Digital Terrain: From Steppe to Cybersteppe

A mythos for the digital raider

Introduction

How did the “imageboard user” archetype and his distinct set of characteristics come to be? Are the features random or disjoint? Are they coherent parts of a bigger whole?

There exists a mesh of biological infrastructure and instincts that had developed to accommodate the Aryan population in the harsh terrain of the steppe. I assert that related inherited behaviors have resurfaced, among other points in history, in the "cybersteppe" of the internet imageboards, due to structural similarities of their digital geomorphology with that of their physical equivalent above the Pontic sea. The unique characteristics of the archetypal chan user is a result of this. I'll take a plunge into early 2010's era HBD blogs as background before making the connection.

Group evolutionary strategies

I begin with a brief analysis of group evolutionary strategies, more specifically by studying the cases of steppe lands and river lands. The reason for this will become obvious later on: they will be used as relevant background to expound the main argument.

The terrain of a certain place sets the modifiers on what operations upon it can occur seamlessly or with difficulty / profitably or with high cost, and these modifiers in turn dictate behaviors on the human populations living there. These adopted behaviors are 'group evolutionary strategies', strategies in other words that these populations converge to, in order to maximize their probability of survival and domination. Their biology also evolves to maximize the effectiveness of these behaviors. These are analogous to the min-maxing phenomenon of strategy video games. A historical description of the aforementioned societies now follows. Try to find the connections as you read.

steppe lands

The defining feature of steppe civilizations is the impossibility of emergence of a centralized state. This is the result of many factors, most importantly an economy based on cattle herding instead of farming, spatial mobility afforded by horse-riding, lack of geological choke-points, etc. Those factors in turn render improfitable the upkeep of slavery, as it requires the existence of an activity of high enough return of investment, compared to the cost of keeping the slave in place. The predominantly pastoral economy lends itself to sparsity and decentralization. Intuitively, slavery would mean that one needs to pay as many guardsmen as many slaves there are, a clearly useless endeavor. All of this has implications for the conducting of warfare as well, of which there is plenty in this regional type: since there are no natural borders, and because of the mobile economy, the potential of conflict is constant. This continuous friction between nomadic tribes is what breeds the overaggressive character peculiar to the steppe peoples. Warfare cannot be waged by states supporting a standing army, paying them a salary raised by taxes. Instead, warbands can only be manned voluntarily and ephemerally in the form of militias, by peers possessing agency for themselves, motivated by plunder and honor rather than salaries. This form of organization leaves no room for disagreements: different opinions between parties must be dealt with immediately, or a schism happens.

An underrated phenomenon here is what's known as "martial epistemology". Most humans are NOT attracted unconditionally to truth by their nature. Nassim Taleb has postulated that military people are the most driven towards truth, because they have skin in the game. The process of constructing a military report leaves no room for ideology or comforting lies, as the one doing the deception is going to suffer in battle from the tactical mistakes its inaccuracies have caused along with the other men the report was written for. It has even been theorized that western science is largely an outgrowth of unique Aryan conditioning towards truth.

river lands

Civilizations of the river lands can be seen as the direct opposite of steppe land ones. Rivers are the veins of economy, the backbone around which a fertile farmland is cultivated. Dense concentration of high ROI economical units (farms) around them renders slavery cost-effective. This economic organization means that, as opposed to what occurs in the steppe, human domestication is now profitable, and centralized states arise to extract this profit. Armies are raised by them through motivating soldiers to fight in exchange for a salary, which is paid by taxes that extract surplus value created throughout the territory controlled. Public/infrastructural density and geological borders (rivers, mountains) make fortifications a worthwhile investment. Need for political stability introduces the HLvM mechanic: there are the god rulers (H), and there are slaves laboring (L), but between them (M) there is a portion of the population that finds this setup unfair and wants to subvert it and rise to the top. This portion is systematically decimated by the superiors, to secure their positions. So, agency is often a handicap in this setting. There is no special condition that drives people to truth-seeking behavior. Instead, we see here the advance of organized religions, which serve to unite and create coherency narratives for the mass of individuals living in the densely populated cities of this region. The lack of pressure for increased drive towards truth has even created stereotypes for the descendants of these territories: they are famously known as liars and deceivers (Semites/Mesopotamia and Chinese/Yangtze). In conclusion, this strategy is a lot more productive than the steppe one, making full use of the lush river biome, and this is why almost all first civilizations started in such environment. But what does that mean for its inhabitants? Does it scale properly?

a few words on truth-seeking

The "interface theory of perception" informs us that increased perception is not always beneficial. A mosquito or other insect has just enough sensory ability as it needs to detect the objects it can feed upon (example: detect heat of warm-blooded animals it can sting). Increasing it's visual sensitivity to that of an eagle for example would not result in increased surviveability, as it can already detect the objects it needs just fine. It would vastly decrease its fitness though because of the increased cost associated with maintaining such organs. It's similar with operating systems on our computers: we don't want to see the zeros and ones going through our CPU registers, we want to see an abstract view of them through windows and buttons we can click. This view is technically less accurate, but more desirable for us. What does this have to do with truth? Substitute “perception” for “truth” in the above paragraph: we are not evolved to maximize truth, only what little truth we need to deal with external pressures and survive. Some require more, some less. The autistic is a famous example of a person sabotaging themselves by pursuing truth beyond what is acceptable by their social circle.

Geomorphologies: physical and digital

The science of cybernetics equips us with a new way to study the world, by focusing not on the objects which comprise it separately, but on the processes governing those objects. A famous example compares the movements of a bee searching for flowers and a homeless drug addict searching for their dose: they have structural similarities, despite one being the subject of insect biology, the other the subject of sociology. To restate the introduction of this essay, the main thesis I put forth is that such associations can be drawn between physical terrain types and web application interfaces, in that certain website UX/UI are more suitable towards instinctual patchworks developed as strategies for certain terrains. Websites, then, function as attractors of individuals possessing the relevant behavioral habits. With that in mind, we can start searching for equivalencies between the digital and the physical.

from steppe to cybersteppe

These are the behaviors the imageboard user has adopted from the steppe raider. You should scroll back to the related section if you can't see the connection of any of these points with behaviors I explained to be exemplary of steppe society.

1. Zero need for attachment and unity. Transiency of identities: people are not stuck with each other inside fortifications. A user does not mind becoming enemies with anyone. Fighting is endless and happens over the smallest thing. Disagreeableness is the ruling trait.

2. Anonymity and truth-telling: people driven towards truth are attracted to imageboards, as anonymization minimizes the risks associated with attacking the moral fabric of society. People who would lose their jobs over expressing uncomfortable truths that damage mainstream narratives can express their opinions safely here.

3. Disproportionately successful memetic propagation. Indo-europeans had a population a lot smaller than their neighbors (e.g. Mesopotamia, India, China), but their sub-languages are now spoken by half of the earth's population. Imageboards had a lot fewer visitors than social media did, but nevertheless the vast majority of internet memes have originated there. The examples of polandball or wojak ('feels guy') are extreme: they originated in krautchan, a community even smaller than 4chan, underwent an eventual explosion in popularity, being discovered by average run-of-the-mill twitter users around 2020.

4. Culture of intolerance. Deception against those possessing low agency (trolling). You also don’t have your group of buddies like in Facebook to back you up on anything. Recall how steppe society had no use for slaves or those of low agency.

5. "Swarm intelligence", voluntary self-organization without the need for dictations by leaders, similarly to steppe warbands, often seen in raids or memetic propagation activities. More importantly, this decentralized form of agency is what leads to the infamous gore/CP posting, which is nothing but the community’s self defence mechanisms against intruders.

6. Propensity for raiding. See above point: voluntary, without leaders.

7. Swarming and settling to more fertile lands. Indo-Europeans have largely settled on Europe, like chan diaspora to Twitter. Funnily, even when they settled at reddit, they still had to plunder the semitic man's wealth.

8. Both steppe and cybersteppe raider operate exclusively as cyborgs. One tethered to his horse, the other to his exocortex-connected computer. The pipeline goes like this: aggressiveness -> high testosterone -> aptitude for mechanical control.

9. Culture of flexing. Not sure what causes this, or if it’s unique, but the Aryans had a culture of hosting personal feasts and showing off, and I can’t help but connect this to the /g/ user, participating in the sacred ceremony of “desktop posting”, boasting a pure keyboard/CLI dwm gentoo installation, a simulacrum of productivity as the gold-plated spear is a simulacrum of a weapon, unable to do any meaningful work beyond participating in “fizzbuzz" threads, like the spear that spills no blood beyond that of a sacrificial animal.

10. There is something to be said on the more esoteric aspect of posting: it is a unitive experience that borrows from the non-dualistic dharmic religions of the Aryans, but I will not elaborate here. I plan to dedicate a whole essay on this subject.

The section “from river lands to social media” should be obvious, as its items are almost the inverse of what has been just listed. Those mainly involve behaviors necessitated by lack of agency, such as preference for comforting narratives over truth, reliance on fortifications and top-down interventions, need for coherence and unity, and more. Example: lack of agency leads to requirement for a cheap means of decideability, such as trusting “experts” or copying what others do. This is what’s being targeted in the process of trolling, with the victim being unable to perceive deception without external guidance.

It should be noted that these aren’t features of social media specifically: they are features of the human populace in general, whose instincts are mirrored accurately in social media. The imageboard, in contrast, mirrors the instincts of what’s only a minority in the meatspace.

End

This is the first post in a series that will explore digital (oc)culture and the less studied/more esoteric effects of the internet on society. I think it's a subject that's not given the attention it deserves. A large portion of our world had remained intellectually stagnant in the face of the advance of mass media like the television: the matter had been largely relegated to pseudo-intellectuals. This should not be repeated with the topic of the internet. The aggregate of sorcerers that participated in a massive initiation rite in the electronic frontier must be the ones that undertake the effort of this research. It should not be resigned to uninitiated outsiders, university grads paid to grind out papers.

I drew connections between physical and digital terrains. My analysis was limited to just the two terrain types relevant to our comparison of imageboards and social media. These are not the only ones that exist, though. As homework, I leave you to ponder about digital equivalents of mountain ranges, archipelagi, forests, or of the physical equivalents of IRC, discord, deep web (caves? islands?), whatever else. My analysis also completely skips over the computers used to browse the internet, OS level details, physical and software networking protocols (wires/TCP IP stack), which might also be relevant. Terrain is not the only physical category we can draw analogies from, there are many other categories, especially human infrastructure such as houses, streets, shops, clubs/bars, but even non-spatial ones. I hope that this exploration of transitions and processes over objects functions as a catalyst for further introspection on your part, even if you didn’t care about this post’s main point.