Some recent experiences in a distributed online community have prompted important discussions around practices for addressing problematic community members in a restorative manner, while also safeguarding the sanctity of the community as a whole.
This particular conflict involved a chronically controversial individual lacking established relationships in our community, an individual toward whom the community at large nonetheless felt some degree of sympathy and willingness to tolerate. There are various idiosyncrasies distinguishing this community from others, such as its pluralistic ideological profile and its collective expertise in various emerging technologies, but overall many of these considerations ought to generalize to community writ large. The community in question is also operationally active on a volunteer basis, hosting various collaborative projects involving a couple dozen of its members who engage as a labor of love.
The core tension here can be expressed as such: how can a community practice tolerance and forgiveness vis-a-vis members who introduce conflict, while also ensuring the safety of its other members and the operational coherence of the group as a whole? In other words, how can restorative peer-to-peer conflict resolution be facilitated without degrading the operational efficacy of the group as a whole?
Personal Context
This note regards my personal conceptual navigation of such issues, within both the lived context of my involvement with this community, and the auto-discursive context explored in various previous writings:
- Wu Gwei, or Going with the Flow of Governance
- Notes on Methodology for Communities of Practice
- Notes on an Ethical Hermeneutics of Machiavelli
- Intimations of a Post-Machiavellian Moral-Tactical Calculus
- Intimations of a Post-Machiavellian Moral-Tactical Calculus, Part 2
As such, my considerations on this matter will be colored by my ongoing attempts to reconcile the tactics of realpolitik with one’s subjective moral integrity, resulting in an embodied sensibility or intuition regarding the moral-tactical navigation of micropolitical turmoil in any arbitrary operational context. In this particular case, the tactical orientation of this sensibility is geared around the particular operational circumstances and exigencies of the community in question, such as the project of creating and managing a community knowledge base. All in all, this attitude could, I believe, be justly considered “post-machiavellian” in that it takes realpolitik as a point of departure for tactical consideration, and then assumes some degree of enlightened self-interest on behalf of the subject.
Lastly, in terms of the spirit in which such considerations are expounded, I will be proceeding in the method of auto-discourse (see A Primer on Auto-Discourse), largely as an experiment in cognitive transparency.
Earned Reciprocity
One of the factors which characterizes this particular conflict is the apparent assumption, held by the controversial newcomer to the community, that one is automatically entitled to the trust and solidarity of said community. The community in question prides itself in being open to newcomers, and being pluralistic in its composition of backgrounds and beliefs. That said, for communities like this to be completely porous is to for them to open themselves up to interlopers who, consciously or not, endanger the existing social fabric.
A key consideration for members of such communities, is the manner in which trust is dispensed to newcomers, the manner in which bonafide solidarity spreads its roots through an expanding social network. This needn’t necessarily be handled in a dogmatic fashion, as a matter of community policy, but it can instead be approached on an individual basis. How willing are you, personally, to assume that a given newcomer has the community’s best interests at heart?
Additionally, beyond how we allocate our trust, we also have the matter of how we allocate our attention. Attention is a sacred resource, especially in volunteer communities wherein traditional forms of compensation may be scarce. In this respect, to abuse the attention granted by members of one’s community is to signal that one does not value said attention. This abuse erodes trust, consciously or unconsciously, and if it prevails throughout community messaging channels, it promotes a general disengagement unto burnout.
Sadly, this is a path many of us have experienced time and time again, when our communal bandwidth is not respected. One grassroots approach to address this problem is to promote a philosophy of reciprocity, where peers respect each other’s attention and earn each other’s trust over time, by collaborating and cultivating relationships. These relationships constitute the backbone of the community, and arguably determine the endurance of a community as its social fabric inevitably undergoes turbulence.
Micropolitical Flux
From a perspective of micropolitical realism, any social fabric by nature experiences constant disruption, sometimes constructively and sometimes destructively - and even this depends on the beholder. To expect constant harmony is arguably to neglect a certain reality of how we socially navigate our worlds. As individuals we experience shifts in our priorities, our affordances, and our emotional bearings; and these shifts can ramify outward unto social interference patterns, in most unpredictable fashions.
In this context, social coordination is as much an art as it is a science, if not more. For a community to achieve and maintain a social coherence, this sort of flux ought to be accounted for preemptively, not just by organizational policy, but in the anticipation of its members.
This can be a difficult sensibility to instill in lieu of experience. That is, if the community is composed predominantly of individuals who lack experience dealing with governance takeovers, hostile interlopers, or various other forms of community disruption, the naturally sanguine predispositions of these individuals may culminate as a broader culture of micropolitical fragility, susceptible to such disruption. After all, experience is the oracle of truth1.
Such a sensibility may better orient the individual to prudently allocate their trust and attention in the spirit of reciprocity, and in anticipation of inevitable social conflict. When members of a community embody this more refined standard by which trust and attention are granted, said community becomes better protected against abusive actors2, while still remaining accessible to those who are willing to earn the trust and attention of their newfound community.
Malattunement before Malice
One key aspect of this sensibility is the interpretation of the intentionality of other individuals in and around a given community. It is a common wisdom, to assume incompetence before malice, but for our purposes I would like to specify the pithiness in a particular direction: social attunement3.
A great part of the work of relationship building is the ability, and willingness, to understand where the other person is coming from, to meet them on a common wavelength as it were. It is a largely preverbal social phenomenon, and the ease with which it is undertaken varies drastically from one relationship to another, owing chiefly to the sheer diversity of human experience. To feel attuned with another person is, in many respects, to feel less alone, less encumbered by the communicative friction of language.
This attunement is a key phenomenon in matters of social coordination, and it sheds a light on why communities historically tend to take more parochial forms: all else being equal, people of similar upbringings have a narrower gap to attune across. Indeed it can even be cultivated as a preverbal social skill, whereby one consciously equilibrates their present consciousness to that of another.
This becomes even more interesting when seen through the lens of neurodiversity, and how the degree to which one exercises (or neglects) this skill can determine, to some margin, their placement on certain neuropsychological spectra4. Deeply relating to other people can be hard, and it is increasingly common in our day for individuals to be, one way or another, socially isolated and deprived of opportunity to exercise these skills.
In this sense, many of the disruptive behaviors discussed here can be understood as improper attunement between the disruptive individual and the wider community. Because these matters are usually implicit and purely vibe-based, this can be exceptionally difficult to remedy, especially once conflict has irrupted from a latent stratum of the social fabric into a more overt form. Then, offense may have already been taken, sides may have already been drawn, and complex optical considerations often render earnest engagement tactically unviable.
It’s a delicate matter even to practice attunement oneself, let alone to monitor the aggregate attunement of a diverse community, and the various vectors of latent conflict which invariably reside under the surface. In this micropolitical framework, a post-machiavellian heuristic would be to assume malattunement of disruptive actors, but to brace for malicious intent.
Here, ‘malattunement’ is taken to refer not only to an outlier relative to the community, but an outlier which is functionally detrimental to the wellbeing of the community. A restorative approach would be to assist the disruptive individual in their efforts to attune to the community; that is, to learn and embody the language and values of that community.
The tactical sphere of considerations concerns the assessment of how operationally costly this attunement aid will be, and the lengths to which this aid will be provided despite continued disruptive behavior. That is, if the disruptive individual is considered to be well-intentioned but merely malattuned, rather than malicious, community members may elect to talk with them and help them align with the community at large. Of course, this assessment is no blithe matter, and a false negative here could cost the community valuable time and resources, or even further degrade the social coherence.
Ultimately, every individual has autonomy over their assessment of character, and how they choose to respond. Worth considering, however, is how these individual sensibilities influence the culture of the community and, by extension, both the vulnerability of that community to disruptive actors, and the accessibility of that community to earnest newcomers.
Footnotes
- From James Madison, Federalist No. 20. The Same Subject Continued (The Insufficiency of the Present Confederation to Preserve the Union)
- At least, the duller among the bad actors, who are tactically incapable of longer-term social engineering - but that is a concern for a different discourse.
- No relation to the so-called “energy medicine” known as attunement. Rather, I mean it in a purely secular and common sense of deeply relating to other people.
- See A Rhapsody on Neurodiversity, wherein I document a relatively extreme traversal of neuropsychological states, which led me to better understand the practical importance of social attunement.
