Geeks, MOPS, and Sociological Essays

David Chapman wrote a famous essay called Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths that looks at the lifecycle of geek subcultures as an arc from innocent creators to being overtaken by cynical exploiters.

This concept was also expanded by Benjamin Ross Hoffman http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/construction-beacons/ and Aella https://knowingless.com/2017/05/02/internet-communities-otters-vs-possums/

These essays are all hitting on *something* but doing so in such a morally loaded manner that they start missing the Real early on. The best form of essay like this starts with an idea based on their observations, but instead of just inductively growing from that idea, sees how it can lead to explaining OTHER observations. They just sound pretty judgy and tell us why we should dislike the sociopaths etc so much (even if they nominally say “I’m not saying these people are evil.”)

Here is instead the bambamramfan modification:

1. Geeks are obsessive creators who make a new thing, that every so often catches fire with other obsessive creators, and they make a super-charged circle of people making awesome stuff. It can be a new artistic movement, or people playing with computers in their garages, or competitive rubix cube solving. This category includes people who aren’t creators, but just really love that thing.

If you have read the famous Infamous Brad essay, this includes both Dream Nazis and Authenticity Policy https://bradhicks.livejournal.com/128514.html

2. Mops are people drawn to the POSITIVE ENERGY of this. Being around a bunch of people who are excited about something is itself very exciting. There’s just a magic in the air, the group is breaking boundaries and forming bonds and it is all very intense and creative. Even if you don’t care about the thing qua the thing, it can be fun to just be around that community. This includes the third part of Bard’s trichotomy, the Fun Mavens.

Hakim Bey talks a lot about this in his landmark essay Temporary Autonomous Zones. https://hermetic.com/bey/taz_cont

Note this really applies to political groups too. It’s *fun* to be in a revolution. It’s fun to think you’re overthrowing the patriarchy/the SJW bureaucracy. This is all the dark-web or pirate-radio stuff. They are not only exploring new intellectual territory, but they’re also having fun while doing it. This attracts people who… just like fun.

On a purely economic level of course, you can see this as the transition from “people who program for the love of programming” to “people who realize you can make a fuckton of money from this.”

3. Systematizers. (Shockingly, “sociopath” is a really bad word here for any hope of clear communication.) These people see the geek subculture, and the positive energy and think… this could be better if only they got organized. The political geeks could actually be organized into activists. The tech geeks could get venture capital and HR. The art geeks could modify their product just a little and then I could sell it on the mass level.

This is usually not experienced as a cynical ploy. They see something wonderful, that’s just ordered dysfunctionally, and they want to help by bringing their logistical skills. Maybe they’ll take a cut for the value add they bring, but it’s not the primary motivation: the motivation is to “spread BLANK to the masses.” And of course, the original geeks and mops love that. Being part of an organized thing means validation after all.

But one can not serve God and Mammon. Once you’re doing what the Systematizers advise, then you become more dependent on the value they’re trying to mine, and anything that threatens that value (money or public acclaim) has overwhelming pressure to make the geeks shut up and get in line.

(Even social justice, I believe, is a very good geek idea that has been completely taken over by systematizers who use it to sell their website and increase their twitter presence. Let alone how this played out with say, comic books.)

***

This is the part of the essay where all the above authors say “and HERE is how you can stop it, and keep your group pure.” Well go back and read TAZ more closely: you can’t. It’s an endless process of creation, rise, and decay. Either you group dies or it ossifies. Die a hero or live long enough to become the villain. Am I cliche enough yet? There’s no stable system where you don’t grow like that, anymore than you can tell a colony of fruit flies “don’t eat all the nutrients in your environment or else the colony will die.”

What you have to do is embrace the rise and fall. Don’t tie yourself to rationalism or battle-bot-building, thinking “it will always be about the music.” Enjoy the Mops and their energy. Resist the Systematizers for a while. But once they’re deep enough in… just go somewhere else. Make a new geek source of energy. Enjoy it while it’s small, and don’t spend all your time dreaming of how great it would be if EVERYONE was part of it.

Axiology / Morality / Law

Or the A/M/L distinction that comes up frequently.

From http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/

Axiology is the study of what’s good. If you want to get all reductive, think of it as comparing the values of world-states. A world-state where everybody is happy seems better than a world-state where everybody is sad. A world-state with lots of beautiful art is better than a world-state containing only featureless concrete cubes. Maybe some people think a world-state full of people living in harmony with nature is better than a world-state full of gleaming domed cities, and other people believe the opposite; when they debate the point, they’re debating axiology. 

Morality is the study of what the right thing to do is. If someone says “don’t murder”, they’re making a moral commandment. If someone says “Pirating music is wrong”, they’re making a moral claim. Maybe some people believe you should pull the lever on the trolley problem, and other people believe you shouldn’t; when they debate the point, they’re debating morality. 

(this definition elides a complicated distinction between individual conscience and social pressure; fixing that would be really hard and I’m going to keep eliding it) 

Law is – oh, come on, you know this one. If someone says “Don’t go above the speed limit, there’s a cop car behind that corner”, that’s law. If someone says “my state doesn’t allow recreational marijuana, but it will next year”, that’s law too. Maybe some people believe that zoning restrictions should ban skyscrapers in historic areas, and other people believe they shouldn’t; when they debate the point, they’re debating law.

I’ve been to write a lot more about this distinction and all its implications (like, write an entire book.) But to generalize it further – from an axiological perspective, the OP is correct that all social order no matter how unspoken is order and we should not deny that.

But from a morality/community perspective, we prefer something more concrete in defining social order. We still understand there are unspoken rules and ambiguities, but we acknowledge some unofficial rules like “the family patriarch” or “the gossipy sewing circle.”

And on the legal level, we don’t want to acknowledge any order than what is explicitly written down and we can pretend is objectively verifiable.

Where most Marxists go astray is that they are so committed to axiological values (like “no one should go hungry, even if that’s not one of your written down civil rights”) that they lose sight of how much normal people really really like having a distinction between that and the moral and social orders. It may be “good” to wish everyone in the world is well taken care of and loved, but almost no one wants the responsibility for doing that for the whole world themselves, and when you make people have that responsibility they become extremely unhappy and anxious.

 kenny-evitt
Are you not a consequentialist with respect to your ideal axiology?

Consequentialism is always the axiology answer. It does not care about the community or law, except as tools to achieve an optimal result, but always judged by your axiology. This is one of the many ways the True answer of a question will be the axiological one, and axiology can back itself up with facts and arguments the best.

That being said, you would have to be a bull-headed social engineer or philosopher to not realize that people are not pure axiology. They do not care just what the “best” action is, but what is allowed by the community and what is legal under the law.

(Imagine a law saying you are forced to marry… the person who will make you the happiest. Yes in some sense that encourages “more happiness”, but people would rebel over that coercion over the private sphere in a split second. I would rebel.)

Understanding how these three types of morality intersect are not really valuable as an ethical matter – since yeah, consequentialist axiology still wins the ethics – but they are key for building an accurate model of how people work and what will make them happy.