people model a “Hugbox” as something like… “a vending machine that dispenses near-infinite, extreme validation to an individual”
but that ignores the questions “where does the validation come from?” and “what makes it so extreme?”
Well, it doesn’t come from some ghostly force or abstract concept, it comes from the other flesh-and-blood members of the community, and it’s so extreme because the Individual’s preferences, their likes and dislikes, have become simultaneously exaggerated and perfectly aligned with the rest of the community.
A better, if less succinct, definition would be this:
“A Hugbox is a community that offers you a trade: reshape your personal preferences to be in perfect alignment with (and just as extreme as) our preferences, and in turn, that perfect alignment will in itself be a source of infinite validation for you, with the intensity of the validation significantly amplified by the extremeness of the preferences involved.”
“So what?” I hear you ask. “All you’ve done is re-derive the concept of the echo chamber.”
Well there’s two points I want to make:
1) Hugboxes aren’t nice. They’re actually incredibly cruel– they ransom their members self-esteem for conformity, and enforce that conformity mercilessly. Just ask anyone’s who’s written ~problematic~ fanfic. And far too often, criticisms of hugbox communities (especially from right-of-center sources) fall into the pattern of “They’re exactly as nice as they seem, and that’s bad,” which utterly misses the point on two accounts.
2) Hugboxes are factories that turn ordinary people into utility monsters. They have to, in order to fulfill their basic function. They can’t provide validation without conformity, and they can’t maintain conformity without enforcing it, and they can’t enforce it without giving the individual members a reason to enforce it. And in most cases, the reason is that they have been conditioned to feel pain and anger at the sight of preferences different from their own. Once again, just ask anyone who’s written ~problematic~ fanfic.
This second point is the more important one– because it means that hugboxing is utterly incompatible with competing access needs.
Hugboxes are full of people who have been conditioned to see the mere existence of preferences different from their own as an attack on them, people who will never understand that others may have needs radically different from their own.
Hey @balioc what’s a pithy term for the process in #2. “Turning yourself into a utility monster sensitive to symbolic actions”? There should be one.
If we’re going to take your phrasing seriously, then the word you want is “socialization.”
…I mean, that’s precisely what any human society does: it puts you through a regime of operant conditioning, teaching you to value or abhor symbols, attaching reward and punishment to triggers that are arbitrary outside the cultural framework of the society. The world is full of “utility monsters” who are super-sensitive to actions like “being given roses and hearing the words ‘I love you,’” or “walking across a stage in a stupid robe and hat and being given a diploma,” or whatever. Because we spend our whole lives being carefully taught that those symbols define goodness and badness, success and failure.
@raggedjackscarlet, of course, is talking about something a lot narrower than that.
I’m reading between the lines a bit, but if I understand correctly, he’s describing the process whereby people are taught to expect (and crave) ideological fealty. In one of his “hugboxes,” the universe is Good and Correct when-and-only-when people are agreeing with you…not because your view is necessarily all-important or even all-correct, not because it reflects some profound natural sympathy between your beliefs and theirs…but because agreement is the symbol of personal validation and disagreement is the symbol of personal attack. In a Not-Fearful World, a Basically-OK World, people will be falling all over themselves to demonstrate that they treat your opinions as sacred and that they don’t want to offend you. (This is why the Forced Apology is so highly valued, and why the hugboxes in question are generally happy to forgive acts of Problematic Sin so long as there is effusive sincere-sounding self-abnegating contrition.) If people are acting like they’re perfectly happy for you not to agree with them, that’s a form of ongoing threat, in the way that having shady-looking people hanging around outside your building at night is a form of ongoing threat.
This is honestly pretty much the thing that happens in societies of mutually-hostile tribes, as far as I can tell, except that the symbols of tribal pride/allegiance take discursive/ideological form.
So…”discursive tribalization?”