On Sneer Culture
The plus side is that sneering can be usefully used as a barometer to which memeplexes are currently in power. Who Sneers, Rules, no matter what persecution narratives they’re selling.
This is either false or the word ‘sneering’ is now being used in a different way than I originally meant. The Dark Lord Potter form is clear sneer culture: they consider themselves the sophisticated connoisseurs of edgy dark adult Harry Potter fanfiction and get together to sneer at slashfic (or HPMOR). They are not the dominant memeplex in Harry Potter fanfiction and are little noticed outside their own tiny Internet forum. Sneering doesn’t go with power, period.
It goes with self-perceived power and a belief that you are a successful bully getting in hits on the target, but it doesn’t go with actual power and it is found just as much in marginalized outsider groups as in mainstream journalists.
Going back to a discussion this old is tomb-robbing by Tumblr standards…but nonetheless I think it’s worth unpacking a bit, because there’s a useful insight to be dredged up here.
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Power exists at all scales. Anyone can have a place of power, and places-of-power can be arbitrarily tiny. The fact that your notional domain is the size of a postage stamp doesn’t make it any less real, and doesn’t (much) reduce your ability to impose consequences within that space.
It’s a little silly to equate sneering with power in any kind of absolute global sense. Sneering is the favorite pastime of the wretched of the earth, and always has been. Imagine the outcast leper clique of five high school boys, the lowest of the low on their school’s social totem pole, the poor greasy-haired acne-scarred souls who are the favored victims of every bully. What do you think they talk about, when they get together in their basement lair? In large part, they talk about how stupid and shallow the popular kids are. They talk about their dripping contempt for their abusers. And of course this is exactly, exactly, the dynamic that’s going on with the Dark Lord Potter people.
(You can go even smaller-scale than that, and talk about the terrifying dictatorial power that one person can often wield over his family, even if in any broader sense he is a totally powerless peon. There are also, of course, parallels to be drawn with some of the Officially-Recognized Marginal Oppressed Cultures.)
But…why is it that these outcast leper kids can get away with sneering at their social betters? Why doesn’t the high school hierarchy crack down? Because, within the basement, they’re in power. It’s their space, and it operates by their rules. Within it, they’re the popular kids, in the sense that they’re the ones with the ability to impose social consequences. If any outsider comes into that space, he’s going to have to follow their rules and adhere to their party line…or else he risks mockery and scorn and abuse and shunning, in exactly the way that the clique kids themselves run that risk in the “wider” world of high school.
On a local level, it’s absolutely true: Who Sneers, Rules. You can’t successfully sneer up. Your attempt to display disdain towards your betters will not harm them socially [1], because they have enough support to withstand the blow, and the retaliation will be tenfold. Most people have enough native social sense that they won’t even try. If you find that you can get away with sneering at the mighty ones, and it has the social effect you want, that’s a pretty good sign that power dynamics are realigning and that the mighty ones aren’t going to be so mighty for long.
Why does this matter? It matters because local power matters, and watching the sneer patterns is a good way to learn where local power lies in a given community.
In any given society or sub-society, no matter how small it is, someone’s going to be at the top of the social pyramid. That’s a form of authority, whether or not you want it to be, and as such it comes hand-in-hand with responsibility. Even if you’re a miserable wretched peon despised by the whole world, you can still be a bully, because in your place of power you can still possess the ability to hurt people terribly. So…be careful not to do that. And if you want to learn whether your community is ruled by bullies, then watch where the sneering comes from, and evaluate how cruelly-weaponized it is, and draw the appropriate conclusions.
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[1] Which doesn’t mean that you won’t be able to wound them on a personal, emotional level. Hi there, @savetheprincessorditrying!
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Side Topic A: What determines who holds the power within a given space? It’s a perception game, largely. You have power if everyone thinks you have power. Those who perceive you as powerful will back up your decisions and pronouncements, which is the substance of power-in-fact. If you enter a space and try to disrupt the local perceptions-of-power, via the-emperor-has-no-clothes-ing or self-aggrandizement or any such thing, then it’s functionally an attempted coup. In spaces where there are multiple discernible subgroups or factions, this dynamic usually collapses into “the biggest faction has the power” – if you assume that the members of any given faction are mutually supportive in most cases, then the members of the big faction will reliably get the most support.
Side Topic B: Does this mean that absolute global power hierarchies don’t matter within someone’s local rinky-dink social domain? Of course not. In particular, if you have the sort of power that matters in a large-scale way, you can often use that as a weapon or a shield in a small-scale setting. “I know that I’m just a contemptible outsider by your standards, but…if you do what I want, I’ll help you out in the outside world, by using my power to help you do things that you couldn’t do on your own. And if you make things hard for me, I’ll make your life in the outside world a living hell. In fact, maybe I’ll have my outside-world buddies invade your cute little bubble here, and destroy it completely!” It’s like being a Roman citizen in a barbarian court. This is why Privileged People are often able to thrive, and rise high, even in settings that are theoretically hostile to them.
…but Internet communities, especially anonymous ones, are pretty good at subverting this dynamic. On the Internet, it’s hard for outsiders to use either carrots or sticks on you, even if in absolute terms they’re very powerful indeed.