Online So Much, Being Human is Impossible.
The thing about a forum for a "debatebro" streamer is that everything kind of leaks out from the format.
There are no more people in front of you, only interlocutors.
It took 20 minutes to agree with someone because any slight ambiguity in language was viewed as an attempt to downplay, to sidestep, to talk down the issue. Why?
They are not prepared for a human being. They are prepared for a debate.
I wonder how much of this is just what happens when online debate culture is your main litmus for social interaction. I see people on these servers get lauded for being employed and going outside. It's a little staggering how low the bar is. Of course, it isn't when I zoom out. Unemployment rates are sky high, so is social isolation, and nothing can drive you to the suffering of a "debate" discord quite like a combination of the two.
Unfortunately, this means that people being deliberately obtuse becomes the norm to you. Everyone in a server like this has their own ideological goals that have to be considered before you ever engage. Again, the people in front of you are not to be regarded as people, but interlocutors, a game you play to mimic a conversation, without having to engage in social understanding. From this framework, we can see how we get here, any attempt to agree must be an attempt to negotiate a draw in the debate, to manufacture the best outcome from a losing position. It's a little sad honestly.
I pitched my football leftism bit to them a while back. I think in general I have been proven right, progressive politicians like Burnham and Mamdani have been using sports regularly to disavow corporatisation, and we've even seen another attempt at commodifying the beautiful game rejected by the big leagues. The centrepiece of my argument though, is that football is a means to go outside and I was amazed to find out that they were surprised I did this for the World Cup. I pitched football, and games in general, as a means of melting down social barriers, and making it as easy as possible to form new relationships with those around you. I fear they may be uninterested in such a concept.
The other thing is that the debate focused mindset often leads to the world becoming a game of spreadsheets, definitions, facts and figures. As you abandon stories it loses the humanity that defines it. You begin to bicker over death tolls instead of caring about the dead. You begin to LARP as international lawyers whilst children are amputated without anesthetic. The suffering of others becomes part of your toolbox, evidence for a future argument. The statements used to justify that suffering also become a part of that toolbox. At no point are the victims considered. To take this perspective is anti-human, the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic.
At one point in a discussion of a previous article, I said that I intuited someone's intent behind a set of actions. Intent is an impossible and slippery thing to pin down, and unless someone simply tells you everything they are thinking, it often requires a level of natural human intuition. The kind of thing that people do when they see other people. I was met with:
"FEEELINGGSSS"
This is an inherently detached and inhuman thing to say when we are discussing how to feel about another person. The absurd suggestion that all judgements must be made to a courtroom of LARPers with carefully defined evidence and hypothesis is effectively everything wrong with this line of thinking. It rejects the emotionality of the human experience with an enthusiastic fervour to make fun of anyone daring to think otherwise.
The thing that separates a true debatebro from someone engaged in debate as a means of intellectual stimulation is the failure to recognise that debates are definitionally polite and low stakes. The very point is for academics to discuss the pros and cons of their work collectively, and then shake hands and implement what they have learned. The point of a debatebro, by contrast, is to argue about something extremely high stakes, in a very loud and angry way, and to conclude afterwards that evil has been defeated. Paradoxically, it is the debatebro who must care about feeling less, even if they are the ones shouting.
This kind of behaviour is conditioned within the realm of these online discord and reddit communities and I can tell you firsthand, it is completely insufferable to sit around this kind of person in real life. It's physically painful to watch a person so anti social attempt to exist in the real world. People wonder why I engage, and the answer is usually that I have too much free time (I'm a TA with 6 weeks off right now) or some mental health issue and it becomes my vice. Indeed, at one point I too was like this, I understand the need to feel like you want to escape emotion whilst also needing an outlet for it. The desire to be above what you are feeling, and the reality of just needing a conduit for that frustration.
The problem is that this is not a way out, it's a spiral. One that drags you into one unsatisfying fight after another, away from helping other people and towards a sense of being "right". Nothing else matters as long as I win this next argument. As long as I hate this loser in front of me.
I am much more personable and outgoing than I was just a few years ago and that's because I used my online connections to tether myself to an outside world. Fighting games are uniquely good at this, being an online community with a very large focus on offline cultural events, but that is a topic for another article. I broke out of the spiral that I was confined in, and started to form more real life relationships with new people. I started volunteering and working for a job and causes that I'm passionate about, I started helping people, and from that seed, humanity blossomed.