reading: that venkatesh rao piece
Specifically, this one: The Internet of Beefs. Here’s an excerpt that I guess conveys some of the flavor:
Online public spaces are now being slowly taken over by beef-only thinkers, as the global culture wars evolve into a stable, endemic, background societal condition of continuous conflict. As the Great Weirding morphs into the Permaweird, the public internet is turning into the Internet of Beefs.
The Internet of Beefs, or IoB, is everywhere, on all platforms, all the time. Meatspace is just a source of matériel to be deployed online, possibly after some tasteful editing, decontextualization, and now AI-assisted manipulation.
If you participate in online public life, you cannot entirely avoid the Internet of Beefs. It is too big, too ubiquitous, and too widely distributed and connected across platforms. To continue operating in public spaces without being drawn into the conflict, you have to build an arsenal of passive-aggressive behaviors like subtweeting, ghosting, blocking, and muting — all while ignoring beef-only thinkers calling you out furiously as dishonorable and cowardly, and trying to bait you into active aggression.
And another one from a bit later:
A beef is a ritualized, extended conflict between named, evenly matched combatants who each stand for a marquee ideological position, and most importantly, reciprocate each other’s hostile feelings in active, engaged ways. A beef is something like the evil twin of a love affair. A beef must be conducted with visible skill and honor (though codes of honor may be different on the different sides), and in public view. Each combatant must be viewed, by his or her supporters, as having picked a worthy adversary, otherwise the contest means nothing. The combatants fight not for material advantage, but for a symbolic victory that can be read as signifying the cosmic, spiritual righteousness and rightness of what they are fighting for. So the conflict must be at least nominally fair, hard to call decisively, and open to luck, cunning cheating, and ex-post mythologizing by all sides, in terms favorable to their own champions.
I’ve read a small part of Rao’s earlier writing, of which there appears to be a lot. The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to “The Office” is one of those things that I lacked the patience to absorb in its entirety, but it often comes sort of bitter-amusingly to mind when I think about business and organizational politics.
I read most of this one. It’s long, way too heavy on its own jargon1, and abstracts the content of current ideological struggles in ways that probably ought to trouble an observant reader. All that said, it also feels like it kind of has a point. Something like the Internet of Beefs model seems implicit in how a lot of people I know approach the network now, consciously or not.
Conflict on the network feels like a system that can’t be fully explained with reference to the specific things its participants believe at any given time. It’s self-sustaining and seems to escalate or ratchet continually. Correctness - lockstep alignment with a rapidly shifting consensus in whatever domain you find yourself in - seems both mandatory and impossible on more than a temporary basis.
It’s difficult to articulate this sense of things. A lot of the people who seem to try are themselves engaged in bad-faith territorial disputes and culture-war tactical exercises. The entire meta-question of how questions are disputed in public has itself become a zone of maximum rhetorical risk.
(work in progress)
1 "Never get high on your own supply" is a maxim more writers of this kind of essay could stand to embrace.