Note:
Elsehere on the internet, Tony Lower-Basch posited that the geek social fallacies (ie, never kick anyone out) are exactly what an abuser would want in place.
He's not wrong, and he went on to further suggest that this is intentional.
I think this is true. Here's a ... let's call it a thought experiment.
You're 17. You smell bad. You don't have a lot of friends. You feel bad about yourself., (Note to 17 year old boys: You're fine. People will like you if you stop being an ass. And shower in the morning. Maybe wear clean clothes. Trust me.)
But hey, there's this cool geek name of Steven. He's got charisma out the wazoo, and is kind of the gatekeeper to the local crew. And Steven says "Come play in my White Wolf game". So, you go and these guys put up with you. You can sense most of them don't really like you and you freeze up a lot and find the game stressful more than fun, but Steven says you're in, so you're in.
There's not a lot of girls in the group, usually just Steven's girlfriends. This seems normal to you.
And, you are benefiting from GSF #1. You get to be around people. Hooray. And you're stupidly grateful.
And, why has Steven invited you around? Well ..
That's the question, right. I was never Steven. But, I do know that when I heard bad things about Steven, I didn't believe them. If those rotating girlfriends said bad things, it's not like I'd stop being Steven's friend!
Plus, I'm sure I defended him -- he'd made space for me, afterall!
See what Steven has done? Recruited unworldly unwashed geeks into the league of his defenders. Turned the innocent (ish) into his weapons.
You never quite realize this, and go off to college. Where more people enjoy being around you -- you started showering every day -- and you make similar groups to Steven's. You make groups where nobody is ever kicked out, and all sorts of shitty behavior is tolerated. You help to enforce these norms, because you remember this is how Steven's group operated.
You now create groups in the same vein as the first one that accepted you -- one where people who did bad things can benefit from geek social fallacies.
And, you do this over and over again. And not because you are shitty, but because it is the only model you ever knew. Because for a group to accept you at 17, it must be able to excuse a lot of crappy behavior.
Eventually, it is brought to your attention and you try -- often failing -- to make better groups.
The names have been changed to protect the guilty.
Or, maybe I'm completely off base. What do you think?
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ReplyDeleteBet you the first three sentences of your fourth paragraph set off G+’s abuse filters.
ReplyDeleteDavid Hertz Did you have a post and it disapeared?
ReplyDeleteThis fits neatly into the narrative that crappy (racist, misogynistic, take your pick) paradigms keep getting repeated because the people implementing them just crib what the guy before did.
ReplyDeleteWhich means I find it really plausible, although I don’t actually know.
I was, in middle school, a...Steve, I guess? I was among other things a theater nerd, which requires a certain amount of social poise. But I got teased with other groups, and the bottom-of-the-barrel nerds seemed to really appreciate my presence, and I didn’t think anyone should be excluded.
I couldn’t, however, manage a group of friends worth a darn and some petty personal conflict exploded everything about twice a year. I thought I was trying t do good and not managing.
So this can arise without the charismatic guy being a slick ass looking for protection.
I suspect the social geek fallacies were so widespread because something close could arise from several different circumstances and then merge and standardize.
Nah, I don't think it's intentional at all.
ReplyDeleteWhich makes it worse, actually.
I think that happens somewhere greater than 0 but less that 100% of the time. But I'd be hesitant to call them intentional as a rule.
ReplyDeletethis is a divine watchmaker argument, right? look at this complex system, and look how it functions to reinforce itself, nothing like this could have arisen without an intelligent mind behind it. i think i'm with Mickey Schulz on this one (though i don't want to put words in her mouth)
ReplyDeleteit's tempting to attribute systemic problems to individual bad actors, because then we get to exculpate ourselves. but i think it's probably a feedback loop of system rewards/encourages bad behavior, and then people who behave badly find themselves in positions to influence how the system works.
and if you or i were to find ourselves in a position of power in a system like this (that is, a geek community), it would likely result in our behavior becoming worse. because there's a lot of subtle (and some not-so-subtle) reinforcers for behaving badly.
edit - which is not to say i think it's inevitable and an unsolvable problem! just that we have to hold ourselves accountable and really interrogate our actions along the way.
Sort of, Adam McConnaughey, but it's also lived experience.
ReplyDeleteI guess it depends on what intentional means.
ReplyDelete"I made these choices and did these things on purpose." That's intentional.
"I made these choices and did these things on purpose, and for these specific reasons." That's also intentional.
I don't think the second is what happens in the majority of cases.
I wrestle with a tricky internal balance.
ReplyDeleteOn the one hand, thinking “all of this evil is caused by people with motivations fundamentally unlike mine” can be an excuse to not examine my own harmful actions and beliefs, and how I contribute to broken systems.
On the other hand, thinking “none of this evil is caused by people with motivations fundamentally unlike mine” can be an excuse to not address the full scope of threats faced by people in the cross-hairs of abusers.
If I posit the existence of a conscious, deliberate, Steve then it seems pretty obvious to me that he would find (or form) a group this spectacularly vulnerable, and curate its vulnerability. I can imagine a group not being so targeted, but in order to do so I need to tell myself there are no such predators... and I know that’s not true. I’ve been part of repelling the attempts of one to suborn a group.
So ... at different times I've been different aware of this, and have acted differently:
ReplyDelete17: High School, not aware!
22: College, kind of aware but don't know what to do about it.
27: Grad School. Aware, try and fail to make better.
32: Got a professional job in DC. See this in a board game group, and burn it to the ground to make a better one. This better group is still going, and will kick assholes the fuck out. A half dozen marriages have resulted from this group. I wanted a gaming group my now wife would want to be in, and we made it together.
37: Now. In smaller groups. Spending less energy on large groups, but trying to make positive groups in the ones where I hang.
And, of course, the anecdotes of individual guys are as nothing to the mountains of evidence from brave women speaking out to say “yes, this is happening, these predators are definitely present and active in this community.”
ReplyDeletePredators are here, they’ve been here (as best I can tell) since the start. When you believe that testimony, what does it imply about whether they were positioned to have an impact on the culture?
So, what if I am reading you correctly Tony what I am getting is that either
ReplyDelete1. That there are predators, and thus every group has been targeted and suborned by one and the geek social fallacies were put in place to protect them.
or
2. There are not predators, and the geek social fallacies are independent things.
You seem to be saying there are only two options. All or None. I'd say that is 100% wrong. The real answer is "some".
3. "There are geek social fallacies. There are also predators. Predators will use those fallacies to their benefit, but they are not the sole inventors and perpetrators of them."
It may also be that you are defining "group" differently than I am. I include home gaming groups in there, and this your assertion is telling me that my home group was actually created by a predator and is being used to offer them shelter. I'm pretty sure that is wrong.
Matt Johnson: How about, rather than digging in to whether or not you interpreted me correctly, we both agree that the interpretation you are assigning me is transparently incorrect.
ReplyDeleteHow are you with the assertion “your home gaming group was created in a geek culture that was, in turn, strongly influenced by abusers in order to establish norms that give them shelter, and your group (and every group) will need to wrestle with the fallout of that”?
Tony Lower-Basch That... feels antagonistic for some reason... If I'm misinterpreting you I am sorry, but I'm not deliberately doing so. I'm just not sure how else to interpret what you said, which is why I was re-framing in the hopes you would clarify for me if I'm wrong... :/
ReplyDeleteAs to the assertion there, I... don't know. I mean, I guess we all need to wrestle with the notion that everything we do is done in the context of the patriarchy existing? So... sure? But I don't think that the geek social fallacies were specifically the creation of predators who used them to gather a geek-shield for their activities.
Guys: please be gentle with each other.
ReplyDeleteMatt Johnson: Okay! You don’t think that’s how it happened. So noted.
ReplyDeleteI think differently, but it doesn’t seem like there’s much to say. We seem to be operating from different bases of evidence.
Bad actors discovered a feature of social culture they can exploit for their own benefit.
ReplyDeleteOr
Bad actors conspired to create and embed a feature in society they can exploit for their own benefit.
Which is more believable?
If the bad actors in question are billionaires who control major media outlets and have a team of bought and paid for politicians to call upon, the second is entirely reasonable.
If the bad actors are dorky high school kids manipulating their D&D buddies...not so much.
Tony, I feel like I'm not really getting what you are asserting... if I may ask... are you asserting that every single geek group is based on a social predator manipulating the other geeks into defending them?
ReplyDeleteRalph Mazza Just to check: Are you saying that my experience didn't happen?
ReplyDeleteThat is: My experience -- which I've seen several times -- is an abuser creates a group so that they can be a shitbag. I saw this in high school, I saw this in college, I for sure saw it as an adult.
That's my lived experience. Are you saying it didn't happen?
Matt Johnson: No. That would be idiotic.
ReplyDeleteI am asserting that some groups have been so co-opted (as William describes), both early and ongoing, and that because of precisely the mechanisms that he describes for how that cultural change then propagates, it has had a formative influence on the unconsidered cultural context as a whole.
EDIT: Removed metaphor, because metaphors derail stuff.
Okay. I'm not sure how that ties into your statements of "On the one hand, thinking “all" and "On the other hand, thinking “none ". It seems like it's neither of those and is just "some".
ReplyDeleteMaybe I'm just really not understanding this conversation.
William Nichols
ReplyDeleteThing one "an abuser creates a group wherein he can take advantage of existing geek fallacies to be a shit bag".
Thing two "an abuser intentionally creates geek fallacies, in order to create a group to exploit those fallacies to be a shit bag"
These things are not the same things. Asserting thing 2 requires: A) Steve have a level of power and influence far larger and more widespread than he actually does. B) tracing all 5 geek fallacies back to a single Ur-Steve from which they then propagated throughout all of society by word of mouth, or C) several Ur-Steves invented the same 5 fallacies at the same time and the propagations eventually merged with each other.
Something like this is required to get from a single point anecdotal example to a society-wide phenomenon. How else does the phenomenon become so wide-spread with common characteristics to be identified as a recognizable fallacy?
Occam's Razor suggests none of these are high probability events. What I'm saying is that the beliefs that underlie the fallacies came from an honest place. A place of ostracized hurting people endeavoring to forge common bonds with other similarly ostracized people. That those beliefs and bonds are imperfect and vulnerable to exploitation is no great surprise given that the socially ostracized people in question are by definition starting from a place outside societal norms. I.e. "socially awkward people create socially awkward norms for dealing with other socially awkward people" is not at all unexpected, nor does it require any malice or abusive intent.
Such norms...the so called geek fallacies...being so created, are then easy to adapt, manipulate, and abuse by bad actors for their own ends. This is also not surprising, it is quite characteristic of sociopathic behavior.
But the existence of bad actors who use the geek fallacies to inflict abuse in no way requires those bad actors to have invented the fallacies for that purpose.
Ralph Mazza: Let’s make a non-abuser character-type named Lester. Using your logic from above, were the geek social fallacies created by (A) a single Lester with the power to impose the GSF directly upon all geeks, (B) one urLester who created the GSF, and from whom they all propagated, or (C) a number of urLesters who all came up independently with the same GSF, and the propagation eventually merged with each other?
ReplyDeleteThose are the options, right? So how do you think Lester pulled it off? None of them seem like high-probability events.
Tony Lower-Basch They are not high-probability events. Because that's not how mores and folkways work. There is no Lester.
ReplyDeleteWhich is my point.
Well, honestly, I think the problem here is assuming the GSF were /created/. I'd maintain that the GSF's are really just a set of terms used to label, group and define sets of emergent behavior...
ReplyDeleteRalph Mazza: Okay, let me see if I follow along here: Suppose, for instance, an uncomfortably large number of Steves did their Steve thing, and that propagated the way mores and folkways do, and the end result is a set of cultural norms for our community that is everything Steve wanted (and probably several things that individual Steves wouldn't have even dreamed of asking for).
ReplyDeleteNow all of this happens in large part because each Steves (being a manipulative so-and-so) gathered his original group by pushing precisely where his desires aligned with their more innocent desires for acceptance and tolerance. That's what gives it legs, to maintain itself in Steve's group and reproduce itself elsewhere.
In the end, you have the GSF, world-wide, and it doesn't include other possible geek fallacies (like "Friends always encourage you to improve yourself") that would also have had legs among the mostly-innocent carriers, because those got drowned in the Steve signal.
Are we arguing here about whether that should be called deliberate creation? Or are you arguing that that can't be how it happened?
Because if the former ... sure. Whatever. Label it to your heart's content.
But if the latter, I'd be interested to hear your argumentation. It might reassure me. I really don't want to believe this.
Tony Lower-Basch my initial reaction, which is all I have time for at the moment, is that sounds highly unlikely because at the time these fallacies originated, there was no need for Steve to seek protection for his behavior, because his behavior was normal.
ReplyDeleteI mean it wasn't that long ago (as an example) that date rape was just called "getting laid" and harassment was the expected response to "playing hard to get". The idea that Steve would have had the foresight to invent ways to protect himself from things that at the time he didn't need protection for, seems rather a stretch.
That would also require the uncomfortably large number of Steve's hitting on similar approaches to doing this, which also seems unlikely in the pre-internet / dark web era.
I think you need a lot more to get to causation from a pile of what looks to me like correlation.
And on the claim that date rape was just getting laid in the , I'm going to close this thread down hard.
ReplyDelete