On Griefing for Goodness
secretspice posted this really good article a while ago. Among other things, it presents a sympathetic view of Something Awful's griefer community (guys that will, for example, disrupt Second Life interviews and entrepreneurship with flocks of flying penises.
According to the article, there's an underlying ideology that motivates this sort of behavior, which [my paraphrase:] is that by punishing those who put too much stake in the internet by humiliating or disrupting purely internet-based activities, it makes people take stock of the situation and realize that the internet is not serious business, after all.
I approve of this kind of activity.
In my opinion, the problem with capitalism isn't that it is market driven. Markets are really important for aggregating and using information that is distributed among the participants in the economy and costly to centralize or collect. That's why planned economies have been comparative disasters. This is just the Hayekian defense of capitalism/criticism of planned economy here.
The problem with capitalism is that it is that the pricing mechanism only care about what people's preferences are, not what is actually valuable for people. So you end up with an economy for ... err ... virtual real estate that is not only completely artificial (hosted on Linden Labs' Second Life servers), but pretty much artificially scarce (Linden Labs limits availability so that it can fix the price on real estate.) There's no actual value to society produced here. To me this and most real-dollar economies around (things like) MMORPG equipment/accounts provide the reductio ad absurdum that most starkly demonstrates how stupid unreasoned, uncritical consumer preference can be. It's a total disaster, as far as social progress and welfare are concerned.
So Something Awful griefers are actually performing a critical social function here by driving this sort of development to a crisis--to a point where the Second Life businesswoman quoted in the article likens flying virtual phalluses to real life terrorism--and exposing the contradiction in the current setup of society.
The problem is, of course, more general than just that pricing Second Life real estate highly is a stupid thing for society to be doing. The problem is that, for a perceived lack of anything better to judge itself on, our society has organized itself around a measure of progress which is a function of only its formal properties, and in particular on the formal psychological properties of the people who make it up. The extreme of this view is simple utilitarianism, which reduces all value to a single purely formal (and chimerical) measure of subjective utility (and on which virtually all contemporary economics lays its normative claims). But more generally, when you talk to most people today you hear them say that their goal in life is to be happy, or to get self-esteem, or to find love. But this defines the goal in a way that is dependent entirely on content and indifferent to form.
When somebody is confronted with flying phalluses in our virtual lawn, so to speak, one hopes that it raises new questions for them: Is this worth my time? I want to be happy--but about what? I should have self-esteem--but for what reason? I want to find love--but with whom? Now the content of the attitude is important, and it opens up room for people to discover what actually is valuable--for themselves, for society--through reason, criticism, and inquiry.
If people did actually reason through there preferences in this way, then that would open up room for a lot of personal and social progress. Even with the current market mechanism in place, a population that really took its value-creation seriously (perhaps in a Habermasian, deliberatively democratic process) could do a lot just through consumer boycott.
Of course, some of this is happening already--people shell out extra dollars for their Fair Trade coffee and organic vegetables because they think its the right thing to do. But why isn't there more of this sort of thing going on? One of the biggest reasons is probably a combination of access to information and the complexity of the task of synthesizing that information into justified values. Here, I think there is a lot of hope for technology to improve things in the future.
But I think a large part of the problem is the kind of value-in-form attitude best characterized by utilitarianism and hedonism. Why do people adopt this attitude? I think that as I've questioned people about this, the most common answer is basically a confession of nihilism (or moral skepticism): there's no such thing as a right answer to the question "what is valuable?" (or it's impossible to know), so you might as well just do what makes you feel good.
How do you beat the nihilism problem? Probably lots of ways. But one of the most effective is probably crisis, because in crisis the fact that valuation is a necessary part of life is most clear. If Something Awful is pulling that off, then kudos to them.
According to the article, there's an underlying ideology that motivates this sort of behavior, which [my paraphrase:] is that by punishing those who put too much stake in the internet by humiliating or disrupting purely internet-based activities, it makes people take stock of the situation and realize that the internet is not serious business, after all.
I approve of this kind of activity.
In my opinion, the problem with capitalism isn't that it is market driven. Markets are really important for aggregating and using information that is distributed among the participants in the economy and costly to centralize or collect. That's why planned economies have been comparative disasters. This is just the Hayekian defense of capitalism/criticism of planned economy here.
The problem with capitalism is that it is that the pricing mechanism only care about what people's preferences are, not what is actually valuable for people. So you end up with an economy for ... err ... virtual real estate that is not only completely artificial (hosted on Linden Labs' Second Life servers), but pretty much artificially scarce (Linden Labs limits availability so that it can fix the price on real estate.) There's no actual value to society produced here. To me this and most real-dollar economies around (things like) MMORPG equipment/accounts provide the reductio ad absurdum that most starkly demonstrates how stupid unreasoned, uncritical consumer preference can be. It's a total disaster, as far as social progress and welfare are concerned.
So Something Awful griefers are actually performing a critical social function here by driving this sort of development to a crisis--to a point where the Second Life businesswoman quoted in the article likens flying virtual phalluses to real life terrorism--and exposing the contradiction in the current setup of society.
The problem is, of course, more general than just that pricing Second Life real estate highly is a stupid thing for society to be doing. The problem is that, for a perceived lack of anything better to judge itself on, our society has organized itself around a measure of progress which is a function of only its formal properties, and in particular on the formal psychological properties of the people who make it up. The extreme of this view is simple utilitarianism, which reduces all value to a single purely formal (and chimerical) measure of subjective utility (and on which virtually all contemporary economics lays its normative claims). But more generally, when you talk to most people today you hear them say that their goal in life is to be happy, or to get self-esteem, or to find love. But this defines the goal in a way that is dependent entirely on content and indifferent to form.
When somebody is confronted with flying phalluses in our virtual lawn, so to speak, one hopes that it raises new questions for them: Is this worth my time? I want to be happy--but about what? I should have self-esteem--but for what reason? I want to find love--but with whom? Now the content of the attitude is important, and it opens up room for people to discover what actually is valuable--for themselves, for society--through reason, criticism, and inquiry.
If people did actually reason through there preferences in this way, then that would open up room for a lot of personal and social progress. Even with the current market mechanism in place, a population that really took its value-creation seriously (perhaps in a Habermasian, deliberatively democratic process) could do a lot just through consumer boycott.
Of course, some of this is happening already--people shell out extra dollars for their Fair Trade coffee and organic vegetables because they think its the right thing to do. But why isn't there more of this sort of thing going on? One of the biggest reasons is probably a combination of access to information and the complexity of the task of synthesizing that information into justified values. Here, I think there is a lot of hope for technology to improve things in the future.
But I think a large part of the problem is the kind of value-in-form attitude best characterized by utilitarianism and hedonism. Why do people adopt this attitude? I think that as I've questioned people about this, the most common answer is basically a confession of nihilism (or moral skepticism): there's no such thing as a right answer to the question "what is valuable?" (or it's impossible to know), so you might as well just do what makes you feel good.
How do you beat the nihilism problem? Probably lots of ways. But one of the most effective is probably crisis, because in crisis the fact that valuation is a necessary part of life is most clear. If Something Awful is pulling that off, then kudos to them.