John mcwhorter has been calling the whole woke left a religion for years now. He’s not the only one.
The fun part about it is that it always seemed like we were all just being metaphorical to the outside. “Oh they mean it’s like a religion not that it’s an actual religion.”
Well to those people I can now offer the woman shaming chimes and screaming “repent motherfucker” as my strongest evidence yet that this entire mentality is identical. IDENTICAL. To Puritanism.
You know, this is interesting. I left an office environment to stay home with my kids a little over 10 years ago. At that time I worked in an office that was quite diverse actually, but there were more women than men. Several of the women I worked with were quite open and explicit about their bisexuality. At the time I certainly could have contacted HR and said I was Uncomfortable. But it didn’t even really occur to me to do so. The only time I ever talked to HR it was about how I felt my supervisor was unfairly treating me as responsible for a project issue.
Weirdly, it seems like NOW the people who would say that something makes them uncomfortable would actually be told to shut up, if what makes them uncomfortable is talking politics at work or being pressured to support social issues they disagree with or simply don’t care about.
Interesting theory and good read, but I have to nitpick the Berkley article you linked. You specifically cited it as evidence on how social media's interactive functions turbocharge groupthink. You then contextualized it as "like the "like" button". However the study the article was based on did not study the interactive functions at all, or at least nothing like any kind of like button.
Furthermore the article itself mischaracterized the scholarly article by saying things like "Once more than a third (37%) of participants advocated..." but that was never an axis of the test. They tested 37% of the participants being bots, but they never tested any other percentage (according to their documentation, also this wasn't a preregistered study so who knows how many times they tweaked their study design to get their result). Also, since the study with the bots (confederates) wasn't the main thrust of the study, they only did 6 iterations of it with a grouping of 24 people, never at any of the other group sizes.
I did think it was an interesting study that showed that *even though the participants didn't know they were paired with different people or how large their grouping was* a larger group of people produced more CONSISTANT results over a small group of people. It really makes me sit down and ponder how that functionally works given the constraints of the experiment, but it doesn't really speak to social media in particular except insomuch as social media allows for a greater grouping to participate than normal dinner parties.
(Also, this study only drew on US, English-as-a-first-language, participants)
(Note, this isn't actually Tabarrok as the guest in spite of what the URL implies, for some reason the normal URL for 236 points to episode 237, and the actual 236 episode has a suffix appended)
If this was slack I'd respond with a bunch of emojis and maybe even a gif!
Navigating one of these companies as a fairly conservative person was a trip. There was lots of encouragement for me to bring my political beliefs to work, yet the idea of a fellow employee being, for example, pro-life, just never occurred to them. And it's not like I was alone. The engineering departments of these places are probably 50/50. But hey, they pay you more than enough to just smile and nod.
But seriously, it's interesting to reflect on how structural factors might drive innovations in worker organization. Just to debate some points of fact first...
• The time window of interest should go beyond 16 months ago. 3 of The Guardian's journalists published an open letter calling out the editorial desk as transphobic back in November 2018, and Google's internal uproar about James Damore's "Ideological Echo Chamber" memo was in summer 2017.
...and back to the structural factors. I notice every case is from a media publication or a software company: enterprises that select for educated employees, and where most employees probably spend all day in front of a computer (especially during the pandemic).
To me that fingers easy inter-employee communication and education polarization as causes. Especially since Trump's campaign, having a degree correlates pretty well with being socially liberal, so I'd expect these mutinies to be more and more concentrated in high-education companies.
Slack itself is likely just a marker for high-education enterprises where everyone's at a computer. And maybe a marker for youth, as well: instant messaging's familiar to lots of people under 40, less so to the middle-aged. (So age polarization may be another factor. Social liberalism's concentrated in younger Americans too.)
After all, Slack's main role in these mutinies is making semi-private group chats easy, and Signal/Telegram/WhatsApp/email ought to work about as well. And I can think of a case when WhatsApp and email, not Slack, were key: Britain's Labour Party in 2017.
Great take! More remote work will likely continue make companies a microcosm of our larger society of atomized individuals mediating their communication through these Satanic platforms. 😂
I've had four normal, for-profit jobs in my professional career thus far but never with a company that uses Slack. We've similar functionalities though - gchat and whatever Microsoft decided was best at any given time. I do use Slack for (very limited) personal purposes though, so I'm kinda familiar with it. But why is Slack so different in the workplace than those generic IM platforms?
John mcwhorter has been calling the whole woke left a religion for years now. He’s not the only one.
The fun part about it is that it always seemed like we were all just being metaphorical to the outside. “Oh they mean it’s like a religion not that it’s an actual religion.”
Well to those people I can now offer the woman shaming chimes and screaming “repent motherfucker” as my strongest evidence yet that this entire mentality is identical. IDENTICAL. To Puritanism.
You know, this is interesting. I left an office environment to stay home with my kids a little over 10 years ago. At that time I worked in an office that was quite diverse actually, but there were more women than men. Several of the women I worked with were quite open and explicit about their bisexuality. At the time I certainly could have contacted HR and said I was Uncomfortable. But it didn’t even really occur to me to do so. The only time I ever talked to HR it was about how I felt my supervisor was unfairly treating me as responsible for a project issue.
Weirdly, it seems like NOW the people who would say that something makes them uncomfortable would actually be told to shut up, if what makes them uncomfortable is talking politics at work or being pressured to support social issues they disagree with or simply don’t care about.
Interesting theory and good read, but I have to nitpick the Berkley article you linked. You specifically cited it as evidence on how social media's interactive functions turbocharge groupthink. You then contextualized it as "like the "like" button". However the study the article was based on did not study the interactive functions at all, or at least nothing like any kind of like button.
Furthermore the article itself mischaracterized the scholarly article by saying things like "Once more than a third (37%) of participants advocated..." but that was never an axis of the test. They tested 37% of the participants being bots, but they never tested any other percentage (according to their documentation, also this wasn't a preregistered study so who knows how many times they tweaked their study design to get their result). Also, since the study with the bots (confederates) wasn't the main thrust of the study, they only did 6 iterations of it with a grouping of 24 people, never at any of the other group sizes.
I did think it was an interesting study that showed that *even though the participants didn't know they were paired with different people or how large their grouping was* a larger group of people produced more CONSISTANT results over a small group of people. It really makes me sit down and ponder how that functionally works given the constraints of the experiment, but it doesn't really speak to social media in particular except insomuch as social media allows for a greater grouping to participate than normal dinner parties.
(Also, this study only drew on US, English-as-a-first-language, participants)
Here's a recent podcast from another Heaton-guest with a social media researcher that was quite good: http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/236-why-are-the-prices-so-dmn-high-alex-tabarrok/
(Note, this isn't actually Tabarrok as the guest in spite of what the URL implies, for some reason the normal URL for 236 points to episode 237, and the actual 236 episode has a suffix appended)
If this was slack I'd respond with a bunch of emojis and maybe even a gif!
Navigating one of these companies as a fairly conservative person was a trip. There was lots of encouragement for me to bring my political beliefs to work, yet the idea of a fellow employee being, for example, pro-life, just never occurred to them. And it's not like I was alone. The engineering departments of these places are probably 50/50. But hey, they pay you more than enough to just smile and nod.
[ 🤔 1 ]
But seriously, it's interesting to reflect on how structural factors might drive innovations in worker organization. Just to debate some points of fact first...
• Are these employee mutinies simply "non-labor-issue" mutinies? The Netflix walkout includes demands about working conditions as well as demands about Netflix's output (https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/18/22733098/netflix-trans-employees-demands-dave-chappelle-walkout).
• The time window of interest should go beyond 16 months ago. 3 of The Guardian's journalists published an open letter calling out the editorial desk as transphobic back in November 2018, and Google's internal uproar about James Damore's "Ideological Echo Chamber" memo was in summer 2017.
...and back to the structural factors. I notice every case is from a media publication or a software company: enterprises that select for educated employees, and where most employees probably spend all day in front of a computer (especially during the pandemic).
To me that fingers easy inter-employee communication and education polarization as causes. Especially since Trump's campaign, having a degree correlates pretty well with being socially liberal, so I'd expect these mutinies to be more and more concentrated in high-education companies.
Slack itself is likely just a marker for high-education enterprises where everyone's at a computer. And maybe a marker for youth, as well: instant messaging's familiar to lots of people under 40, less so to the middle-aged. (So age polarization may be another factor. Social liberalism's concentrated in younger Americans too.)
After all, Slack's main role in these mutinies is making semi-private group chats easy, and Signal/Telegram/WhatsApp/email ought to work about as well. And I can think of a case when WhatsApp and email, not Slack, were key: Britain's Labour Party in 2017.
Curiously, in that case it wasn't non-white or trans or pro-BLM activists rebelling: it was the party's anti-left bureaucracy sabotaging an election campaign led by socialist Jeremy "my pronouns are he/him" Corbyn (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-leak-report-corbyn-election-whatsapp-antisemitism-tories-yougov-poll-a9462456.html) and trashing female and black Labour lawmakers (https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/h-long-250-spiteful-misogynistic-bullying-diane-abbott-and-left-wing-staff-laid-out-internal).
It may not be a coincidence that the anti-left case is one where Slack wasn't used!
Great take! More remote work will likely continue make companies a microcosm of our larger society of atomized individuals mediating their communication through these Satanic platforms. 😂
I've had four normal, for-profit jobs in my professional career thus far but never with a company that uses Slack. We've similar functionalities though - gchat and whatever Microsoft decided was best at any given time. I do use Slack for (very limited) personal purposes though, so I'm kinda familiar with it. But why is Slack so different in the workplace than those generic IM platforms?