Accessibility Discourse

@Discoursedrome in a recent thread about "do difficult videogames face accessibility issues?" identified a tradeoff between accessibility and specificity. Specificity is the way in which a game (or any creation) is special, in how it is deep or thick or high-context or interesting, that generates enthusiasm - which often involves weird and arbitrary limits. The difficulty of the Dark Souls games is their specificity. The more you make something specific the more likely that some people won't be able to enjoy it - ie. disabled gamers may have trouble with the split-second timing of Dark Souls games.

In cooking, a chef's eagerness to experiment with new ingredients (or new preparations of old and unappreciated ingredients) is their specificity, and it can conflict with people who are kosher, vegetarian, allergic to peanuts, have a gluten allergy, or low spice tolerance. If you've ever tried to cook a meal for 60 people with different eating restrictions, you know how limited your freedom for creativity becomes.

You can look at romantic norms this way too: traditionalism provides a lot of specificity about who you should date: the other gender, if you're both unattached, on a specific ladder of rituals towards marriage (with appropriate class and station concerns). Bisexual polyamory of the form "date who you want and make up the rules that work for you" provides a great deal more freedom to people who were left out of the old system, but in that freedom often leaves people feeling lost or unexcited about their paths. The overly complex song and dance of (mildly d/s) traditional norms had specificity that are not entirely replaced by the new rituals.

In straight up internet argument, specificity loses to accessibility, because in mass media rhetoric, how can "I like my meals to be interesting" stand up against "okay well some of us would like to be able to eat them at all." However, specificity as a virtue does not really need to be defended, because people will keep independently inventing it on their own and discovering that they really enjoy it. Most new and vibrant forms of art and communities have high specificity - whether it Speedrunning Conventions or Immersive Theater or Weird Twitter. There is always a hunger for this interestingness that unconsciously outpaces accessibility, until the systemitizers notice it.

(My rhetoric may sound like I am selling accessibility short, but let me assure you that when there is something everyone loves that I can't experience or enjoy, my blood boils and I want it erased from the face of the Earth. I get the emotion behind it, and do not think people are wrong to experience it and act on it.)

I'm not taking sides on that tradeoff (yet) and I don't even think that tradeoff wholly describes the situation, because there is another dimension: audience size. Are you creating for yourself, for your close friends, for a small niche market, for a large national market, or the entire world?

With a small intended audience size you can be both specific and accessible - you're cooking a dinner at your home for five friends and you know one is allergic to peanuts but that still leaves plenty of freedom to experiment with an interesting meal. The larger the group you make for, the more accessibility limits you, and the more difficult specificity gets. (Recall that on a global scale, you can't even count on people using the same language you do.)

All of these traits exist in tension, but can be compatible to some degree.

There is an old adage in construction: Quality, Price, Speed: Pick too. Which is to say of getting your building done cheaply, affordably, and fast, you're going to have to sacrifice one. I think the "pick two" applies here, and in fact circumscribes my philosophical perspectives at different times (ie, the three masks.)

Accessibility and size - universalism. Making something is truly supposed to be for everyone with no limits on where they are, who they are, or what they are capable of.

Specificity and size - cthughaism. (Or what I often refer to as humanism, but we'll trade ambiguity for using a new term here.) This is the perspective that interestingness, richness of experience, the new and unexpected and complex is the best thing, the only important thing, and seeks to maximize this in all ways. This means art that is spread to the masses, and if some people can not enjoy it, then hoping they enjoy other art.

Accessibility and specificity (with small audience) - tribalism. This is the understanding that you can make the perfect combination of openness and interesting if and only if you group is small and you know them well, and it is the opinion that this tradeoff is worth it.

The Gatekeeper’s Dilemma

I have a friend who is running a mix swap, where people exchange playlists they created. He wants this to be as open and friendly to newcomers and easily intimidated people as possible. He has two things to monitor in this regard:

One, playlists need to be formatted properly for listeners to be able to run on their device of choice (iTunes, a CD, etc) with a minimum of fuss. This means editing the titles so that player order is kept between conversions to different formats, and a number of other small and important tweaks.

Two, MAKING the playlist needs to not be so intimidating that a newbie doesn’t break down in tears because they got the format wrong.

Failing at either one of these, could result in the mixclub getting a reputation for being exclusive and difficult. And you see the irony, that an enthusiastic manager could lean very much into one solution, solely out of desire to make sure people feel the mixswap is easy and low pressure, and inadvertently make it harder on participants on the other end of the axis, thus creating the atmosphere of high pressure and elitism.

There is of course no easy solution, and this falls under the broad category of “competing access needs.” But it seems a very specific category to me, that a lot of different fields face - most importantly sharing the characteristic moral irony. If you go to the ultimate lengths to make newcomers feel included on one access axis, you might actually be making newcomers feel excluded because they now have all these rules they need to follow.

I think of this when I browse reddit where various subreddits are passionate about free-flowing and uncensored discussion, but in order to keep that have a great deal of intimidating rules about formatting and on-topicness and whatnot. Or when I see old GMs talking about all the demands a LARP should satisfy in order to be welcoming to new players. Or of course, discussion about the right words to use to refer to oppressed groups, that can involve high level knowledge of academia or the latest fashion in slang to even participate.

It’s important to understand that in all of these cases the rules enforcement is done with the best of intentions. It’s just important to see whether it is really working out well or not. Are you adding or reducing stress to your most marginal participants? And this is a hard thing to monitor, since your marginal participants are by definition the ones least tied into your feedback loops. If someone doesn’t bother to listen because songs are hard to load you might not know, but also if someone doesn’t make a playlist because formatting is too hard you also wouldn’t know. These are the areas where we are just most likely to fly by the pre-established rules we believe in, and think anyone who deviates from those rules just doesn’t care as much as us.

There tend to be three solutions to this dilemma:

1. Decide that one type of newbies really is more relevant than another (because of size of population, or their previous experience, or what you are currently lacking, or just your personal bias) and just go full-throttle on protecting their experience while not worrying about the weight incurred on the other type of newbie. This may in some cases be the right call, though it’s easy to do this while being an asshole too and that is to be avoided.
   
2. Put a great deal of thought and effort into striking the exact right balance, considering concerns of all involved groups, figuring out the comparative advantages where one group’s needs can be satisfied with minimal cost to other groups, and intervening directly to solve problems (like edit playlist files) when necessary.
   
3. A return to deontology, and declare “if I don’t want there to be gatekeeping, then I do that best by not gatekeeping.” This is in some sense “privileging inaction” but in the Kantian sense that the best way to achieve pacifism is for everyone to stop fighting, starting with yourself, rather than hoping you can enforce non-violence with violent power over others.

They all have their merits, and different situations will call for each. All we can preach here is awareness: rather than believing “I am trying to be inclusive and if others don’t agree with me they just aren’t as inclusive as I am”, seeing “this is the choice inclusivity requires, and I am resolving it with this particular solution, but I can see how they care about the same principles but think that other solution is better.”

Relatedly: Freedom always requires someone else be limited, and becomes a discussion of who gets the freedom to enforce what.

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.

It's Good to Have Goals

Since @kenny-evitt is poking me about what I want, and @balioc is calling me out talking about tribalism here, this is a good opportunity to express some of my more positive vision, instead of complaining endlessly about capitalist ideology.

There’s an important distinction between utopian and practical goals, between long term and short term. If you talk your long term goals you get dismissed as irrelevant (or worse, a Leninist who will cruelly bend the world to your ill-thought out vision), and if you talk your short term goals you get dismissed as doing very little to fix things and leaving most of the underlying problems of the world intact, erasing whatever short-term progress you make. So it’s important to state clearly that you have both.

In the utopian sense, I am a Christian universalist. I really do believe in consensual anarchy and universal justice. Some day we can resolve all the major social problems that lead to fear and anxiety that cause us to do stupid, destructive things on a society wide scale.

I believe this will look like a humanist love towards every other person that exists. They are not just a commodity who can buy your stuff or sell their body to you, and they are not just a soldier who represents the threat of the Enemy. They are a person with their individual story, who cares about small things and big dreams, who can have effective dialogue, and be understood as a friend and a source of help. And it will be natural to share whatever we have with the, when it leads to overall higher enjoyment. This is taking all the good things about tribalism that balioc says

And – don’t get me wrong – there are many great things about families.  It is cool that, due to the power of collective identity, resources can be distributed in a literally final-stage-communist fashion with very little friction.  It is cool that you can get to know everyone super well, and keep an accurate map of all the relationships.  It is cool that people care about you, no fooling, they really care about you, they are not going to drop you just because you’ve become inconvenient or whatever.  

...applied to every other person who exists, not just one small group. This is the love of Christ (whether or not He exists.) It’s not just saying “you are a person so I guess you get this”, but seeing them as a full person, and because of that, wanting to share.

This is obviously very hard. I do not expect it in our lifetimes. But it remains that without this end-state, we’re basically never going to be happy on a wide scale. All other social utopias leave in place a lack, an anxiety, that this person may deceive you or be taking advantage of you, so you must remain ever on your guard against them.

Maybe it is even impossible. Maybe there will never, ever be universal justice. Humans are just too fallible, you know? What do we do if that’s the case?

Okay then, then we are not working on total solutions. We are just talking about harm reduction, acknowledging that any solution we come up with will still leave problems.

In that case, what I note is that in our current moment, our society’s ideology places way too much weight on the benefits of liberal individualism, and puts very little normative weight on the benefits of tribalism and communities. Tell someone you’re moving for a job or your spouse, ok. Tell them you’re moving for the weather/local culture, well you’re short sighted and hedonist but still reasonable. Tell them you’re moving for a non-spouse family member, or a group of friends, or some sort of club, and you get increasingly rattled looks asking are you insane???

(This is an exaggeration, but you take my point.)

Tribes - not just your family, but any time you’re thrown together with a group of people and all caring about something at the same time, and suddenly find yourself respecting the others as individuals because of that attachment - are a tremendous source of joy and support. But at the moment, rhetorically, they are mostly treated as a way conservative parents oppress their gay children, and as a cult if they are anything non-familial. (Rationalists, do you even know what they say about your Bay Area houses?)

It’s terrible. It scares people away from something that could make them happier and do all the things Balioc talks about. Sure, they aren’t perfect - there will be some abuses of power, some flakes and defectors who ruin it, some even terribly exploitative stories - but those stories happen under liberal capitalism too. We’ve just decided that the pains suffered because of individualist society are acceptable and due to “bad apples”, whereas the ones caused by tribes are reason to be wary of the whole concept.

(You can interact with people on the basis of what you know they actually like and can handle, and not on endlessly trying to find one-size-fits-all rules about what sort of approach is inappropriate or not. It’s so great!)

So my tribalism blog explores the short term solutions of embracing our tribal opportunities. It’s not a utopia, and there will always be problems in a society based on tribes. But there’s a source of happiness there that we can reach out to now, and take advantage of. And that seems a lot better than the impossible project of trying to refine liberalism and social justice and individualism into a contradictory morass of rules where no one ever gets hurt.

Warcraft: Right of Exit

A political conversation I’ve seen since childhood, and going on well before that I’m sure, is how much various under-performing people should be tolerated. In the past, a conservative of some sort would say that schools are too easy on kids, and don’t push them harder, like you would find in the military or at a real job. More recently we see cultural liberals saying the same thing, about the sort of “tough love” that should be shown to violator of the social contract (particularly with regards to racist actions or harassment.)

And the obvious rejoinder was always “Well yeah, schools don’t do that, they can’t kick people out. They’re stuck with them. So they have to do the best they can to encourage these people to improve, instead of threatening them with expulsion.”

(Okay, schools clearly can expel people, but only in dire circumstances. It’s very different than failing to meet your quarterly performance targets.)

And so schools treat their students differently. Yes they can enact harsher in-system punishments than any job where the worker can just leave… but they also need to avoid a confrontational dynamic involving, and so will be less interested in ever

It’s interesting how World of Warcraft has mirrored this split with their dungeon groups in the Legion expansion. As discussed before, the basic heroic group is random strangers thrown together, who can vote each other out if someone is a problem, and if the group fails, they can just queue for another one quickly. This is the LFG, and is similar to modern social commodification.

In Legion they also added a Mythic system, for truly hard version of dungeons that you are trying to beat under a harsh timer. In order to even run a Mythic, you need to spend a “key” attuned to a certain difficulty. If you beat the dungeon under the timer, you key replenishes and it upgrades to a harder level – but if you fail the timer, you still get loot, but your key is depleted. This creates a lot of pressure for everyone to perform quickly and reliably in a dungeon, and to communicate even less due to the time constraints.

And, you can’t get rid of anyone. If someone disconnects, or just trolls you, you’re screwed and you can’t finish the Mythic. Your key is used up, and that may have been your one chance to run this sort of content for the week. That can really suck.

And what does this say for harassment? If someone is taunting you and saying crude slurs and being horrible, now you can’t vote them out without giving up your own run as well. So there’s now a much higher bar to object to in-group harassment.

You would think then, with the pressure and the inability to get rid of harassers, that Mythic+ culture would be a lot more hostile and unpleasant.

But it’s not. It’s a lot calmer. The other night we had a pick-up member join our group, who just went Away From Keyboard for five minutes in the middle of the run. In LFG, this would have gotten them booted, and cursed out. But in Mythic, what even was the point of complaining? Your group couldn’t get rid of them anyway, so there was no point in creating social pressure to remove them, so there was no performative anger. Just resignation and pushing on. The guy eventually came back, and we completed the dungeon just five minutes slower.

That’s a somewhat extreme example. But do you have a damage-dealer who does very little damage (compared to what you think they should be able to do?) Do you have a tank that pulls less quickly than you’d like? Well that’s a pity but your only option is to give up the whole run and your key too. No amount of social shaming will get the group to get rid of them.

And so there’s no escalation. There might be some casual complaints… but they don’t feed on each other, into a war of words where two people are trying to convince everyone that the other person is a troll and a liar and a burden on the group.

There’s less harassment, even though you can’t get rid of harassers, because the dynamics that feed harassment are removed. People actually have securitythat no judgment can fall on them, and everyone chills the fuck down.

In Defense of Safe Spaces

Given the distinction I gave yesterday between tribes and rule-based morality, I want to talk about the libertarian boogey-man: safe spaces.

A safe space is a place where a certain group is granted protection from normal modes of criticism. The reason for this is because many minorities spend most of their time in a culture that is telling them they are wrong. Maybe queer kids have to deal with heteronormative messages all the time, or maybe a black person is sick of how any time they express anger it might be interpreted as a criminal threat, or maybe an immigrant just wants a place where everyone speaks their language. It is very stressful having to monitor your casual tendencies all the time, and a safe space promises “here, you can just be yourself.”

It can be very easy for non-minorities to forget how incredibly valuable this is. It’s like when you go from high school to college and you finally meet “your people.” The relief at a place where you can just be you is immense.

I think of these less as “space where we enforce rules about how we treat a minority group” but rather “a tribal zone for that minority group.” You can’t define what one specific thing it is that makes such zones great, but it’s everything about them. In fact, trying to overzealously defend any particular rule just turns a safe space into another ideological war zone.

Looked at it from this perspective, the majority culture in this country can see how important safe spaces are. For many people, every public place used to be a safe space for white Christian middle class traditions. If you went into the grocery store, you could wish the clerk “Merry Christmas!” And you didn’t do that to enforce your religion, but because you were really fricking happy about Christmas and you wanted to share that joy. Sharing joy with like-minded people about stuff is really really fun.

And then the feared political correctness police came, and (even if no one will ever jail you for saying “Merry Christmas”), when you talk to the clerk you think “Merry Christmas”, but you have to stop yourself for a second, check yourself, and say “Happy Holidays” instead. And having to think for that one second, that consideration for someone different than you, just interrupted the little joy-feedback loop that was going on in your head, and brought you out of it. It’s an exceedingly trivial thing, but now you’re not quite so happy about Christmas and neighbors as you were a minute ago.

This is stressful. Having to do it a lot in places you previously felt comfortable in, will make you less comfortable and happy in those places. The shift from Merry Christmas to Happy Holidays is if anything, understated in how it has affected our culture.

Now imagine this is what a minority goes through every single day. Outside their home or synagogue, no one wants to share their reflexive holiday cheer. A space where you can do that is fantastic. Nothing interrupts your little joy feedback loop. And after a while, you’d fight and die for this place.

Safe spaces for those groups are absolutely amazing, and anyone should defend them on pure utilitarian grounds of “they create a lot of happiness.”

***

Of course, safe spaces can be turned into a close-minded ideology like any other. The mainstream culture, having heard how important safe spaces are, can try to turn every group and place into a safe space for this minority culture. And once every campus/club/event is a “safe space” then members of the majority can ask that their traditions be respected there too – which generally causes the sort of debate where both sides lose. Because re-shaping the rules of the entire society shouldn’t be the point, and instead turns the spirit of tribal joy into just another ideological civil war.

Tribes and Ideologies

Among people discussing the culture wars and social violence that plague the internet, there is a lot of discussion of tribes. Scott Alexander’s I Can Tolerate Any Group Except the Out Group is a pretty solid example of this. If you haven’t read it before, you should.

The implicit or explicit assumptions of this genre is that people treat people outside their “group” with different standards than they apply within their group. The moral assumption is that this is bad in of itself, and leads to a lot of bad consequences. The overtone of it all is that this sort of unfairness is responsible for almost all of the misery on the current internet, and if everyone treated everyone else by fair standards, our problems would go away.

There are certainly double standards in how we treat people, but often I think the term “tribe” is the wrong way to describe this. A tribe is a group of people who share some trait (be it ethnicity, or hobby, or location) and has some level of care towards everyone else in the group, and the group itself, that evolves from that connection. It’s “sure, I’ll give you a lift to the airport, anything for a fellow Husky.” Now, there is nothing in any tribal by-law about transport to airports for alumni of the University of Washington, there’s no specific rule about offering rides, it’s just the desire to help this person in any way that is reasonable for you, as if you gain pleasure from their happiness as well. In the sparsest logical terms, you would do anything for a small group of people.

This is contrasted with its moral opposite, the ideology, or a rule that you try to apply for everyone. For instance you may feel that no one should be silenced, even if you hate them and don’t wish to interact with them at all. To you, the freedom of speech is just too important. It doesn’t mean you have to like that person, or loan them your car, or trust them with your children, but you would not censor the free speech of even your most hated enemy. The logic on this is that you have limited obligations to every person.

(Often tribes and ideologies overlap. A whole tribe can believe the same ideology together. Or they can be torn apart in ideological wars. Or what starts as a group of people sharing an ideology can become a tribe united by that agreement, who end up doing stuff like giving each other rides to airports. But they are not necessarily the same, and in fact their obligations are in contradiction with each other.)

Ideologies can be good. But they can also be devastating. When someone does not agree with your ideology, if you are wholly committed to it… there is no common ground with them. If you think Margaret Thatcher violates your ideology, then no amount of compassion or polite manners can prevent you from dancing on her grave when she dies.

Tribes, when they are healthy, take an attitude of benevolent indifference to people outside their circle. This has some pretty serious problems when, say, they have all the resources and people outside their circle are starving or poor. But, absent these power dynamics, it’s not a particularly hostile attitude. You’ve got yours and we’ve got ours.

But ideologies are consumed by their obsession with the outsider. Someone who is an opponent of the ideology, whether your closest friend or a distant foreigner, represents an existential threat to the ideology’s universal morality. If you believe for instance, that sexism is responsible for all the evil in the world, then no sexist anywhere is really acceptable. Even secret sexists, ones hiding their sexism or unaware of it but possessing subconcious sexist biases, need to be dealt with before you can rest. If you spend enough time obsessing over this, then you literally become glad when other people die, or otherwise suffer ill fortune.

A great deal of what is consuming the internet is not tribal wars (like the blue tribe and red tribe and grey tribe that Scott discusses), but ideologically inspired civil wars. There can be no peace in these, even when your best friend is the enemy, because your entire identity becomes based on them being wrong, and this wrong being the original sin for all suffering.

(And for the few manipulators out there, ideology is way more useful than tribalism. With tribalism you can’t turn people against someone who’s obviously one of them. With ideology you can find impure fault with anyoneand turn them into the pariah du jour. Try to find a pure Democrat according to your average left wing activist, or try to find a Republican who has not once been called a RINO.)

This is the spirit discussed in the linked Black Girl Dangerous article. Since everyone is fallible, but their group is trying to find absolute moral standards to judge people by, when they gather they just turn their guns on each other.

For any morality that defines itself by a standard of behavior, the next question is “okay, what do you do with people who broke that standard of behavior?” (Or were perceived to have broken it.) If you’re a pacifist, how do you treat killers? This is a tricky question but there are generally practical answers that manage to avoid violating the standard of behavior they just set (like, lock the guy up but do not kill him.) However, it becomes incredibly, irresistibly tempting to say “Oh this guy gave up his right to be treated fairly when he violated the standard of behavior, so any and all punishments are acceptable.” When you’re really afraid that Donald Trump is a threat to free speech, then silencing his own speech does not sound so unreasonable. And so now your civil war, which has a fierce moral urgency, collapses into a rules-free melee.

And if you look at the worst arguments online, people aren’t saying “This person is scum and should be shamed because they drink a different caffeinated beverage than me” they’re saying “This person is scum and should be shamed because they are a threat to my existence and safety.” And if they actually believe that threat, can you really blame their reaction?
Perhaps the biggest difference to identify ideological groups vs tribal groups is that tribal groups are the ones that are happy.

***

There was some disagreement: 

This was an interesting, well-thought-out post, but I have to disagree with its thesis. I do think that the disputes being discussed are typically tribal rather than ideological; I’ll try to explain why.

***

Thanks for all the well thought out words. I’m glad people are engaging with the concepts.
This is mostly an empirical disagreement between us, and that’s hard to resolve without empirical studies (which there aren’t a lot of), or appeals to intuitions and anecdotes. Are politically-affiliated groups looking more for tribal markers or ideological loyalty?
So, I’ll ask this. Let’s use social justice liberalism as an ideology. I’ll list 4 “archetypes” of people. What is your ranking of “how much energy, discussion, and emotion do social justice types use on these figures?”

1. Middle Eastern cleric who says gays should be stoned, women should not have jobs, and everyone who doesn’t hold to their version of their religion is a target for faith based warfare.
2. Middle American pastor who encourages his congregation to vote Republican, and that the happiest model for a woman is a stay at home wife.
3. San Francisco libertarian who has voted Democrat in every election they’ve voted, supports gay marriage and UBI, and thinks college campuses and internet communities are being over run with social justice zealots who can’t think rationally.
4. Brooklyn Marxist who voted for Bernie, wants equal pay for women and a job guarantee written into the Constitution, thinks all American military adventures are imperialism, and believes college campus activism is pursuing bad strategies and that we should pay attention to classism within our own ranks. (Like DeBoer)

My feeling is that this order (which increases in the number of tribal signifiers they would share with the activist ideology) is also the order of how much emotional energy said activist puts into attacking that group. I read DeBoer as generally pointing out this exact phenomenon.

If you don’t agree with my intuition, I don’t really think I can convince you. Perhaps design a test.

(I concede that temporarily, there’s a lot more anger at #2 right now than usual, due to Trump’s election, but if you’re averaging the last 4 years, or just wait 6 months from now, #2 will receive less fire than the more similar enemies.)

(And as always, this is definitely not limited to one side of the political spectrum. There was no one during the election Trump expended more wrath at than… Paul Ryan when Ryan would disagree with him.)

You could credit many different explanations to this phenomenon. Scott talks about Near Group and Far Group. It could just be an emotional response proportional to how often you encounter this person. You might just cynically point out that this is the order by which they actually have power over people. I think those excuses are wrong, and the reason is the logic of purity (particularly because the last two groups will swear blind they are your allies), but it’s hard to prove explanations.
But, well, it’s really weird to say that “tribal signals” are a dominant factor in this process. At every step of the way, the person who has these various shared characteristics gets even harsher judgment.

And if you spend enough time hanging out in a mature ideology, listening to the various social discussions, there is a hell of a lot of pride in being willing to enforce the rules against people similar to you (be it members of the tribe, or your friends, or your closest brother.) I am trying to pay attention to “the logic of the system” here, and the logic in such arguments seems to be “principles over similarity.”

The second thing I would say is that both tribal and ideological exclusions happen, and clearly tribal logic intersects with ideological logic in weird ways. But of the two, the ideological witch hunts are much more painful, because they are directed at the people closest to you. You can really hurt those people, without even trying very hard.

I think a secure tribal group, like the one in a Zizek quote about the Hebdo massacre, does not go out of its way to hate other tribes very much.

However, do the terrorist fundamentalists really fit this description? What they obviously lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the US: the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the non-believers’ way of life. If today’s so-called fundamentalists really believe they have found their way to Truth, why should they feel threatened by non-believers, why should they envy them? When a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he hardly condemns. He just benevolently notes that the hedonist’s search for happiness is self-defeating. In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued, fascinated, by the sinful life of the non-believers. One can feel that, in fighting the sinful other, they are fighting their own temptation. 

But even if tribal hatred did get out of control, there’s only so much you can do to someone very far away and different from you (absent serious power imbalances.) But someone who loves you, respects your opinion, and needs you for the daily harmony of your life? They can fucking wreck you if they have an ideological disagreement with you and think you need to be punished.