Robin:

Hello Agnes.

Agnes:

Hi Robin, and hi Katherine. You go by Katherine, is that correct? Yep. Okay. So, okay, so today we have Katherine to talk to us about, I don't know, many things. I'm not sure where the conversation's gonna go, but let me start by asking you a little bit about fandom. And I wanted to ask you about the essay that you wrote, like, lesbians who only have sex with men, or I can't remember the exact. Oh, yeah. So I was really interested in this idea of a shift away from the category that involves lived experience to a category that is connected to being a fan or being a member of some kind of affinity group. But I actually wanted to take a step backwards first. And so it seems to me that once upon a time, identity, categories of belonging were mostly geographic. So like in the ancient world, like it would be like your family or, you know, your deme, the like larger city structure part that like your neighborhood, maybe your city, right? And then later you can get country as a bigger, like kinship group is a word that I would use. And then something that seemed to start happening in the 20th century is a really strong move towards kinship groups that were non-geographic. And to some degree, some of them come earlier, like religion. is an example, right? Like Catholicism, you have to think of in some ways as non-geographic because it's just spread over such a large area. You know, gender is a non-geographic kinship group. Sexual orientation would be like the really salient one around like, you know, I don't know, 1970 to 1990 or something, becomes really salient as a non-geographic kinship group. So to me, that's one big shift. And then there's a second shift, from those sorts of non-geographic kinship groups to what you wanna talk about, fandom or, yeah, so anyway, that was just me giving a little bit of context and then I wanna hear more from you.

Katherine:

Sure. So is your question like, how does it work or what do I mean?

Agnes:

Well, so one of my questions is, you know, you describe fandom as in some sense not non-geographic, but it's more than that because we already had this shit. It's a separate And so what is the second kind, what is the basis of the second kind of, the second shift, the second shift away from geography, even further shift away from geography?

Katherine:

This is sort of an obnoxious answer to this. It's like an internal gravitation towards something. You like something, right? And identifying with it for a whole host of reasons. And one of those reasons might be no reason in particular. Like, I don't know why I like this pink sweater, I just kind of do. And I think maybe I would be able to find a reason if I really thought about it. But I think most people are in this zone of like, they don't really know what's drawing them to what they like. It's just a vibe. It's just a sense that they like it. And it might be aesthetic. Maybe there's some sort of deeper psychological reason. But it's not readily available. And I've noticed that this defines people's identities much more than experience, which I think would include geography. So something I noticed, which was really strange, In high school, a lot of people were, lots maybe stretched, but I knew more than one person who would be like, no, I'm Mexican, I'm Italian, I'm whatever. They didn't speak the language. They had never been to the target country. It was very often that they didn't have a parent or even a grandparent who was from that country. And the relationship was really tenuous. But what made them want this to be at the forefront of their identity is they had some sort of affinity towards it, right? They liked it for some reason. Whereas like, I had grown up thinking like, if I were to say that I'm Italian, like my mother's Italian, right? And if I were to say I'm Italian, it would, it's an experience of being Italian, right? And it would be the purpose of saying that would be to find other people with a similar experience. Maybe it's that they speak the language, or there's something cultural that we share, or I'm searching for some similar values. But what I started encountering in high school had nothing to do with any of that. It was just like, this is what I like, and I'm sharing something about my preferences, which are often pretty poorly defined.

Agnes:

Can I just ask a follow-up, and then you can ask for others? Sure. It seems like there's maybe a little more than liking or maybe the special flavor of liking in that you can like many different kinds of things. Like I might like certain foods, right? Where I just whimsically have certain preferences and I wouldn't feel like I need to justify them. I mean, it would be weird if I say I like a certain novel. It would be weird if I hadn't read it or something.

Katherine:

But I also think you see that. You see that quite a bit. And you see that politically often. You have a lot of people It happens on the left and the right. Being left-wing or right-wing might not reflect their values, and they may not know anything about the positions that they're claiming to hold. But there's something about the safety or even just an aesthetic preference about that identity.

Agnes:

So if you ask someone in the ancient world why Why do you like all the things, like your family, your child, your city? I think they would have had a hard time saying why. That is, they would have given sort of some of the same, like, well, of course, I just like them. I just like my people, my stuff that's mine. I like it because it's mine. And so it's not as though they would have had a lot more to say to articulate the reason. So I'm not sure that's a difference. And it seems like there's an element here, not only of liking, but of wanting that liking to be part of your self-presentation to other people, which makes me of all of my likings. So I might like a certain novel but not want to be recognized by other people as someone who likes it. So there's that additional step beyond liking where you decide that you want this liking to somehow represent you, right? Right, yeah, that's totally correct. So how do you choose which of your likings are supposed to represent you?

Katherine:

I mean, I think it's different for everyone. It depends on what environment you're in, right? So like, for example, the example I gave people who are sort of mystifyingly identifying with certain cultural heritages that weren't their own when I was in high school. It might have said, like, they were more cultured, or they had, like, more access to a certain worldliness. You know, maybe they're more open-minded. It depends, right? But it's not... What it isn't about is, you know, going back to the Mexican who isn't Mexican, It's not saying I speak Spanish, I'm likely to have certain values and experiences, and most saliently of all, I am from the country of Mexico. It's some other proxy thing. What does Mexico symbolically represent in this environment?

Robin:

So one thing that might have changed in the rhetoric of identity or the concepts of identity is that once upon a time, there was the story that you didn't choose your identity, it chose you. And so, for example, in the discrimination, we might say it's unfair to discriminate against someone for a feature they didn't choose. And that was in the early discussion of homosexuality or something, the people who were disapproving of it were claiming it was a choice, and other people were saying, no, it isn't a choice. Therefore, you shouldn't be allowed to criticize me for something I didn't choose. And it sounds like people are now more embracing the idea that these identities are chosen, especially if they say, my choice doesn't have to reflect any actual facts about me. It sounds like more it's admitting, well, it is just purely a choice. And that's kind of the point of it. I chose this.

Katherine:

I think that's a little bit of it. But what I think can be even more confusing is that for things like gender and sexual identity, it's this weird conflation of both where it's like, I don't choose what I have an affinity towards. But my behavior doesn't have to reflect some internal attraction to something, right? And it's like, it kind of like, it's an explanation that sort of eats itself. Because if you say it like that, it's like, what are you talking about? And it only starts to make sense when you realize, A lot of this, for a lot of people, is happening online. That's a big component of it. The way it's performed is not through physical experience. Sometimes it is literally in a bio on a website or It's through like certain types of activism or just certain types of like presenting yourself to other people. It makes sense in a very anti-social disembodied world. It really doesn't make sense if you're under the assumption that you're using these terms and these labels, you know, while interacting with people face to face and they're helping determine physical actions and physical behaviors.

Robin:

or that they're supposed to tell something about your context or background or skills or anything. The idea is that this identity, I guess people might deny that it was a choice, but they'll still insist the identity has nothing to do with the other parameters you might see about them. You must accept their declared identity, even if they say it's not a choice, but it need have no relation really with anything else about them.

Agnes:

Right, exactly. So when I when I was in high school, this is in the 1990s, you know, there were like gay people who had just like started coming out as gay publicly and there were like clubs, let's say, for gay people. It was just beginning when my siblings who are a lot younger than me were in high school. There was a thing called the Gay Straight Alliance. This didn't exist when I was there, but my siblings were part of it. Right. So you could be straight, but you could still sort of be in the club with gay people, which is very attractive to many high school students. And so I wonder whether this the lesbians who only sleep with men, is that just the next step of the gay straight alliance or the gay straight alliance? I think. Yes, it was kind of, it was expressing positive vibes about being gay, but it was also, it was alliance. It was a statement of who do I want to help? Who do I want to benefit? And it was like, I might want to benefit gay people even if I'm not gay. So I wonder whether there's that element, not just of do I like something, but who are the people that I want to benefit and that I expect to be benefited by?

Katherine:

Yeah, I mean, I definitely see that as related. I mean, and, you know, another part of it is like, there's a cultural dimension of being a lesbian, right? There's certain television shows and music, and books, you know, and it does fashion, obviously. And, you know, it's not confined to, like, you don't have to be a lesbian to Like, you know, lesbian coded music, right? But so much of our lives now is like what we consume and what we're able to share with other people, you know, what culture we consume, right? Again, as opposed to these physical experiences. And I, oh, sorry.

Robin:

I got my PhD in formal political theory a long time ago, and there's this key concept of left versus right, and I recently did a discussion with my colleague Brian Kaplan on this book, The Myth of Left and Right, so I think that's relevant here in the sense that The usual concept of left and right, most people try to identify actual policies or stances toward policy that would represent what left versus right is. But in fact, over time, people find it hard to figure out what those are in any stable sense. It looks like they aren't very stable. And so political scientists more have this idea that there's just a natural tendency to form an axis of disagreement, and there's a lot of freedom about what direction that axis could be. But again, people are reluctant to admit that it's kind of arbitrary what left versus right is, and they keep wanting to find definitions of collectivism or regulation or more care for the poor, some way that they could describe what it really is, because they're uncomfortable with admitting that it's just an axis we all pick. I wonder, I mean, that seems like that's not about physical relationships. That's about sort of sharing policy preferences supposedly, but it still seems somewhat like what you're describing in that most people who pick themselves as left versus right or Democrat or Republican, they actually have no idea what most policies are that are chosen by that. It's pretty random. And it's people who know a lot about politics who have higher correlations in their opinions of politics about different policies. Most people don't have that high degree of correlation because they're just picking it. So I guess, you know, is that, are we moving toward other things being like left versus right or are people less rejecting things even being as structured as left versus right?

Katherine:

No, I mean, I think that, I think, yeah, I think that's a good analogy.

Robin:

But people who think they're on the left think they are standing for something.

Katherine:

Right, right. But they don't even really know what that means.

Robin:

But it's important, the idea that it is something. So when somebody decides to be a lesbian or something, in their mind, does that mean something? And even if it doesn't actually correlate with things, is it important to them to think that it does correlate with things?

Katherine:

Yeah, yeah. I think it does. I think a lot of identities are more symbolic. And it's more like, again, I think that the Gay-Straight Alliance was a really good example. Whose team are you on? What group are you in? And it's the same thing as why should certain brands of beer be left or right coded, that it doesn't make any sense. But there's certain brands of beer that are lesbian coded, right? It just kind of is what it is. And sometimes there is a reason, right? There's a concrete reason why Subarus are the lesbian car. But that's not true of every single thing that ends up in a bucket like that.

Agnes:

So something I wonder is like, how much change does this really represent? So like one way to think about it is people have always just randomly liked stuff for no reason. That's just always been the human condition. And they've always thought there was a reason, but there never has been a reason. That is, everyone always liked the stuff that was close to them. And it's not like, you know, your family is somehow the best family, your city is gonna always be the best city, or your customs or your whatever are like the best ones. But everyone's always like, yeah, I like mine. So it's always just been a thing where nobody ever had any reasons for liking things they liked. But that totally irrational liking activity was mediated by geography or experience. That is, there were things that determined sort of externally behind your, you know, in your mind where you couldn't see it, what you were going to like. That's still true today, obviously, because we're still living in a causal web. It's just that the determinants of liking are now less geographical and more like a bit of which part of the online sea or something you get exposed to. And so it's sort of like, It will be harder in real life, I guess, maybe, to associate with all people who have your same likings as it was in the old world. But is there something distinctive that happens when when these likings get, because it's like, if you say, well, there used to be something to being, you know, Mexican or something. Like, how much was there? Like, so you spoke this language. I mean, that is, there are other inferences we can make about you, right? But there's like, it's not like you chose the Spanish language or something for some reason because it was somehow good. You just would grow up speaking it. And so, Is there some difference in how, I don't know, how deeply or shallowly you have an identity if it isn't mediated by experience or geography?

Katherine:

Yeah, I think so. I think part of it also is A lot of people don't have... I don't know if opportunity is the right word, but it's increasingly rare to be born into an identity or to have an identity that's not strictly chosen. And even in the ways that Tien manifests... I was born and raised in Florida, but there's very few things that I could hold on to and be like, I'm a Floridian, and this is part of the Floridian experience. It's kind of just like, I'm not really that different from someone who's from Georgia. And maybe together, we're like, well, we're from the Southeast. And I think people want that kind of cohesion, and they want a group to fit into. And so because you're not really born into anything, or to the extent that's been eroded in various ways. Also, you have all this choice. You end up constructing these identities yourself. I think that's a big part of it.

Robin:

So let me suggest a hypothesis here. There's a guy, Martin Gurry, who famously wrote a book called The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority. And his story was that in his time, politics had more become groups of people who refused to let anybody have authorities or to have leaders. That is, half a century ago, you would have political identities or something, and then you would choose leaders and let those leaders negotiate on your behalf and then accept what they produced. And he said that more recently, people would form these big crowds that would form spontaneously, et cetera, but they would never allow any leaders to be appointed. and that was a principle of theirs, they were all equal, and then that made them harder to achieve concrete political ends, because nobody could negotiate on their behalf, but they enjoyed the egalitarian nature of it. So it sounds like these new kinds of identities are less something somebody else might own and therefore command your allegiance on, right? You get to choose this group, but your sort of obligations are minimal. And that might be attractive that you can, or whereas groups of, you know, a geography or a political party or profession or other sorts of identities, family identities, they come with the possibility that somebody might make demands on you based on those identities. And these are safe from that.

Katherine:

There's still some demands, because you see all this vicious gatekeeping. What is cancel culture if not gatekeeping? And cancel culture is extremely present in these smaller affinity groups. And always has. If anyone's listening, it's been part of a DIY punk scene or something. You already knew everything there was to know about cancel culture. So you need to enforce boundaries somehow. And I think they become kind of arbitrary, because you can't tell someone, well, you don't speak Spanish, so you can't be part of the Spanish speakers club. But there are other things where it's like, well, you didn't say Latinx. And I'm making this up. This is a wild sort of example, but principally true.

Robin:

So maybe the demands still exist, but they've narrowed or they become a new character of demands. That is, people can't show up to your house or demand that you help them move, or they can't demand that you give them a job or babysit their kids or other sorts of things that identities in the past might cause demands. So the people still want their demands. So they make demands on what words you use.

Katherine:

The demands of identity used to be pretty basic, which was like, fulfill the criteria of this identity, right? To be from Mexico, right? To say you are Mexican. But now, and again, maybe not that specific example, but there's So demanding something that basic of someone is kind of taboo, especially in certain circles. So then it like gets outsourced to something else, like use a correct language, or it's more like etiquette based, right? It's something that's sort of like open, like open source and kind of like available to anyone. But then it becomes arbitrary, because it should be like, you know, I should be able to say, I'm a UChicago alum, because I went to UChicago, but that would be take that away, then it becomes this confusing thing.

Robin:

In the literature on religion, there's this idea of high commitment and low commitment religions. And high commitment religions basically demand a lot. They have a lot of rules about food and dress and what you're supposed to do. And low commitment religions, like Unitarians, people are minimally bound together. And the story is high-commitment religions enable people to trust each other more, and they do trust each other more, but that's because they make these high demands. Maybe it sounds like we're moving to a world of low-commitment, low-demand identities, and More generally, just in religion, we're less religious and we're less high commitment religious, but we're just lower commitment, all sorts of identities. We're demanding less of people.

Katherine:

This other kind of commitment, like you bring up religion and I stumbled across this really weird story and hopefully I do it justice. Some branch of the Lutheran church, they rewrote some foundational texts basically to make it more liberal and catch up the values of this church with the prevailing vibe of the day. A lot of people were pushing back on that. And there are people who got pushed out of the church, right? So, like, in making it lower commitment, they actually made it higher commitment. Because they were like, well, you're- you're- contradicting church leadership, right? So it's like this weird situation where it's both. The barrier to entry of being a Lutheran in this particular context, I'm definitely mangling the story, so apologies for that. You need much less to say you're a Lutheran, but you can't contradict other things, right? That ordinarily would have been foundational to the understanding of the faith, which is, I think that's happening in a lot of things.

Agnes:

Yeah, it makes sense to me that sort of level of commitment would come apart from degree of policing and that you might actually end up with more policing in the lower commitment. Like in this world, it's like it's kind of hard to tell now who's a lesbian, right? And so you might have to do more policing than you did in the world where it was the relatively simple thing of the women who sleep with other women. But it does seem to me like, you know, in a world where Like where being Mexican was more geographic, it does seem to me like it's higher commitment. Like maybe if Mexico goes to war, you're supposed to go to war, for example.

Robin:

Or a Mexican friend wants a job, you're supposed to help them because they're Mexican.

Agnes:

Exactly, right, and so it seems to me that there are those sorts of commitments and the kinds of commitments that are being, that are the sort of subject of this policing and thus are very dramatically in the spotlight would be things like, do you say Latinx or whatever, but that's a different, that does seem to me to be a relatively low commitment issue even if there can be a lot of policing of it.

Katherine:

Yeah, I think that's right. But it's harder to adhere to, right? Because it's like a learned etiquette as opposed to something that sort of just makes sense through experiencing this identity through physicality, right? Speaking the language, having certain commitments to your immediate environment, which may be like being drafted in a hypothetical war.

Robin:

So this does sound like it's basically individualism increasing over time, which is a common claim about culture over decades in the West, that is less about belonging to groups that can make demands on you and more about letting individuals choose their own identities more, having more freedom to make those choices and making fewer demands on those choices, even though there are some. So I just read a paper here on nature that came out a week ago called Worldwide Divergence of Values. And it's basically saying the West is in fact becoming more individualist over time, but the world is diverging on that. Many nations in the world are becoming less individualist and it's becoming a bigger difference in the world. So you're seeing something in the West here that's definitely a West trend, but you should be wary that the world isn't necessarily all on this track.

Agnes:

I wanna ask a totally separate, different question. Unless, Katherine, did you wanna say anything about that? No, you could go. Okay, I wanna ask about emotional truths. Perfect. So I wonder whether the distinction between, let's say, conventional truths and emotional truths maps onto a distinction that I recently heard a psychologist make that I'm interested in for, I have my own terminology for this, but I'm gonna use the psychologist's terminology. Her name is Tanya Lombroso. I went to a talk of hers and she distinguished between epistemic and non-epistemic beliefs, okay? So the non-epistemic beliefs are the emotional truths. or what might be emotional traits. And so she's tested three correlates of non-epistemic beliefs, i.e. emotional traits. One is people don't tend to have a, don't tend to be inclined to attach a probability to it. So if you ask me like, how sure are you that there are like at least 50 pencils on your desk? I would say I'm pretty sure. I think it's like 80% chance that there's 50 pencils on my desk. I'm not looking at the pencils right now. So I can be like, so I cannot say, you know, but I think, I think there's 50. They're in the corner of my eye. I do actually have that many pencils on my desk. I'm 70% sure. And now I'm looking over there. Yes, I think there's at least 30. So there I'm happy to attach approximately how sure I am to many of my beliefs, but in this category, people are not. They're just like, this is the way it is. Either believe it or you don't believe it. There's no degree of belief. The second is there's more of the, and here I'm going to simplify it. There's more of a sense that you can choose the belief. That's not quite what it is, but it's close enough. And the third is that you say believes rather than thinks. That is with an honest, so in the non-abasthemic one, you choose and you say believes rather than thinks, and you don't have a degree of belief in it. And it looks like, you know, she's tested, you have the very same content. Like, did John commit a crime? Say you believe this, Shiving, you believe he didn't because he's your best friend. He would never commit a crime, right? You're loyal to him. You're like, no, John didn't do it. Here, you don't have a degree of belief. You're just like, he didn't do it. And you're like, I believe he didn't do it. And in some sense, you see yourself as like, of course, I decided to believe it. I wouldn't let myself believe anything else, something like that. Versus if you're on the jury and you're just tracking the evidence and you're like, Did he do it? Like, I think he probably didn't, you know? I'm like 80% sure that he didn't do it. And I think he didn't do it. And, you know, the evidence is forcing me to say he didn't do it. I'm not choosing. Anyway, I'm curious whether you think this distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic belief as sort of pointed to by those correlates is the same as emotional truth. And if so, do you think somehow we're starting to have more and more non-epistemic beliefs? Are we trending in the direction of having more of our beliefs be non-epistemic?

Katherine:

I don't think it's quite the right model. I think, to use the example about John committing a crime, I think it would be closer to, is he a murderer? Assuming murder is different than, did he kill someone? Or Yeah. Or like, is he a bad person? Right? So the emotional truth is whether or not he's a bad person. And whether or not he committed the crime, it's separate, right? He could have or he couldn't have. What happens online, so in the context that I've written about this, is when people lie about certain aspects of their identity, it's because you have a limited set of tools to express things about yourself. And it's kind of like storytelling. I mean, it's exactly like storytelling. So you might, if you're crafting a narrative, you might set it in a particular city, which, like in the context of literature, that itself conveys certain things about the story you're going to tell. But this happens online because you have more freedom, but you also don't have the tool set to communicate certain things with body language, But on a voice sometimes, there's other limits placed on it. So really, when I talk about emotional truth, it's closer to speaking metaphorically about things. Again, things becoming symbolic of other things. Then it gets complicated when it's much more easily understood when it's person to person and it's about one's identity and one's personal story. It gets more complicated when you start drifting into the news and the way we convey current events, which is then closer to what you're describing.

Robin:

I guess I'm especially interested, as a social scientist, in just what is exactly the role or reason we have identities? What's the point? Agnes initially pointed to, well, I could like different things. What's the difference between liking something and choosing that likeness or having it as my identity? So, two theories that are coming to mind here at the moment, but there may be more, but I think you might have some insights into why bother to have identities at all. One might be forming groups that might help or protect or promote each other, some sort of way in which people would form groups and know who's in and who's out and that they would then, as a group, do something with that groupishness, i.e. hire each other, marry each other, at least go to parties together, something that the group would promote some social contact or connection or loyalty. That's one reason you might want an identity. And then we might wonder if these new kinds of identities actually achieve that or not. And another reason you might want an identity is as a brand, you might basically just be really complicated and people can't really relate to you or trust you that well, because you're so complicated. And you might want to present a simplicity. a, well, you know, here is my brand promise of what I am and you can trust this and therefore you can more relate and rely on me because I've made a brand promise. Now for this kind of identity, it needs to be stable. I can't be changing it every week, right? Otherwise it's not going to serve the purpose of giving you a predictable thing. And it also needs to be kind of simple and understandable. And, but maybe some of these identities aren't that simple or understandable. Anyway, those are two possible reasons we could have identities, but What other reasons could there be and what data can we use to pick out a theory of identity? Like what's the point of identity?

Katherine:

I mean, to tell a story about yourself, right? I mean, that addresses both things you mentioned, right? Self-understanding. I don't think it's always for other people, although it's probably mostly for other people. In isolation, you might not think about it in such structured terms. But I think there's definitely something to be said about, this is who I am. This is why things happen to me. This is how I'm going to justify certain decisions or certain externalities that I have no control over. So that's one big part of it. I think it's really interesting, too, that you mentioned branding yourself and then framed it as making yourself more easily understood to others. Because that, I think, is another example of moving away from the shift of physical experience helping define things. Because in an office, when you're going to an office every day, you don't need a brand. You just show up, and you do your tasks.

Robin:

You kind of do have a brand at the office, but it'd be a certain personality, maybe a hard worker or, you know, puts their head down and doesn't get involved in politics. I mean, people at the office do pick identities as their persona at the office.

Katherine:

I think it's less structured, though, than you might on social media or even if you're moving through large groups as an individual. Maybe it's just my office experiences, but I think you may have a little bit of a brand And it's almost a little more fun or something. But most of what people know about you is like, oh, yeah, I worked on a project with her, and she's low-key. And it's based on this experiential thing.

Robin:

Which makes it very relevant. I mean, those kinds of brands are actually very informative for the people around you in terms of what they can predict from you about the things they care about you.

Katherine:

But you're not trying to like simplify who you are in the same way. I mean, in some ways, yes, you are. But in other ways, it's just, this is how I'm showing up. Other people are helping construct that brand more than maybe you're sort of self-consciously designing it.

Agnes:

Maybe one thought is that when you show up to the office, here's something that everybody is going to immediately know about you. You're a human being. The way they know that is you're shaped like a human being. Right. Obvious just from looking at you that you're a human being. But that's kind of a problem in the online space. And so it seems like there's a challenge that shows up in the online space that maybe doesn't show up in real life where I have to project myself as a human being. I have to prove that I'm human. And not just in the sense of I'm not a bot, but like those little big pictures on Twitter are like pretty important. Like I feel like every time I see a tweet, I look at the face, you know? And that's how I'm like, this is coming from a human. And then, you know, someone's description or whatever, it's like trying to give the substantiality that a body would give someone, where it's like, your body is your immediate ticket to humanity, and we don't have that online. And so we have to do all this substitution for the body. And so maybe partly that's what the narrative is. It's how I play a human on the internet or something.

Katherine:

Yeah, I think that's totally true. I mean, there's this cliche from the New Yorker in 1994, like, on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog, right? That's never stopped being relevant.

Agnes:

Right. Right. Right. So identity. So Robin asked the question, what's the role of identity? There's a general question about that, but there might be a more specific question. What is the role of identity on the internet? And how is the role that identity plays in the internet gonna shape the identities that are formed on it and by means of it? And maybe there's just an additional set of demands on top of group membership, brand, and story, all three of which are presumably gonna be there for everybody, for all identities, but just like this demand to be a human. And I somehow feel like a very big part of that online is the pressure, what is it to be a human? It's to be a good human, to be a good person. What makes you a good person online? How are you on the good guy team or one of the good guys or to be approved of? It feels to me like to play a human on the internet is to try to play the good human.

Katherine:

It depends on what you mean by good. I would use the word trustworthy more, maybe. Another part of it is standing out. There's all of these people who are effectively invisible online, either by choice, they're lurkers, or they're just talking out into the void. How do you become accepted into a group and become an important member of that group?

Agnes:

It's like standing out and trustworthy are actually a little bit of a tension though, because a lot of times the things you have to do to stand out is be really different or something. Sorry, Robin, I interrupted you.

Robin:

There's a basic question that's been, say, raised by Haight recently on his Anxious Generation book or other things, is whether people are getting as much value out of their online interactions as they think they are, whether suffering more harms than they might expect. To set that in context, there's a story that in the United States, high school students intuitively think their social relationship at high school is extremely important. They invest a lot of emotional and time energy into managing and generating high school relationships, which then they all just lose when they go off to college or somewhere else. And it seems like then they're being tricked from some sort of historical habit into over-investing in high school relationships. And they just haven't learned that. And so you might sell a similar story about the internet. You might say, well, with respect to coworkers or neighbors or people you might date, you know, you'll present an identity, but you can see all the reasons why you might want to have an identity with them and why that might lead to good things or bad things as a result of the relationships you have. And then you go out onto social media or something and you. generate, put out an identity and generate some relationships, but there's a sense of which you don't actually get that much out of it in terms of the other things you'd use to get from your other kinds of relationships. You know, your neighbors could help you when you're locked out or, you know, when the power is out and your, your coworkers could, you know, suggest you for a promotion or move with you to another division. I mean, with other kinds of real life relationships, we, we know a lot about the kinds of. uses that identities and the relationships can be put to. And then on the internet, it looks from a distance like, what are you guys spending all your time there for? Because it's not going to help these other things much. Is this just all consumption fun? Or are you being tricked into thinking it's important like you're tricked into thinking high school is important?

Katherine:

Well, high school, I mean, high school is important at the time, right? If you mess up your relationships in high school, I mean, it can prevent you from having romantic relationships or certain milestone experiences.

Robin:

Oh, sure. But people seem to invest in high school as if they were going to live with those people the rest of their life, which they used to. That is, it did make sense a century or so ago that you would pay a lot of attention in high school age because that was the rest of your life.

Katherine:

It's 40 years. Right. It's not 40. But it's four years, and you've only lived for 14. You know what I mean? So in the grand scheme of things, it feels really significant. I totally understand why. I'm someone who I did not enjoy high school for some of these reasons. And it feels like a big deal because it's like, all right, if I mess up this situation, who else am I going to socialize with? I don't know any other people my own age. I can't drive. How am I going to get invited to parties? For a lot of people, there's no alternate sort of like, oh, I'll just do community theater or something and have this escape. Actually, that escape, funnily enough, you mentioned Hyte. I don't wholesale disagree with him. But some things I wondered, would he have the same perspective if he wasn't in New York City? What does the suburban or rural kid who only has their high school and maybe doesn't fit in and the internet provides this great escape, what are they supposed to do? That's what the internet was for me. I felt totally awkward. I couldn't make eye contact with people and my interests were weird. But they weren't weird on forums, which were in LiveJournal and stuff, where I was able to meet people who possibly were predatory adults, most of the time were actually kids my own age, and talk about things I liked. I think it stunted me in some ways, but in other ways, it was like, oh, well, I'm not actually as alone as it seems, as a 14-year-old who can't drive or go anywhere.

Agnes:

Robin, you can turn your question around. So my 10-year-old recently asked me, do adults have friends? And I was like, yeah, of course. And he's like, well, why don't they ever spend time with their friends? And it was like, oh, this is kind of a good point. And he's like, he can't believe hanging out with his friends. He's like, is it that adults are just too embarrassed to have play dates? Um, like, because he, like, well, you know, arranged a thing where he's going to hang out with his friend all day or maybe have a sleepover. And he notices that, like, me and my husband and my ex-husband, we never do that. We don't, like, hang out with our friends. Mostly our friends are, like, all over the country. We talk to them on the phone. But, um, you might think, like, yeah, what high schoolers are doing is having a social life. And then basically for, like, some of them, okay, um, and not just high schools, but elementary school kids are really into their friends. They're into their social life. It's very important to them. It's a very big part of their life. And at some point, we, you know, we sort of select a few people, maybe, in the world that we currently live in, and we, like, spend a lot of time with them, and we don't really, like, have friends anymore, and it's kind of sad. And you might think it's the high schoolers that got it right.

Robin:

Well, so there's this old observation that it gets harder to make friends as you get older, and you should invest in them earlier if you realize it's going to be harder later. But I think that's more strong friends. So there's this old observation early in the internet that the internet gave you more weak friends and fewer strong friends. You had fewer people who could come help you move, but more people that you could send a message to and they might respond. And I guess that's continued to be true. Like I'm an older person and I do find it harder to make close friends, but I find it easier to, you know, find people that I could just have a quick chat with or send, you know, get a response from. So that seems to be this key trade-off. So then I guess the key question is, is it good or okay to give up having fewer strong friends and more weak ones?

Katherine:

I think it depends on how you use the internet and what environments you're in. In my adult life, I've moved around a lot. I've moved to states a lot for work and things like that. The internet has been a very important component. in making friends. And I've made, I mean, at this point, people have been my friend for 12, 15 years. That's a long time. Some of my best friends I met online, and I've met them in person at this point. But most of our relationship is mediated. We have digital memories together. When we hang out, when my best friend says, do you want to watch something, it's over Discord. And it takes a lot of effort, but I think for some people, you're not able to make friends in your city. And the internet's not such a bad place to find, you know, you can get screwed over, but you can get screwed over in real life too.

Robin:

But that doesn't address the overall question. Are we having fewer strong friends and more weak friends?

Katherine:

Well, well, I mean, it depends. It depends on how you how you use the Internet. Depends on who you are, I think.

Robin:

But averaging or everybody averaging on the over the depends. Surely there's some overall trend, isn't there?

Katherine:

I mean, there might be. I tend to think that in general, people's relationships just have been weak, right? And we talk about it more, and we focus on it more. And especially as it moves online, it feels more acute. How well did people really know their neighbors when it was normal to interact with your neighbors? You might have always had someone who would just come around for tea or whatever. Remembering ancient things with people just showing up. But how close were you with those people really? Or were you just hanging out in this casual way in a way that maybe does translate online, but it seems less robust because there's no physical component to it?

Agnes:

Can I jump in? There's a question I wanted to ask you, not related to any of this, but sometimes when I read stuff, when I read you, I ask myself, are you exclusively a descriptive person or are you also a prescriptive person? That is, are you all social scientists or are you also an activist of any kind? Is there some world that you want to see come about? Or are you mostly just interested in sort of understanding the place where we are now? I am... I don't really know, actually.

Katherine:

I think I'm more descriptive. Because I think my default is anything can work in theory, right? Doesn't mean it does, but it could. So that makes it difficult for me to promote one thing being better than the other, more interested in like, well, what's actually going on?

Agnes:

OK. One more question, then I'm going to let Robin ask, because we have maybe 10 more minutes. There is, in your list of things that define who you are, it's kind of your identity statement, your final one was like, every celebrity, academic, and journalist eventually becomes, I don't actually know how to say this word, lol cow, or L-O-L. Lol cow. Yeah. Then I looked it up. And it means sort of somebody that will get made fun of partly for their sort of naivete or disingenuousness. I think Robin and I are both examples of your principle, so N equals two, it's true. And you said, you know, like these are not necessarily the people who should be internet personalities. And I was curious, who should be an internet personality? That is, what makes for a good internet person?

Katherine:

Someone who is self-awarely playing an audience and knows how to, and who's sharing. I think like Pearl Davis, right? The anti-feminist who everyone loves to hate. She might in some senses be a law cow, but she's totally bought into it. She likes being a personality as opposed to someone who's you know, who's trying to move books but has like deeper sort of ambitions, right? And is kind of in this weird situation where it's like, all right, I might earn, you know, 10,000 extra dollars if I can make it seem like I can sell XYZ number of books, right? She, I mean, she purely is like, she wants to be in the limelight. Is that good?

Robin:

People we want to see in the limelight? People who want to be there? Is that how we want it?

Katherine:

I mean, I think given the choice, it's such a difficult way of life. I would much rather have like, OK, your Pearl Davises or your internet personalities, and they don't become conflated with these other roles. Keep the professors professors, and the people who want to teach, and who have a research project, and what have you, and belong in universities, and allow them to thrive in that environment. And then the people who are entertainers, let them be entertainers. It's the meeting of the two, where every now and then, there's someone who does both great. Again, to bring up Hyte, I think he's a really interesting speaker and personality, regardless of what he says. I love watching interviews with him, because he does it really, really well. But I don't think every academic is that type of person. And it's kind of cruel to force academics or journalists or writers or all these professions that are more sort of introverted by nature to be selling a brand in that particular way where they number go up is an important part of the career.

Robin:

people and maybe including me, one of the things we like most about the modern world is maybe that we think we aren't being sold as much. Like, you know, TV from the 1960s or whatever, you know, every image was very carefully packaged and marketed, etc. And whatever they were presenting to you, you couldn't really trust that that was who they were really like or something because they were so marketing to you. once you realize that it can be a little disheartening and that the modern world is full of these somewhat awkward personalities that then let you believe that you're actually seeing something true about them that wouldn't be there for the purpose of

Katherine:

When people start digging into your personal life in a way that ... I mean, people are always trying to go through my digital detriment to figure something out about things I don't want to share, and then I become a liar or overly defensive. I don't want to talk about my siblings. They're offline. Why does that have to be part of my story? But then the thing is, when you're growing an audience, that could happen regardless of the environment you're in. But it's more likely when you're growing an audience. You know, nitpicking things that they ordinarily wouldn't have cared about, you know, or you wouldn't have had to think about at all. It's very different, like, a recorded conversation. And correct me if I'm wrong here, because I, funnily enough, I am an internet personality at first, I think. a small one, but I'm still, you know, that's still how, you know, why I'm here. But there's just something about, like, you're more open in a way that I don't think, like, if I was having the same conversation with you guys in a classroom, right, there's certain things that I wouldn't have to think about. Like, it wouldn't matter that I'm backlit, you know?

Robin:

So if I have the main reason I basically said, I want to talk to more people about culture. And then you were a person that came up associated with the word culture to talk to. A question is very hard and you probably don't have a good answer, but it's the reason I was thinking about this. is when I realize just how much culture is changing over the decades and the things you're talking about are ways in which cultures have changed, right? You're highlighting and pointing them out and trying to realize them. Then at least part of me gets this terror that, you know, there's this, the world is changing in these huge ways and nobody really anticipated them or planned them. And then I worry like, things could just go really wrong because of these huge cultural changes. Do you feel that sort of fear or scared about it? Or do you just trust that surely it must work out because it's always worked out before? Did it always work out before? I mean, how do you feel about the magnitude of these culture changes?

Katherine:

Well, I don't think they're totally unpredicted. Something that's really interesting to me is if you read anything about media studies from the late 60s onward, if you read Marsh McLuhan or you read Sherry Turkle in the early 90s, that stuff holds up.

Robin:

Was it a reassuring analysis they could give back then? Oh, it'll be all fine because we figured out where it's going and this looks fine?

Katherine:

Of course not. But I mean, so at least we kind of, we knew, so at least we knew.

Robin:

And then we did nothing, right? I mean, if it was, it was a bad place we were going, we should have done something, but we didn't. It's because we didn't think it was bad or we didn't that not enough people knew, but people who knew didn't have any idea what to do about it?

Katherine:

Maybe not enough people knew, or the harms weren't evenly distributed, as another very prescient thinker. Yeah, I don't know. I don't think, I'm not pessimistic.

Robin:

You're optimistic?

Katherine:

Don't be pessimistic, more optimistic. I think some people have the privilege of being able to enjoy this moment and other people don't. And I know these answers are somewhat of a cop out.

Robin:

You're younger than I am, so you're going to live through another 30 years or 40 years of more culture change. How do you feel about that? Are you optimistic about that? Do you think it'll go great places or do you think it'll be terrible? It doesn't really matter?

Katherine:

I think it'll be terrible for some people, and others will be able to make the best of it. I think I've been very lucky that I've been able to make the best of it. I don't know if that's true for everyone. I think there are certain things that maybe shouldn't have changed. Like, there's certain people who I don't think should be online, right? I think that with the internet, I love the internet. I'm a big internet evangelist. However, maybe it shouldn't be so easy to log on and for it to be always on and the curtain never closes. on your online life. Maybe the barrier to entry should be a little bit higher. It should be more difficult to use, so less people use it, right? Yeah, I feel like this has been my catchphrase this whole conversation. It depends. I mean, but it really does, right? It just depends on so many different things. Culture really sucks for some people.

Robin:

But the average over the world doesn't depend so much, right? I mean, we talk about, is the world going to do better? But we're not going to do better for it.

Katherine:

The average of the world. I mean, there's so much diversity in the world. And is this a pop-up answer? I mean, what do you think?

Robin:

It sounds like the culture damaged we always have with us, sort of like the biblical, the poor we always have with us. Don't mind that we didn't give to the poor and we washed Jesus' feet with the expensive perfume because we can't really prevent people from getting hurt and it's not really the thing to think about.

Agnes:

it's hard to think practically at the scale of the world. I mean, people think, even try to think practically at that scale. And so it just feels like, because you know you can't change it. And we tend to think practically at the scales where we could possibly have an impact, even an indirect impact. But I wonder, how do you, so we've dealt with the internet. and the huge changes, social changes of the internet. And, and, you know, Robin and I are like older than you. And so we are, you know, our internet engagement is characterized by our age. I wonder how How big for you is like large language models chat GPT in terms of the looking forward, like changing what the internet is? Do you think that large language models will change the kind of place that the internet is?

Katherine:

Yeah, I do. I use AI every single day, and I find it very, very helpful. I used to waste so much time. Actually, this is something that Tyler Cowen brought up in his conversation with Jonathan Haidt. I actually do use it to get digests of things that I was wasting hours on, and I love that. We thought we were in a sea of information. And now it's breaking certain social places online. There's way too much junk. And it's pushing some people offline or into smaller spaces. And that's a good thing and a bad thing. It's a bad thing because the way cultural products were spreading or being created is changing, but also these smaller online environments or even hybrid online-offline environments are probably much better for building the stronger relationships you were mentioning, Robin, that I said. Once again, it depends on how you use the internet. It's much easier to make these lifelong friends in a small chatroom or group chat or Discord server than it is when your only engagement with the social world online is like a feed of people, whether it's on Facebook or Twitter or, you know, MySpace, you know, 20 years ago, what have you.

Agnes:

Okay, maybe, this makes me realize, maybe my question is something like, it seems to me that when there's innovation online, like, you know, people are going on TikTok or something, that the older people are left behind. So it's the younger people that are, you know, gravitating towards new online environments, but ChatGPT is a bit of an exception to that. That is, I think old people, excuse me, and Robin use that plenty as well, and there may not even be a differential. Maybe we even use it more, I don't know. But it seems to be this force for change that is a little bit, floats a little bit free of the general rule that the new cultural spaces are created by younger people.

Katherine:

Part of it, too, is it's not really a space. It's a tool. I also kind of disagree that older people get left behind. I think a lot of, like, I think, like, age is sort of divorced from your literal age online. Like, you know, you get called, like, a boomer if you're kind of behind or, like, you know, there's different kinds of, like, slurs for people who've been around so long that they're not keeping up with cultural changes. But it doesn't have anything, and it's net, since the beginning of the internet, it's never really had anything to do with your physical world age. It's your ability to keep up with technology. And it's actually easier, in a sense, online. Because you don't have to, no one knows what you look like. No one can see that you're not dressed the right way, or you're showing signs of aging.

Robin:

But you still have to put in a lot of work. That is, if you just keep your vocabulary the way it was decades ago, or your opinions the way they were decades ago, or your habits, then you'll stand out as somebody who obviously isn't keeping up. So you have to put in all this work to keep up, even if your age isn't the limitation.

Katherine:

For everyone, I think some people sort of absorb it. I'm in a weird position where people also think I'm much older than I am. But just because I'm online so much, a lot of newer slang, I don't feel like I'm actively learning it. There's certain communities that I look at where I feel like there's a real learning curve because I need to figure it out and immerse myself. And it's sort of like if I was trying to learn Vietnamese or something. I'm like totally on the outside and I've got to figure out a strategy. But then there's a lot of stuff where I just sort of, I'm there enough that I start to absorb it.

Robin:

Does that happen for most people? I mean, like there used to be this phrase, the silent majority, the idea that the society was full of just kind of ordinary people who weren't trying to stand out or weren't trying to keep up. And there was a place for those people to just be ordinary people in the world. Do we still have a place for those people?

Katherine:

Yeah, I think we do. I think you'd be surprised how easily some people are able to keep up just from exposure, right? And there's this lack of age boundary. I'm thinking of my mom's visiting me right now. She's downstairs. She's in her 60s. And she doesn't use Zoomer slang or anything, right? But because she's exposed to certain Gen Z things, or certain millennial things with the way she uses the internet. She scrolls TikTok just like anyone else. She just knows certain trends, right? And it's like, sometimes she's more to date with certain music and movies than I am. And it's just from exposure.

Robin:

And I don't think she's trying. Exposure must take hours a day, right? I mean, that's the main complaint people often give, that the modern habits just... eat up hours and hours. And part of the fear is if you don't put in those hours, you'll get left behind and stand out as somebody who doesn't get it and who isn't with it.

Katherine:

I think there's a little bit of, I think it's a little bit true, but there's some exaggeration there. I don't think it's totally, I think it's more penetrable, even. I had a much more difficult time knowing what, I didn't listen to the radio in the 2000s, so it was like, and I didn't watch MTV either, right? So I was like, I had no idea what was going on with music. Now it's so much easier because it's just like, it's there. It's ambiently there, and I don't have to like, I don't have to be like, what's going on on MTV? What's going on on the radio? I don't have to do any of that. It's all kind of in one place. I don't know. I think it's easier. But maybe it's just the unique way that I'm sort of me and my family drowning in technology.

Agnes:

To me, there's something in what you're saying that makes sense, which is that there's quite a lot of one-stop shopping nowadays. Yeah. Whereas you would have had to turn on MTV. I remember when I was a teenager, and every once in a while, I'd turn on MTV, and I just wouldn't know how to watch it. And this person's singing, and then, you know, and it's like, I think if I just spent a little more time, I would have kind of gone into, okay, this is how you watch MTV, but it had its own watching style that I hadn't learned. Yeah, but but now it's like well you're on Twitter or you're you know that that there's Like TikTok, there's like a few places you can go, Instagram, and then from that, you know, you're exposed to a variety of things. And so it's a little bit of a less of like choice of genre or something. Like you might imagine- It's like not strategic. And now we're not reading a specific genre.

Katherine:

You know, speaking of that, like another thing I really struggled with, and I remember like, I mean, I was pretty young, I was like ninth grade or something. I had a friend who's like always like knew all the, like what was going on in the news. I was like, how does he do it? And I remember I would try to go to BBC, Financial Times, on the websites, or even buy magazines. And I was like, I don't know. How does he keep up every day? And now it's like, I'm not an expert, but I know generally what's going on because I scroll Twitter and just shows up. Yeah.

Robin:

The opposite story is that once there was mass culture, and say the main three TV stations, and if you just followed the mass culture, then you'd be up, and now culture fragments. So there's just no way you can track all the fragmented culture. You have to pick some subculture to track, and then the people who are in the other subcultures will definitely know you're not tracking theirs. And so in some sense, you have to pick a community to be in now, whereas you used to could just be a regular person who followed mass culture.

Katherine:

I kind of buy that, but the one thing about that that always sort of like, you know, leaves me scratching my head is like, if there's no monoculture, how does everyone complain about, for example, wokeness, right? That can only be a product of a monoculture, because it's in every movie and every, you know, if it's infecting everything, then surely there is some monoculture that is able to- There's some elements of shared culture, the idea which it's just less.

Robin:

Once upon a time, we had shared culture encompassed enormous more things, and we could more count on things being shared, and now fewer of the things we have are shared.

Katherine:

I think there's probably less, you know, like, not everyone, there's no, like, Game of Thrones type thing, you know what I mean? There's no, like, people aren't, there's no analogy to friends, right? But there is a monoculture that just looks different. There's definitely a fragmentation, but there's no, it's not as bad as I think it's described as being. Okay, we should probably stop because we've now gone over.

Agnes:

Thank you so much for talking to us. Thanks for joining us. Yeah, thanks for inviting me.