And Then There Were None

The 4 or 5 person Dungeons & Dragons party (with a dungeon master) gives way to the classic arcade with its heated duels and oneupsmanship; the arcade gives way to the flickering console in the bedroom with one playing Final Fantasy VII—alone. The increased graphical realism, the more ergonomic controllers, the introduction of genuinely challenging AI techniques… Trend after trend was rendering a human opponent unnecessary. And gamer after gamer was now playing alone.

Perhaps, the critic says, the rise of the Internet has ameliorated that distressing trend—the trends favored no connectivity at first, but then there was finally enough surplus computing power and bandwidth for massive connectivity to become the order of the day.

It is much more satisfactory and social to play MMORPGs on your PC than single-player RPGS, much more satisfactory to kill human players in Halo matches than alien AIs. The machines finally connect humans to humans, not human to machine. We’re forced to learn some basic social skills, to maintain some connections. We’re no longer retreating into our little cocoons, interacting with no humans.

Welcome to the N.H.K.!

But, the critic continues, things still are not well. We are still alienated from one another. The rise of the connected machines still facilitates withdrawal and isolation. It presents the specter of the hikikomori—the person who ceases to exist in the physical realm as much as possible. It is a Japanese term, of course. They are 5 years further in our future than we are (or perhaps one should say, were?). Gibson writes, back in 2001_25ya (see also his “Shiny Balls of Mud” short essay):

The Japanese seem to the rest of us to live several measurable clicks down the time line. The Japanese are the ultimate Early Adopters, and the sort of fiction I write behooves me to pay serious heed to that. If you believe, as I do, that all cultural change is essentially technologically driven, you pay attention to the Japanese. They’ve been doing it for more than a century now, and they really do have a head start on the rest of us, if only in terms of what we used to call ‘future shock’ (but which is now simply the one constant in all our lives).

Gibson also discusses the ‘Mobile Girl’ and text messaging; that culture began really showing up in America around 2005¹—Sidekicks, Twitter etc. You can do anything with a cellphone: order food, do your job, read & write novels, maintain a lively ‘social’ life, engage in social status envy (‘She has a smaller phone, and a larger collection of collectibles on her cellphone strap! OMG!’)… Which is just another way of saying ‘You can do anything without seeing people, just by writing digital messages’. (And this in a country with one of the most undigitizable writing systems in existence!² Languages are not created equal³.)

The hikikomori withdraws from all personal contact. The hikikomori does not hang out at the local pub, swilling down the brewskis as everyone cheers on the home team. The hikikomori is not gossiping at the rotary club nor with the Lions or mummers or Veterans or Knights. hikikomoris do none of that. They aren’t working, they aren’t hanging out with friends.

So what are they doing with their 16 waking hours a day?

Opting Out

They’re not preoccupied with our culture—they’re participating in their own subculture. It’s the natural progression of the otaku. They are fighting on Azeroth, or fiercely pursuing their doujinshi ‘career’, or… There are many subcultures linked and united by the Internet, for good and ill. For every charitable or benevolent subculture (eg. free software) there is one of mixed benefits (World of Warcraft), and one outright harmful (ex. fans of eating disorders, child pornography).

The point the critic wants to make is that life is short and a zero-sum game. You lose a third of the day to sleep, another third to making a living, and now you’ve little left. To be really productive, you can’t divide your energies across multiple cultures—you can’t be truly successful in mainstream culture, and at the same time be able to devote enough effort in the field of, say, mechanical models, to be called an Otaking. A straddler takes onto his head the overhead of learning and participating in both, and receives no benefits (he will suffer socially in the esteem of the ‘normals’, and will be able to achieve little in his ‘hobby’ due to lack of time and a desire to not go overboard).⁵

The otaku & hikikomori recognizes this dilemma and he chooses—to reject normal life! He rejects life in the larger culture for his subculture⁶. It’s a simple matter of comparative advantage; it’s easier to be a big fish in a small pond than in a large one.⁷

The Bigger Screen

As ever more opt out, the larger culture is damaged.⁸ The culture begins to fragment back into pieces. The disconnect can be profound; an American anime geek has more in common with a Japanese anime geek (who is of a different ethnicity, a different culture, a different religion, a different language…) than he does with an American involved in the evangelical Christian subculture. There is essentially no common ground—our 2 countrymen probably can’t even agree on objective matters like governance or evolution!

With enough of these gaps, where is ‘American’ or ‘French’ culture? Such cultural identities take centuries to coalesce—France did not speak French until the 1900s (as The Discovery of France recounts), and Han China is still digesting & assimilating its many minorities & outlying regions. America, of course, had it easy in starting with a small founder population which could just exterminate the natives.

The national identity fragments under the assault of burgeoning subcultures. At last, the critic beholds the natural endpoint of this process: the long nightmare of nationalism falls like a weight from the minds of the living, as the nation becomes some lines on a map, some laws you follow. No one particularly cares. The geek thinks, ‘Meh: here, Canada, London, Japan, Singapore—as long as FedEx can reach me and there’s a good Internet connection, what’s the difference?’ (Nor are the technically-inclined alone in this.⁹)

You can test this yourself. Tell yourself —‘The country I live in now is the best country in the world for people like me; I would be terribly unhappy if I was exiled.’ If your mental reply goes something like, ‘Why, what’s so special about the USA? It’s not particularly economically or politically free, it’s not the only civilized English-speaking country, it’s not the wealthiest¹⁰…’, then you are headed down the path of opting out.

This is how the paradox works: the Internet breaks the larger culture by letting members flee to smaller subcultures. And the critics think this is bad. They like the broader culture¹¹, they agree with Émile Durkheim about atomization and point to examples like South Korea, and deep down, furries and latex fetishists really bother them. They just plain don’t like those deviants.

Monoculture

One can’t opt out of culture. “There is no view from nowhere.” To a great extent, we are our cultural artifacts—our possessions, our complexes of memes, our habits and objects of disgust are all cultural. You are always part of a culture.

Suppose there were only 1 worldwide culture, with no subcultures. The overriding obsession of this culture will be… let’s make it ‘money’. People are absolutely obsessed with money—how it is made, acquired, degraded, etc. More importantly, status is defined just by how much you have earned in your life; in practice, tie-breakers include how fast you made it, what circumstances you made it in (everyone admires a person who became a billionaire in a depression more than a good-times billionaire, in the same way we admire the novelist in the freezing garret more than the comfortable academic), and so on.

This isn’t too absurd a scenario: subjects feed on themselves and develop details and complexity as effort is invested in them. Money could well absorb the collective efforts of 7 billion people—already many people act just this way.

But what effect does this have on people? I can tell you: the average person is going to be miserable. If everyone genuinely buys into this culture, then they have to be. Their talents at piano playing, or cooking, or programming, or any form of artistry or scholarly pursuit are denigrated and count for naught. The world has become too big—it did not use to be so big, people so powerless¹³ of what is going on:

“Society is composed of persons who cannot design, build, repair, or even operate most of the devices upon which their lives depend…In the complexity of this world people are confronted with extraordinary events and functions that are literally unintelligible to them. They are unable to give an adequate explanation of man-made phenomena in their immediate experience. They are unable to form a coherent, rational picture of the whole.

Under the circumstances, all persons do, and indeed must, accept a great number of things on faith…Their way of understanding is basically religious, rather than scientific; only a small portion of one’s everyday experience in the technological society can be made scientific…The plight of members of the technological society can be compared to that of a newborn child. Much of the data that enters its sense does not form coherent wholes. There are many things the child cannot understand or, after it has learned to speak, cannot successfully explain to anyone…Citizens of the modern age in this respect are less fortunate than children. They never escape a fundamental bewilderment in the face of the complex world that their senses report. They are not able to organize all or even very much of this into sensible wholes….”¹⁴

You can’t make a mark on it unless there are almost as many ways to make marks as there are persons.¹⁵

To put it another way: women suffer enough from comparing themselves to media images. If you want a vision of this future, imagine everyone being an anorexic teenager who hates her body—forever. In the contemporary First World, people die from starvation, not of food, but pride.

We all value social esteem. We need to know somebody thinks well of us. We’re tribal monkeys; ostracism means death.

Jaron Lanier: “I’d like to hypothesize one civilizing force, which is the perception of multiple overlapping hierarchies of status. I’ve observed this to be helpful in work dealing with rehabilitating gang members in Oakland. When there are multiple overlapping hierarchies of status there is more of a chance of people not fighting their superior within the status chain. And the more severe the imposition of the single hierarchy in people’s lives, the more likely they are to engage in conflict with one another. Part of America’s success is the confusion factor of understanding how to assess somebody’s status.”

Steven Pinker: “That’s a profound observation. There are studies showing that violence is more common when people are confined to one pecking order, and all of their social worth depends on where they are in that hierarchy, whereas if they belong to multiple overlapping groups, they can always seek affirmations of worth elsewhere. For example, if I do something stupid when I’m driving, and someone gives me the finger and calls me an asshole, it’s not the end of the world: I think to myself, I’m a tenured professor at Harvard. On the other hand, if status among men in the street was my only source of worth in life, I might have road rage and pull out a gun. Modernity comprises a lot of things, and it’s hard to tease them apart. But I suspect that when you’re not confined to a village or a clan, and you can seek your fortunes in a wide world, that is a pacifying force for exactly that reason.”¹⁶

Think of the people you know. How many of them can ‘compete’ on purely financial grounds? How many can compare to the chimps at the top of the financial heap without feeling like an utter failure, a miserable loser? Not many. I can’t think of anyone I know who wouldn’t be at least a little unhappy. Some of them are pretty well off, but it’s awfully hard to compare with billionaires in their department. There’s no way to prove that this version of subcultures is the right one (perhaps fragmenting the culture fragments the possible status), but when I look at simple models, this version seems plausible to me¹⁷ and to explain some deep trends like monogamy¹⁸.

Subcultures Set You Free

Having a society in which an artist can mingle as social equals with the billionaire and admit the Nobel scientists and the philanthropist is fundamental to our mental health! If I’m a programmer, I don’t need to be competing with 7 billion people, and the few hundred billionaires, for self-esteem. I can just consider the computing community. Better yet, I might only have to consider the functional programming community, or perhaps just the Haskell programming community. Or to take another example: if I decide to commit to the English Wikipedia subculture, as it were, instead of American culture, I am no longer mentally dealing with 300 million competitors and threats; I am dealing with just a few thousand.¹⁹

It is a more manageable tribe. It’s closer to the Dunbar number, which still applies online²⁰. Even if I’m on the bottom of the Wikipedia heap, that’s fine. As long as I know where I am! I don’t have to be a rich elite to be happy; a master craftsman is content²¹, and “a cat may look at a king”.

Leaving a culture, and joining a subculture, is a way for the monkey mind to cope with the modern world.

Growing Up

I have a theory about why so few older people are hikikomoris or otaku.

I think that they have succumbed to learned helplessness: they’ve suffered throughout their entire life the fear²² & stress of walking down a crowded street and having no idea who all these people are, what threat they are²³, or how they relate to you, and their minds have been warped to the point that it no longer bothers them, they’ve simply adapted to the mental burden²⁴. (As one would expect, young people are more exhausted by groups²⁵.) The remaining mental dislocation is handled by exactly those small-scale social organizations whose passing Putnam bemoans in Bowling Alone. (This solution is as viable as it ever was. But the young have other options, and are no longer forced into this ancient conformity.)

Stress is an important issue. You can ask the primatologists, they’ll tell you. Social stress shortens lives. The monkeys on the bottom of the heap don’t live as long as they should; the hormones like cortisol damage the body²⁶. The ape at the top of the heap may not live particularly long either, but at least he can see his death coming. Madness is not associated with the countryside; it is with the city²⁷, perhaps due to stress or low-level infections²⁸.

Special, like Everyone Else

Chronic stress is particularly toxic. If the stress is caused by an unclear and extremely low place in the social order, then modern man will constantly suffer it, and his health will be impaired by it.

When one considers this, it’s clear that seceding from the culture at large can have benefits that the larger culture can never deliver. A larger culture can never reduce the number of people I need to know about to a few hundred or thousand; it can never give me an intuitive place in the scheme of things. 7 billion, or even 300 million, is just too large.

But a subculture can deliver that. A subculture can know my name, and pat me on the back for an achievement that to a larger culture is incomprehensible at best and trivial or objectionable at worst. A subculture can remove that social stress.

And if we were to take it even further? If we chose a subculture that was online, and we never went outside? Then all the stress would be gone; if one doesn’t walk down the street, one isn’t bothered by strangers in such close proximity.

“A Winner Is You”

To judge by many people’s revealed preferences, work is what is most important to them, yet the common saying goes that on one’s deathbed, no one wishes they’d spent more weekends in the office; is Jiro Dreams of Sushi admirable, or horrible? Particularly the treatment of Jiro’s two sons and his minimal relationship with his own wife gives one pause for thought. Speaking of Jiro, it’s worth noting that the protagonist of world-famous director Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises is also named Jiro, and speaking of Miyazaki, there are some interesting remarks by his son Goro Miyazaki³⁰:

Hayao Miyazaki, to me, is “Zero Marks as a Father, Full Marks as a Director”. My father was almost never at home. That’s why for me, when I was a child, my mother had to fill the place of my father. My father came home every day in the middle of the night, after I had already gone to sleep. He was always very conscientious in this regard—apparently, no matter how late it was, he always made sure that he came home. But almost every Saturday and Sunday he was still at work regardless. That’s why, from my earliest awareness to the present day, I hardly ever had the chance to talk to him. He always came back after I was asleep, and when I left for school at 8 o’clock he was still asleep. That’s why, when I was in elementary school, before going to school I often used to go and look in the bedroom to see if my father was there or not. My father threw himself completely into his work. Not only did he not look after the children, he never did a single bit of housework. So my mother did all of that. My mother was also an animator, but when my younger brother was born, just before I started going to elementary school, my father changed workplaces, and his work got even busier than before. So the result was, that in order to bring up the children, my mother had no choice but to give up being an animator.

For a great artist, one could perhaps justify the costs. But for other people…?

A phenomenon in various fields is Lotka’s law, which is an exponential power law for number of publications per authors: most publish few, but a few publish many. Simonton decades later would formulate the ‘equal-odds rule’ which says that in general, no scientist has a higher batting average than others do; the outsized differences in performance stem from simply the greats publishing a great deal. (One thinks of Gauss’s unpublished notebooks, revealed to contain many mathematical discoveries found by later mathematicians, when the mathematical historians finally went through them all, or of the gems buried in the notes of the American logician Charles Sanders Peirce.) Hence, Lotka’s law extends to the actual discoveries: most make a few, but a few make many more than they should. Charles Murray remarks in Human Accomplishment on the graphs of ‘great’ artists or scientists (as measured by how many different textbooks or encyclopedias thought they were important enough to mention) that they exhibit—no matter how you try to recalculate or adjust them—an extraordinary imbalance with many minor figures and just a few universal figures, as Lotka’s law predicts; this is odd, since the distribution looks nothing like a bell curve or “normal distribution” as one would predict if greatness were based only on IQ or only on hard-workingness or only on wealth. Some of this is network or Matthew effects, but the simplest explanation is that greatness requires multiple traits: one must be intelligent and hard-working and not desperately poor and… Many of which are normal distributions or similar, and when the requirements multiply out, what is left is a fast-shrinking distribution—like Lotka’s law.

One of the requirements for great work in any field is that one must be motivated—one must think one’s work or the field vitally important. It’s hard to become a chess grandmaster if one has contempt for devoting one’s life to studying the minutia of an arbitrary set of rules whose mastery has no utility to anything else whatsoever. I believe this may lead to a paradox of expertise, a winner’s curse: those most likely to have achieved world-class mastery of a topic are systematically the most likely to be self-deluding or badly mistaken about its value. The “grandmasters” of many fields claim their field is uniquely important, which of course cannot be true in general, or uniquely satisfying to them, which seems improbable as any person can have sampled but few of life’s wares. Dinosaur Comics, on the topic of world-class violinists starting in very early youth, asks “What are the odds a 6-year-old would know what a 30-year-old wants to do?”

One sees this in chess: various chess figures extol its applicability to finance, with no evidence; or claim it is applicable to politics, despite the analogy being tenuous at best and chess inferior to games like Go, regardless; or place their hopes in chess training of children transferring to faculties like IQ, despite all such attempts at “far transfer”—even far more plausible ones like early enrichment or (most) nutritional supplements or dual n-back—failing for the last 60 years and the cited chess studies being either methodologically suspect or contradictory. Is chess really something to spend one’s life on? World chess champion Magnus Carlsen said something interesting in early 2010:

Carlsen: “I have no idea [what my IQ is]. I wouldn’t want to know it anyway. It might turn out to be a nasty surprise.”

SPIEGEL: “Why? You are 19 years old and ranked the number one chess player in the world. You must be incredibly clever.”

Carlsen: “And that’s precisely what would be terrible. Of course it is important for a chess player to be able to concentrate well, but being too intelligent can also be a burden. It can get in your way. I am convinced that the reason the Englishman John Nunn never became world champion is that he is too clever for that…At the age of 15, Nunn started studying mathematics in Oxford; he was the youngest student in the last 500 years, and at 23 he did a PhD in algebraic topology. He has so incredibly much in his head. Simply too much. His enormous powers of understanding and his constant thirst for knowledge distracted him from chess.”

SPIEGEL: “Things are different in your case?”

Carlsen: “Right. I am a totally normal guy. My father is considerably more intelligent than I am.”

Can we exempt subcultures from this line of thought? Are those who become “Otakings” kings only of folly? This is the curse of knowledge: those who know, do not do—and those who do not know, do.