OK, Socko

[nemorathwald]

No matter how useful and beneficial something is, it can be done wrong. I'm not saying it's always bad. It's just done right some times and wrong other times. When we conceive of ourselves as belonging to the hero team and fighting the villains team in a superhero movie, it becomes impossible to conceive of any way that is doing it wrong. Hold that in mind.

If you bounce off of this blog post quickly, or if you assume bad faith, at the very least please read "The Stifling Air Of Rigid Radicalism", an excerpt from the book Joyful Militancy by two radicals. It's an excellent book.

For years, communities have had to deal with emotionally-reactive members who were there to antagonize other members. This was relatively easy when we were insisting to free-speech extremists on the right wing that we require much better emotional regulation from them. It's become harder now that it's disenfranchised demographics exhibiting much the same attitudes and personality disorders. (It's important to understand that almost no members of under-privileged groups indulge in this. But it only takes a few, for reasons I'll get into. And the majority of the time, it's someone else attempting to act on their behalf.)

If I had a time machine to go back in time a few years, and tell myself this story, past-me would have assumed I was hearing a dumb and emotionally-activated right-winger describe their paranoid delusional caricature of activists. So I get what you're probably thinking. If you're like me, you're skeptical. That's why I've waited so long to write this story. I don't know what else to tell you. The caricature is coming true, making it difficult to hold people together.

Part I.

Since 2016, many of the most active leaders of my local polyamory group in Detroit rebranded themselves Relationship Anarchists, and redefined "Polyamory" to mean every bad thing that anyone labeling themselves polyamorous had ever done to them. All the parts they approved of were defined as belonging, fully and only, within their re-branded term for themselves.

They became seized by extreme conviction. They began Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion meetups which I attended and found very interesting, although the events did not succeed in their goals.

The central tenet, repeatedly emphasized at their Relationship Anarchy meetups, was that their intimate relationships in the home were filtered through the lens of a zeal for identitarian justice in the world. In seeking to "de-colonize one's own mind", they redefined "the personal is political" to reduce the political to the merely psychological.

Selecting the right label for the group took on heightened significance-- since the desired purpose of their label was to provoke confrontation, they debated the various ways clueless newbie polyamorists, who they wanted to antagonize, might misinterpret various labels to sustain their privileged comfort. They started debating whether to reject the term Relationship Anarchist ("RA") in favor of the term "Political Relater". After the rebranding cycle repeated often enough, I said maybe finding the right label is not actually a solution for their dissatisfactions.

I attended their first annual convention, RAD (Relationship Anarchy Discussions). Attendees were required to be in general agreement with a list of resources provided by the unconference. The list was roughly 134 different Tumblr posts and manifestos that often contradicted each other. Many were not really "ideas"; years later I realized these were more like slam poetry. I tried to pick out a structure of justifications from this mess, to model in my mind what would qualify me in the minds of the founders. Which criteria was really being applied privately in the minds of the four people who approved attendance applications? I wanted to go to them and just ask. But they didn't have the energy to talk to people. Sometimes they called that energy "spoons". A process of back and forth discussion would have been really constructive to ensure I was not attending wrongly. Instead, there was a form. And in this form, they asked questions that omitted what I regarded as the most likely and relevant potential points of conflict between us. I wanted to just put my cards on the table, and prevent them from having a bad experience at the unconference itself. But they didn't have enough "emotional labor" for that.

The unconference paid two medical personnel to be there. The application process had made it clear that attendees were on notice to avoid any appearance of doctrinal impurity; and yet, the indomitable spirit of a community of ungovernable anarchists was apparently no substitute for marketable skills under capitalism, possessed by these two white men, who we were there to get paid. I did not ever hear this remarked upon.

The unconference was almost entirely wishful thinking. We got to hear from one person who was living out the Relationship Anarchist dream, in a remote commune for homosexuals with no electricity or plumbing, who had all fled the violence that had been committed against them in the wider world. We learned from him that everyone there was constantly suicidal, they barely could tolerate each other, and there were constant fights. The speaker had to be coaxed into speaking at all, and seemed miserable and expressed no interest in wanting any of us to suffer the same fate.

In the final session, I asked to discuss the criteria the organizers had used to determine who was in this room and who was not, and ask the group if it matched up with the overall will of the group, in case most of us were just silently compliant. But the organizers said they did not have enough energy for that. In retrospect, I should have said they are at liberty to leave the room, and the rest of the group was at liberty to discuss whatever we wish to discover the group's goals. Wouldn't that be an expression of the leaderlessness to which we supposedly aspired?

The organizers wrapped the walls with a large sheet of paper, and invited the group to write every problem in the world. (Except the power they were exercising in that room.) Then they laid the paper out and asked the group how to solve ... *gestures* ... all of this. But... without power. Anarchism is not supposed to take power. Somehow, if they changed the world, that would not count as power? And anyway, power is energy, and energy is spoons, and using their own spoons wouldn't be fair. Instead of ideas, they had a lot of feelings, and they made each other feel heard. Perhaps if they were mad enough, other people would change the world.

When you are responsible for everything, you are not held responsible for any specific thing in particular.

After the convention, they went on to abandon publicly-accessible meetups, to form what is effectively a queer separatism commune in one of the organizers' homes. They named it "The Compound". God, I sound delusional. There is no way to describe Qanon and their Woke edgelord counterparts without sounding like one is making up things to be mean. They even have a Patreon for The Compound.

The rest of us have been rebuilding the normal polyamory meetups over time.

Part II.

It was not long before I was invited to a Zoom call, with about a half-dozen people within the Relationship Anarchy group. They described having experienced power dynamics and status slaps. (The founders of the group were among the accused. They were invited, but were not present.) I asked if I could record the meeting and make an automated transcript, which I have put in my Roam Research graph.

The discussion brought to light a lot of power dynamics. You only belonged in the group if you turn most conversations of any importance into confrontation and shame. This was done with a smile, to create plausible deniability for the passive-aggression; look at their YouTube channel and decide for yourself. If confrontation is the point of the group, why be surprised when it breaks down in acrimony? After all, the only people remaining there to be educated are each other, right? This phenomenon is so common in activist spaces that it has a name: Picking Out The Villain Of The Day.

What I saw in the group was a constant need for ever-greater measures to prove to the group that which could never finally be settled, as if one owed a societal debt, but nothing one can do will ever reduce the balance on the debt.

My own comments in the meeting were not about subtle power; they mostly concerned explicit power, as it was expressed in the RAD (Relationship Anarchy Discussions) by who was allowed to attend the annual conference and what was allowed to be posted to the Facebook group. There was no transparency around that power, and I thought it should be guided by the actual will of the group rather than the group's four self-appointed leaders.

Moments before the meeting ended, it was revealed that the meeting had not been about the annual conference or the Facebook group. Bewildered, I expressed confusion about which organization this meeting was about. In conversations afterward, it was revealed that as anarchists, they did not value organization, most of them had already left RAD, and my redesigns to rules for the conference and Facebook group were inapplicable, and moot. I realized the organization had already dissolved, and the meeting was about buddies who hang out. I finally realized Relationship Anarchy Discussions had been intended more like a form of slam poetry or dream journals. I had mistaken it for ideas about having an effect on the world.

Part III.

We see emerging, a greater awareness of the important concept of intersectionality. With it, we have also seen the rise of a simplistic misunderstanding of intersectionality, as a way to perform multi-directional status slaps and power games. This dynamic is now playing out in houses of worship, classrooms, activity groups, conventions, discussion groups, local spinoffs of Burning Man, and anywhere else where new social norms lead inevitably to constant acrimony. When not kept in check, it leads most of these groups into a revolving door of constant splitting and collapse. In the past several years, most online social groups I am involved with have developed the following unsustainable and self-defeating norms:

1. Redefine societal change on the world stage, to mean which buddies in the friends group get invited for parties or are shunned.
2. "The personal is political" is misunderstood to mean that if you don't give your friends their way, especially in terms of their feelings, it is vaguely associated with the genocide of their identity group.
3. Standpoint theory. If you are not a member of an underclass, you lack standing to speak about any statement about it, no matter how incoherent.
4. If someone makes a demand, or makes it on behalf of a less-privileged person who is not making the demand, do not ask how the demand would lead to justice outcomes. If someone asks that question, take it as evidence of opposition to the cause, or insufficient zeal. This is a double-bind in which, either you admit you are incapable of perceiving reality for yourself and need someone to take over your choices, or, by rejecting the demand, you prove that you can't perceive reality yourself, and need someone to take over your choices.
5. A feeling or expression of grief or outrage amounts to doing something about justice.
6. Effect matters, but intent does not matter at all. Therefore, any person's finances, time, or health may take second-place to hurt feelings, by escalating one's own feelings of hurt to get one's way.
7. Base your interpretation of your observations on your first emotional impulse. If you observe that someone disagrees with your interpretation-- especially your interpretation about them-- believe your first emotional impulse of suspicion. They must have sinister motives to undermine your ability to perceive reality, known as "gaslighting". (They can apply this to you in reverse. This accounts for mutual accusations of gaslighting.)
8. The social group exists for one reason: to commisserate and offer support. That's the only thing anyone should be there for. "No advice, please." Therefore, offer unqualified support with no discernment. As a result, you believe the first person who gets up to a microphone. Your sympathies might reverse if you find out more later, but you get to feel good by holding space and making someone feel heard, and that's all that matters.
9. Interpret "uncomfortable" as "unsafe". Safety from physical violence over-rules any other consideration, and the appropriate response to physical violence is to control others. Conflating comfort with safety means that anything you want over-rules anything another person wants.

Part IV.

Imagine if we could wave a magic wand, and get a trade-off. The magic wand would remove most congeniality and bonhomie from our own social spaces; conflicts get more intractable rather than less; it's predominated by pissing matches and personality disorders; and we burn out our organizers. Imagine that the same magic wand would eliminate redlining, job discrimination, police violence, environmentally unhealthy housing, and other worthy non-feelings objectives. Imagine also that the magic wand would raise the median income, median wealth, average lifespan, incarceration rates, home-ownership rates, and access to health care, of all marginalized people.

It would be a worthwhile trade-off, right? Certainly.

It does none of those things.

None of those important things are at stake in the argument in the online space. The only effect it can have is who likes who.

I want groups to reach some kind of equilibrium, even if it doesn't favor me, or actively works against me. But do you see such an equilibrium emerging? It's not. The social norms I listed above don't remove privileged people. They don't even reduce our power. Those norms just get exploited, leaving the marginalized people in the community even less coordinated in solidarity than they were before.

Part IV.

I wish the above story were the only one of its kind I could tell.

There are almost no members of under-privileged groups who get a power trip from dominance tactics. Mostly it's their self-appointed representatives. The few-- the very, very few-- who enjoy doing that have ever-increasing influence.

More and more of our communities give them approval to make any demand over any behavior for any reason, or no reason at all. Asking that such demand be justified with actual justice outcomes is a violation of a taboo which was never spelled out in the rules of the online group. Instead, one person has a "fight" response from "fight/flight/fawn", and someone else responds to that with a "fawn" response, and somehow that is considered justice, socially.

No matter how many advantages are unfairly given to me in courtrooms and hiring interview rooms, that's not the balance of power in the online conversation space. Filling the room you are in with demands for subordination and silence does nothing but encourage a very few cynical opportunists to show off how much power they can display. There is an inability by victims to recognize the power in the specific room they are in. It doesn't fit the narrative.

I have educated myself exhaustively for the better part of a decade on behavioral requests around micro-aggressions and which identities own which ideas and expressions. The views I read usually do not represent most of the people in the class they intend to help. For example, the vast majority of Black people, such as my neighbors here in Detroit, are far to the right of the average white leftist on race-related issues. Almost no Pacific Islanders call themselves "poly" and most of them don't identify with the term "Polynesia" which was invented by white people. But it doesn't matter. It became taboo to call one's self "poly", and fashionable to call one's self "polyam". It is nothing more than a way for a privileged people to show their compliance with shared social norms.

When you demand someone be quiet and listen, but after they have listened, it's clear what you say has no efficacy to make change in the world, they will be unconvinced. If they just decide to agree with you because you have standing to speak and they do not, even though they know perfectly well your behavioral request doesn't lead to progress, that's not an ally. You're demanding performativity. If you don't question yourself, and you demand no one else does either, don't be surprised when you're surrounded only with the performativity of compliance.

My years-long quest to educate myself led to Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion speakers and writers who use only emotionally-loaded language that's sparse on details. So I dug for the details, for years. What I eventually found was mystical Jungian-shadow bodywork. Conveniently for this "work", it is so abstract that it can never be held accountable to produce any justice outcomes.What is the actual "doing the work"? Not self-improvement evasions like "understanding", "sitting with", "holding space", "making others feel heard". If I make you feel heard, but nothing changes, that's just manipulating you. As Socko the sockpuppet said in Bo Burnham's Netflix special "Inside", one's own self-actualization doesn't change anything. OK, Socko, then what? Nothing. Socko has no solution. Eventually I had to admit it's because no one has a solution. And if those affected by the problems have no solution, and I search for years for a solution, eventually I have to admit you don't want your problems to stop. You want to feel heard. Remember? "No advice, please."

What Socko actually gets, instead of justice, is vocabulary, identity symbols, and empty symbolic gestures of belonging. We should recognize each other at the bottom of the same gladiator pit, but instead, we dig a hole in the bottom of the gladiator pit, and try to throw each other in, and feel-- for one small moment-- as though we are in the stands.

Comments

[selki]

I'm sorry toxic dynamics are so thick on the ground where you are. More people need to read *The Tyranny of Structurelessness*. I think feelings matter and holding space (listening, being heard) matters, but it's damaging to say that's all that matters or that they matter more than tangible changes/accomplishments. I'd like to respond better; I feel my words may not be helping any. Is it annoying to read that I've read what you've said, without my being sure what more to say/do?

[nemorathwald]

No, it's not annoying. I appreciate the mention of The Tyranny Of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman. Thank you.