hex_m_hell

CW: kids and violence, self harm, reference to sexual violence

When my oldest was a baby, I'd hung a bell by her changing table. It was within reach of her feet. At one point she bumped it and heard the sound. She struggled to control her legs, trying to do it again. Over the following weeks she practiced, bit by bit, until she could reliably kick it.

She would kick the bell over and over again, smiling, throwing her whole body in to it to see how hard she could kick it. She was so excited to kick the bell that sometimes it was hard to change her. The ability to influence the world, even in this tiny way, brought her an intense joy.

I remember reading an explanation of this behavior. We have so many things to learn as we grow. We must learn to move our bodies, read faces and mirror them, speak, read, write, and so on. Brains operate largely on incentives, and the easiest way to incentivize the development of these behaviors would be to reward behavior that effects the world. This reward would have to degrade in such a way so as to always require a greater quantity or new type of impact to experience the reward.

This worked well for many of our ancestors, but becomes increasingly dysfunctional in the modern era. David Graeber pointed out, in his book “Bullshit Jobs,” that this problem manifests in the creation of said bullshit jobs in order to justify one's own ego and in non-consensual sadomasochistic dynamics in the workplace (that is, bosses deriving psychological, if not sexual, pleasure from emotionally abusing workers). Unfortunately, as terrible as that is for all of us, it's probably one of the less horrible effects of the maladaptation of this trait to our capitalist modernity.

There was another mass shooting a few days ago. This one followed a common pattern. It Could Happen Here covered the shooting, and I'm going to pull from their transcript here:

If this is anything, it is […] a memetic shooting.

It is based on a whole bunch of memes about other mass shootings as well, specifically in the way that engages in […] anti-semitism and racism and includes slurs and catchphrases. It's not in the way that the shooter actually believes these things ideologically. It is just to gesture to them as they exist in the lineage of other mass shootings.

[…]

It's a perfunctory use of slurs and of messaging that just kind of wraps around this whole like nihilistic fandom culture around other mass shooters, and […] that is that's what this shooting is. I've watch now like seventeen minutes of video of the shooter like showing off their weapons, going through their diaries and journals, inspired by a whole bunch of like Eastern European mass shooters as well. And this shooter reminds me of participants of what's called the true crime community or TCC. Not as in like the genre of true crime podcasts or documentaries, but it's more of an online fandom based on a personal obsession withmass killers themselves and specifically school shooters.

[…]

Like they scatter shot all of these memes and references and like bits of manifestos and like images to just to make this whole mess of stuff to look at. But none of it actually means anything.

It's worth listening to, in full, because it goes in to a lot of connected threads. But let's return to the drive to “have an effect on the world.” The greater the levels of hierarchy within a system, the less power any individual outside the hierarchy has. That is, the less power within the system, the less their actions mean and the less their actions influence the world.

Humans evolved as cooperative organisms. A human alone will generally die. Living alone has been almost a death sentence, since long before our modern form. So we evolved along side the social organisms we built. We evolved to fit in, to conform with the value systems, to identify and follow the social incentive models. Humans are pattern seeking animals. Devoid of patterns, we will find them. Leave a person in a sensory deprivation chamber for long enough and they will hallucinate.

Capitalism provides one simple incentive model: maximize wealth. The more wealth an entity (person, corporation, whatever) has within capitalism, the greater the survivability. This dominant system drives a lot of behavior within the capitalist world. But this system isn't accessible to everyone. Wealth requires wealth, and the combination of the atomization of social systems and centralization of wealth has left huge numbers of people entirely locked out.

If a person is to unable to fulfill their innate drive to influence the world, then what happens? There are two relevant things here. The first is depression. Humans naturally want to have some control over their reality. If they are trapped or controlled, they tend to get depressed.

Obsessive behavior and self-destructiveness of those who feel trapped is not unique to humans. Animals do this all the time in zoos. I've written about this before. The caging of living things can lead to all kinds of unpredictable and abnormal behavior, including aggression, self-mutilation, and self-destruction. Most animals, when trapped, become extremely volatile.

The second thing can happen is that the individual may use that pattern recognizing brain to find an incentive system that they can access. And perhaps, some may think, there's a way to do both.

While a lot of people kill themselves in the course of the act […] it's a way of making your suicide not just be about yourself.

(From the same transcript)

Do you use social media? What's in your feed? What's trending? A beautiful picture of a rainbow. A story about a government oppressing a marginalize group. A silly picture of a goat. A video of protestors being beaten by police. A picture of a dead child. A silly web comic. A picture of a cat. A warning about the immanent collapse of human society, mass extinction of other species, and possible extinction of humans. A heart warming story about strangers being kind. A picture of a police car on fire. A funny shitpost. A Nazi. Another picture of a cat.

The undifferentiated feed does not distinguish between good or bad, upsetting or wonderful. There are upvotes, likes, favorites, boosts. Perhaps there are other interactions, but the important factor here is the spread. Engagement is impact. Oh hey, look, a metric for impact.

That model of undifferentiated information predates the current algorithm-centric era. This video talks about how legacy media, partially driven by the shift of users to the Internet for their news, accidentally created and incentivized this problem. (Thanks for the head up @kkarhan@infosec.space)

Today the subculture has evolved long past the need for legacy media. They maintain their own kill counts, they glorify their own heros, they spread their own infection.

Authoritarian systems survive by cutting off other vectors to influence the world. You're doing community organizing that could threaten the system? Yeah, you're getting drugged and killed in the night. Trying to build a community garden? Yeah, that's gonna get paved for a parking lot. Go back to buying food, prole. Make money or make content so the shareholders can make money.

Undifferentiated content that drives engagement, that feeds rage, terror, hopelessness, traumatizes everyone until they stop fighting and just let it happen. Those that explode become useful, become content to feed back into the machine. All content, without regard to context, is then incentivized. Oh, yeah, there it is again. You are hopeless and angry, volatile and self-destructive, and you're looking for some way… literally any way… to feel important. You are looking for any way to have an impact on the world. It's right in front of you. Make content.

[T]he draining of meaning, the flattening of meaning is part of the [plan]. [The] point [is taking] a man who shot fucking fifty people to death and turning that into the same thing as a twenty year old joke about a comic strip in terms of its impact and severity, Because if that's no more serious or meaningful or painful than fucking a joke about Tim Buckley's dumbass cartoon.

Like, once you get someone in a mind state where they accept that they're willing to accept a lot of terrible things, right, And the goal here is creating content in the form of mass shootings, right, Like, that is the goal, and that is also what people are consciously. A lot of people want to be a part of themselves.

(Emphasis added.)

Making things is hard. It takes a lot of effort. Most things get ignored. You are flooded every day with content. Why should this idiot's weird video be worth watching? Why should that long crazy rant be worth reading? It takes time to learn how to edit video, how to write scripts, how to edit an essay. But mass shootings always get boosted. It's as easy as getting a gun… which, is extremely easy in the US.

And there it is. Impact for the sake of impact. It's just a bell, kicked by a baby, devoid of meaning and context... just a way to do something, anything, to know that you existed at one point.

Like and subscribe if you enjoyed this content. Retweet or boost to provide a quick hit of dopamine. Reach into the void and ring that fucking bell for me. I'd like to thank my sponsors: the void, the undifferentiated feed, a chicken having a nervous breakdown.

I'm going to leave with an antidote to all of this: a random video, created by some random person, that has some advice and some hope. I have some ideas about ways to solve this, maybe you do too. I'm going to drop offline, limit my social media usage, and try to focus as much as I can on creating things without regard for the algorithm.

Perhaps you could too. …or perhaps throw your phone in a river, wonder into the forest, and spend the evening picking berries. Do whatever you're gonna do. I don't control you. You choose your own incentive model.