- 11 mins read
Many technical spaces have become extremely partisan, and this has lowered their utility for all parties. This is not a new phenomenon–in recent times you can look back at COVID and the summer of Floyd, Gamergate in the early 10’s, and even back into the 90s for things like the open-source schism and the Sokal Affair’s discussion.
We need not look at the particulars or righteousness of any involved side to recognize that this politicization is an undesirable thing–and we can develop a theory of operation that both informs us as to its inevitably bad outcomes and suggests how to fix it. As a side effect, we can develop a bit more empathy or at least understanding for the people who’ve said “hey, can we just keep politics out of tech spaces”.
There are three types of payout structures in game theory:
Technical spaces–sites like Hacker News, Slashdot, Reddit, and so forth–are positive-sum by nature, with a slight caveat I’ll go into momentarily.
At risk of romanticizing things: people come together and share their experiences, their projects, their code. Every participant comes away with knowledge at no real cost beyond that of the time spent participating. There is room for everyone.
The caveat is that there is limited attention and hours in the day, and a forum of sufficient activity will eventually saturate the available bandwidth of its participants–at this point, things go from being positive-sum to potentially zero-sum, as every work I share must compete for limited headspace. Still, this is an embarrassment of riches: “Oh no, we have so many people sharing their neat projects and repos and blogs that I cannot possibly read them all! Whatever shall I do?!”.
This is a state of play and enrichment, and it is beautiful.
Politics is ultimately about which group has power over other groups.
Power–by which I mean the ability to make binding decisions without the consent of all parties (e.g., use of force but equally importantly things like status and access)–in bounded communities is, by definition, a zero-sum game. This is unavoidable: if I get my way then you cannot also get your way (unless it agrees with mine).
“But power may be shared”, you might object, and I argue that that sharing is consensual and ultimately predicated only on the ability of one side to force the other to play nice and go through the motions. Power in a closed volume is a partition into those who decide and those who abide.
As actually practiced, though, politics is negative-sum: in most every case, you seek to enrich your side at the expense of the other (because, again, power is zero-sum)–and if you can’t use something you must deny it to the enemy. If you’re taking political action seriously, you cannot abide fence-sitters. Anybody not on your side is just a laggard enemy.
Once political discussion becomes normalized, there is no hope of positive-sum games anymore–at least until one side has totally and completely removed the other from the diaspora–because it is unacceptable that the Other might in any way benefit. Until you’ve banned all the representatives of the other side from your site and silenced or converted the fence-sitters, there is yet work to be done for the industrious comrade.
Even more insidious is that the space taken for these games is not small. There is no way in these fora of actually addressing the claimed harms and policy differences: no Hacker News thread will ever restore Roe v. Wade, no Reddit thread will ever close the border, no 4chan–well shit okay one time the idiots did perhaps cause an airstrike (the exception that proves the rule, I suppose). Because nothing ever changes in the real world, nothing can be resolved, and so struggles remain and must express themselves using the tools available in the communities: insults, brigading, banning, doxing, and so forth. The struggle is not about the thing itself because that is unattainable in these spaces; rather, the struggle is about going after the Other.
The arguments flood the discussion space as people lash out at each other over policy differences, and the moderation space becomes a critical target: whoever controls the moderation of the discussion space has the ability to remove the Other. This becomes the primary objective and manifest behavior of the meta space, and more pedestrian missions such as civility, keeping out spammers, and celebrating cool contributions fall by the wayside. And why wouldn’t they–at best, they make the Other’s life easier!
Your community becomes just another theater in some broader struggle, and none of the factions care what happens to it. Frequently, in order to win the battlespace, they’ll start pulling in reinforcements from elsewhere, and those folks surely do not care about the community. They just care about burning down the forum to prevent their enemies from enjoying it.
Negative-sum thinking.
The vast majority of people on a site, the lumpencommentariat (the mass of posters unawakened to the Struggle of the moment), are actually just there to talk about anime or CSS or whatever Javascript framework is hot this week. Some subset of them will either know or intuit that politics is anathema to this, and will object or complain.
“Can’t we just keep politics out?” they ask, and they are immediately set upon–by all sides, because they are pushing for the one policy that every member of every warring faction can agree is bad for the Struggle (whichever side of whatever Struggle they themselves are on).
(Sure, some minuscule subset of users will actually be playing the meta by invoking topicality as a longer-term strategy against their opponents–but ever notice that complaining about the existence of these folks is always useful to the politically-minded? Funny, that.)
These lumpen just want to enjoy their space, and as the political slapfights rage they will drift away because life is short and attention spans are finite. This eventually kills a community.
First, to misquote the Incredibles: “If everything is political…nothing is.” If everything is political the label of “political” has no power for discernment, no ability to meaningfully partition the semantic space. It’s logically bunk, mathematically superfluous.
Second, I have never once in over three decades of this nonsense ever seen somebody who says “But everything is political” then not immediately go on to the same negative-sum fuck fuck games where they then immediately try to cudgel somebody else into silence. Every. Time.
(Why wouldn’t they, if you think about it, because to make such a statement must be in service of political violence. They wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t somehow going to give them power in the Struggle. QED.)
If you don’t believe me on the empirical, unbiased lived experience–as you shouldn’t!–then consider that this is an inevitable consequence of the game theory we talked about before: any remaining positive-sum games, any last fleeting bit of positive creative force and enriching play, can be subsumed into the negative-sum framework with one thought-terminating cliche and brought into service in the grand conflict.
It is rhetorical grey-goo.
For some of you reading this, you might say “Well, there’s nothing to be done–this is exactly the way to fight $OUTGROUP”. I congratulate you for your honesty and heartily invite you to go fuck right off. You are the problem–and yes, this would be uncivil in a forum but this is my blog and I can do what I want. There’s the door, friendo.
For the rest of us, I have a few ideas but I must admit they aren’t fun.
First, you have to maintain topicality. If you have a forum on NodeJS, and somebody starts talking about Quebecois secession, you have to shut that shit down. Even if you live in Montreal and have Vallières on your shelf. Tabarnac, mon chéri. You even have to do this for smaller non-political things, because each broadening of scope and stretching of norms inexorably provides case law the factions will invoke to defend their antics.
(Note that discussions of the implementation of various political topics can still be on-topic, though obviously devolution is more likely. How to be GDPR compliant, how Five Eyes Burger and Fries actually conducts SIGINT, which exact version of the wunderwaffen became ancestor to America’s moon landing–all of these things can be discussed without arguing over politics. It is possible for adults to compare notes on the implementation of a policy they disagree on without getting into arguments. We’re all adults, right?)
Second, you have to hold the line on civility. Struggles around power inevitably involve violence of one form or another, and the most minor manifestation of this is typically name-calling and bullying. Some users of course bully and insult for mere love of the game, but every politically-active user will eventually insult and bully perceived members of the Other–and why wouldn’t they? Even without profit it costs them nothing and might harm the enemy…again, negative-sum–and eventually the lumpen users (because again, negative-sum…if the user isn’t for their team in the moment they are just a laggard Other and must be removed from play). In all cases, your community is better without these people.
The nice thing about topicality and civility as metrics is that they’re relatively legible to the userbase.
Consider:
In all of these cases, the reasoning is obvious and simple and the lumpen can follow it. In all cases, it even removes people you’d really probably prefer weren’t around!
You will, of course, get pushback because you removed those people for the Wrong Reasons. Removing the Nazi and the terrorist and the babykiller for breaking decorum does not validate the framing of political struggle that the factions require to exist, and so you too become the enemy. Negative-sum thinking.
You and people on the same page, of course, then become the “let’s maintain sanity” faction, and you then need to engage in the same negative-sum games you’re trying to prevent. If you do this early enough before the other factions are sufficiently dug-in, you might be able to get away with it before too much is lost–but that’s always the gamble, isn’t it?
And now we come to the bittersweet.
The thing about all of this is: positive-sum spaces are easy–trivial even–to create. You get together people and lift each other up and celebrate your accomplishments. They are wonderful, they are kind, they are valuable, they are precious. They make everyone who engages in the play better off for it.
But, these spaces are hard to defend. Even the act of defending corrupts them, shatters the delicate iridescent structures of liminal play like a blown-glass ornament shoved unkindly into a ballistic vest.
When the bozos show up, leave. Let them fight over the ashes, and build anew elsewhere. They can’t, because they have to hold territory and that is bandwidth they can’t spare to invade your new space–for once, zero-sum can work for you.
Their worldview will prevent their following–and that’s a game we can actually win.
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