Ahh fuckit part of my @threadapalooza thread had a clear subtopic and wanted to be its own thread. Here's the thread about "membranes" as a metaphor for groups of people.
Membranes as a metaphor for group boundaries
11 tweets · December 2020 · 30 likes · 0 retweets · read on Twitter
15a/ Membranes. Monists go on about how everything is one, which is true in a sense but also have you noticed that some things are inside and some things are outside? The role of skin, or the walls of a house, or a windshield on a car, is it keeps inside in & outside out.
15b/ Membranes can be applied to groups, and we can talk about a few different kinds of membranes that you might see around a particular group of people: - closed membrane - closed web - semipermeable membrane - open network
15c/ Closed Membrane: eg a company, family or country. Maybe a way to join it, but you need an active & explicit invitation by the members, whether that’s a job application or a marriage or an immigration process. Lots of intentional community houses are also like this.
15d/ Closed Web: consider a friend group. You don't exactly need an invitation from everyone in the group to join, but you do need to make friends with *someone* in the group. Polycules (except polyfidelity) work similarly, usually.
15e/ Semipermeable Membrane: ~anyone can join; there might be a requirement like buying membership, but you can just do it. Or going vegan. Or there might be a requirement of actually showing up, like Kevin Kelly's description of the Camp 4 scenius: kk.org/thetechnium/sc…
15f/ (note that semipermeable membranes do need to eject people sometimes, but only if the person’s presence is actively disrupting the group, either asshole-style or by undermining the norms, eg by arguing using blatant logical fallacies at rationalist parties)
15g/ Open Network: doesn’t have clear boundaries at all (not a membrane) and is more of a description of an emergent cluster in people-space. The region of twitter I hang out in is sometimes referred to as “strangely earnest twitter”.
15h/ How many ppl have heard of the phrase “strangely earnest twitter”, or identify with being part of it? It existed before it had that name. It overlaps with many other seemingly-unrelated twitter networks. Rather than joining such a group, you find yourself in it.
15i/ There are probably more types than this, but this is an initial typology that seems helpful for thinking about the nature of groups. All of these types are necessary, *and* you're gonna have a bad time if there isn't clarity about the nature of a particular group/membrane.
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