Venkatesh Rao

There’s a persistent community of taste emerging around sensemaking of noisy social media around developing events. It’s like fandom, with connoisseurs of the play by play getting snotty. Things like the Minneapolis strife end up being processed like concerts.

The interesting thing is that competing interpretive dance aesthetics evolve around the *same* event, with projected grammars, tropes ,and apophenia patterns. And people who just want make sense of the event run afoul of those building interpretation institutions.

Like if the same concert were being watched by Beatles fans, Bach fans, and Grimes fans, each sorting signal and noise differently to extract unique “truth” performances. Asking a question offends them all.

There are no innocent questions when tastemakers corner sensemaking. Questions mark you as either dumb or bad faith guy on the Other Team. The presumption is that there are no spectators, only participants. And participants don’t ask questions publicly, only to trusted team mates

The only public discourse allowed around doubt is: “Is X true?” “How dare you entertain doubt around X?”

Publicly expressed doubt is weakness in a participant so if all are presumed participants, nobody can express or explore doubts publicly. Fwiw, I downgrade the credibility of anyone who acts like the news is a concert and that asking questions is philistinism/gaucherie.

One of the perks of being willing to look foolish and tasteless publicly is that you get a better sense of where actual foolishness lies. It can generally be found lurking under aesthetic confidence in one’s own interpretive stance. A kind of aesthetic Dunning-Kruger effect.