💾 Archived View for nomadpengu.in › thoughts › sincerity captured on 2023-01-29 at 15:38:59. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Posted on 2022-05-17
There's been a bit of discourse about the lack of sincerity in modern culture.
gemini://altesq.net/~masqq/gemlog/2022-05-10-2.gmi
gemini://republic.circumlunar.space/users/flexibeast/gemlog/2022-05-17.gmi
gemini://text.eapl.mx/re-the-dissappearence-of-sincere-conversations
I understand and sympathize with the frustrations and sentiments expressed here. However, I think the analysis of the fundamental issues at hand are flawed.
Grab any 19th century novel, and you'll see displays of vapidness or people bemoaning the increase of vapidness in society. Many have blamed this on technology -- TV, and before that radio, and before that yellow journalism newspapers, and before that the printing press, and before that you had Plato saying that writing itself weakened the mind.
I do not think there ever existed some halcyon age where strangers (or even friends) had Deep and Meaningful conversations more than they had vapid smalltalk. Perhaps what everyone remembers as better days of conversation are simply days of youth, when the vulnerability entailed by sincerity could do little to materially harm you.
As Christopher Lasch notes early in _The Culture of Narcissism_, codified forms of decorum and smalltalk acted as a sort of API between social strata. When you, a worker, chat with a more refined gentleman in the park about the weather, you have a set of acceptable topics, questions, and responses that allow you to exist together in that space. Without smalltalk, conversation quickly breaks down, as the experiences of higher strata are so different from the lower.
With the rise of neoliberal individualism, coinciding with the waning days of 70's counterculture, the idea of smalltalk and decorum came under attack. Instead, it became the expectation (especially among media elites) that conversation should be some pure interaction between people, unbound by the authoritarian strictures of polite society, akin to how children and early teenagers interact.
Of course, this was a pipe dream, as the material conditions of neoliberal capitalism require the careful management of public image, with dire consequences if your image is sullied. This means that discourse has taken on a constant veneer of sincerity, even when impressions are being carefully manipulated. Look no further than Elon Musk's Twitter -- the most powerful, most elite man in the world understands the need to communicate in a way that signals sincerity, even when the ends are cynical. (i.e., he constantly posts cringe in order to mask his clear market manipulations.)
Now, whether these changes are good or bad, whether they dissolve class solidarity or deepen class antagonisms, is a whole other discussion which I haven't done enough reading and thinking about to have a firm opinion on. All I'm stating is that smalltalk has historically functioned as a social glue, and that social glue is now expected to stem from sincerity rather than decorum.
With increasing expectation and pressure for all social utterances to be a reflection of the soul rather than a constrained set of acceptable speeches, the modern person must _change their soul itself_ in order to stay socially accepted. We can all spot fake sincerity from a mile away, so in order to convincingly play the part of sincere social acceptability, we must in no small part convince ourselves to believe in the positions that we take. (i.e. some part of Elon genuinely loves cringey memes and believes in alt-lite political opinions)
Of course, the way this conformity is expressed depends on which social circle you're trying to signal to. Leftists are expected to sincerely express their disgust of landlords, conservatives are expected to sincerely express their devotion to right wing politicians, and liberals are expected to sincerely agree with NPR podcasts. The key point is that the breakdown of smalltalk means there has been a breakdown between the public and private self -- and we, as fundamentally social creatures, must choose the public self to the detriment of the private.
We are unable to speak with true sincerity, as true sincerity must flow from the private self, which no longer exists -- the quest to eliminate smalltalk has contradictorily created people who cannot speak sincerely
So where does technology fit in to the picture? That seems to be the main point of attack from everyone who has written on this. I would argue that it doesn't really, at least not at a fundamental level.
The development of new technologies expands the possibility space of what society can look like. However, mass adoption of a technology is always preempted by political, social, and ideological changes. Technology acts as a lubricant and an accelerator of existing trends -- as science fiction fans will gladly tell you, cultural artifacts often predict both the development of new technology and the consequences of their adoption.
That is, a dopamine hungry, addictive mass existed far before the first line of the TikTok codebase was written. On the flip side, smol web technologies did not generate smol web users.
So what can we do as technologists? The truth is, very little. Our culture is, and I would argue has always been, driven by media (both high and low), politicians, entertainers, and journalists. Silicon Valley, the supposed bastion of technologists, was only ruled by techies before computer tech was widely adopted -- these days, SV is ruled by influencers and hucksters. Maybe you can get on Joe Rogan's podcast and talk about how gemini is free from cancel culture or something.
On a less sarcastic note, perhaps what we can do as technologists is to build tech that empowers the existing cultural currents that we want to amplify. Maybe that does indeed mean bikeshedding smol web protocols. Maybe that means figuring out how to use algorithmic attention hijacking for good (unlikely as it seems). Maybe more productively, you could build applications that help with labor organizing or something. But crucially, what we need to understand is that the substrate for change is _people_, not technology -- gemini can connect like minded people, but I'm convinced that if you somehow magically turned every TikTok app into a gemini client, very little would meaningfully change. This also means that face-to-face conversation, unmediated by technology, also will not save us.
This, of course, is all assuming that cultural change on its own can happen. Many believe that only radical change in the economic base can fundamentally change culture, and they may be right.