The hyper-scientism of the modern age is apparent in the excessive categorization too. The naming of the plethora of sexualities gives one the idea this isn't a personal whimsy. It's Science. In previous times this urge might have had more useful outlets, like classifying bird species.
There's a thread to pull on here with teenagers or even some adults in search of identity getting one shotted by the digital infinite identity machine. It feels a bit like how processed hyper palatable food led to massive increases in obesity.
The validation of finding a community that uncritically accepts your identity and flatters your biases is very seductive. It really weakens the forcing function of society and family telling you to just be normal. In truth, what online person isn't better off being 20% more normal?
Excellent essay, as usual. I actually view the phenomena as parallel to to the mid-90's land grab for internet domain names. If you registered money.com or sex.com or yahoo.com at the right time then you got rich essentially for free. People think if they invent the right gender incantation then the world will magically recognize them as special. It's a projection of the deeply narcissistic adolescent impulse to think of yourself as uniquely wonderful.
True, but there's also an impulse (not just for adolescents) to belong. And these "gender incantations" while they look as though as they function as tribes (with flags) or subcultures, seem to be closer to nicknames—they assert your unique identity ("No, I mean demisexual Bob; you're thinking of queerplatonic Bob") but they don't sort out who you hang out with. And I think there's a need for the tribes one joins to pre-exist, as they would have for most of human history. When you join a gang, or adopt a music sub-genre, it's already there. Identity, it seems to me, is relational—it's about how you are like other people. And insisting on uniqueness reduces identity to mere existence. (Which may be why some people claim that if you deny their identity, you're saying that they don't exist.)
Shorter me—these kids strike me as terribly, terribly lonely.
I’ve always associated the same ‘spirit’ with the impulse to take photos of everything that many people have since the advent of smartphones. One must photograph meals, events, shows, travels - even when, as is most often the case, those photos will never be shared with anyone or even looked at again.
The photo thing I’ve always associated with a fear of death / inability to accept the transient nature of life from moment to moment. A photograph freezes that moment in time so it lasts forever, make you feel somehow that it hasn’t actually escaped between your fingers (especially if you were focusing on getting a photo rather than actually living in the moment).
The categorization impulse you describe so well here seems related: by cataloging everything we make it known, mastered, controlled, and reinforces the scientific feeling that all is knowable.
If the photo is a fight against transience, cataloging is maybe a fight against the unknown and the not understandable. Both seem to flow from the disenchantment of life, the death of religious spirit (not any particular religion but rather the acceptance of transience and apparent senselessness of things as part of the embrace of something beyond us).
One thing I would like to add is that a lot of people don’t really know what OCD actually is. There’s a general public image of “yeah, I like to keep my room tidy, I’m *so* OCD teheee,” but in reality, the condition is much messier than that. OCD stands for obsessive-compulsive disorder, and an experience with OCD will typically involve 2 parts: an obsessive thought and a resulting compulsion. For example, when talking about her first experience with OCD, Rowan Ellis explains how became obsessed with the idea that her teddy bear was trying to kill her for a few minutes. She understood that this thought was irrational and weird, but it completely took over her thoughts. Her OCD told her that in order to counteract these obsessive thoughts, she could count things in 3’s in the room around her. This is the compulsion. For some people, a compulsion might be washing their hands over and over again for several minutes until they do it just right. For others, it could be something far messier, potentially even being harmful. Basically though, a lot of public understanding of OCD is pretty inaccurate as to what the condition actually is.
Rowan has a fantastic video talking about the topic (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUpEg2FO5R8). She’s very articulate, smart, and an effective communicator, and I would highly recommend people interested in learning more check it out. I don’t have OCD, and my knowledge about it comes from her videos, so she can explain it much better than I can.
Your discussion of the public image of OCD reminds me that a lot of the things that Kitten highlights in Reddit should be best understood as manifestations of the phenomenon FdB discussed here.
Great analysis. Do you ever think that this impulse to name, categorize, and create some ersatz community of likeminded individuals is actually ruining the online experience? Sure, it’s how the internet works now, but I’m finding that I increasingly hate using my phone and going online because of this stuff. If everything is worked into this prism, then I’ll just limit my time online and do something better with my time.
More and more, I believe the algorithms and autism spectrums are in a death spiral. The internet just kinda sucks now, and we might be returning to a collective de-atomization. App bans for minors and phone bans at schools might even accelerate this. We can only hope.
I'm not sure here. In many ways, I think this impulse *is* the online experience, and has been since the beginning. What many of us think of as the "classic internet" was really just older media forms trespassing onto the new digital realm and trying to enforce their norms there. It mostly didn't work, that wave crested and is now receding, leaving behind the culture that came before.
it truly feels an extremely american impulse from an outside point of view, this urge to define and categorize and box and ship
what stands out most about deep american socioethnic values globally, it seems, is this pinnacle of ruthless precision and practicality - pragmatics as the foundation of capitalist ethos
Humans are generally confused about the nature of naming, labels, definitions and so on, so "Nominative mania" is probably a valuable concept worth investigating, but I think you've overstated the degree to which Reddit is obsessed with categorizing things, and ended up with the wrong mental model for why certain subreddits do/don't exist, what content you're likely to see in each of those subreddits, or what macroscopic level behavioural trends you can predict about the moderators/posters/lurkers.
I see Reddit as more of a social network organized around the "clubs" or "interest groups": Imagine a university that is extremely pro-free speech and allows anyone to start a club on almost any topic (including pornography, as long as it's legal), and the university will provide the infrastructure necessary to host that club.
A subreddit like /r/LearnMath is for people who are interested in learning math; it's not an attempt to delineate or categorize what content does or does not count as learning math.
/r/politics is for people who want to discuss politics, not for categorizing what does or does not count as politics.
Circularly, /r/technology is for people who are interested in the things you are likely to find in a community whose self-identifying label is "technology", which is to say, it's about tech gadgets and electronics and things like that. It's not about, for example, the invention of writing or levers and pulleys or eating utensils, all of which are clearly examples of technology.
Perhaps the first time you post a picture of fire to /r/technology, it may get upvoted for the lulz. But if you make a regular habit of posting examples of technology invented before 1 BC (to pick an arbitrary cut off date), probably they'll get tired of "the joke" and start downvoting your posts to oblivion.
This falsifies the hypothesis that /r/technology is intended to help people categorize what is or isn't technology, but supports the hypothesis that it's for people to socialize with people who are attracted to the Schelling point that the label "technology" provides, even if upon deeper reflection, the concept being gestured at by the Schelling point is not quite the same as the concept being gestured at by the label (in isolation, outside the context of acting as a label *for a subreddit*).
Certainly Reddit is more than one thing, yes. The subs you name and many others are not primarily dedicated to the categorization of life to the same extent. A useful distinction might be subs dedicated to news and articles and discussions of a particular topic, v. subs dedicated to collecting examples of that topic.
Wonderfully thought provoking. I view all you’ve noted as inevitable given our current technological environment. Inevitably what you are saying/illustrating is that we humans are all “unique”. The technology we have invented—let’s just call it “the Internet”—simply allows us to group/describe ourselves with finer and finer distinctions. In the end, if such can be reached, we will group/define ourselves into a category of “one”—ourselves and no one else—unique among 8 billion souls!
Of course, philosophers across the ages have noted this in one way or another, but now we have the ability to illustrate such prescient understanding of the human condition. To that I enthusiastically include yourself among those philosophers.
If it's narcissism, it's a very lazy sort of narcissism.
When you get a classification you are welcomed into a ready-made friends group with its own private jokes, aesthetics, rules and leaders. If all you are is, say, a straight women with some outlier qualities, you're just a weirdo.
As another mentioned, I think you are off base in thinking that Reddit has anything whatsoever to do with classification. All those subreddits are created by users, not the company itself. If you wish, you could create one dedicated to last images containing only cats (that belong to you!). And while you could enforce your moderation rules, you cannot prevent an image from being posted elsewhere on the site. So classification is, in my opinion, the wrong lens to be looking through.
I see the site as a mini internet, toxic in places, wholesome in others. Basically you find what you want to find.
Sorry if my first comment was negative. I just discovered your substack this morning and I’m finding your posts thought provoking!
I think, at least in the case of subreddits, though this may apply to the other domains you discussed, that obsessive categorization is one way of dealing with the insane amount of data flowing in every direction in the digital age. I have so many photos on my phone that I have difficulty finding any individual one unless it has been presorted into a category of similar photos by virtue of the circumstances of the date they were all taken (e.g. trip photos). I have so many bookmarks that I have been forced to develop an ever more specific categorization system to ensure that the hypothetical me who eventually wishes to revisit those sites will, in fact, be able to find them again. I have so many documents on my google drive that I have been forced to develop a parallel filesystem to keep track of them all.
So it goes with the subreddits. A massive sorting machine maintained by hundreds of thousands of nerds with very specific interests is one way of dealing with the fact that everyone can post everything about their daily lives, internal thoughts, artistic creations, obsessions, successes, etc. ad nauseam on the internet.
Simply navigating this world requires us to think like an industrial-scale engineer or agriculturist. We are deprived of the pleasure and simplicity of considering one thing for itself by the nigh-infinite spread of other things, similar things, totally divergent things, all prying for our attention at every moment.
In this way it might also apply to the microlabeling of queer identity. In addition to the pressure of individualistic consumer culture there is also the fact that queer community is millions of people on the internet, not the local gay bar. There has to be a way to carve out domains that a single person can even begin to parse for themselves from that, and in lieu of geographical digital real estate, they take a cue from the subreddits and develop a complete and obsessive taxonomy of the self, because that's enough to sort millions of selves into several hundred communities of a few hundred to a few thousand.
Never does this person comment "oh, and these are all young Gen Z white men, and they're weebs", including the right-wing subreddits, instead aiming at imaginary women they imagine populate Reddit in high numbers. Ridiculous. They (like "femboys") are the product of the internet age, not some kind of queer conspiracy -- real queers (like most Millennials) don't like the internet. Nor is it a leftist conspiracy because leftists find it hateful to spend your entire life being a persona on a website a la 4chan
The hyper-scientism of the modern age is apparent in the excessive categorization too. The naming of the plethora of sexualities gives one the idea this isn't a personal whimsy. It's Science. In previous times this urge might have had more useful outlets, like classifying bird species.
With a bonus that to really have Fun classifying birds, they'd have to go places with a decent chance of dying, so that would remove them either way
As always, a very nice essay.
There's a thread to pull on here with teenagers or even some adults in search of identity getting one shotted by the digital infinite identity machine. It feels a bit like how processed hyper palatable food led to massive increases in obesity.
The validation of finding a community that uncritically accepts your identity and flatters your biases is very seductive. It really weakens the forcing function of society and family telling you to just be normal. In truth, what online person isn't better off being 20% more normal?
Toaster-fucking all the way down
Thanks, I was thinking demisexuals were people who were only in the mood now and then.
Either way, we used to call them "women."
lol
Excellent essay, as usual. I actually view the phenomena as parallel to to the mid-90's land grab for internet domain names. If you registered money.com or sex.com or yahoo.com at the right time then you got rich essentially for free. People think if they invent the right gender incantation then the world will magically recognize them as special. It's a projection of the deeply narcissistic adolescent impulse to think of yourself as uniquely wonderful.
True, but there's also an impulse (not just for adolescents) to belong. And these "gender incantations" while they look as though as they function as tribes (with flags) or subcultures, seem to be closer to nicknames—they assert your unique identity ("No, I mean demisexual Bob; you're thinking of queerplatonic Bob") but they don't sort out who you hang out with. And I think there's a need for the tribes one joins to pre-exist, as they would have for most of human history. When you join a gang, or adopt a music sub-genre, it's already there. Identity, it seems to me, is relational—it's about how you are like other people. And insisting on uniqueness reduces identity to mere existence. (Which may be why some people claim that if you deny their identity, you're saying that they don't exist.)
Shorter me—these kids strike me as terribly, terribly lonely.
I’ve always associated the same ‘spirit’ with the impulse to take photos of everything that many people have since the advent of smartphones. One must photograph meals, events, shows, travels - even when, as is most often the case, those photos will never be shared with anyone or even looked at again.
The photo thing I’ve always associated with a fear of death / inability to accept the transient nature of life from moment to moment. A photograph freezes that moment in time so it lasts forever, make you feel somehow that it hasn’t actually escaped between your fingers (especially if you were focusing on getting a photo rather than actually living in the moment).
The categorization impulse you describe so well here seems related: by cataloging everything we make it known, mastered, controlled, and reinforces the scientific feeling that all is knowable.
If the photo is a fight against transience, cataloging is maybe a fight against the unknown and the not understandable. Both seem to flow from the disenchantment of life, the death of religious spirit (not any particular religion but rather the acceptance of transience and apparent senselessness of things as part of the embrace of something beyond us).
This is a good insight, I agree these two impulses are related
One thing I would like to add is that a lot of people don’t really know what OCD actually is. There’s a general public image of “yeah, I like to keep my room tidy, I’m *so* OCD teheee,” but in reality, the condition is much messier than that. OCD stands for obsessive-compulsive disorder, and an experience with OCD will typically involve 2 parts: an obsessive thought and a resulting compulsion. For example, when talking about her first experience with OCD, Rowan Ellis explains how became obsessed with the idea that her teddy bear was trying to kill her for a few minutes. She understood that this thought was irrational and weird, but it completely took over her thoughts. Her OCD told her that in order to counteract these obsessive thoughts, she could count things in 3’s in the room around her. This is the compulsion. For some people, a compulsion might be washing their hands over and over again for several minutes until they do it just right. For others, it could be something far messier, potentially even being harmful. Basically though, a lot of public understanding of OCD is pretty inaccurate as to what the condition actually is.
Rowan has a fantastic video talking about the topic (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUpEg2FO5R8). She’s very articulate, smart, and an effective communicator, and I would highly recommend people interested in learning more check it out. I don’t have OCD, and my knowledge about it comes from her videos, so she can explain it much better than I can.
Your discussion of the public image of OCD reminds me that a lot of the things that Kitten highlights in Reddit should be best understood as manifestations of the phenomenon FdB discussed here.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-gentrification-of-disability
That was a good read. Thanks for sharing!
o7
Great analysis. Do you ever think that this impulse to name, categorize, and create some ersatz community of likeminded individuals is actually ruining the online experience? Sure, it’s how the internet works now, but I’m finding that I increasingly hate using my phone and going online because of this stuff. If everything is worked into this prism, then I’ll just limit my time online and do something better with my time.
More and more, I believe the algorithms and autism spectrums are in a death spiral. The internet just kinda sucks now, and we might be returning to a collective de-atomization. App bans for minors and phone bans at schools might even accelerate this. We can only hope.
I'm not sure here. In many ways, I think this impulse *is* the online experience, and has been since the beginning. What many of us think of as the "classic internet" was really just older media forms trespassing onto the new digital realm and trying to enforce their norms there. It mostly didn't work, that wave crested and is now receding, leaving behind the culture that came before.
it truly feels an extremely american impulse from an outside point of view, this urge to define and categorize and box and ship
what stands out most about deep american socioethnic values globally, it seems, is this pinnacle of ruthless precision and practicality - pragmatics as the foundation of capitalist ethos
I think this is true, but where America goes the rest of the West follows
Humans are generally confused about the nature of naming, labels, definitions and so on, so "Nominative mania" is probably a valuable concept worth investigating, but I think you've overstated the degree to which Reddit is obsessed with categorizing things, and ended up with the wrong mental model for why certain subreddits do/don't exist, what content you're likely to see in each of those subreddits, or what macroscopic level behavioural trends you can predict about the moderators/posters/lurkers.
I see Reddit as more of a social network organized around the "clubs" or "interest groups": Imagine a university that is extremely pro-free speech and allows anyone to start a club on almost any topic (including pornography, as long as it's legal), and the university will provide the infrastructure necessary to host that club.
A subreddit like /r/LearnMath is for people who are interested in learning math; it's not an attempt to delineate or categorize what content does or does not count as learning math.
/r/politics is for people who want to discuss politics, not for categorizing what does or does not count as politics.
Circularly, /r/technology is for people who are interested in the things you are likely to find in a community whose self-identifying label is "technology", which is to say, it's about tech gadgets and electronics and things like that. It's not about, for example, the invention of writing or levers and pulleys or eating utensils, all of which are clearly examples of technology.
Perhaps the first time you post a picture of fire to /r/technology, it may get upvoted for the lulz. But if you make a regular habit of posting examples of technology invented before 1 BC (to pick an arbitrary cut off date), probably they'll get tired of "the joke" and start downvoting your posts to oblivion.
This falsifies the hypothesis that /r/technology is intended to help people categorize what is or isn't technology, but supports the hypothesis that it's for people to socialize with people who are attracted to the Schelling point that the label "technology" provides, even if upon deeper reflection, the concept being gestured at by the Schelling point is not quite the same as the concept being gestured at by the label (in isolation, outside the context of acting as a label *for a subreddit*).
Certainly Reddit is more than one thing, yes. The subs you name and many others are not primarily dedicated to the categorization of life to the same extent. A useful distinction might be subs dedicated to news and articles and discussions of a particular topic, v. subs dedicated to collecting examples of that topic.
Wonderfully thought provoking. I view all you’ve noted as inevitable given our current technological environment. Inevitably what you are saying/illustrating is that we humans are all “unique”. The technology we have invented—let’s just call it “the Internet”—simply allows us to group/describe ourselves with finer and finer distinctions. In the end, if such can be reached, we will group/define ourselves into a category of “one”—ourselves and no one else—unique among 8 billion souls!
Of course, philosophers across the ages have noted this in one way or another, but now we have the ability to illustrate such prescient understanding of the human condition. To that I enthusiastically include yourself among those philosophers.
Reddit is a dumpster fire
It's too bad James C. Scott never got to write a follow-up to describe the modern age, "Seeing Like a Sperg"
If it's narcissism, it's a very lazy sort of narcissism.
When you get a classification you are welcomed into a ready-made friends group with its own private jokes, aesthetics, rules and leaders. If all you are is, say, a straight women with some outlier qualities, you're just a weirdo.
As another mentioned, I think you are off base in thinking that Reddit has anything whatsoever to do with classification. All those subreddits are created by users, not the company itself. If you wish, you could create one dedicated to last images containing only cats (that belong to you!). And while you could enforce your moderation rules, you cannot prevent an image from being posted elsewhere on the site. So classification is, in my opinion, the wrong lens to be looking through.
I see the site as a mini internet, toxic in places, wholesome in others. Basically you find what you want to find.
Sorry if my first comment was negative. I just discovered your substack this morning and I’m finding your posts thought provoking!
I think, at least in the case of subreddits, though this may apply to the other domains you discussed, that obsessive categorization is one way of dealing with the insane amount of data flowing in every direction in the digital age. I have so many photos on my phone that I have difficulty finding any individual one unless it has been presorted into a category of similar photos by virtue of the circumstances of the date they were all taken (e.g. trip photos). I have so many bookmarks that I have been forced to develop an ever more specific categorization system to ensure that the hypothetical me who eventually wishes to revisit those sites will, in fact, be able to find them again. I have so many documents on my google drive that I have been forced to develop a parallel filesystem to keep track of them all.
So it goes with the subreddits. A massive sorting machine maintained by hundreds of thousands of nerds with very specific interests is one way of dealing with the fact that everyone can post everything about their daily lives, internal thoughts, artistic creations, obsessions, successes, etc. ad nauseam on the internet.
Simply navigating this world requires us to think like an industrial-scale engineer or agriculturist. We are deprived of the pleasure and simplicity of considering one thing for itself by the nigh-infinite spread of other things, similar things, totally divergent things, all prying for our attention at every moment.
In this way it might also apply to the microlabeling of queer identity. In addition to the pressure of individualistic consumer culture there is also the fact that queer community is millions of people on the internet, not the local gay bar. There has to be a way to carve out domains that a single person can even begin to parse for themselves from that, and in lieu of geographical digital real estate, they take a cue from the subreddits and develop a complete and obsessive taxonomy of the self, because that's enough to sort millions of selves into several hundred communities of a few hundred to a few thousand.
Never does this person comment "oh, and these are all young Gen Z white men, and they're weebs", including the right-wing subreddits, instead aiming at imaginary women they imagine populate Reddit in high numbers. Ridiculous. They (like "femboys") are the product of the internet age, not some kind of queer conspiracy -- real queers (like most Millennials) don't like the internet. Nor is it a leftist conspiracy because leftists find it hateful to spend your entire life being a persona on a website a la 4chan
I have no idea what you are responding to. Where do you imagine this essay contains the words queer conspiracy or leftist conspiracy?
And no, it was not primarily teenage boys who imagined the constellation of neogenders, that was teenage girls on Tumblr.