I was hopeful for the headline, but then the actual post meandered around different ideas. Phoebe Bridgers runs the venue and has the power to throw people out if they don't obey. That's not a social rule, that's just a rule enforced by real consequences. It doesn't tell people it is unacceptable to film concerts, it tells them that it is a specific rule at a Bridgers concert that you can't do that.
On the other hand if you tell someone to turn off a television program in a diner and they ignore you, then you can't kick them out. Only the diner owner can do that. Or for airline queuing, I've seen the "everyone clumps up and comes in at once", but I've also seen "the airline tells everyone to line up according to a specific order and boards them in that exact order". The airline has the full power to do that if they want. Shanghai Disneyland had to shove everyone in a single person wide funnel so it's impossible to line jump... but they could do that and did.
And here's something really interesting. I noticed something new on the comment box for this post, something I've never seen before. It's a dropdown called "The Argument reply rules".
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The Argument reply rules
We welcome strong and even harsh disagreement but personal attacks or gratuitously offensive language will be deleted and repeat offenders barred from commenting.
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So people behaving rudely will be kicked out of the venue, even if they paid to attend. Sounds an awful lot like a Bridgers concert!
Is the real lesson here not that random bystanders should be more aggressive in staging social inteventions, but that venue owners and managers should be more aggressive in enforcing actual rules to make life easier for all the regular users?
I think it requires both. These are meant to be shorter so I try and restrict myself rather than turning this into a full piece but it’s very difficult for venue owners to enforce rules on their own. They often rely on the social pressure of others to maintain compliance when staff aren’t there or observing the failure—this really broke down during covid which coincided with the anti-Karen moment which vilified but productive and unproductive public shaming.
Yeah, like fundamentally if you're arguing that the only solution is enforced consequences, then you're also arguing for a much higher level of omnipresent surveillance and/or policing (in both the literal and figurative senses).
Venues setting policies and enforcing them can help shape norms, but people also just have to be willing to try to set these boundaries themselves. I think pandemic and social media have just cooked many peoples' brains to the point they don't even realize what they're doing is rude and unwelcome until someone actually points it out to them.
There's a continuum between explicit rules, backed by force, and social norms. Social pressure is real pressure. If people repeatedly tell you to put your headphones on at the cafe, you hopefully will eventually get the message that you are violating a social norm.
I'd also argue there's a strong feedback loop between explicit rules and social norms. People do not like and will resist rules that violate social norms, and accept rules that enforce them (all probabilistically, of course). If the cafe owner gets a bunch of complaints about device noise, they are more likely to implement an explicit rule about using headphones.
I'm not sure if I want to open the debate, but I guess I'll also say I'm not sure what expectations people should have about "noise" in a cafe. If it were two people talking that would be fine, right? A cafe is a place to have conversations, so if you went there for work and there's a lot of chatter around, that's your problem. I think we're solid there. But then if it's noise from a device, that's bad and they should shut it down, even if it's two people watching the device together? Okay but then what if they're not passively watching but are having a conversation about what they're watching?
I don't know! That's why I want the cafe owner to tell me what the expectations are, if there is a place where people can be noisy and watch a device together, or if it's a place where people bring their laptops and get some work done and no one should be too loud.
But that's part of the point, right? Nobody knows exactly what the social norms are, they are always being negotiated! So you provide a little bit of feedback for the other customers, and for the cafe owner, to indicate the direction you think things should go. What they do with that in the short term is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, but it's part of the aggregation/negotiation process.
The problem, perhaps, is that we've collectively acquired the very bad habit of escalating every issue to one of existential threat. And there's a reason for that, which for that the last 20 years or so this has been an incredibly effective tactic for getting your way.
We should probably go back to applying light social sanctions against making too big a deal about things. If you really seriously for real can't be without your phone, well, you can just not go to the Phoebe Bridgers concert! You don't need to get the UN involved and claim your human rights are being violated! And if you do so, people are allowed to make fun of you a bit.
People violating noise ordinances or other laws by being obnoxiously disruptive in public spaces don't deserve to be tossed in prison, but they should be subject to lesser sanctions such as being evicted, ticketed, or temporarily banned. At least in America, asking people to be considerate is going to be more impactful if supported by genuine consequences; they just need to be proportionate to the gravity of the offense.
Japanese artists have been discouraging filming at venues for a long time. Japanese artists tend to be very big on their own privacy and the exclusivity of their venue experiences. Before things like Yondr pouches, it used to be lots of announcements during the show in smaller venues along with staff ready to kick out misbehavors. These days it can be Yondr pouches.
Japanese artists have become more open to filming recently as social media has been filled with videos of these festivals/concerts where the crowd is constantly filming, which IMO sucks!
For the record, I support Black Friday having a special carve out whereby shoppers are free to act like savages. And if eyewitnesses use their phones to capture the bedlam on video, so much the better!
Strongly disagree. Black Friday is a curse for all the people working retail who already live the rough life of interacting with a public who tends to look down on them. It's bad enough to have to deal with unreasonable people every day, it's 10x worse to have to get up super early the day after Thanksgiving to work a shift where people think it's okay to act like animals.
Get me a solution to the inefficiency of people holding spots in advance of arrival. Pool lounge chairs at resorts, parking spaces while a friend circles around and on and on.
The resort posts a sign saying "no holding spots" and gives you permission to simply take over a held spot, reassuring you that if there's a conflict the resort will side with you ignoring the holding. That's the solution.
These are two different issues. There's 0% excuse for pool lounge chairs; resorts should just ban the practice, and probably also have more lounge chairs so people don't get the urge as often.
The holding of parking spots should be highly discouraged except for a few scenarios, which the holder can explain if questioned:
1. This is the best spot for to park for moving cumbersome objects into or out of the building directly next to it
2. We need to unload or load an elderly/pregnant/disabled person as close to this location as possible
Possibly there are other good excuses, but people should feel free to question spot holders, and when questioned, the spot holders should be expected to supply an excuse of equal quality to the ones above and also apologize for the inconvenience.
I was hopeful for the headline, but then the actual post meandered around different ideas. Phoebe Bridgers runs the venue and has the power to throw people out if they don't obey. That's not a social rule, that's just a rule enforced by real consequences. It doesn't tell people it is unacceptable to film concerts, it tells them that it is a specific rule at a Bridgers concert that you can't do that.
On the other hand if you tell someone to turn off a television program in a diner and they ignore you, then you can't kick them out. Only the diner owner can do that. Or for airline queuing, I've seen the "everyone clumps up and comes in at once", but I've also seen "the airline tells everyone to line up according to a specific order and boards them in that exact order". The airline has the full power to do that if they want. Shanghai Disneyland had to shove everyone in a single person wide funnel so it's impossible to line jump... but they could do that and did.
And here's something really interesting. I noticed something new on the comment box for this post, something I've never seen before. It's a dropdown called "The Argument reply rules".
===
The Argument reply rules
We welcome strong and even harsh disagreement but personal attacks or gratuitously offensive language will be deleted and repeat offenders barred from commenting.
===
So people behaving rudely will be kicked out of the venue, even if they paid to attend. Sounds an awful lot like a Bridgers concert!
Is the real lesson here not that random bystanders should be more aggressive in staging social inteventions, but that venue owners and managers should be more aggressive in enforcing actual rules to make life easier for all the regular users?
I think it requires both. These are meant to be shorter so I try and restrict myself rather than turning this into a full piece but it’s very difficult for venue owners to enforce rules on their own. They often rely on the social pressure of others to maintain compliance when staff aren’t there or observing the failure—this really broke down during covid which coincided with the anti-Karen moment which vilified but productive and unproductive public shaming.
Yeah, like fundamentally if you're arguing that the only solution is enforced consequences, then you're also arguing for a much higher level of omnipresent surveillance and/or policing (in both the literal and figurative senses).
Venues setting policies and enforcing them can help shape norms, but people also just have to be willing to try to set these boundaries themselves. I think pandemic and social media have just cooked many peoples' brains to the point they don't even realize what they're doing is rude and unwelcome until someone actually points it out to them.
There's a continuum between explicit rules, backed by force, and social norms. Social pressure is real pressure. If people repeatedly tell you to put your headphones on at the cafe, you hopefully will eventually get the message that you are violating a social norm.
I'd also argue there's a strong feedback loop between explicit rules and social norms. People do not like and will resist rules that violate social norms, and accept rules that enforce them (all probabilistically, of course). If the cafe owner gets a bunch of complaints about device noise, they are more likely to implement an explicit rule about using headphones.
I'm not sure if I want to open the debate, but I guess I'll also say I'm not sure what expectations people should have about "noise" in a cafe. If it were two people talking that would be fine, right? A cafe is a place to have conversations, so if you went there for work and there's a lot of chatter around, that's your problem. I think we're solid there. But then if it's noise from a device, that's bad and they should shut it down, even if it's two people watching the device together? Okay but then what if they're not passively watching but are having a conversation about what they're watching?
I don't know! That's why I want the cafe owner to tell me what the expectations are, if there is a place where people can be noisy and watch a device together, or if it's a place where people bring their laptops and get some work done and no one should be too loud.
But that's part of the point, right? Nobody knows exactly what the social norms are, they are always being negotiated! So you provide a little bit of feedback for the other customers, and for the cafe owner, to indicate the direction you think things should go. What they do with that in the short term is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, but it's part of the aggregation/negotiation process.
agreed! I made a relevant argument about the in-between things here: https://thepursuitofliberalism.substack.com/p/the-over-delegation-problem?r=n8nwg&utm_medium=ios
The problem, perhaps, is that we've collectively acquired the very bad habit of escalating every issue to one of existential threat. And there's a reason for that, which for that the last 20 years or so this has been an incredibly effective tactic for getting your way.
We should probably go back to applying light social sanctions against making too big a deal about things. If you really seriously for real can't be without your phone, well, you can just not go to the Phoebe Bridgers concert! You don't need to get the UN involved and claim your human rights are being violated! And if you do so, people are allowed to make fun of you a bit.
But of course, this has its own tradeoffs.
People violating noise ordinances or other laws by being obnoxiously disruptive in public spaces don't deserve to be tossed in prison, but they should be subject to lesser sanctions such as being evicted, ticketed, or temporarily banned. At least in America, asking people to be considerate is going to be more impactful if supported by genuine consequences; they just need to be proportionate to the gravity of the offense.
Japanese artists have been discouraging filming at venues for a long time. Japanese artists tend to be very big on their own privacy and the exclusivity of their venue experiences. Before things like Yondr pouches, it used to be lots of announcements during the show in smaller venues along with staff ready to kick out misbehavors. These days it can be Yondr pouches.
Japanese artists have become more open to filming recently as social media has been filled with videos of these festivals/concerts where the crowd is constantly filming, which IMO sucks!
For the record, I support Black Friday having a special carve out whereby shoppers are free to act like savages. And if eyewitnesses use their phones to capture the bedlam on video, so much the better!
Strongly disagree. Black Friday is a curse for all the people working retail who already live the rough life of interacting with a public who tends to look down on them. It's bad enough to have to deal with unreasonable people every day, it's 10x worse to have to get up super early the day after Thanksgiving to work a shift where people think it's okay to act like animals.
Get me a solution to the inefficiency of people holding spots in advance of arrival. Pool lounge chairs at resorts, parking spaces while a friend circles around and on and on.
The resort posts a sign saying "no holding spots" and gives you permission to simply take over a held spot, reassuring you that if there's a conflict the resort will side with you ignoring the holding. That's the solution.
These are two different issues. There's 0% excuse for pool lounge chairs; resorts should just ban the practice, and probably also have more lounge chairs so people don't get the urge as often.
The holding of parking spots should be highly discouraged except for a few scenarios, which the holder can explain if questioned:
1. This is the best spot for to park for moving cumbersome objects into or out of the building directly next to it
2. We need to unload or load an elderly/pregnant/disabled person as close to this location as possible
Possibly there are other good excuses, but people should feel free to question spot holders, and when questioned, the spot holders should be expected to supply an excuse of equal quality to the ones above and also apologize for the inconvenience.