Thinking today about online communities that enable members’ obsessive-compulsive tendencies:

• “Zero covid lifestyle” subreddits/Mastodon groups that encourage germophobia and contamination thinking
• Anti-AI forums that portray any engagement with AI tools or products thereof or products of products thereof as a sin against intellectual property, the environment, and god
• Pro-AI forums (have only really seen this in the context of programming) that portray AI maximalism and “how many repos did your agent create today” as the standard of True Productivity
• Pro-ana forums—literally just communities for enabling anorexia

A common feature of these communities is that they provide users with a moral and social rationale for engaging in compulsive behavior. It’s not just “Here are some AI-free alternatives to XYZ.” There is a whole added layer of “you are a fucked up and bad if you violate the rules of the community.”

This may seem counterintuitive, but for people with OCD and adjacent personality types, the strictness what makes these communities so appealing! The community elevates a particular flavor of scrupulosity above all else, providing members the opportunity to align their identify and self-worth to something consistent and legible. If I can clear my conscience merely by following these 27 rules for covid-free me, or by adopting this specific hard-boiled-egg-only diet (or whatever tf is the trend now), then of course I am going to choose that world, and the attendant compulsive behaviors, over the chaotic moral patchwork of real life.

A rationale that traps people in these communities, and keeps them going even when the compulsive behaviors start to feel unhealthy, is the idea that this is a “community of empowerment”: Look at all these people who share my values and worldview—they must want what’s best for me!

Here is the logical error: Empowerment is (or should be) about empowering you. Communities of enablement don’t empower you; they empower themselves, feeding on your independence and self-worth in the process.

I don’t really do astrology, tarot, and other such woo-woo stuff. But I know a bit about it via osmosis because I follow a bunch of queer people on Tumblr and watch a lot of content on YouTube about mindfulness.

I used to find it annoying how things like astrology fly in the face of science and don’t even both attempting to offer a justification for why they should work or why we should find the theory credible. I know a bunch of smart and thinking people who love to give tarot readings and it has always seemed a bit cringe—like, you can’t possibly believe in that, right?

However, I just watched a video where someone talked about how she had gotten super deeply into new-age spirituality and taken a conscious step back when she realized that all the rituals were preventing her from staring the problem in the face. Her story made me realize that these practices have a sort of meta-value that is difficult to appreciate if all you are trying to do is gauge whether the theory is real or not (it obviously isn’t).

This woman had an experience doing tarot where she found herself “resisting” the cards as they came up—she really wanted to see card A but instead was shown card B, again and again. Through this experience, she was able to work through a blocker in how she perceived herself: She thought she was the sort of person implied by card A, but the deck laid out an alternate narrative. And then she did the hard work of thinking about which narrative she actually wanted to accept.

This wasn’t a story about replacing narrative A with narrative B because the tarot deck knew something new about physics or the human soul. The point was rather that tarot can offer narratological challenges to how we see ourselves, or get us unstuck when we are invested too deeply in the wrong narrative, not unlike lateral thinking.

I’m still not really interested in tarot and I honestly am not sure that all practitioners do so with the amount of self-awareness needed to unlock the benefit described above. But I am open to the fact that human nature is complex and sometimes you need to use a back door to get inside of your head and see what’s really going on in there.

Not really going anywhere with this one. I just read Ava’s post about the LLM circus at her work. I get Ava’s blog on RSS but in this case she blew up on Hacker News, for better or worse. (I use adblock to vaporize the Hacker News comments section because it always leaves me in a bad mood.)

Hey Ava—I have the same LLM circus at my work! It’s ridiculous. Everyone is being asked to show how they are using LLMs to make things more efficient and yet all of the use cases we have are either more inefficient or solving problems that don’t exist.

One of the shittiest use cases I encountered was an executive who asked the LLM team to build him an agent that would automatically generate thank you letters. Who wants an AI-generated thank you letter? Just send me nothing, at that point!! Or send me an obvious form letter instead of pretending to actually care.

I wish I knew where all this LLM stuff would end up. I’m not one of these extreme anti-AI types who thinks they are never useful or that they are always bad for the environment (that depends on what the LLM is replacing). But the good use cases are few and far between. And we’re already paying a steep price in terms of the social upheaval and workplace tensions caused by companies pushing this AI stuff way too hard.

My friend has a birthday coming up and her friend, who I barely know, started a huge text thread to coordinate a group gift. She wanted everyone to supply personal anecdata: a favorite memory, a “silly photo” of the protagonist, other particular template items.

This is a very annoying idea for a gift IMO! It is confusing two well-established categories of gift that serve mutually exclusive purposes:

1. Group gifts, where everyone pools their money in order to buy one big gift
2. Personal gifts, where you choose/make a gift that is highly individualized and expresses your unique relationship with that person

Group gifts are organized by one “representative” friend and fanned out to lesser friends and acquaintances. They are especially useful in awkward coworker scenarios where you want to get someone something but have no idea what would be good; the group gift defers that decision to someone who actually knows the recipient’s taste with the added benefit of allowing people to chip in the amount of money that is appropriate to their level of friendship.

Personal gifts are for when you are the best (or a close) friend. The thing that makes them personal and good isn’t just the DIY aspect—it’s the intimacy of it, the way you work in shared experiences and memories that wouldn’t make sense to someone outside the relationship.

The “group personal” gift is neither of these things. It asks you to be personal, but you might not be ready for that. It asks you to be intimate, but then requires you to share the intimacy with 25 other friends you don’t know. It asks you to be creative, but then imposes a template that may make no sense for the relationship at hand. Not everyone takes silly photos! Some friends live far away!

This is a cynical take, but it’s my dumpster site and I get to leave in throwaway content: I think the real motive for these group personal gifts is a dominance play. It’s laying claim to a best friend slot and then demanding that others subordinate their expression of intimacy to the template permitted by that specific friendship. And then making them feel inadequate as friends if they don’t have a specific silly photo.

Well, either it’s a dominance play or just extroverts being super fucking weird.

Anyway, please don’t do this shit! If you want to congratulate your bestie on their birthday and want to put a lot of effort into it then just do that—may I suggest a PowerPoint?—but don’t cramp anyone else’s style.

Post-coffee addition: I think another reason people reach for these kind of structured gifts is as a nostalgia play. When we were kids, friendship was about unconditional loyalty and concentric circles of intimacy. The best friend, whose friendship with the birthday haver often traces back to high school or earlier, understands the relationship on these terms and wants the gift to reflect and energize that conception of the friendship.

Adult relationships, by contrast, are more compartmented and situational: You may share everything about work and family but avoid discussing sex, for example. Non-group personal gifts allow you to express intimacy that is neither all-encompassing nor subject to a hierarchy of closeness. That very fact is a challenge to the bestie’s identity. The bestie recognizes that the protagonist’s life has expanded and misses being #1. Organizing the photo album is a way to relive that inaccessible past.

It’s not wrong for the bestie to pine for the past. I also feel a sense of grief over the kinds of innocent, unyielding friendships I had in elementary and middle school. Being an adult and having to impose and respect boundaries is kinda exhausting sometimes. The question is what you do about that grief. Do you recognize the maturity it represents? Or are you stuck with the sense of loss?

We’ve all heard the line “If you aren’t paying for a service, you’re not the customer, you’re the product,” yeah? My problem with this quip is simple: They’ll make you the product either way. End of post.

Jk, let me give a few examples:

• I pay for shit on Amazon but they still have tracking and metrics on every page, creepy suggested products, and constant upselling and guilt tripping about not having Amazon Prime.
• I pay for a Costco membership and they still make me listen to a dump spiel about, idfk, “executive hour” or something and how I should buy the more expensive membership.
• I pay for public transportation with my taxes and then again with my rider’s fare and I still have to endure ads in the subway. Sometimes the ads are bright, distracting, and offensive, sometimes for products I find objectionable like sports gambling.
• I don’t pay for anyone’s Patreon or whatever, but apparently it’s very common for the so-called “direct access” to creators that you get through these subscriptions (ability to DM, etc.) to actually be outsourced to ghostwriters/LLMs.

The problem is that money is valuable. That’s true for the skeeviest for-profit corporation you can think of, but it’s also true for public utilities, non-profits, and random bloggers. Paying for a thing doesn’t remove the incentive to commoditize your attention. It’s just a way of asking nicely.

Basically, if you want non-enshittified service you have to either pay exorbitantly for it (billionares are not standing in line during Costco executive hour; they have people for that). And if you want non-enshittified service as a rule then you have to change the actual law to prohibit the bad thing.

I pay for Hetzner to host this dumpster fire of a website because, sure, they are providing a service that costs more than $0 to deliver and is pretty good for the price. But lots of companies offer similar stuff. A big advantage with Hetzner is that they are based in Germany, which has actual data privacy laws that provide a modicum of reassurance that Hetzner won’t try to, idk, monetize my blogging cycles to detect my nonexistent period cycle. Not that I think the GDPR is perfect or anything—but if I can’t change the laws, at least I can kinda change jurisdictions.