The Art of Woke / Wokeonomics
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In healthy communities, executing norm-enforcing punishments (e.g. shaming) tends to have diminishing returns. If you don’t do it too much, you do get some social capital, which makes it worth doing when it’s socially uncomfortable.
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Diminishing returns on norm enforcement ensures that (a) aggressive people don’t rule the roost, and (b) there’s room for norms to fundamentally change if new ones become too commonplace to punish-for-reward.
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If you can consistently buy social capital with norm-enforcing at the same rate — or even an increasing rate! — you can actually specialize in just doing that. That can be the bulk of your social life.
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Now we see increasingly clever ways for people to be in the wrong, new social products for people to buy via agreement, e.g. microaggressions. It feels positive-sum because the victims are the out-group... even if they weren't the out-group before.pic.twitter.com/nYQTtQzGsq
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(Usually the target can buy their way back into the safety of the lower rungs via a period of indentured servitude as communal whipping boy, with a new product to offer: I Reformed the Repentant Villain.)
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Twitter is ideal turf for social defection games because verification & follower count are universally understood to be reputable status markers. High-value targets are labeled right there on the package!
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Targets can be in-group or out-group. Dethroning thought-leaders gives you a bonus opportunity to climb the hierarchy, but doing battle in your own house is risky: if you lose, where's your retreat?
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The ideal target is an unwoke or antiwoke individual operating within an institution that's aspiring to wokeness, e.g. a centrist writer at a traditionally liberal paper, a conservative board member for a company with a PR-optimized social mission.
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Look through the replies to innocuous tweets from high-profile people (ideally: woke-adjacent, but insufficiently woke to trigger the tribal immune system), and you'll inevitably see diligent scholars of the problematic at work.
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This Tweet is Problematic usually doesn't pay off, but occasionally you do actually ruin someone's life. That kind of devastating real-world impact is worth its weight in gold.
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In a healthy community, the payoff has dropped off long before the witch burnings can start. But these things never look like witch burnings from the inside, which is why it's important to notice when it looks like you've maaaaaybe started building a stake for a heathen.
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And if you look around and see an awful lot of stake-construction happening around you, run while you can.
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End of conversation
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