Opinions on bridging subcultures that don't quite harmonize

1 like = 1 opinion on "Bridging subcultures that don’t quite harmonize" (It's not quite a natural category for me but it's what vgr gave me and I like a challenge! good way to draw out some implicit opinions. comment if you have more specific Qs)

Venkatesh Rao ☀️ @vgr · Dec 13, 2019

Everyone should do a one-opinion-per-like personal challenge (make it 2 or 3 if you have too few followers). Live-fire stress test of your brainstorming capacity

Dec 16, 2019

1/ subcultures that don't quite harmonize are the norm, not the exception

2/ subcultures are fractal and fundamentally subjective. no two people live in quite the same subculture

3/ most co-mingling, in practice, happens by people managing to ignore differences, not by any real bridging

4/ real bridging would exploit the differences to create a parallax effect

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean · Dec 3, 2019

@uncatherio For more on this thing about perspective, read Unflattening by @Nsousanis: a PhD thesis created as beautiful graphic art. amzn.to/2YikJ5V (Not coincidentally, I told @Conaw about it in Sept'18, in a convo where we talked about writing a book together) 2 relevant pages:

5/ virtually all subcultures that exist include core assumptions that differences are wrongnesses, which is why ignoring differences tends to be the approach instead (#3)

6/ differing subcultures that can tap some deeper shared purpose will have an easier time bridging than those that cannot.

7/ that shared purpose can be a shared goal or a shared value, or both

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean · Dec 16, 2019

I like @edelwax's perspective on goals & values, and how it's more important not to sacrifice your values for your goals than vice versa. (goal = *what* I want to achieve) (value = *how* I want to live my life) medium.com/what-to-build/…

8/ in general, one needs both shared goal & shared value for an ongoing deep bridge

9/ note that because of the fractal thing, what I'm saying here applies to a collaboration between two individuals or honestly even a collaboration between multiple parts of *one* "in-dividual"

10/ honestly I'm kind of afraid of most subcultures and want nothing to do with them. I think that's part of why I'm finding writing this thread hard ...is that true? idk. there's something true about it

11/ I guess on the scale of individual peoples' subcultures, as I've defined it, I can get pretty curious about somebody's assumptions/ontology etc sort of like "there's more that can be said about one apple than about all apples"

12/ it seems to me (based on @cognazor & @JaredJanes talking on early BothAnd podcast about their appetite to be Memetic Mediators) that there are people who naturally gravitate towards wanting to do this bridging.

13/ one sort of bridging that I do feel more attracted to is like... via context-creation? eg Burning Man creates a new super-culture in which dissonant subcultures somehow come together coherently. (caught up to likes, going to bed for now)