Schismogenesis

Discussion

Arnold Schroder:

"In their sprawling assessment of human history The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow describe the process of schismogenesis, or group differentiation that is self-consciously intended to distinguish one group from another, as driving cultural change even before the advent of agriculture. It is well documented that there are evolved psychological mechanisms for group participation, heavily mediated by oxytocin (Carter 2014), with features like: a tendency to accept group judgements even if they are contrary to the evidence of the senses (Aydogen 2017; Stallen et al. 2012), heightened empathy towards ingroup members (De Dreu and Kret 2015), and diminished empathy towards outgroup members (De Dreu et al. 2011; Sheng et al. 2013).

Group psychology also produces a tendency towards the adoption of idiosyncratic behaviors and beliefs, for precisely the reason that maximum differentiation from outgroups promotes a maximum sense of ingroup cohesion. In other words, the motivation for epistemic differentiation exists independently of any particular value a belief system might have, or need it might meet. This helps to explain why cults, back before the internet killed them, combined truly extraordinary levels of social cohesion with truly extraordinary levels of bizarre belief. Extraordinary, at least, for the time. Arguably we have entered a phase where cult dynamics have become fairly ubiquitous, as the internet did not so much kill them as replace their mode of operation, with a vast flourishing of popularity in the process.

While this group psychology undoubtedly first functioned, in the journey of our species, at the scale of groups that people actually lived in, and shared a collective fate in terms of subsistence and security with, it is clear that, much like newly hatched geese that imprint whoever they happen to see first as 'mother' and proceed to follow them around (Lorenz 1950), our profound psychological impetus for group identification is unfettered by any particular, evolutionarily inherited criteria for what meaningfully distinguishes groups. Sapolsky begins his chapter on group dynamics in Behave with the anecdote that people playing the roles of different kinds of primates during the filming of the original Planet of the Apes ate lunch separately.

A consequence of the technological trajectory is that psychological mechanisms for group identification have become unmoored from anything physical, such as one's geography, or class interests, or the plausible threats of annihilation one is facing. Instead, united in a material culture of Amazon deliveries and coal-fired power plants, which everyone prefers to ignore as a predicate of identity, the psychology of group participation is now being invoked at increasingly niche levels of identification with purely symbolic realities—that is to say, with whatever corner of the internet one inhabits.

With respect to individual psychological variation, group dynamics have thus entered an unprecedented phase where they amplify, rather than subdue, innate differences. In the past, particularly effective individual personalities may have shaped cultures, but ultimately the fundamental realities of shared subsistence and survival muted the degree to which any given individual psychology expressed itself. Because group dynamics tend to cohere perceptions and behavior, and because groups were formerly based on factors like geography, and thus fairly random in terms of the distribution of individual traits found within them, inter-group uniformity was greater.

We don't need to do much speculating about the distant human past to observe this reality. Most of us have experienced, somewhere along the way, the basic solidarity that emerges between people who share an immediate material condition (say, working in a kitchen, or being in a hurricane). And most of us have experienced how people, even those who share obscure worldviews, go out of their way to epistemically differentiate themselves from one another when inhabiting the abstract forms of group identity that occur on the internet.

Groups don't just converge on uniform perceptions, their decisions and assessments tend to be more extreme than the average of the group's members (Bishop 2008). For instance, if, on average, the individuals in a Facebook group rate their confidence as 7 out of 10 that Obama practiced child sacrifice while in office (in the sense of chanting in Latin, dagger hovering over terrified child, as opposed to the sense of indiscriminate bombings, deportations, and oil drilling), the group itself will tend to produce a collective confidence estimate of, say, 9.

This can be fun, perhaps even euphoric, when the internet allows you to find the one other person in the world who seems to love The Stooges as much as you do, creating a collective rush of certainty that The Stooges are the greatest fucking band ever! The process takes on a different quality when people suffering from the same states of paranoia get together and start exchanging technical notes, confirming that they must both have government mind control chips in their brains, as in the case of the Targeted Individuals (TI) community (Vice 2020).

This decoupling of group identification from much of anything happening in physical reality orients us to another profound change in the meanings of left and right, considering that left politics are predicted on creating a sense of group identity out of fundamental material realities. Here, we have to acknowledge that, as much as liberals may express perpetual shock at the great epistemic fracture, there is a corresponding species of shock among radicals, at the fact that people repeatedly support politicians whose policies are directly antagonistic to their interests. This has always been true to some extent, largely because of underappreciated psychological tendencies, but the current degree of the decoupling reflects the post-materialist shift."

(https://www.againsttheinternet.com/post/the-world-got-a-lot-like-the-internet)

Example

By Joe Fay:

"Brian Alleyne of Goldsmiths, University of London joined us recently to explain how geek and hacker culture tends to fracture into techno-tribalism. There’s even a word for this evolution of minor disagreements into all out flame wars - schismogenesis.

Just as importantly, Brian discussed how this has shaped our understanding of the tech history, for better or worse. For example, are the roots of tech really epitomised in the Gates v Jobs v/& Wozniak rivalry? Or is that narrative down to techno-tribalism allied to a particularly American, individualist view of history?

This all made for a fascinating evening that also encompassed the British and Italian computer industries (remember them), the open source wars,"

(https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/10/history_shows_why_geeks_will_never_everget_along/)