Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

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.

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.

(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.)

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!

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?

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.

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.