Still trying to get a handle on what appears to be a relatively scale-free and recurrent phenomenon that I keep observing all across our current panoply of Social Technical Architectures.

Getting just the right acronym is of course 99% of the battle …

Jon

Would you be interested in explaining a bit about what you mean by this name?

Given that "transference" is the psychological term that usually refers to the projection of one's feelings for an important figure in one's past onto a different figure in one's present-day life, my guess is that this is a kind of "macrosocial" version of that, as it might apply to interactive websites or other online communities... In other words, your favorite Facebook group may be nothing like your favorite Wikipedia sub-cabal, but if you begin to feel comfortable, accepted, or influential within the Facebook group, you might begin to internally ascribe characteristics to that group that are similar to that of the WP sub-cabal, even if the group is completely different in almost every important respect.

This could also happen within Wikipedia itself, as people move from one internal social/ideological clique to another. Though personally I doubt that's what Mr. Awbrey here is primarily concerned with.

He could also be referring to iron-on transfers, such as those used to make cheap T-shirts. Aligning those things is much trickier than it might seem to the uninitiated, and if you're doing several shirts at once, you should put aside a good two or three hours for the whole procedure.

This was just my latest attempt to put a name to a group dynamic phenomenon that I've been trying to understand for about as long as I can remember, since grade school I guess, when I used to notice it in the behavior of bullies and gangs that I had the misfortune to encounter on the playground. It seemed at first to be largely a Y-chromosome-related thing, but later I would find out about a fiendishly feminine variation on the ganging-up gambit.

Fast forward to the current scene …

Until just recently I had been thinking that it was something about the massive multiplayer scale of Wikiputia that was to blame for its automated inhumanity. When you really get to know it, the mob mentality of Wikiputia is much less analogous to a hive of bees, who are normally beenign and productive creatures, than it is to a horde of grasshoppers who have metamorphed into a swarm of locusts, destroying everything consumable in their path.

But lately I've been noticing the same dynamics in relatively small groups of otherwise more than usually intelligent people. So I've had to go back to the drawing board as far as drafting an adequate theory goes.

Somey is on target with the psych meaning of transference. I had been remembering some of the stranger effects that I had observed back in the days of T-groups — some people said the T was for Training, but others said the T was for Transference. At any rate, you sure saw a lot of wild transference effects in those settings. And yeah, there was a lot of tie-dyeing of T-shirts involved, if I recall.

The other thing that came to mind, and made the TAG acronym click a bit louder, was "tag" in the sense of syntactic tags, and the fact that so many exploits turn on the uncontrolled automatisms of hermeneutic systems in parsing them.

Jon Awbrey

Man, if I just had a nickel for every time that's happened to me...

I've had some exposure to "T-groups" and in 1968 even took an undergraduate class from the USC business school that was one huge T-group session for an entire semester. In retrospect, the whole thing was completely perverse, destructive, and disgusting. I had to hide my disgust to get a "B" in the course. The instructor was a True Believer and one of those 40-something, superficially-charismatic dudes, who was trying to ride the coattails of the counterculture, probably so he could bang some hippie chicks in his spare time. He never did anything to harm his career, whereas I was really, really pissed off about U.S. policy in Vietnam.

From an essay I wrote in 1993:

“… one of those 40-something, superficially-charismatic dudes, who was trying to ride the coattails of the counterculture, probably so he could bang some hippie chicks in his spare time …”

Some things just never change …

My experience with T-grouping was a bit more positive — albeit at diminished revels — but if I can believe the things I heard from other sections it could have been a lot more mix-mangled-minds-&-bodies destructive of personality and sense of direction. I think it was all contingent on the "non-directive" indirections of the non-directive "facilitator". But I could see the potential for serious brain-washing and mind manipulation in many directions.

Jon

Freudian shrinks tend to use the word in a narrower way, for the phenomenon in which the shrink begins benefitting, by being held in the same awe-struck mindless surrender-of-all autonomy that small children feel for their parents. Or, alternately, the feeling that females feel for a male who is anybody BUT their parents, about the time of pubertal-rebellion. The shrink thus becomes a sort of guru, able to give orders to a patient who does not question them, rather like the military does to 19-year-old recruits, or Manson-type figures do to young female followers.

A certain amount of transferece is necessary for psychotherapy even to work, so goes the theory, since if you (as patient) do not "transfer" some ridiculous amount of over-trust to the therapist/teacher, the skepiticism that naturally attends being asked to tell some nerd you don't know about your earliest memories of your mother, or knowledge of your parents having sex (say), will keep anything from working.

My own feeling is that "transferrence" is just the private Freudian language term for a phenomenon which has been noticed by many people in many social situations, and called by many names. It is the phenomenon behind mass-movements, creation of true believers, and cults. It's even the phenomenon behind hypnosis, in which there must be more-or-less willing surrender of autonomy to another.

It has an interesting relationship to proxy-transference of power in liquid democracies. It's sort of how humans have solved problems in small bands without using an overt voting scheme, for zillions of years. Basically, what happens is that everybody picks out their "heros" and decides to do what the God-King says. This saves on a lot of anxiety about making ones' own decisions.

It must go down in the guts of small-band primate behavior, since it's seen in all cultures. This kind of autonomy-surrender and extreme group-identification (with loss of personal boundaries) has also long been noticed to happen much more effectively and quickly in small groups placed under continuous stress, such as a platoon in battle conditions, or some high-stress military training. Such conditions are therefore deliberately replicated by cults, where the members are suffocated, sweat-lodged, yelled at, or even made to sit in some room and listen to some asshole with a mic, and not allowed to use the bathroom (see Werner Erhard's early EST seminars). If you surrender even the most primitive decisions like when you releave yourself to somebody else, you're activating this particular social circuit.

Of course, there are ironies. In the EST thing (which I resisted and never did) I was told by others who'd done the "training" that the whole message at the end of the training, was some Emersonian message that you didn't have to pick gurus, and that you could make your own decisions, including when to pee. So the irony is that they finally gave you permission to do what I long ago gave myself permission to do, without spending any training money.

Milton Roe

N.B. I suppose I'm personally not very susceptable to whatever-this-is. I can't be hypnotized, for example. I've been telling people "representing" organized religions to fuck-off and take their scam elsewhere, since about the age of 20. And for some time I've been aware that the same types of scams operate in just about all groups, from businesses to governments. At some point, you just realize that all emperors have no clothes, and are nude. A lovely parable, that one.

Miltown Row obviously x-hibits a lot of Oedipal Rebellion (ΨΑ : OR) — you might well ask WHY he wants his Emperors nude — but never mind that now, he has the right idea at ♥ —

Bringing it home to roost in a more suckcinct e-pitome, you could sump it up a bit like this —

Wikipediots Think Wikipedia Is Their Mother

Jon

This still seems to me a big piece of the puzzle …

Jon

Was Post #9 a parody in which you comically project your own inchoate feelings about authority figures onto Milton Row?

My feelings about authority are thoroughly hitched up by now, but, yes, that initial throwaway line was thrown away largely for comic effect, and thanks, as always, for missing the point of the thread.

Jon