Abstract people are dividers. From the start in the 80s, the web divided us into two teams. On every subject, religion, politics, cars, electronics, software, sex…. every forum quickly divided into Team A and Team B. If you weren’t on either team you were shunned.
Non-abstract people who live in a world of physical things and real human contact are much less teamy.
Substack has found a new way to form teams. It started putting a teensy little polygon next to the names of people who are paying for subscriptions. Most have four sides. It looks like an old-fashioned faucet handle to me, but others see it as a flower.
I like to pay for value as a form of rebellion against the “free” web. I want to be a customer, not a product. So my faucet/flower has 7 petals, which is a bit unusual.
Now the non-payers and some payers are predictably turning the teensy flowers into a new dividing line. Also predictably, they’re hating the flowered folks, not the management who planted the flowers.
Normal businesses don’t drive out paying customers. Substack is owned by the Tech Tyrant product-makers, so they’re NOT a normal business. Marc Andreessen is one of the major shareholders. Paying customers are unwanted. Only pure products are allowed.
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Later: Reminds me of a trendy but cruel experiment done by civics teachers in the 60s. The teacher would “randomly” pick half of the class and require them to wear little symbols while they were in class. The non-flowereds would automatically start discriminating against the flowereds. Of course the symbols were meant to represent a certain six-petaled flower that was planted by Team B in Country B. The experiment was supposed to persuade us that we live in wonderful free Country A, where our “constitutional rights” always protect us from Team B, and where we never never never divide our people by symbols.
The experiment would be banned by modern ethics boards. Those boards go too far, banning perfectly benign studies, but this one deserves to be banned. It could cause genuine harm.
Polistra's Mill 