22. Rules of Social Media Engagement, 2019 🔗

By way of Happy New Year wishes, here’s what I hope can be a helpful, perhaps even a bit healing thread, as we enter Year 5 of our culture wars.

This thread is rated UN-13: Unironic and suitable for Normies, possibly disturbingly adult for children under 13.

You’re a channel in a 7 billion channel universe. There are no NPCs (“non-playable characters”) here. Whether or not you make a living off media, you’re a part of it. Even if only 5 people follow you, and 3 are family, and you only do DMs/texts/emails, you’re an active agent.

How should you use your reach, whether small or big? Who (not what) deserves attention? What form should that attention take?

Your personal rules of engagement that you choose for yourself, times 7 billion = our world.

A key rule of engagement: whose sensitivities should you respect?

Almost NOTHING is stopping you from offending anyone you want. Despite what you may have heard, it’s trivial to hurt anyone while keeping yourself mostly safe. Safe addictive sadism is feature #1 of the Internet

Talking about anything you like and ignoring any sensitivities disturbed is actually kinda a legit shortcut to fame now. There’s MANY alt-media infrastructures, circuits of podcasts/blogs, and devoted support-with-$ audiences that will fast-lane you to profitable alt-celebrity

So long as you actually dislike people you break away from, and like the people waiting to welcome you, being “censored” by people you offend is a reliable Streisand-effect trigger to alt-fame among others who dislike them. The fastest route to the top. Streisand effect - Wikipedia

I’ve been in this game ~12 years now, mostly being sensitive to causing offense, avoiding needless provocation, shutting up on topics where I thought others might know better or have more legitimate voices.

Basically staying in my lane by some notion of courtesy in my head.

Result? A variety of less inhibited people have zoomed to 100x my reach in 1/10th the time screaming “I’m being censored!” all the way 😂

Cracks me up.

Zero regrets. I like the platform and rules of engagement I’ve built for myself. There are 7b like it but this one is mine.

I did learn the “edgy” playbook in a previous life and decided I didn’t like the tradeoffs involved in using it to get big reach. It really isn’t very hard. In more peaceful times we called it link-baiting. There is a robotic script to being an edgy taboo-shattering provocateur

Social reach is a pick-2-of-3: fast, cheap, good.

If you acquire big reach fast, and cheaply (by gratuitously offending people etc) the reach won’t be good. And by that I mean by your standards, not mine. You’ll find yourself in bed with people you’ll want to disavow later.

Fast+good = get paid by an institution. If you’re aligned, that’s good. If you’re misaligned it’s torture. And despite all the moaning about narrative monocultures and the Discourse, there’s plenty of varied institutional outlets to fit almost every sensibility. Look around.

If you’re actually any good, and willing to jump through some hoops, you’ll find institutions willing to fund anything you want to do/say. The problem is not lack of variety but too much competition. What you want said is probably already being said, professionally and better.

That leaves us with cheap+good, giving up on fast.

“Good” reach doesn’t mean you won’t piss people off. You always will. But it will be a side effect of your creative work rather than your unconscious wounds and repressed demons.

You’ll piss the right people off for the right reasons, and if they compete, they‘ ll do so via substance in their work based on alternate premises, not via toxic beefs or cheap “debates.”

And if they win, you’ll actually appreciate it because knowledge will have been produced

But more importantly, your own reach will be “good” in the sense that relationships you form will be real human ones that you’ll want to keep for life most of the time. Where you might be on different sides of specific reductive labels but on the same side of “human.”

Because ultimately “censorship” in free parts of the Internet (without Chinese characteristics) only matters if you care about the people who can’t hear or talk to you.

If you don’t, screaming “censorship” is posturing. You’re being heard by the people you want to be heard by.

But If you do, learn to find and connect to both the humans beneath the partially overlapping tag clouds. Yes, forming a for-life-by-default deep connection with another human being means connecting to a hidden part of yourself as well.

In fact, many hidden parts. Every deepening of the relationship is a new way to continue the infinite game between you two, a deeper knowledge of yourself and the other. And yet you’ll never be clones so long as you’re alive and thinking for yourself. Finite and Infinite Games - Wikipedia

So in 2019, do yourself a favor and forget about the people “censoring” you and instead focus on people with whom you might be able to form a slowly deepening infinite-game relationship for life, peeling away label after label, connecting as two entangled full humans.

If this sounds like marriage that’s no accident. Marriage is merely the relationship where failure to operate in “till death do us part” mode is costliest. But it’s an ethos you can bring to any relationship you value. You can’t invest this much in 7 billion but you can do ~150.

I don’t care what your tribe is, but I hope you’ll build it slow+cheap or cheap+good. I hope you resist the temptation of fast+cheap. I don’t care about your ideology/politics. All I care about is that you build your social world around the “good” reach of for-life relationships.

If you do that — make it a resolution perhaps — then even if I violently disagree with you about everything from immigration to IQ to climate change, I’ll defend your right to exist and do your thing your way, with your chosen people, and I suspect you’d do the same for me.

So happy new year, here’s to a good 2019, and let’s try to wind this dumb culture war of fast-and-cheap tribes as quickly and painlessly as we can. We’ve all got better things to do.

Really.

Even if it seems right now that “owning” your outgroup is the best game in the world.