Spirits in the Digital World

Or, Stereotypes, Self, and Silicon Sentience

One of the things I found myself doing right before I shut down this newsletter – back when I was unhappy with my content but far more popular – was writing in response to things I would see. Instead of having an idea, incubating it, working on it, doing research, and producing a well thought out argument, I would just see something online and write 2,000 words about it. When I decided to bring this back I vowed I wouldn’t do that, which lasted until this week. Because sometimes you get an article shared with you that hits exactly on a topic you have spent that time thinking about: the decline of online discourse and the changing nature of social media.¹

The article in question is one by the prolific and popular Freddie de Boer. It’s certainly worth reading, and I won’t try and summarize it as Mr. de Boer is a far better writer than I am.²

The Person-Guy is the term given by Sam Kriss to an internet genre that you can’t possibly have missed; it’s the type of essay that posits that some actual human beings are in fact members of a broad archetype whose traits are both predictable and boring and, more than anything, cringe and annoying. The Person-Guy is the type of person you never want to be. The Person-Guy is a collection of embarrassing traits and lacks the self-knowledge to know it. And crucially, the Person-Guy is by dint of being a Person-Guy someone who is not subject to the same rules of universal charity and kindness that the rest of us are. A Person-Guy essay is about defining a type of person - usually a type of person really only familiar to well-educated and culturally-savvy urbanites who spend way too much time online - but more important is about how you’re allowed to hate that type of person. Without pity.

The most important part is that I do agree with Mr. de Boer here. There is a lot of Person Guying going on over the internet in general and social media in particular. And I don’t care for it. As for the idea of this being a type of essay, I would note two things. One, this is part of the bigger issue of the Beast demanding more content, not better content. Which I’ve written a jeremiad against recently.

The second point I’d make is that the solution which works for me is to not read these essays. But I am increasingly ruthless in my usage of the internet. If someone is not going to increase my enjoyment of this place or increase my knowledge of the world, they cease to exist to me. This describes the vast majority of “journalists” who ply their trade in this digital space. I freely acknowledge this is a benefit I have as someone who has no need to be part of any internet discourse. I live my life and I pop on briefly to publish weekly essays with low readership and even lower engagement. And I’m fine with that. Not everyone is or can be, such as the author from whom I’m stealing.

Having addressed Mr. de Boer’s essay, and having dealt with my general agreement, what I’d like to do is using this as a jumping off point. His remit is quite often media criticism, and his interest is in Person Guying as a form of essay. I care quite little about the media but quite a great deal about the way society in general uses the internet. And although I found his essay an interesting and well-written piece of media criticism, what it did was help me clarify more of my thinking about how we use the internet to engage with others. So forgive me, but I’m going to expand Person Guying beyond just negative essays on the internet and into the way we act on the internet. But before we do so, let’s take a step back.

---

A consistent theme of this newsletter since the very first episode is that humans are going to be humans. We’ve been around for a very long time and we are set in our ways. I always like to caution that this is not the end of the argument, as it is often disingenuously used. Our ability to adapt is our great superpower, and when people focus on “human nature” that is often ignored. The classical example to me being the type of man who cheats on his wife and says men are naturally polygamous. Great argument, yet I don’t see you shitting in the woods, so apparently you’re capable of adapting to civilization. When it suits you. No human is bound to the mental processes of our past. But I think it’s important to acknowledge that they exist, particularly when we live in a time of history that is revolutionary, as we do.

We often fall into the trap of thinking our brains our purpose built for our current situation. They are, rather, like a piece of software hacked together over the course of ages. Adaptable yet highly imperfect and slowed by previous programming. The part of this I have always found most interesting – to the extent it was the first thing I ever wrote here – is the issue with media and scale. Over the last century and a half we’ve been subjected to massive advances in media and communication which broadened our worlds well beyond anyone who has ever lived. The internet was like humanity hitting turbo jets on this project. No one before us has ever been confronted with being connected to so much of humanity as we have. Are we really so hubristic to think we have any way of dealing with that well?

Again, I’ve written about this multiple times. The human brain is just not well adapted to handle the sheer amount of people we interact with on the internet. Whether our brains are maxed out at the 250 people we’re alleged to be able to know or not, we’re certainly not well adapted to the numbers on social media. This is in part why, although I don’t like Person Guying, I realize that we all do it. But it’s also how we work offline. So let’s take a trip back in time (no, you don’t need to watch the video, it’s just illustrative of the time period we’re going to).

It is the year of our Lord, two-thousand and seven. George W. Bush was still President. MySpace was the social media of choice. Millions of Americans were flocking to the theaters to see Transformers for some reason. And your humble correspondent was a fresh-faced young law student. One of three hundred thrown together, then split into groups of sixty and told you’d spend every moment together for the next ten months. You damn well better believe I Person Guyed them. There was Brady Girl (she wore a Tom Brady jersey once). There was Sub Guy (he mentioned he worked on a nuclear sub). There were The Ivies (this one seems easily explainable). These weren’t people, they were caricatures. You’ll also note that two of those caricatures were negative. There are few insults more damning you could throw at someone than Ivy Leaguer or Patriots Fan. So, why – beyond it being my nature – was I being such a jerk?

I wasn’t. I was a human being thrown into a complex social environment with more information than I could process. It wasn’t an option for me to sit down and have a long discussion with each of my classmates to get to know them. My brain did what all our brains do: it took cognitive shortcuts. Over time, I was able to engage in – essentially – long discussions with almost all these classmates. Sub Guy was really interesting, and we got drunk together the night the Phillies won the pennant. The Ivies were actually a fascinating and distinct group of individuals, each with their own personalities, quirks, and positive and negative factors. Brady Girl and I dated for quite a while and, unfortunately, was in fact a Boston Sports Fan so I was right to be negative there.³ But until those opportunities to humanize each came up, they were Person Guys. And I’m sure to most of them, I was a Person Guy too.

Now, the essay version of this that Mr. de Boer discusses emphasizes the negative stereotypes in Person Guying. But the true problems with Person Guying are best described in his own excellent prose:

The first [problem] is simple: you are compelled to have a certain baseline of compassion for everybody, no exceptions. 

And later…

The other issue, the analytic issue, is not just that these broad and vindictive stereotypes can’t ever really describe the irreducible complexity of a single human being, let alone thousands of them.

I believe this is true, and yet, I would say that “vindictive” is an unnecessary word. It may be for his purposes, as he’s attacking an array of terrible writers, but for my purposes, I think if you take that word out it’s still bad. If I’m at a bar and walk up to someone I believe to be of Asian descent and tell them “I have a math problem I need help with” I am not acting in a socially acceptable manner, even if being good at math would be praiseworthy if directed towards an individual. The sheer act of stereotyping is considered wrong. Therefore, even if I tend to think Lit Bros are good, I am still wrong for Person Guying them. I am replacing their humanity, their individuality, with stereotypes.

Yet, it is inevitable. It is literally how the human mind works when exposed to new people, and that’s what social media is. Endless new people. In my original version of this article I had a long section about possible solutions. It was good stuff! I had some amusing anecdotes about the early days of the internet, shoutouts to some of Mr. de Boer’s comment section regulars⁴, and an interesting digression into the issues of “coding” things to political groups that have no inherent connection to them. It was some of my better writing but I deleted all of it because I realized it served no purpose. It was aimed at trying to solve this problem when really there is only one conclusion: social media is not fit for purpose.

I’ve written before about the positives and negatives of social media. Allow me to excerpt some of my own writing:

Social media isn’t perfect. Clearly, a lot of people struggle with using it. But, as I’ve written about before, I think those can be chalked up to two things. One, the internet breaks our brains because it conflicts with how we evolved to understand the world. Not just on its own, but as the culmination of a few generations of hypercharged innovation. We’re processing our social media interactions through the only prism our brains can handle, which is our real life. But they’re not the same thing.

The second – and related – problem is that we haven’t created new norms for interaction online, we merely imported in our offline ones. But often nonsensically.

If you did not previously read it, I would encourage checking out that article for a few reasons. One is that the next two weeks I’m going to expand upon that article. Another is that it’s my favorite subheading I’ve ever written. But most importantly it’s because I think I did a fine job of walking the line between overall optimism (social media can be good) with specific criticism (it’s not designed to be that way now). And Person Guying is the ultimate example of why. Go back to my anecdote about law school. Although I never did get to know all my classmates, I had the opportunity to get to know most of them. Person Guying them was a useful cognitive shortcut that served a valid, short-term purpose in what is essential a social survival scenario. That does not exist on social media. There’s just too many people. You’re always in survival mode. With few exceptions you’ll never move beyond Person Guying people. And people are more willing to openly tribalize themselves on the internet, see, for example, the tendency of people to put little flags or other symbols in their Twitter/X handle to tell the world about themselves. We Person Guy ourselves. Because how else is social media going to work?

As I stated in my other article, I’m not reflexively anti-social media. I believe even now it can be used in beneficial ways, and I think there’s a future version of it that is quite good. But right now, it is broken. It’s not fit for purpose. Elon Musk refers to X as the world’s public square, and I think that’s both a neat idea and a noble one. But quantity has a quality all its own, and the sheer amount of people in that square is too much.⁵ We need to begin building the next phase of social media. Will people still Person Guy on it? Of course, because we’ll do all the same things we do in real life. This is not the Kingdom of Heaven, as much as many people will hold anything on the internet to that standard and be furious critics when it falls short. Anything built by humans will be flawed because we are flawed. But we can build something that is more focused on emphasizing the things that make us good and deemphasizing our negative traits, like our ability to strip people of their individuality. We just need to build it.

1. Of course, this means we’ll be a little more “wall of text” than normal. Yes, I actually do put great thought into the images and videos I use, they’re not random. You may also wonder how something I wrote in the last 24 hours is Part I of a series. I previously had two articles - one a social media survival guide and one on the unplanned revolution occurring in digital spaces - that I’m now stringing together as one three part series.

2. In my defense, he’s a professional writer and I’m a lawyer who does this on the side.

3. Although we remain friends to this day she knows well that I wish all her teams lose, as they did in Super Bowl LII when Nick Foles caught a touchdown pass and the Eagles beat the Patriots 41-33.

4. I’m now saving that for two weeks from now when we come back to this topic.

5. Hi Elon, Dan here. I hope you’re having a good day. Considering you dislike Substack and you’re the world’s richest man and I’m a nobody, it’s unlikely you’re reading this. But if you are, can offer you the advice of someone far less successful than yourself? Charge people money to post on X. Charge people a smaller amount of money to reply on X. Let everyone else browse with an account. People will gripe up a storm about this but I guarantee that the version that will be created will be far better for everyone. I’m not even going to charge you this idea, but I am in Austin so just buy me some drinks and we’ll call it even.