Vibecamp And Its Consequences

(or: Against Pseudonyming as Virtue and Realnaming as Sin)


—

Context: this was a pseudo-open letter criticizing the norms and illusions - primarily relating to privacy and epistemology - of a social scene called tpot and an event called vibecamp, with focus on what happens when those norms are taken seriously by large numbers of people. I've decided to publish it publicly in light of Mike Crumplar's work, which gives me the sense that this hindenburg of a subculture has been if anything emboldened and isn't going away.

Still, to ease your working memory, keep in mind that the primary purpose of this essay is to oppose a specific subset of privacy and community norms. I understand how much of this may be deep in the weeds of weird internet-people granularities. Because this was written to address a social scene collectively there is a significant amount of presumed familiarity, so you may be at times lost while reading it. Feel free to skim what parts are opaque to you; I hope you will, in spite of that, be able to infer or at least glean the more important messages being got at here.

——

For those familiar with vibecamp (https://vibecamp.xyz/), you may know me as The Person Who Did Not Pass The Vibe Check because, to correct false rumors about me, I wrote a document that involved real names of people who circulated those rumors and explained how I knew they were false and originated from their circle specifically. Explaining this necessarily involves naming names because there is not a person on earth who will believe the vague and HRified "someone who I was involved with once..." — no. A guy who happens to be the biggest figure in a weird internet hideyhole was attending, and so were his friends, and his wife used to have feelings for me that are now embarrassing for all parties to talk about, and someone involved in their circle was embarrassed additionally, and someone in their circle made shit up to get me removed from local events, then played the schizo card when their strategy was found out, then when their rumormilling was corrected they claimed it was a violation of their privacy aka """""doxxing""""". I am not at all sorry that you are not able to lie about people, and for that matter will never be sorry and this is in fact the correct thing.

It should be obvious that I don't consider the schizo definition of "doxxing" to be actually doxxing. I've been doxxed; twice, actually. First when I was a teenager and had many people calling my house at various times throughout the night; second at some point circa 2013 in my reddit heyday. I've been on the news (google exists); I've been in a Tucker Carlson book ("Ship of Fools" p.130); I've been tracked by questionable entities. None of this moves the needle and I know doxxing when I see it, but for the sake of a definition this works: doxxing is the collation of a person's identifying and usually-trackable/abuseable information into a set of documents or dossier, hence the name.

And before you say, as many people I'm sure will, that language changes or evolves and so forth: shall I presume many of you have no objection to being called 'nazis' in the standard twitter-left definition? Shall I treat all drunk sex as 'rape' because kidnapper-rape and frat-sex have the commonality of reduced consent? Shall I treat your remarks about this-or-that group as 'hate speech', or 'violence', in the form of speech? Clearly, we have some sense by which concept creep exists; by which definitions can be stretched dishonestly. That *is* what you're doing, and you know what you're doing.

Really, the most accurate term would be something like 'depseudonyming'. This might be called 'euonyming' although that has extant usage for "a personal name aptly or peculiarly suited to its owner." It might also be called 'verinyming' if you're okay with root word fuckery, which everyone should be as linguists are way beyond the point of being okay with blending (and compounding more generally and for the love of god just https://i.imgur.com/w8R0xBY.png) — but you could even get especially on the nose and just call it 'realnaming'. Even the trans community has done its due diligence to distinguish 'deadnaming' from 'doxxing'; if you continue with inaccuracy in light of these clearly more accurate options, you can't consider yourself better than the screeching twitter-proglodyte who inisists on hurling "nazi" at normies.

And in fact there are many legitimate uses to have a pseudonym. You might be a political refugee; you might be under witness protection; you might be fleeing from real violence. A man I knew used pseudonym to evade, if his word is to be trusted, very real people with very real weapons who have committed very real crimes. Not crimes in the streched definition of criminal — in the way Martin Luther King was criminal, doing for “crime” what’s been attempted for “doxxing” — but crime-crimes. There is a non-dismissable probability said criminals could kill him if he were easily trackable, and so his use of a pseudonym is clearly justified.

But the twitter-schiz ethos of pseudonym usage is not. It's not some sense of threat. It's rather just social anxiety or the idea that maybe you might lose some confidence — let's not even for a moment pretend this would lead to destitution — in your already-well-paying probably-tech career trajectory. How is one to give a fuck about this? It strains the ability.

("I understand, but why would you have tried to join an event that is hostile to your views?" one might ask although this is somewhat not the point. The establishing of explicit community norms pertaining to realnaming and identity and recordkeeping are the organization's after-the-fact response to complaints about my document and, more importantly, those norms would still be objectionable even if the event took place in a location I'd never visit. In other words, and in case it's not clear: this is not an anti-vibecamp post, this is an anti-norms-of-vibecamp post. If these norms took place at a non-vibecamp event in the bay area rather than Austin and propagated in roughly the same way I would have not have shown interest in going but would have had approximately the same response as this once learning of its rules pertaining to information, because norms that prevent information exchange in such a manner are, at their core, anti-truthseeking.)

But, with mind to the comfort biases of the demographic, this deserves mentioning and I will mention it elsewhere: for people who aim to be truthseeking and self aware and conscious of global issues like existential risk, LessWrong and adjacent communities are inexcusably class-blind. I first noticed this in the way one notices a slap to the face when an EA organizer dismissed homelessness as "poverty in a high income country". Despite the moral preference for utilitarianism, lesswrong rationalists revert to deontological intuitions pertaining to transgressions they find actually important or real or both, which by implication means that you can infer what issues they find less important or not real by the extent from which they are able to keep a cool and postured distance. Other than the unique norms around privacy and doxxing, the revealed morality tends to be the same as what exists in normie liberal environments that trend bourgeois, where chief moral concerns are not real fights, real theft and real betrayals but rather the vague and rubber stamped capital-A 'abuse' as determined by your preferred therapist, while obviously bracketing how they've paid for it. Their sense of violence is still very much calibrated toward their psychological profile, which is what it would be in any other bourgeois community or more accurately what I call "comfort class". (https://alfredmacdonald.medium.com/comfort-class-definition-4eba877f210b).

This is also reflected in what is deemed acceptable drugs to use. There are Prestige Drugs, which to this demographic are just drugs; they are the "good ones" or the exceptions. Anything that can be labeled a Nootropic or anything that can be "mind expanding" falls into this category, and this prejudice parallels the comfort class's prejudices about exercise, as argued by Daniel Duane in “How the Other Half Lifts” and Carl Stempel in “Adult Participation Sports as Cultural Capital”. (https://psmag.com/social-justice/half-lifts-workout-says-social-class-85221 and https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.893.984&rep=rep1&type=pdf). The most acceptable prestige drugs, which you may have already guessed, are the psychedelics: psilocybin, LSD, DMT and so forth. Perhaps this is an artifact of Timothy Leary and others, or the fact that LSD was popularized at an Ivy League institution; regardless psychedelics are the clearest divide between drugs the lower classes accept and drugs the comfort class accepts.

Consider also that, lesswrong-aside, it's often acceptable to just drink alcohol in whatever amount you want if you can spin yourself as a educated drunkard a la Hitchens or Hemingway; not so much if you can be spun as a former "abuser", in which case you are terrifying. I supsect the term 'microdosing' had to be popularized because the comfort class had no framework for just a person who does drugs without pathology, as neuroscientist Carl Hart demonstrates in a talk I've linked below. But the medicalization of behavior, which is a topic that could be its own book and in the case of Foucalt's "Madness" sort of was, doesn't stop with drugs; in the case of personality disorders and much of the therapy-universe jargon, psychiatry and psychotherapy weaponize pathology to enforce cultural norms. It is, to say the least, scientifically problematic if a diagnosis is used not as medicine but as a tool of cultural conformity. I could cite the political abuses in the Soviet Union, or the now-removed diagnosis of homosexuality itself, but I think it's sufficient to say this: the fact that pathologization of behavior-and-only-behavior, with no physiological correspondent, can exist within a medical framework is ludicrous. Jeremy Hadfield's important essay on this topic has made a better argument on this than I can. (https://jeremyhadfield.com/the-conceptual-engineering-of-mental-illness/)

But you might draw the line of "not good drugs" at psychedelics and think other class-equals are wrong. If so, fair. But where this becomes obviously organized by class is in the regard of MDMA. Note that prior to Scott Alexander's articles on Desoxyn, virtually no one talked about microdosing methamphetamine as a substitute for Adderall, which is more accurately phrased "therapeutically dosing" as the aim was to imitate a Desoxyn prescription. I know this because I was one of the few to do it, and you were absolutely thought of as a scary person doing the Wrong Kind Of Drug. MDMA, however, is meth; it's literally its name: thre-four-methylene-deoxy-methamphetamine. Not only is it more cardiotoxic than vanilla meth, it's significantly more metabolically demanding. Zyzz, an iykyk sort of bodybuilder, famously died in a sauna while on a combination of MDMA and megadosed trenbolone, a steroid that can be characterized as "doing what people falsely think testosterone does." If you think I am at all exaggerating and have easy access to drugs, feel free to use an Omron wrist monitor and thermometer to track your heart rate and blood pressure and body temperature during a standard-if-not-conservative club dose of 100mg MDMA, then on a different day do the same with an oral dose of 10mg junk meth you can find. You will reach my same view.

So you might as I do find it palpably weird that a demographic of people ostensibly concerned with rationality and longevity and biohacking and all manner of experimentation will accept MDMA because it is "mind expanding", and be scared of drugs like cocaine because, um, uh,

You may have seen Carl Hart's admission to smoking heroin. You may have also seen his presentation at the 51st Nobel conference. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dzjKlfHChU). The combination of these two things is jarring because heroin is a Big Kid drug, not a prestige drug, and how, of course, could a *neuroscientist* smoke heroin? His talk answers this question indirectly: the risk profile of drugs, as any pharmacologically literate person knows, is a matter of dosage and dose frequency and route of administration. This is not the framework the educated, lesswrong rationalist crowd is using, which is despite all pretensions much more qualitative and sociological. His status as a neuroscientist ensures that people less educated on the topic won't rebuke him for fear of looking stupid, but were he not so esteemed we know what the result would be: implicitly patronizing DMs like "are you okay?" and "I'm just here if you need anything." An ideas-podcast guy like Coleman Hughes can openly talk about MDMA on Dave Rubin without consequence (https://youtu.be/rdh8zPr_ZmI?t=583), but without the veneer of some deliberate purpose -- if you're just having fun -- there is a social penalty for the Wrong Kind Of Drug. Given that this social penalty is not evidence-based, a sensible enough explanation is that it's an unconscious class association.

It's still very much stigmatized to be a cokehead, and even more if it's crack cocaine. Far fewer people admit to openly doing these things; as far as I know, no one with Hart's status has openly admitted to smoking crack cocaine, and while Rob Ford is the best example formally he is not culturally. There's a comfort class way to straddle the line if you managed to make yourself sound scientific enough, but at the end of the day this is just a class evaluation without real scientific evaluation of any harm profile. Street urchins we don't talk about do crack and heroin, it's why "San Francisco has a lot of problems", and the Good Ones -- the ones who can afford to go to burning man and ephemerisle and vibecamp -- do LSD and MDMA.

If you are this kind of person, I don't trust your threat modeling of many things, violence included, and many if not most of you *are this kind of person*.

A friend of mine recently looked into the process of filing a restraining order against her ex boyfriend. She was deciding whether to do this or risk payments on the debt he owes her. There's a quite real possibility that he could have approached her at her residence, because he has. I made it known to the San Antonio Police Department that any presence of him on my residence will be considered a trespass. As it affects us, this is mostly due to the fact that he is exactly the sort of person who *could* and *plausibly might* fly and/or drive across state lines to settle some sort of vendetta. He is unhinged, and by unhinged I do not mean aggressive: I mean unhinged. You can be unhinged and nice. The same ex-friend was unhinged and altruistic in giving a ride to a random stranger or person we'd colloquially call a crackhead — to be distinguished from actual crackheads, and if you don't know the difference this is a tell for your class background. But he gave a ride to one as we were partying in San Marcos at about 2:30 in the morning with his girlfriend in the car, as we were pleading he not, while launching into a tirade about how you must be nice to strangers and inexplicably having his shirt off as if ready to fight someone.

Most of you won't ever know psychopaths because these sorts of people only show their true colors when they've hit rock bottom. Psychopaths are not the Dexter types. They are, classically, impulsive morons who you can't lend money; they're people who will instantly peace out after earning enough trust to lend them money, which by the way is quite easy to do under the veil of pseudonymity you're so protective of.

I think the long history of crypto scams and exit scams indicates it's fantasy that crypto and privacy technologies are going to be enabling of people to to exercise some great level of empowering freedom. Do you think that your group will not develop an elite and then be capable of very similar things to what other elites have done? Why would elites *not* want the privacy cryptocurrency affords? There is not much inherently liberating about cryptocurrency. My first exposure to cryptocurrency was in 2013 for its original use-case, which is to say to buy drugs. The other use-case is to launder money. Crypto is in many ways still the gold standard for both, and this is lost on no one.

But this is not an argument against or for cryptocurrency. This is an argument that most of you have no idea what you're doing with crypto as merely the analogy; much like how cryptocurrency has a more dignified mission statement, you think that your use of pseudonyms is for a dignified reason and not just to enable your own personality disorders, and to curb your entirely-confrontable anxieties, and to avoid holding others accountable.

It's interesting and by that I mean suggestive-of-failure that this weird intellectual millennial-genx segment of semi-libertarian tech-adjacent twitter is so wet for pseudonyms when most of tech is rapidly eroding the ability of youth to care about this sort of thing. In fact, most zoomers don't; this is just a weird late-20s-late-30s identity concern. It's not a *real* concern.

But this is somewhat peculiar to people who hide behind screens, and I don't mean that as a synonym for using a phone or computer. It's not a coincidence that most of the people in the fitness industry are people who are aggressively nonpseudonymous. The fitness industry is an area where accountability is aggressively pursued, which ought to be the ideal. The only pseudonym account I know of is atlaspowershrugged which originates more from coincidence than in his refusal to give his real name. Otherwise, fitnessnames are largely realnames. To the extent they have pseudonyms is for the sake of branding, not so that people know who they are. A callout meme in the industry is "post physique" — the function should be obvious here. Pseudonym accounts who don't post physique are looked at with suspicion; why wouldn't they be? You could be lying about the very thing you're advocating, and it's arrogant to think the effects of lying about yourself stop at your body, or can't be used to assess whether anything you say is trustworthy at all.

This is to say nothing of how many of you are hypocrites about the fertility crisis so-called. The raised question of course is the fertility crisis *for whom* because, quite obviously, latinas are not having a fertility crisis. The answer is that it's the high IQed among us; no one is talking about the fertility crisis of the lower class. There is an intense arrogance in the term "fertility crisis" when what you really mean is high IQ fertility, and what I think *many of you* mean is fertility among people *like you* — who by the way are not exactly the ideal candidates for society that you think. The concept of masculinity is merely a basket of secondary and tertiary sex stereotypes and pursuing a stereotype on purpose is a joke if not pitiable, but to entertain this for a moment: how can you be so cocky when you yourself are not very fertile? Or are low-T? Or by your own standards not very masculine? Or in various ways so clearly subpar to your own ideal?

(The tactic of redefining masculinity to be a mood or a vibe or whatever you think is cool is new-agey and womanish but more importantly a falsehood. This is not unlike saying ADHD is a mindset. You either have dopamine dysfunction or you don't and you either have high T or you don't and there are known correlates with T. Some traits are associated with sex stereotypes — e.g. competitiveness with men and kindness with women. This is measurable, and that's the end of the amount of thought worth putting into it when you can pursue traits like kindness and competitiveness a la carte without worrying about whether they fit into a role. Men and especially male writers above one sigma fixated on masculinity scream Male BPD or at the very least identity-dysphoria. Thinking in stereotypes is justifiable in lieu of more accurate concepts and there are more accurate concepts; insisting on continuing is for dipshit normies who don't know any better or people with such poor self-awareness and ability to know who they are that they need someone else to do it for them.)

The futility of save-our-kind movements (has there ever been a successful one?) brings to mind the originators of every purity movement who are themselves partially composed of whatever they're trying to purify. You could argue, yes, that it's not purification, that you believe that you're just further on a spectrum of quality that you want to be proliferated in society, that you just want to raise IQ by some marginal amount or at least keep it stable. But most of you are not that precise. It's just vibes, if I recall?

An irresponsible number of you — which is more than zero — know next to nothing about IQ testing despite using it as a basis for many of your sociopolitical beliefs. Many of you, if pressed, could not tell me how a WAIS IV scaled score is determined. You could not tell me why intelligence measures are really not that valid past three sigma IQ or why the activity approaches statistical alchemy in tests that claim to measure beyond 160. Many of you meme "shape rotator" and "wordcel" and, in spite of the painfully voluminous ocean of strained variations on this joke, most of you seem unaware that the shape rotation meme originates from a mockery of the overgeneralization of what one can infer from rotational ability, specifically the kind of overgeneralization from epistemic fuckboys who read abstracts and not full studies and conclude that, say, spatial rotation explains the gender gap in programming. (All schizonutrition, from microplastics to seed oils to soy hysteria is also a result of being a headlinecucked abstractcel, so schizonutrition is to schizopsychometrics as the real thing is to the real thing.) For that matter, none of you have pointed out that image rotation is a fractional component of g compared to, say, perceptual ability and "perceptcels" (you are allowed to hurt me for this) are as if not more of a thing than rotators or wordcels. (https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-four-stratum-Verbal-Perceptual-Image-Rotation-VPR-model-of-mental-ability_fig1_222550032 and more thoroughly DOI: 10.1016/j.intell.2007.01.005)

My elaborated thoughts on the issue of children are here https://app.simplenote.com/p/wzRtFQ but that is largely not the point. There's intense arrogance to insisting that your existence is too fragile to be shown to the world, while also believing that you are what needs to be injected into the human vat of lifestream, while looking like the byproduct of a 12 year old who snuck into his dad's liquor cabinet and fucked around with the Skyrim character creator. Doubly so when you have the mental discipline of a literally sophomoric dilettante, or when it's unclear that your personality genetics would translate to someone the rest of the world would want to talk to for more than a few hours. This arrogance is decisively worsened by your ability to hide and insistence on doing so. Your case for a fertility crisis would make you look plainly like a bunch of weiners if you were forced to post physique, as it were, and you know it.

Beyond the ability to lie about yourself, high-confidentiality social norms have this incredibly abuseable exploit where anyone can spread rumors about you and the inaccuracies will rarely if ever go corrected because people following these norms are forced to speak in HRish nothings like "there was a dispute."

But archival is, on balance, at least as important as privacy and probably more important. For clarification, see here: https://app.simplenote.com/p/hQnp5D

The unfortunate reality is that there is a tradeoff between privacy and transparency and authenticity. I prefer openness and transparency and knowing that I can trust people to tell me what's actually on their mind. Once I know you're sacrificing transparency around me, the vibe is like talking to a colleague who at one point tried to fire you. There will be that strained elephant-in-the-room awkwardness which gossip-heavy communities enable — and they do enable it, because you cannot identify who-said-what and you've prevented recording and documentation, so you are reduced to "someone has said." Neither I nor many of the people I know are enthusiastic about the thought process of "what is everyone *really* thinking" over the course of an evening. No one likes worrying that any interaction they're on the receiving end of will be muted and self-censored.

Extreme adherence to confidentiality reduces available information to something below even hearsay. You are left to take people at their word, which is epistemically about the worst place to be in because the word of people in general is extremely unreliable, as is memory itself. no one should #believeher or #believehim. Accurate records of information are what keep us from being medieval. (Once again, see https://www.opencolleges.edu.au/informed/features/why-straight-a-students-havent-learned-as-much-as-you-think/ and "how reliable is your memory?" at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB2OegI6wvI.) As it pertains to the truth, you are risking medievality for short-term comforts.

Comfort-over-truth (or feelings-over-facts if you want to meme it) is a commonly joked-about spectrum but it is nonetheless a testable one. My groupchats and circles generally are centered around information and discussion quality. Discussion quality is not determined by cordiality or how good people feel, it's determined epistemically and by the quality of information and dialogue. I don't care if you're important. I have removed "important people." I don't care whether you're well known either, or whether you're a good father, or anything high-status. You can be a celebrity and a good father and a horrible contributor and I'm still going to remove you if your output is annoying and a blight on everyone's cognitive real estate.

Inevitably some people struggle to understand this, so I've made a thought experiment that makes this clearer. This is called the Fuck-You Genie. The genie gives you very good information that you either can't get anywhere else or would have a tremendously difficult time getting anywhere else. When he does this he's verbally an asshole, but not in a way that is psychologically injurious. He just calls you a cunt or retard or whatever. The genie's remarks aren't traumatizing. The idea here is that there's a fuck-you-genie threshold people have where they would tolerate some degree of interpersonal discord for information.

More elaboration is here: http://facebook.com/1441668545/posts/10226164823334012 and the comments serve as nested footnotes here, such as explaining how Nassim Taleb is a FYG.

A lot of people, I've realized — not rationalists, but just in general — have an extremely low FYG threshold. In the most extreme example, you'd forego a PhD or something of equivalent knowledge in whatever you care about because an instructor made you mildly uncomfortable or called you a couple of names or something. If you have lied to yourself enough to think realnaming is doxxing and that this is an egregious violation, rather than a way to avoid rumor-circulation, you clearly have comfort prioritized here.

It's precisely backward to think that accurate archival or an accurate record should take a backseat to personal comfort, which you have called privacy. If this concern isn't informational, or isn't rooted in something else ultimately after a long chain of priorities concerned with the truth on some level — if, in other words, the schizo concern for privacy is just for personal comfort — then this is in result no different than other comfort-over-truth ideologies that many of you are familiar with.

Some of you think privacy is reasonable all the time, or reasonable in and of itself. I invite you to consider that privacy is in fact a proxy concern for something else, and almost rarely an issue in-and-of itself.

You can tell what privacy issues are irrational and/or copes by using a counterfactual where completely banal information about someone is known. For example, I have never heard anyone at any school cafeteria say "doesn't it bother you that the school knows *exactly what we're eating*" because of course the response is "so what if they do?" — what, exactly, could a school do with your lunch history? Feed you more square pizza? (If for some reason you were a 1-out-of-thousands kid who actually did think this, please go to any large public school ever. Kids do not have this concern because this is not a thing to be threatened by and if you bring up this concern you will get looks like you're from another planet.)

But it's very obvious that most of us have passively accepted the outcomes of our school knowing our eating patterns and just don't worry about it. If people who claim privacy-qua-privacy were for real, they'd be concerned about wacko domains like the school lunch scenario and this would expand to just about every scenario you can think of. (You'd feel paralyzed at having an order history when doing online shopping, I guess.)

A lot of privacy issues really resolve to things like:

1. What kind of laws/penalties you think society should have? Example: I am opposed to police knowing what drugs I use, but that's because bullshit laws about drugs exist that would get me arrested, and I think those laws should not exist; also, police just in general will find reasons to arrest you. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE) Meanwhile, I don't care if some random person in a different country knows what drugs I use.

2. What kinds of threats you think may exist if someone knows your information? Example: The location of stashed money in my house is not something I want known, obviously because that money puts me at a higher risk of break-ins. By contrast, I don't care if someone knows who I bank with. They're welcome to try to rob a bank.

3. What kinds of judgments you think may befall you? Example: If someone knows your college transcript, they may make erroneous conclusions about what you know/don't know even if your GPA is perfect. By contrast, I don't care if you see my grades in elementary school. Who cares? It's elementary school. (Also, how many guys care about height privacy if they're in the most favorable category? I'm not aware if this has been empirically studied but we have a pretty good intuition about the answer.)

Privacy pertaining to the IRS is a great example. Recently, it was decided that if you have a total of over $600 in PayPal transactions this must be reported to the IRS. Given that a significant chunk of my income comes from RedBubble and therefore PayPal, I am obviously upset by this. However, that's because I want to gaslight the IRS and have more money. Not being able to gaslight the IRS gets in the way of my ability to do that. If I have the same amount of money, I don't care what the IRS knows, because this is about me having more money, which I obviously like and want, as opposed to less money which I don't like as much. (And probably if it were reversed, i.e. the IRS was *giving* people huge chunks of money in exchange for a privacy loss, they'd be okay with it.)

Just to be absolutely clear, because I am sure someone will misread this: I am not saying that privacy is bad; I'm saying it's a proxy concern for something else, and those concerns can have varying levels of reasonability, and the extreme of these concerns aren't that reasonable. This is my transcript, with slight modifications for readability, from an interview Antonio Martinez did about his book Chaos Monkeys:

"This is going to be absolutely heretical and people will hate me for saying it. But there's a chapter in [Chaos Monkeys] called The Narcissism of Privacy. It's titled that for a reason. It sounds terrible, but I do think that a lot of what we now call privacy is a form of narcissism, in the sense that we jealously guard this thing that we feel that we need to protect from the outside world. [It's as if we think] our right to protect it is like a constitutional right. As I say in the book [...] even if Facebook had a video of you engaging in indecent acts, along with a voiceover someone reading your deepest, darkest secrets from childhood — even if Facebook had that, and even assuming perfectly evil behavior on Facebook's behalf — they wouldn't know what to do with it. They wouldn't care. It has no commercial interest.

[...] [People] misunderstand how advertising actually works. They think the data that or the knowledge that they most jealously guard — the fact that they had an incestuous relationship with their sister when they were 10 or something — would actually be commercially interesting to anybody. That's a major fallacy that they don't understand. Nobody actually cares. Of course, what they want to know is: what TV show did you see on Netflix? What was your last car? What make and model? How many miles does that have on it? When have you last walked into a Best Buy? What did you look at on the shelf? That's what they want, actually.

There's this major sort of discrepancy between what people feel protective about and what the advertising world actually needs in order to basically fund the internet. (For free, which is the point of advertising.) [...] What people are worrying about they really don't need to worry about. Not in any sort of paternalistic "oh, don't worry, Facebook will take care of you" sort of way. It's just like, here's the harsh reality: nobody cares about your secret grandma's brownie recipe. Facebook isn't trying to get that out of your messages. That's one point on privacy. The other is: what is the future of privacy? What does it mean?

I'll quote Nick Denton, who I don't like quoting. [...] But he said something very good in the interview he did for Playboy a couple years ago: "in the future, we're only going to have one sin, and that sin is hypocrisy." By that he meant you're one thing or one persona in private — in what you keep from the world — and you're another in the public persona you face to the world. It doesn't matter what you're into; what weird, deviant, whatever you're into, as long as you're honest about it and wear it on your sleeve, and it's a part of you. Then the world won't judge you for it.

I think that's the reality of the world we're we're heading to. We use words like "oversharing" — in the future, your entire personal life will just be a matter of fact; there will be so much personal data [on the internet] that I challenge the listeners: if you're fearing that a photo taken seven years ago [can be used against you], just go ahead and even try to find it on your own timeline. I bet you can't find it. I know this because I had to go back and find photos for excerpts of [Chaos Monkeys] that were only four or five years ago. I am a former Facebook [project manager] and former power user and I couldn't find the damn things.

The reality is that either there's no data and you literally live like a hermit or a Bond villain, or there's so much data that you need the computing power of the NSA to find anything. We're going to get lost in the crowd. That drunk photo of you at the happy hour will be no more embarrassing than your choice of jacket the morning after. That's just part of you, and really: nobody cares about it."

In a society where everyone has a pocket recorder it's delusional to think you have some kind of entitlement about what happens with those pocket recorders; everyone has plastic drinks and we can barely get the public to agree to recycle them, at times even throw them away period. In a more charitable interpretation this entitlement is forgivable if specified in advance, but you are still the weird one for expecting it. The norm everywhere is recordability and this is a post-worldstarhiphop world; if you are schizo about privacy the sane norm is defaulting to an explicit opt-out, not requiring your opt-in for any information that may be revealed about you. And what exactly do you think you are at risk of in any plausible sense?

Truly, though: it speaks volumes that the sorts of people going to this $300 camp thing — which I'm told does not cover flights or transport — are people who, on the short notice the event has given them, have the disposable income to obviously do this. You're quite wealthy and have quite a bit of freedom as-is. Why should everyone erode the norm of realnaming, which aids accountability and trustworthiness, for the sake of your comfort? Pardon me, but who the fuck cares?

I've lost my sympathy for people in the tech industry talking about their livelihood after finishing books like Hatching Twitter or Chaos Monkeys and familiarizing myself with the incomes of present-day workers in tech, which Martinez in particular has elaborated on extensively and says exceed even Wall Street salaries as of late. Perhaps four or five years ago I thought that the typical tech worker I was seeing on Twitter might make $70,000 because, at the time, most of the people I knew who worked in what I thought was "tech" made about that. I've since learned $150,000 is common in Austin, to say nothing of remote jobs or jobs elsewhere.

I have no sympathy if a person who makes $200,000 loses their job for speech; you should stand by your speech, first and foremost. Second, the idea that a person who could get hired for a $200,000 job would later be permanently *out of one*, even in a similar income bracket, is unlikely or absurd depending on the degree of the assertion. Third, you could have saved the money to move into residence and otherwise accrued enough liquid assets to be, as it's so-called, based. There are many places in the world — maybe not in the world where they self-fund twitter camps — but there are many places in the United States even where you can live with 500 grand in liquid assets and be essentially uncancelable. It's deserving of laughter when suggested I'm to pity a person with multi-six figure income reduced to a little risk of job insecurity because they were realnamed into what *might be* accountability.

It's especially ridiculous and I mean classically, as in deserving of ridicule, that of all things the Chatham House rule was cited (https://vibecamp.xyz/communityvalues/), which has been a shelter for politicians and oligarchs and other powermongers to cement corruption over the years. You might as well have said "we go by the smoky backdoor room rule :)". Do you think — do you actually think — that the presence of such a rule benefits proliferation of the truth? Or the health of society? Or anything of this kind? It benefits people who are willing to lie, to rumormill, to advance their ever-sketch agendas without any sort of disincentive.

And they do. Shall I link the document a second time? https://app.simplenote.com/p/c70Nb5

The image of an Antifa sort, who are benefiting from this anonymity, is radically opposite to the actual aims of a free, transparent and open society. The idea that you can get there this way is precisely backward; for every truth you think you're advancing through anonymity, it's so much easier to circulate a lie or rumor or falsehood or whatever. How many fake accounts have you seen outright lie on reddit? 4chan is not an apt comparison because you cannot verify any of it. Reddit is notorious for pseudonym accounts who make up information in anecdote-friendly subreddits for the sake of attention or a thrill or just their ability to see if they can get away with it. Not only is it easy to do, it's quite common. There are two such examples at https://imgur.com/a/OzwvKee and four at https://twitter.com/tim_cato/status/1329147212920737792 but frankly this happens so often that you can harvest it in the wild. Yes, Buster, someone would really do that; they would go on the internet and tell lies.

"But pseudonyms let us say what we want." Yes. We should be able to say what we want without employers firing us.

This is not fantastical. It should be illegal for employers to fire people for their speech without citing proven financial damage from the speech; certainly it’s illegal for employers to fire people based on race or sexual orientation alone, so the legal groundwork is there. Merely creating your own alternative as the free market ethos goes is half-measure and not at all sufficient for that. It should be actually, governmentally required — at the point of guns if necessary — to prevent employers from firing people for merely unpleasant speech as opposed to financially damaging speech.

And it so obviously benefits those workplaces and in fact people in power to have an NDA policy whenever they want for private events. Who do you think benefits more from non-disclosure agreements? The corporate status quo, or 4chan? It's no coincidence that Hereticon was an NDA-heavy event funded by Founder's Fund. (I am told that I am plausibly on some blacklist, potentially organized or influenced by Aella, who spoke at the event, so by this standard I am a second-order heretic.) Do you think this was an event for actual "heretics" or, a la University of Austin, do you think it was a vibecamp-style mixer for people who want to social climb? Use your better judgment. These are people who ten years ago would be saying "it's rude to discuss your salary."

The degree of awkward, frazzled, twitchy responses that I've gotten from rationalists of all stripes after being cited as a Person Who Realnames is, frankly, alarming because this is precisely the opposite of where your morality should be. It is actually reprehensible that you think that you're doing the right thing by elevating something like the Chatham House rule as a model.

The ideal model is something like mandated and enforced neutrality — say, a social network where the first amendment *must* apply by law, and where the speech is protected by law, and where a person cannot enact any sort of occupational judgment against a person for speech therein unless said speech is already law-violating. Further, we ought to increase the amount of crimes that are prosecutable if someone were to suppress speech via the crime. Hate crimes can be attached to violent acts by the mere intention that the crime is racially motivated; we can and ought to do the same with crimes that suppress speech. *That* is a step in the right direction, not committing the HRification of America where one can't even *DISCUSS WHO SAID WHAT* and must rephrase all disagreements as "there was a dispute", effectively neutering any information communicable and allowing the dishonest among us to flourish.

(It's no coincidence also that rumors were spread about me in the Austin rationality group *after* I was removed and no longer able to correct these rumors. The correction is here https://app.simplenote.com/p/c70Nb5 but the moral is that people who do this are not trustworthy. You *should not be trusting* people who are willing to spread rumors in plain view of you; they will do the same thing about you when they're behind your back, and their willingness to do so indicates how little they actually value the truth or the accuracy of any sort of record for that matter.)

And if you think I am overstating the case or are so bold think that there's no such thing as "the truth", I invite you to walk through violent neighborhoods, some of which I can show you to if you're uncreative; if somebody approaches you with a gun or knife and asks for your money, will you be so brave as to say "well, you know, what is truth anyway? Isn't money a social construct?" Is meaning subjective when asking if you have a condom on? Is it a social construct whether you're on birth control? Is it all just vibes when I take you to be my husband or wife? I think you'll find that even if you date a woman who claims meaning is subjective, meaning suddenly becomes very objective once you flirt with another woman.

While there is disputability to the truth, the truth is still something that can be settled to a degree. It is flagrantly immoral to act like it's not.

This palpably bourgeois assumption that uncurtaining someone's esteemed pseudonym renders me some sort of danger to you is outrageous and mockable in its own right. I'm told that after I had supposedly made a privacy violation in the Austin rationality group that I was spoken about as if I was the Unabomber — or Dr. Ted Kaczynski, may he be so doxxed. This is an offense to people who need to worry about violence. Once more, there are people who need to use pseudonyms. There are people who are "worth it." In other words, people who for whom the social cost of violence and the risk of committing actual violence against them is worth the potential upsides. I think it's quite uncontroversial to say things like "it would be beneficial if great harm were to befall Kim Jong Un" — or the executives who keep science paywalled from taxpaying public, or the executives responsible for predatory lending during the housing crisis, or people currently running sex trafficking organizations — and so on. If we have agreed on one then we are merely expanding the list.

There are people who are self-evidently "worth it", in full seriousness. The profound majority of people are self-evidently not. The unhinged man who I mentioned reporting to the San Antonio Police Department in the event he trespasses is not worth it. While my residence is nonetheless armed, there is no point at which I think he is worth even a self-defense case under the Texas statute. I'm just going to call the police and remove him from my residence. It takes great arrogance to think that you are worth it and I want to be emphatically clear that none of you are remotely.

The vibe camp performance has been a nauseating act of high openness and pathologically high agreeableness. I am middle agreeableness, and I want to remind you that in the confines of normal society, or in just normal interaction, what I'm doing right now is considered exceptionally polite. It requires a macrodose of sheltering to consider a string of essays and imgur ridicule the lowest possible behavior on the spectrum of agreeableness. This is aggressive to you perhaps if you operate in the supra-90th percentile of pretty much everything. Truly low agreeableness is worldstarhiphop shit. And you clearly ought to have a dab of disagreeability to correct the record; to have proof in the first place; to tell people who to trust and who not to trust and what is the case and what is not the case. As a reminder I want you to reconsider what I just said about the subjectivity of truth; if you would really trade that for agreeability under the risk of, say, STD transmission because you refused to ask about your partner's STD results as you thought that was too private. (We know the answer, and it's a matter of application. Men in their thirties with self-assessed social anxiety who think "this vibecamp thing is just like high school" are unable, not unwilling, to exercise disagreeability because they do not have the backbone.)

Quite a bit of the vibecamp stuff that I've seen so far has been what a man named Horace calls technoyogi bullshit, defined as an intersection of hippie bullshit and tech bullshit that manages to use the vocabulary of the tech industry to make new-age bullshit — which we would normally call pseudoscience or woo — appealing to people who should otherwise know better and who more importantly have the income to pay these people for their cons. If you make your grift about workshopping energies, or distributed chaos magick or whatever — go fuck yourself absolutely, entirely, and forever and after that.

(For more on technoyogi bullshit, see http://alfredmacdonald.substack.com/p/technoyogi-bullshit-and-cure-by-rubricism)

Nothing I'm saying is controversial and if it is it shouldn't be. But many of you have no real idea of what is involved in fighting for knowledge or strugglng for the acquisition of standardized knowledge. Most of you don't care. You've been blessed to have good teachers and parents and grow in environments where you are given these resources to learn a lot. If you've had to actually fight to establish the truth of something — nevermind to really combat a myth of some kind — then you know how difficult it is to win that fight. Knowledge needs to be fought for, and disregard of this is actually quite reprehensible.

It is also abundantly clear to me the most of you have not been taken advantage of. People who have a dash of disagreeability are less likely to be abused. People who trust a bit less are less likely to be abused. It is however a very odd group of people who are both so trustworthy that they will accept at almost verbatim and at face value these statements of other people who they don't know at all, yet also have these identities protected with a sacredness that acts as if suspending their protocol for accountability's sake is a sin.

But I do agree with the premises of both the rationality movement — i.e. reducing biases to become less wrong — and the postrationality twittersphere — which is to say that rationalists have been explicit to the point of ignoring obvious things like motivations, intentions, and our underlying uncomfortable dirtiness that makes us less trustworthy by default. I don't trust, for example, a leader of a rationality movement who can't manage basic weight loss routines. I don't trust a leader of a rationality movement who can't acknowledge that they are biased enough to simp (and this is gender-neutral); the reality of romantic jealousy has been codified into law, such as in applications for protective orders (https://www.txcourts.gov/media/1449964/protectiveorderkit-english.pdf), yet the obvious tendency of us to feel this way is practically ignored by rationalists as if Marie Kondoing our inner disturbances is The Way. There are a lot of unclean, dirty, messy, sloppy human motivations ignored by rationalists, to more or less constantly focus on the LARPing threat of existential risk by AGI or who can flex harder via donations to Against Malaria.

(And to use a platform that is so horrible at in-depth argumentation! You have no threaded replies; you can't any sort of length correction or anything requires a multi-reply post. Bullshit typically requires more information to refute than to proliferate. The very use of Twitter as a platform for any kind of so-called discourse disqualifies you from seriousness in the first place. The fact that you've used Twitter to organize a counter movement is disgraceful. This is elaborated at http://fb.com/amacdonaldiv/posts/10228458955365879 — yes I could post it on Twitter, but this would reinforce your bad decisions.)

In proceeding this way, in saying you know it's all just vibes man, you've become post-postmodernist which is to say you are actually what the postmodernists are accused of being like. The postmodernists, contrary to popular belief, had some sense that there is truth. Foucault would not even remotely agree that truth is subjective. Nor would Baudrillard. Nor would Rorty. Nor would many of the other philosophers called postmodernist — nor would Butler! It's a small set of people who have endorsed any sort of view like this; the people who endorse relativism are their political aisle's equivalent of the fringe psychos who endorse schizonutrition about seed oils. (Which by the way no exercise scientist of repute has concerned themselves with and the universal response is "bro just supplement more omega-3 wtf?")

And to the extent they've said truth is social construct they mean what we consider "the truth" as in a sense of "the record" is dependent on institutions and can never be truly objective, which is frankly uncontroversial if you actually examine it. The fact that not every research area is equally given grant funding is a trivial example and the fact that grant funding can be biased proceeds from this but another example is how pharmacologists and medical researchers and neuroscientists and so on don't know what many illegal drugs do because they simply can't study them like they can legal drugs. There are more dose-response studies on whey protein than I could get through in a month of doing nothing else, and I can think of studies on supraphysiological dose-responses of testosterone — such as Bhasin 2001 — that can be named with my fingers. (Which is to say nothing of trenbolone, the fitness industry's favorite badboy steroid or The Thing That Actually Does What People Think Testosterone Does. If you can find me a study that gives a dose-response relationship for trenbolone to muscle growth in normal healthy young men a la Bhasin 2001 I will light a cigar and burn one into my skin for each study you find. The fact that there are none speaks to how institutions epistemically gatekeep, which is a postmodern contention.)

But the solutions to this problem include among other things hierarchies of evidence (e.g. https://www.instagram.com/p/CZ2hidwhHAA/), not "science is irrevocably biased and so can't be trusted" or "meaning is subjective" or "it's all just vibes." That is more postmodernist than the real postmodernists, and for the dumbest reason at that: you've surrendered the effort to be less wrong in favor of agreeability, which is about your social identity; your clout; your sense of comfort. That's all it is.

And rationalists tend to discourage the sort of callout that entails something like "you know what you're doing", because they are on Team Never Admit Things where my motivations are a lie to me and I have no idea what my internal monologue is. But you do, and you do know what you're doing. Many of you are in fact doing a very dishonest thing, by advancing these norms, because these norms are bad. They are going to contribute to more people lying and spreading rumors. (Which they already have, just so we're clear.)

This sort of thing enables gossip and dishonesty and deceit. It's a function of your naivete that you think it will not do that. It's a noxious class bias that most of you think that this is reasonable at all, when in fact this is centered on a libertarian-leaning millennial conception of social reality. To be clear: zoomers don't think this way. The political future doesn't think this way. This is an oddity of millennial, libertarian leaning, tech-adjacent thought.

But many of you are influential and it would be to our benefit for you to understand this; to understand that what you're doing is actually harmful, not just wrong. And if I allow this to go on unresponded then you're going to think this is peachy and walk around unencumbered by any doubt. You might not agree with me, but I ought to at least be a gadfly in your head that reduces your confidence in the virtues of pseudonymity and the idea that moving to a city for people you've known for two days is just great.

(Which is fucking insane; you should not be considering moving to Austin after merely meeting people for two days. That is psychotic and if not culty it's at least indicative of personality disorder. Get your shit together; you need to make real friends, not just friends with a subculture. As in, if you think the people you know after this event are your friends *for real* you're friends with a subculture, you're not friends with friends. I have had friends who I've been friends with nominally for years IRL who were not real friends. You are friends for real when you know who someone is in multiple IRL contexts. Vibecamp is by definition one context.)

My greater purpose in ridiculing you and mocking you was to get you to read this and understand that what you're doing is wrong and that this is actually much more important than the mockery outlaid in my album. So in that sense, I suppose the comparisons to the Unabomber were not entirely unfounded in the sense that I'm a G-rated version of a terrorist, except an emotional one who causes drama to get you to read something that's much more important. (And I promise that my emotional terrorism stops at simple longform. This does not and won't ever extend to actual violence because, once again and for emphasis, none of you are Worth It and won't ever be.)

This is the extent of my declaration and most of you should know better. But my nickname for a hot minute has been South Texas Diogenes and in some contexts still is, so I suppose it's antidotal to shit on the ground, pee on you and hold a featherless chicken in your face to remind you that this is not a person — as it were.

- Alfred
(contact: http://simp.ly/p/Nm3pD7)