Navigating the Twitter War
Balancing
Twitter war has no map.
There are various camps who dislike each other. Only now from @capturingnon did I learn the exact mapping of a part of it. TFW learning of online drama too late.
There are these memeplexes. LW and its dark twin NRx. Subdivisions of the ‘dissident right’. Doll twitter. Solo accounts each with ‘unique mission and viewpoint’.
As a reader, let’s say you can identify these camps. Map the territory. Assign each memeplex a set of topics they discuss. And specific opinions about said topics. Most contentious topics are where both memeplexes speak lots and disagree.
People identify emotionally with them the most.
Now your allegiance can be either to a set of opinions or a memeplex. Let’s simplify out the weight of the topics in your identity, make it constant for each topic.
- But Doxometrist, instead of set of opinions we can have allegiance to a mode of updating them!
Well yes, but then probably you are less attached to that set. And any mode of update is also an opinion. Vide ‘I love science ‘ types.
Suppose you identify with the set of opinions. Then you might model the camps. Find the one closest to you using some measure of cluster distance. And be there until your update of opinions changes.
Now people move in and out of memeplexes. That’s the moment when the supposition of the set of opinions is tested. Whether you stick to the person or the idea. That is certainly correlated with personality traits.
Attachment to people makes it easier intellectually. Modeling different sets of opinions is hard. But it's harder emotionally. People you like both might end up on different sides of some new divide. That sounds quite natural. There is plenty of literature describing such drama.
Your choices are
- stick to one of the sides
- invent a third, conciliatory option
- exit the duality, feel disappointed with the whole enterprise and go elsewhere
Not easy.
The situation above is assuming you start in an environment that later changes. But many more situations are possible. For example when you start with a set of opinions incongruent with either side. So on speicifc topics you align with one, some with the other. As an observer that is quite fine.
It’s different when you try to BE an agent. Then it turns out that memeplexes have reputation hierarchies. You didn’t really need to model that before. You were maximziing some utility, but no skin in the game.
As an observer, choosing whom to follow is easy. Your stream of value is time-independent function of the content you consume. As an agent, your future value streamdepends on your actions now. Siding with people. You can build reputation on something universally recognized. Such as rigour. But building reputation on other dimensions isn't unversal. There are tradeoffs. If you want to be the funny guy in memeplex 1, jokes you’d need to do to opitmize for that you make you ostracized in memeplex 2. Metaoptimization.
Not only do they have reputation heirarchies. Also goals. And talking trash about your side minor inconvenieneces in the name of TRUTH is looked down upon. Because you obstruct the common goal.
Game theory > facts and logic.
Welcome to the brutal world.
Not only are they hierarchized and goal-having. They are mammoth. They invented more rigorous ideas than you can imagine. And funny memes that got people laid more than you’ve heard. Ok, that’s a bit too fatalistic. They have memetic superiority.
The idea of balancing. I am guilty of it.
From the above already shows that it’s not working in theory. There will be more arguments below.
But why would anyone want to balance things?
I always thought of myself as low in that trait. But now did some tests. 2 were ‘low’, one was 73%. From the quizzes some questions really made me think. It seems than women make men soft. I seem to be less agreeable in person. Online higher. [Few hours go by] Yep, I’m quite high on that. In person and online. (Still processing that identity crisis. DM me if you have any ideas).
You could say that meme war is different from physical war. In the latter we can easyily imagine a situation where you need to choose between two sides. In memes, that anyone can post, there is a danger to think that everyone’s opinion matters the same. Meme wars are not that different from physical wars. (Yes, there are cases in both where neutrality is a decent strategy. IMO you have to be lucky to be able to pull it off.) A failure of the ‘middle way’ is IDW. Mocked by the right, suspected by the left.
‘If you chase two rabbits, you’ll lose them both’
What to do in the face of memetic superiority?
If you shoot, they’ll shrug it off. They don’t need to engage with you. Unless you do it well enough. You need to be concise though. It’s not about convincing them, but bystanders. Most of whom would side with the big one anyway.
Big can do more.
Twitter critical engagements will work better. But they need to be short and sweet.
What about long form content?
In theory for blogging there are 2 strategies possible:
- writing things relating to content of some more popular accounts. Then they would share your writings out of self -interest
- nitpicking every bit even someone supposedly on your team says.
The first one definitely works. My most seen piece on substack is the one summarizing someone else’s political proposal. If you want to harness the power of a memeplex, a long form content is the place to do it. It avoids the circlejerk of repeating low cost memes.
Then hopefully you’d build a sub-memeplex on your own. Allegiance to a doctrine, to achieve enough power to be independent? Does this pattern sound familiar? It feels perennial, set to occur in many places.
A good example would be Nietzsche’s 3 metamorphoses. First one is the camel stage where you adhere precisely to a doctrine. Lion stage where you discover imperfections in it and detach from it. That’s the free thinker stage. And then the new sincerity of the child, which finds postironic joy in new ideas. Behaviorally it’s an ABA’ pattern.
In our context, the camel stage would be writing serving the established memeplexes. Surfing on them. Attaching like a fish to a shark. Following them in topics and angles. Getting some scraps, and growing. Similar dynamics are in MMOs, even browser ones, like Agar.io.
Here you might need to restrict your critical voice for friends, and maximize it for enemies. A lower standard for the ingroup. Lower moral and factual correctedness for an article to pass your approval - if it’s aligned with you sensu lato. That feels a really natural way to deal with the problem. That’s an attachment to people over ideas.
Next into the lion stage - abruptly detaching or slowly diverging . The process must include some punctuated points of change, though.
Then you find a new thing. You might construct it on your own. (Like a certain Carlylean in 2007). You can also partake in something already existing. In that case your power level will be felt to the content consumers as a distinct flavour.
Nowadays the lion stage seems to be rare. In the landscape of memeplexes there is a high supply of them, and solutions to each other’s problems. Therefore people rarely stay in the scepticism free thinker lion stage. There’s more reasons for that. The second one is that there is little structural support to such views. If you’re a free thinker you miss out on all of the network effects. And the market feels such content to be dull. The third one is that self-description is not the only factor, and people pidgeonhole you. It's the egalitarian age of ‘everyone has an equal account’. ‘ Democratic’ process of clustering together different points of view has a high cycle rate.
What are the failure modes of this process then? Is it now the best it can be?
Certainly there’s an example of modern academia. In a discussion with Curtis Yarvin Justin Murphy describes his experience. Feeling limited. Pre-selected topics. ‘No, we don’t WRITE about this’. That’s the overgrowth of the camel stage. Obstruction of the flow from the camel to lion.
For the transition from lion to the joyful child I imagine a state of social pressure into valuelessness and free spirited thinking. Heavily normative irony pollution. When it’s cringe to have faith and hope. JReg portrays that among Zoomers. Kierkegaard portrayed that in his concept of the Ironist.
That leaves us the transition from null (non-participant) in the landscape into the greatest camel. From lvl 3 mob to lvl 100 mafia boss. Mastery of a concept is tied to participation in a hierarchy. In a mafia, power relations are presented to you clearly. Same for a medieval monastery.
Here we go back to the beginning. Twitter has no map.
There’s this old 2014 map, a lot has changed since then. Reading all the reading lists? That will get you nowhere. At best as an esoteric scholar, but lack of alignment with any network-memeplex agenda, will push you into obscurity.
Oh yes, we arrive at formalism-porn where every power relation is formalized.
TBH personally the fact that many accounts are just completly non-transparent in terms of what they believe. And username + avatar seem little to imagine a flesh and blood human who’s in a hierarchy and has opponents. Maybe listening to twitter spaces would help, but idk.
So what are the tips for content creators trying to engage with this memespace?
Balancing or going alone is bad. Find a tribe, excel at it - map at least that one well, know whom to retweet, whom to shun. Elaborate the correct opinions in long form. Withold criticism. Engage in community. Surrender your free thinker dignity. Follow the herd. Develop the concepts. Give examples. Mock enemies. Don’t upset the mammoth.
-But Doxometrist, that was just ‘why’ it’s good to stick to one side, and ‘how’ to proceed with it. There is nothing on ‘how to choose it’!
Oh yes, my bad. About that later. Comment your ideas on how to do that. My suspicion is that it must involve leap of faith.
Might I suggest a different strategy?
1. Become worthy.
2. Accept clout.
3. Tweet.