The Internet of Beefs

[bigheadfred]

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs

January 16, 2020 By Venkatesh Rao


This is a long read, people.

You’ve heard me talk about crash-only programming, right? It’s a programming paradigm for critical infrastructure systems, where there is — by design — no graceful way to shut down. A program can only crash and try to recover from a crashed state, which might well be impossible. I came up with a term for the human version: beef-only thinking.


A beef-only thinker is someone you cannot simply talk to. Anything that is not an expression of pure, unqualified support for whatever they are doing or saying is received as a mark of disrespect, and a provocation to conflict. From there, you can only crash into honor-based conflict mode, or back away and disengage.

The connection to crash-only programming is more than cosmetic, but it will take some set-up before I can establish the conceptual bridge.

Online public spaces are now being slowly taken over by beef-only thinkers, as the global culture wars evolve into a stable, endemic, background societal condition of continuous conflict. As the Great Weirding morphs into the Permaweird, the public internet is turning into the Internet of Beefs.

The Internet of Beefs, or IoB, is everywhere, on all platforms, all the time. Meatspace is just a source of matériel to be deployed online, possibly after some tasteful editing, decontextualization, and now AI-assisted manipulation.

More at link

[catfish1957]

I think you have some very valid points.

Here is one that I want to bring up along those lines that in essence supports your posiiton.

Think about the nature of progression of personal communication in the past several 100 years.  These are an anecdotal estimate,  there is no scientific basis, just my educated guess, so play along

Pre 1850-  98% face to face verbal, 2% via letter writing
1850-1880- 97% face to face verbal, 2% via letter writing, 1% telegraph
1880-1980- 90% face to face verbal, 7% telephone, 2% via letter writing, 1% telegraph
1980-1995 - 75% face to face, 10% telephone, 10% email, 4% texts, 1% via letter writing
1995- 2005- 60% face to face, 15% emails, 10% telephone, 10% texts, 5%-Social Media
2005- Today 40% face to face, 20% texts, 15% social media, 10% phone, 10% emails

See the trend?  Face to Face interaction is becoming less and less relied upon for social interaction and communication. People soon forget that there is so much lost in translation without the ability to see body language.  So much can be misinerpreted via non-verbal non face to face talk.  I think this reason more than any other is why we see so much of an increase in the vitriolic tone of communication now.

And society has suffered.

[bigheadfred]

I think you have some very valid points.

Here is one that I want to bring up along those lines that in essence supports your posiiton.

Think about the nature of progression of personal communication in the past several 100 years.  These are an anecdotal estimate,  there is no scientific basis, just my educated guess, so play along

Pre 1850-  98% face to face verbal, 2% via letter writing
1850-1880- 97% face to face verbal, 2% via letter writing, 1% telegraph
1880-1980- 90% face to face verbal, 7% telephone, 2% via letter writing, 1% telegraph
1980-1995 - 75% face to face, 10% telephone, 10% email, 4% texts, 1% via letter writing
1995- 2005- 60% face to face, 15% emails, 10% telephone, 10% texts, 5%-Social Media
2005- Today 40% face to face, 20% texts, 15% social media, 10% phone, 10% emails

See the trend?  Face to Face interaction is becoming less and less relied upon for social interaction and communication. People soon forget that there is so much lost in translation without the ability to see body language.  So much can be misinerpreted via non-verbal non face to face talk.  I think this reason more than any other is why we see so much of an increase in the vitriolic tone of communication now.

And society has suffered.

Since this article is 7 months old things have progressed, or descended, from cyber tribalism to tribalism in the "real" world. Thus the rioting, cancel culture, etc.

[catfish1957]

Since this article is 7 months old things have progressed, or descended, from cyber tribalism to tribalism in the "real" world. Thus the rioting, cancel culture, etc.

And again, my point is why the anger has built so much.  Communication.  So much driven anonymously via social media. 

In my anger, I admit I dial up the rhetoric myself.  In the old  pre-computer days this hatred would significantly less.

[Smokin Joe]

You can't tell if I smiled when I said that if I have a mask on.

Just one more obstruction in interpersonal communication.