Amplified Tribalism

How the vibe shift to negativity is hurting progress, and what to do about it

Jul 25

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Hi friends 👋,

Happy Monday! Hope you stayed cool this weekend. It was a balmy 95 here in Brooklyn; perfect weekend to stay inside and write.

Over the past few months, I’ve noticed a vibe shift online: the conversation seems to be getting more negative, aggressive, and polarized. Today’s piece is an attempt to unpack why so many people are talking past each other, why it’s damaging, and what to do about it. It’s not as upbeat as a lot of Not Boring pieces, but I think addressing this issue is crucial to unlocking progress.

Let’s get to it.

Amplified Tribalism

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You won’t find many people who love the internet more than me. My whole career is based on the internet. I spend way too much time on Twitter. When people have criticized Twitter for being a dark place full of trolls and hate, I’ve defended it. “That’s not been my experience,” I’d retort, “Most of the interactions I have on Twitter are thoughtful and fun!” I wrote The Great Online Game and meant it.

I’m not feeling that love as much recently.

Maybe the bear market and the potential of recession is bringing out bad vibes. Maybe everyone’s a little bit hungover from a couple of years of excess and upside. Maybe it’s just that we’ve just spent too much time online together over the past couple of years and it’s starting to feel cramped.

The early COVID period online was like Episode 1 of any season of The Real World. Everyone shows up to the house all excited to meet new people and embark on a wild adventure together.

*All of us together on the internet in early COVID*

“Everyone here is so funny and smart and hot! Let’s do shots! We are going to have the BEST TIME EVER!!! <3”

COVID was and remains terrible [insert all of the bad things], but there was something catalyzing about the early days of the pandemic. In Conjuring Scenius, I wrote that, “When it is all said and done, I believe that historians will look back at the Coronavirus pandemic as the greatest catalyst for progress and creativity in human history.”

That was a crazy claim to make in May 2020, but there were three reasons I thought it might be true:

It served as the previously-absent, globally-catalyzing event for the internet generation.
People across the globe banded together, united by a common mission: to fight the spread of this disease.
Having been forced to interact almost exclusively online for an extended period, people are creating new tools, processes, and social norms that make collaborating online more like collaborating in-person.

I thought that those three factors might be enough to precipitate the first global scenius, which musician Brian Eno described as “the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.”

Think back to that time. There was fear and fighting, but most of it was focused on the pandemic and, in America, Trump. Outside of those two topics (and they’re very big ones, but concentrated) the vibes online were incredibly positive. People experimented with new ways to connect, share information, have fun, and create online. Technology, from Zoom to mRNA, was viewed as a positive force. People, unlocked, often unwillingly, from their old jobs, tried new things, and generally, people were supportive of whatever they pursued.

In a 2008 essay, Kevin Kelly laid out the four factors that have historically nurtured scenius:

Mutual appreciation — Risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety is appreciated, and friendly competition goads the shy. Scenius can be thought of as the best of peer pressure.
Rapid exchange of tools and techniques — As soon as something is invented, it is flaunted and then shared. Ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside a common language and sensibility.
Network effects of success — When a record is broken, a hit happens, or breakthrough erupts, the success is claimed by the entire scene. This empowers the scene to further success.
Local tolerance for the novelties — The local “outside” does not push back too hard against the transgressions of the scene. The renegades and mavericks are protected by this buffer zone.

All four were present on the early COVID internet, and to me, it felt like we could finally unlock that idea of scenius from its geographic boundaries and bring it to a global scale.

But if you’ve watched The Real World, you’ll know that the novelty and excitement of being thrown into unusual circumstances with a group of strangers fades quickly. Humans gonna human.

By like Episode 3, relationships and cliques and romances and rivalries start to form, and the housemates need to get jobs and work together, and the producers feed them booze, and they’re stuck with each other all… the… time. The housemates stop being polite, and start being REAL.

*All of us on the internet together over the past few months*

It feels like we’ve turned that corner on the internet, maybe a while back. I’m ready to declare my dream of a COVID-fueled Global Online Scenius dead.

Like Real World housemates, the online housemates have retreated into tribes and cliques. People are sick of each other. People are no longer willing to support, or at least tolerate, the wild ideas they were willing to support or tolerate when people had nothing better to do. Instead of concentrating attention and angst on COVID and Trump, attention and angst are once again fragmented. Everyone is talking past each other.

There’s been a vibe shift. It’s not as innocuous as who’s wearing and listening to what. It’s a shift from assuming the best in others to assuming the worst. I’m worried it has dangerous implications for our ability to make progress.

Some of it is outright fighting, name calling, and the like. There are some truly miserable people on the internet who wake up every day and make it their mission to dunk on people to boost their followings and sense of self-worth. But a lot of it just seems to be people picking tribes, identifying with certain worldviews and sticking with them no matter what. Jonathan Haidt was right.

You can find signs of the shift everywhere:

Green activists and nuclear proponents yelling past each other when they ultimately, ostensibly, want the same thing
NIMBYs versus YIMBYs
The Woke Mob versus anyone who accidentally says something in the wrong way or without the right caveats
Tech people versus non-tech people
Web3 versus Web2 (or crypto vs. anti-crypto)
Remote versus in-office
Left versus right

The list goes on and on. It seems as if the default stance is that anyone on “the other team” is definitely wrong, potentially stupid, probably malicious, and maybe even criminal. Without a common goal or common enemy, everyone is talking past each other.

I don’t want to make this a crypto piece, but it’s what’s in my feed, and the conversation around regulation in crypto over the weekend provides a clear example of what I’m talking about.

In January, Prof G captured the anti-crypto camp’s popular (but false) perception of the pro-crypto camp’s view on regulation. He wrote that the decentralization narrative “is a false god evangelized by high priests who pass collection plates the size of Mars and admonish regulation as heresy.”

I got sucked in and wrote a rebuttal, pointing out that anyone serious I’d spoken to in crypto desperately wanted sensible and clear regulation so they could do their jobs without having to worry about going to jail.

Recently, the All-In Podcast has started pushing a narrative that’s been pervasive on Crypto Twitter for a year that web3 VCs are taking advantage of the lack of regulation to dump tokens on retail. Cobie provides the best overview in this essay – essentially, shitty, short-term VCs do this, legitimate, long-term VCs don’t. But Jason and All-In gleefully paint everyone with the same brush and root for people to go to jail.

This weekend, FTX founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried tweeted “we’d love to be further regulated!”, expressing the common view among anyone serious in the space:

SBF @SBF_FTX

2) (As a side note, it's odd to see a few stray "consumer protection" advocates fight *against* federal oversight of crypto and *in favor of* structures with unbounded losses for customers. We'd love to be further regulated!)

And the response wasn’t, “OK, cool, so we all agree? More regulation? Great!”

It was, “Of course they want more regulation! Those in power always want more regulation because it makes it harder for new entrants to compete with them!”

parker @pt

Incumbents always want new regulation as long as it benefits them. Zuck has begged for regulation. Apple as well. What’s unique to crypto is people are mainly just suggesting we enforce existing laws. We don’t really need new ones. https://t.co/CtRYVxX02u

Justin Slaughter @JBSDC

Crypto is the first industry I’ve seen where participants broadly want new regulations/legislation and some of the harshest critics don’t. https://t.co/8LX1y221jy

Others in the crypto extreme chimed in and said, “No, we don’t want regulation. Otherwise, we’ll just end up with banking 2.0,” ignoring the reality of the situation. And on and on it will go. It’s exhausting.

Again, I don’t want to make this a crypto piece. It’s just a very clear example of two sides talking past each other and digging in on their side instead of trying to find a common ground. You can find similar back-and-forths almost anywhere you look.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine brought to light some of the silliness in the environmental movement, which impacts politicians’ very real decisions, like railing against nuclear power. Faced with the very real threat of energy shortages, the EU parliament backed rules labeling gas and nuclear as “green” for investment purposes. Greta was not happy.

Greta Thunberg @GretaThunberg

Tomorrow the European Parliament will decide whether fossil gas and nuclear will be considered "sustainable" in the EU taxonomy. But no amount of lobbyism and greenwashing will ever make it "green". We desperately need real renewable energy, not false solutions. #NotMyTaxonomy

At the time of writing, 1,793 people have quote tweeted that tweet, most pointing out how Greta’s anti-nuclear stance was unrealistic, inconsistent, and led to things like the EU turning to coal as nuclear plants shut down. This battle, too, will go back and forth, exhaustingly.

The internet, and social media specifically, aren’t entirely to blame – tribalism and disagreement go back as far as humanity – but social media amplifies, polarizes, and distorts. Everyone with an internet connection, regardless of knowledge or motivation, can weigh in, retweet, dunk, and argue for argument’s sake. Many choose to play The Great Online Game on dumb mode, fanning flames just to feel something, and it’s pushing sides further apart and further from positive action.

Jonathan Haidt was right when he wrote of the social media game in Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid:

This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment, and their prediction of how others would react to each new action.

(I highly recommend reading his whole essay if you haven’t yet.)

I’m neither innocent nor immune here.

I kinda dunked on someone this weekend, and I justified it to myself because he’d dunked on me in the past. I don’t love that I did that; it’s not my natural stance. I love a good debate, but there’s a pretty clear line between a good faith conversation and trying to score points for your team. I’ve noticed that as I’ve come under fire, I’ve dug in my heels.

More worryingly, I can feel the vibe shift impacting my creativity and writing. If I’m being honest, I don’t think I’ve been as good at writing Not Boring since I went viral for a dumb answer on crypto use cases.

It’s hard to parse whether it’s that the whole incident was personal and internet-scale – there was a fucking Atlantic article about it – or whether it just coincided with the general vibe shift, market crash, and boiling point.

Either way, it’s been harder to come up with ideas. Harder to find the excitement that I usually have when I seize on a topic and work to understand everything about it. Harder to feel great when I hit send, knowing that there are a bunch of people on the internet who will comb through it to find anything dumb (and there’s always something dumb!).

It’s not that I’m scared to write, or depressed, or living in a constant state of worry. I’m happy and optimistic 99% of the time. It just feels like there’s a governor on my creativity and excitement, a low-grade thing buzzing in the background that gets amplified any time I go on Twitter. Sometimes when I’m sitting here writing on a sunny summer Saturday, I wonder: what’s the point? People who agree with me will agree with me, and people who disagree aren’t going to change their mind.

In the grand scheme of things, my creativity and excitement levels are unimportant. I bring it up because, while it’s very apparent that all of this amplified tribalism leads to gridlock on a larger scale – in what politicians are able to propose and pass, in what gets built and how fast – experiencing it first-hand makes me concerned that there are probably a lot of people in more important positions who have that creative and productive governor on.

Haidt describes something similar happening to America’s institutions in the essay:

A mean tweet doesn’t kill anyone; it is an attempt to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one’s own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties. It’s more a dart than a bullet, causing pain but no fatalities.
… This, I believe, is what happened to many of America’s key institutions in the mid-to-late 2010s. They got stupider en masse because social media instilled in their members a chronic fear of getting darted.

He was referring specifically to institutions that lost their backbone – their willingness to stand up for their people in the face of social media heat and their acceptance of dissenting views internally – and became less effective, dumber, in the process. David Deutsch’s Principle of Optimism states that “All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.” Pushing away knowledge to appease a mob is anti-optimistic.

Not Boring isn’t a newsletter about politics or America’s institutions. I’m writing this because the darts hit startups, too, and innovators more broadly.