to ignore someone easily could make communications environments better; it seems like there was probably a lot of direct and indirect benefit in USENET killfiles (although I'm not such a fan of how people used them performatively, publicly announcing that they had killfiled other people -- usually by writing "PLONK!" at the end of a long rejoinder).
How are any of these activities improved by an abrasive culture?
The only thing it creates, ultimately, is the endgame of the Geek Social Fallacies: a place where the only people left all have nasty personalities and no social connections to any other kinds of people.
http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html
If you haven't been in an environment where everybody is tolerated -- you're really missing out. I've been lucky enough to work on projects where programming nerds mingle with visual artists, mechanics, hardware hackers, fashionistas, musicians, and more, and it's amazing. And furthermore, it's not like we're watching what we say all day. In my experience, if you have a baseline where everyone knows they are accepted and have recourse to call someone out, then there's lots of "inappropriate" humor.