That leaves us with cheap+good, giving up on fast.
“Good” reach doesn’t mean you won’t piss people off. You always will. But it will be a side effect of your creative work rather than your unconscious wounds and repressed demons.
Conversation
You’ll piss the right people off for the right reasons, and if they compete, they‘ ll do so via substance in their work based on alternate premises, not via toxic beefs or cheap “debates.”
And if they win, you’ll actually appreciate it because knowledge will have been produced
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But more importantly, your *own* reach will be “good” in the sense that relationships you form will be real human ones that you’ll want to keep for life most of the time. Where you might be on different sides of specific reductive labels but on the same side of “human.”
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Because ultimately “censorship” in free parts of the Internet (without Chinese characteristics) only matters if you care about the people who can’t hear or talk to you.
If you don’t, screaming “censorship” is posturing. You’re being heard by the people you want to be heard by.
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But If you do, learn to find and connect to *both* the humans beneath the partially overlapping tag clouds. Yes, forming a for-life-by-default deep connection with another human being means connecting to a hidden part of yourself as well.
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In fact, many hidden parts. Every deepening of the relationship is a new way to continue the infinite game between you two, a deeper knowledge of yourself and the other. And yet you’ll never be clones so long as you’re alive and thinking for yourself.
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So in 2019, do yourself a favor and forget about the people “censoring” you and instead focus on people with whom you might be able to form a slowly deepening infinite-game relationship for life, peeling away label after label, connecting as two entangled full humans.
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If this sounds like marriage that’s no accident. Marriage is merely the relationship where failure to operate in “till death do us part” mode is costliest. But it’s an ethos you can bring to any relationship you value. You can’t invest this much in 7 billion but you can do ~150.
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I don’t care what your tribe is, but I hope you’ll build it slow+cheap or cheap+good. I hope you resist the temptation of fast+cheap. I don’t care about your ideology/politics. All I care about is that you build your social world around the “good” reach of for-life relationships.
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If you do that — make it a resolution perhaps — then even if I violently disagree with you about everything from immigration to IQ to climate change, I’ll defend your right to exist and do your thing your way, with your chosen people, and I suspect you’d do the same for me.
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So happy new year, here’s to a good 2019, and let’s try to wind this dumb culture war of fast-and-cheap tribes as quickly and painlessly as we can. We’ve all got better things to do.
Really.
Even if it seems right now that “owning” your outgroup is the best game in the world.
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I agree with where you are coming from, Venkatesh. The problem, as always, is in specifics. For example how much of an obligation does one have, when one sees a mob pile-on, to speak up and say, "NO. Actually not everyone here thinks that way"?
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Thank you for this wonderful message of wisdom for the new year! I always appreciate the things you bring to this community.



