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Comment by mattgreenrocks | Hacker News Reader

> I don’t want to be anything like these people. I don’t want to be an internet person.

I love this. I got a similar vibe from people who were "too good at IRC," way back in the day. They had a constant, sarcastic, tired energy about them. They had difficulty being genuine about anything. They knew so much and yet they were so stuck in their life somehow. And that sucked the life out of them.

It's like they were too tied to this vague idea of being online that they weren't willing to sacrifice it to have a better life.

The Internet is a tool, not an endpoint.

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> They had a constant, sarcastic, tired energy about them. They had difficulty being genuine about anything.

I knew such a guy on IRC back in 2003. We all kind of looked up to him on the channel. He was quite eloquent and had (what seemed to us) an enormous knowledge of history and philosophy. His sarcasm bordered on sophisticated nihilism. He spoke to us like Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now. His occupation was nebulous.

Now, 20 years later, a former channel member and I (both in our mid-30ies now, with families and jobs) exchange a few nostalgic mails every 1-2 months in the typical lingo of our channel. We still make fun of this guy as the personification of nihilistic evil, a kind of mythical uber-mephisto of the internet. But in reality, we all realized decades ago that he was just this strange, bitter, unemployed guy in his late 30ies or early 40ies (older than we are now), who spent his entire life in front of mIRC. His history knowledge and nihilism boiled down to repeated Nazi jokes, and his philosophy knowledge was based on a few Nietzsche texts he must have read. We were a bunch of pubertal school kids on some Quakenet channel, and he, more than twice our age, was a kind of tribal god to us. He clearly enjoyed it. It was pathetic.

Some of the people described in this (excellent) article very strongly reminded me of him.

I wouldn't say it's pathetic. People try and get power/control/ a sense of meaning anywhere they can. This man probably didn't have a great life and found his only refuge and belonging to be in IRC. The alternative may have been to confront harsh reality and realize you're nobody to noone.

"pathetic" means pitiable, from the greek "pathos"

> This man probably didn't have a great life and found his only refuge and belonging to be in IRC. The alternative may have been to confront harsh reality and realize you're nobody to noone

I think this fits the bill

> The alternative may have been to confront harsh reality and realize you're nobody to noone.

God I wish more would.

Why? I don't understand what you're getting at.

Most people are much too self-important. If you think at the global scale, each of our existence (except those in position of extraordinary decision-making power) is pretty unimportant/inconsequential outside of the realm of chaos theory.

I think that understanding this is the first step of putting yourself in a position of power. Self-importance is very blinding.

It's exactly like Reddit power mods, or that one guy that edits half of wikipedia or whatever the statistic is. It's pathetic to some people, sure, but if it isn't hurting anyone and the person chooses that life, not simply falls into it for lack of options, what's the harm?

It's power in a place they are comfortable with. The issue is when that impacts actual human relationships, or is turned for purposes that are (for lack of a better way to quantify it) bad.

Power mods using their influence to make sure the subreddits follow the individual sub rules, and ensuring that nothing nefarious slips into the general consciousness- it gives that person a sense of worth and meaning. Great!

Power mods using their influence to sell products, market products surreptitiously, squash stories they don't personally agree with, or otherwise abuse said power - bad bad bad. Not Great!

> It's pathetic to some people, sure, but ... what's the harm?

Hmm, pathetic doesn't mean harmful. It's closer by meaning to "feeble", which I agree with in the case of Reddit moderators. I don't think they are very influential at all.

Do you think schoolteachers are pathetic? They have much less influence than a reddit mod.

No influence makes a moderator feeble and ineffective because it is the purpose of their job to have and apply influence to conversations.

A schoolteacher's job is different. However, I suppose some could be called pathetic at it, just as workers in any discipline.

> It's exactly like Reddit power mods, or that one guy that edits half of wikipedia or whatever the statistic is. It's pathetic to some people, sure, but if it isn't hurting anyone and the person chooses that life, not simply falls into it for lack of options, what's the harm?

In my experience even the "respectable" cliques are like this too. Artists, journalists, the honest-to-god English aristocracy. Any scene of "cool" people ends up being kind of pathetic once you get close enough to see the details, however many drugs they're taking or pictures they're putting up in galleries or whatever.

>This man probably didn't have a great life and found his only refuge and belonging to be in IRC. The alternative may have been to confront harsh reality and realize you're nobody to noone.

That sounds quite pathetic to me.

David Foster Wallace, whom some might sneer at, had a number of observations on the phenomenon you've described. For example, from the book "Conversations with David Foster Wallace":

'Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for. That's what made the early postmodernists great artists. The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates. The virtuous always triumph? Ward Cleaver is the prototypical fifties father? "Sure." Sarcasm, parody, absurdism and irony are great ways to strip off stuff’s mask and show the unpleasant reality behind it. The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, "then" what do we do? Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone. Once everybody knows that equality of opportunity is bunk and Mike Brady’s bunk and Just Say No is bunk, now what do we do? All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.'

Similar observations can be found in the following essay https://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf.

Literary types occasionally called this New Sincerity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Sincerity).

>The Internet is a tool, not an endpoint.

Not to be pedant about such things, but there may be a reason it's a common scifi trope that people are hooked to machines and live in virtual worlds. It is not out of question that the internet eventually becomes an endpoint in itself.

That's not pedantic at all. I've consciously decided I will favor Real Life over the Internet as much as possible. I really believe the meme that Nothing Happens On The Internet; it's a projection of the Real World and as people we are very susceptible to confusing the map for the territory.

From the article:

> You can close the computer, but the world will go on without you.

Even if culture decides that the Internet is tantamount to real life, I'm happy to keep the Internet at arm's length. It is profoundly weird to me that the private online life I led in the 90s was something shameful and to be hidden and now it's okay to be so addicted you become awkward in real life, constantly on your phone, and that I should give a fuck about my follower count.

Besides, accepting that the world will go on without you is part of adulthood.

The bigger impact here when it comes to internet/real life schism is the fact that employers will utilize any digital footprint to make judgments about you, and subsequently fire you or refuse to hire you because of it. At the same time, having a follower count beyond a certain threshold also gives you access to a lot of real life resources. Both of these have tremendous impact on people in many ways, as an example one of the careers kids have most wanted to become in several decades now has been internet-focused (youtubers, tiktokers, influencers, etc).

That's the issue with the qualifier "as much as possible". That will always be sliding towards increasing levels of digitalization that the qualifier becomes meaningless.

It certainly has an influence on one's life, but I refuse to make it the center point. I also refuse to be anxious about the fire/no-hire potential it can pose.

It is a useful medium for sharing things and I'm always open to contributing more good content online. But being Extremely Online? No thank you.

Why not reverse it, I push a button on the computer and something falls out of the sky IRL. Your smart electric meter turns off. The water company shuts off your service. The internet is real life as much as you cannot tow a leaking oil tanker 'out of the environment'.

People don't need the internet to be narcissistic, they've done that fine for thousands of years without it.

no, when you meet many grounded people they're helpful, want to help fix your tire, see if you're ok. Things have changed towards narcissism and unless you're older than 35 you probably can't see that.

pressing a button to have something fall into reality is another thing that creates narcissism. You don't see any of the people involved in getting that thing to you. You can start seeing the world as your personal slave at your bidding. Now for centuries, yes, there have been rich people that can do that. If we make that accessible to a LOT more people - everyone has a butler that they don't need to even talk to.

I don't know what I'm saying right now other than - the world is vastly different than it was pre-internet. It can't go back. Things are forever changed for the worst in some (most?) categories.

> everyone has a butler that they don't need to even talk to.

Aristocracy in some parts of the world didn't talk to staff, they would just announce in the presence of the servant that something was needed and expect that it be provided.

"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers." -- Socrates

Cultures, people, and attitudes change. They've been changing for millenia and they'll continue to change.

There's some real value in social circles around games. Even if accomplishing things in game might be seen as a nothing, those social ties can be real.

Yes. Because the game is the medium for connection, and overcoming challenges in a group of people who want to do that is pretty magical. GitHub is similar in the sense that people have a shared, common goal. I love stuff like that.

Most traditional social media doesn’t work as well for me. I need an underlying common goal.

https://www.quotesoup.com/quotes/movie_tv/tpb_afk_the_pirate...

One of the lawyers: How did you meet Fredrik and Gottfrid?

Peter Sunde: I don't remember, but I assume it was in a chat room on the internet.

One of the lawyers: When was the first time you met IRL?

Peter Sunde: We don't use the expression IRL. We say AFK. But that's another issue. But, I don't remember that either.

Tomas Norstrom - District Court Judge: Got to know each other IRL? What is that?

One of the lawyers: In Real Life.

Peter Sunde: We don't like that expression. We say AFK - Away From Keyboard. We think that the internet is for real.

> a constant, sarcastic, tired energy ... difficulty being genuine about anything. They knew so much and yet they were so stuck in their life somehow. And that sucked the life out of them.

synonymous to HN (comments section) vibe of 2020s.

Oof, that’s a little too relatable. I’ve spent the better part of a decade recovering from that. It has very much colored who I am today but I do my best to not allow it to define me.

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