Respect Privacy for Real
- Melting the Mental Prisons
- Texting
- Privacy
- Abuse of Trust
- What Happened to Me
- Solutions to Personal Attacks
- Reaction to Abuse of Trust
- What I Learned
- That’s it
It’s mostly a personal post. Might be relevant to those who are also into the challenge of finding deep, meaningful, and warm friendships like I do.
Melting the Mental Prisons
Around 10 years ago I told myself something like this:
(kind relaxing voice) Fuck that. Just fuck that.
I don’t want to be neurotic about how I’m interpreted when it comes to building friendships or romantic relationships.
I no longer care whether people interpret partial information about me and prematurely jump to oversimplified conclusions or not.
I challenge myself to do my best to be able to honestly and fearlessly talk in the appropriate contexts without masking my weaknesses.
My buddies’ reactions are a test of their maturity, my maturity, and my compatibility with them. Period.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the same thing as not having any boundaries at all.
I do my best, but I’m far from perfectly following this stoic-like approach. And I don’t recommend it to most people. It’s a hard emotional labor; perhaps it would take me decades of therapy to start doing it properly.
Yeah, it feels good to be actually authentic in communication early. Feels like a superpower. And with enough luck, it’s possible to quickly find somebody important. Somebody actually fulfilling and nonjudgmental about you. But this is in exchange for a high probability of getting smashed right into your heart instead.
Texting
I especially can’t recommend this approach for texting. Really, I wish you could stay away from that urge; chances are you don’t understand what you are signing up for. So many factors of running into unnecessary drama out of the blue while holding basic, non-conflicting worldviews together.
The risk of misunderstanding is incredibly high while texting. There’s no way to perceive real emotions directly from your buddy in texting compared to real life and video calls. An imagined/hallucinated tone of what was said may dramatically affect the interpretation of your intention on the other side. Words we use may have too many meanings for a given context. Tech reliability issues add additional burden.
Make a typo and you may appear evil to them. Make a compliment about a particular idea of some culty guy, and chances are you will be associated with all their discourse totally.
In my experience, most people are not capable enough to check their hallucinations about me before expressing passive or direct aggression towards me. They are not evil in any way. Just incapable.
Privacy
Surprised that some people don’t read DMs here?
Some people are even surprised that I don’t make voice messages. Besides dozens of reasons, whatever private message I make is addressed to a particular person. I don’t want to end up neurotically predicting whether some unexpected people from a public space will be listening to it too.
Abuse of Trust
As I believe privacy is one of the core cultural values here at Nostr, I want to kindly warn you, nostrich. Other nostrich(es) you trust might actually brutally violate your privacy already, probably without even acknowledging it. And I’m not talking about something like DM relays your buddy may set in their profile; Nostr DMs are still WIP.
Unnecessary exposure of your sensitive, privately shared facts about you, without your permission, violates your privacy dramatically, nostrich. It’s more than just a violation of privacy. This abuses your trust.
Exceptions
I said unnecessary exposure. Is there something necessary that would be ethical to expose without permission? It’s less likely you will run into such a scenario. It’s hard to prove that somebody is actually acting out of some enormously malicious intent towards society.
Proof that somebody’s actually prepared for a school shooting would work. Proof that some greedy company is doing intolerably unethical things—probably would work.
But if it’s something purely ideological, just some abstract idea disagreement—this is obviously way more confusing. It may take decades to ensure that somebody actually has a potential for enormous damage to society and runs an actual damaging cult based on that idea, for instance, rather than harmlessly holding this as an immature WIP belief. I’m not proposing to equalize random ideas though; we’re not in a postmodern epoch.
If one believes there’s a necessity to expose something of that kind, it’s definitely worth one’s time researching the full context really well, because it’s also a good chance to lose one’s reputation by exposing a single sloppy “fact”.
What Happened to Me
Just to make it less abstract, I’m talking about personal vulnerabilities in particular, private life stuff that people gradually disclose to each other in friendships and romances, which is easy to misinterpret and cause hurt. Weaknesses, fetishes, beliefs, health conditions, etc. Stuff that’s not supposed to be discussed in public unless one’s allowed it. It’s hard to make a proper formal definition for something fundamentally individualistic, but I hope you got it.
Let’s get back to the point: unnecessary exposure of that kind of stuff without my permission violates my privacy dramatically.
Sounds like something obvious? Yet, this happened to me here at Nostr already.
This was rude in several ways, but most importantly:
- this included the passive-aggressive use of my personal weakness against me in a public thread
- this is done by another nostrich, whom I trusted to some degree and who paradoxically
seemed to value, okay, values privacy too.
Was my personal vulnerability necessary to use publicly against me? In a public thread, which was initially a neutral tech-related discussion?
I believe they had much better arguments. But it’s too late.
The Tone
It all started with an unwelcoming tone.
I may not participate in a discussion if I suspect passive aggression towards any side involved. That would not be a rational discussion in the first place, no matter how hard the aggressor may believe it is and which rational arguments on discussion they hold.
If I still believe it’s important to participate—I will definitely respond to the tone. And this feels weird to do; I’m far from perfect in it.
Obviously, my intention is not to escalate this. My intention is to elevate the discussion to a polite spectrum where both of us can properly focus on the actual topic of discussion. The idea itself should be criticized, not the people that discuss it.
But… The next thing that happened is their response directly involved at least one of the two lowest levels of Graham’s hierarchy of disagreement. Damn. We are cooked.
I really, really hope you never, ever use these two lowest levels in the tech-related discussions, nostrich. This is toxic. It’s the end of the debate.
I would not recommend working with anyone who thinks that it’s a good idea to speak like that. We’re not a bunch of impulsive, angry politicians here. We’re trying to fix what they’ve done with this “approach”.
It’s acceptable to make fun of things that are outside participants and their agendas. Here at Nostr, I might use a classic ironic postmodern deconstruction if I talk about politics, for instance. Because I don’t expect that politicians read me at all. But I would never do such a deconstruction of a politicians’ agenda in a discussion with them if I had a chance to contact them—that would be a foolish way to lose this opportunity. Respecting a side of a discussion isn’t the same thing as agreeing with their agenda.
Solutions to Personal Attacks
It’s tricky but probably not that challenging to directly respond to the specific ad hominem I ran into. And possibly a fountain of other mess that would come later. If it happened offline. But in an online space it’s way more confusing.
Notice That They’ve Already Lost
Is this dispute/debate/whatever worth your resources at all? If you believe it’s not—stop.
Stop. Let them “win”. And notice that they actually won the fake debate that you didn’t agree to participate in in the first place.
They caused you unnecessary stress that distracted you from a real debate. This is not a fair constructive activity anymore; it’s a who can press whom now, psychologically. With bla-bla-bla back and forth in the background that imitates a real rational activity. Who has a “gun” is right now.
No matter how many valid rational arguments they have, this behavior makes them look like a fool that runs out of the best of them, to the point when they couldn’t find anything better than to switch to a direct personal attack.
Real Rational Debate
Those who really-really want to waste the rest of their energy are really good at debating publicly may go for an offline or streaming debate. With a chess clock and neutral moderator.
A good moderator is an active listener who is capable of reflecting the least distorted summarizations of each other’s positions in challenging moments.
This may actually work: it’s much harder to pervert one’s intention or idea when it’s discussed directly using voice.
Videos/Podcasts
Public vlog-based discussion could also work, but that’s much slower and will possibly generate even more drama. I’m talking from my experience of watching dozens of “Answer to: …” videos related to the nature of consciousness: you may very likely end up having a bunch of videos with even more distortions of both sides’ agendas. And I bet, in my particular case, that would be the most boring video playlist ever.
Cheatsheet to Bookmark
Especially if you’ve shared something too risky with this person—here’s what you may find important to learn about various kinds of abusive behavior, besides the one I shared here.
Reaction to Abuse of Trust
In my case I didn’t feel humiliated or angry. The first experience was confusion and some tension. But after acknowledging what’s happening—for the first time in my life, I experienced a weirdly relieving, vivid kind of Spanish shame, a cringe, while observing their risky, potentially self-harming activity.
It’s not malevolence. It’s the opposite: I’m empathetic to them; I’ve been overreactive in conflicts in my life too many times for too silly reasons—it doesn’t feel good at all. I wish them a happy life. And it’s not Stockholm syndrome either.
Hopefully, you’re not a victim of similar behavior already. But if you are and if you feel revengeful—damn, I’m with you, and I still wish you were at peace.
No need for revenge: I think, in general, abusive behavior is not harmless to the abuser themselves, regardless of whether they are aware of it or not. But it ain’t that easy to recall that from an affective state.
If it’s a systematic abuser, people will be gossiping behind their back anyway. And will be less likely to deal with them. This will keep accumulating, and perhaps culture will even smash the abuser at an unexpectedly greater magnitude than you were hurt at some point: other victims may take a chance to participate if somebody decides to reveal who the abuser was and what they’ve done to others.
What I Learned
I need to practice responding to tone. It’s important to clearly communicate that I’m actually interested in de-escalating the possible tension from the very beginning, not the opposite.
Mixing such a response with defense is too risky. The response to the tone should be a separate communication with sincere positive vibes. This communication can help to decide whether it’s okay to continue the actual discussion.
That’s it
Keep nostr weird Keep yourself cheered Don’t be ashamed Don’t be afraid.
Don’t fall into the cheap, abusive scenario spirals abusers invite you to participate.
Obviously don’t spread private (mis)information of those who trusted you. Even if they’ve done that to you already—at least notice that you may also be mistaken about them somewhere.
Respect your own values. Respect privacy for real.
