War Rooms and Peace Rooms

An update to my cozyweb and internet of beefs theories

I’ve been revisiting, rethinking, and updating my cozyweb and Internet of Beefs (IoB) theories ever since the Dark Forest anthology, put together by Yancey Strickler, came out. It strikes me, now that we’re all several years into dividing most of our online time across various cozy enclaves, that I elided a very important distinction: Between cozyweb enclaves organized around war missions vs. ones organized around peace missions. Let’s call these war rooms and peace rooms.

In my characterization of the cozyweb I think I inadvertently suggested that it mostly comprises peace rooms formed by people who wanted to abandon the war-torn public web for private spaces where they could continue (or rediscover) more enriching peace-time pursuits, without retreating entirely offline to waldenponding. Certainly that was my motive. I can do some mediocre online culture-warring when I must, where I have stakes, but I’m fundamentally about generative peace-time pursuits. But now, four years into the Permaweird, taking stock of the dozen or so cozyweb enclaves I’m in, it strikes me that it’s a fairly full spectrum between war rooms and peace rooms, and that despite the healing connotations of cozy, the cozyweb is as much about making war as it is about finding or building peace.

A cozyweb war room is characterized by a clear shared mission, strong and suspicious perimeter-security gatekeeping, deep, battle-tested trust relationships, and activities designed to marshal resources and alliances for consequential and public battles. The most extreme and clear war rooms are of course political campaign war rooms around actual elections, or specific transient needs like unionization efforts, but the most interesting ones are the persistent ones not devoted to specific battles but to maintaining a particular belligerent philosophical posture through an indefinite war. Fortresses rather than forward field positions. War rooms are high-energy places with spikes around hot conflicts.

A cozyweb peace room is characterized by shared behavioral norms, weak and variable gatekeeping (usually assets-based rather than perimeter-based), shallower, less-tested trust relationships, and activities designed to build up peaceful social capital stores. The most extreme and clear peace rooms are pure cultural production zones devoted to art, study, or “deep work” that are radically open to drive-by and permissionless participation. Often they only have security-by-obscurity. The internet of beefs doesn’t leak in much not because there are impenetrable high walls but because the people inside simply aren’t interested in being in fight-mode all the time, regardless of causes. Peace rooms are not good recruitment zones for warmakers. Peace rooms are low-to-medium energy places that try to keep spikes and surges of energy to a minimum, and instead focus on fostering a culture where people simply show up, week after week and as much as they can.

Now that I am thinking in these terms, the two cozyweb enclaves with some public visibility that I’ve helped start in the last 4 years, the Yak Collective and the Summer of Protocols, are both near-pure peace rooms. Both are pretty much open to anyone who wants to wander in and is willing to suspend their war-making commitments while they’re there. In the former, we explicitly focus on “show up every week” tempo. We vastly prefer members who show up an hour a week for 10 weeks, contributing steadily to a low-key study group track, over excited people who come once with a 10-hour surge of participation energy to offer. We don’t mind it or keep such people out, but we don’t prioritize, encourage, or double down on it. But a war room can use such surge energy.

Peace rooms cannot ignore culture wars of course, but tend to adopt don’t-ask-don’t-tell attitudes towards any war-room affiliations members may have elsewhere. In the Yak Collective study groups for example, we sometimes discuss sensitive, controversial readings in study sessions, where members fall on opposed sides, but we tend not to bring war-room attitudes to the study sessions. The temperature is low enough we can actually disagree without danger. It’s like Old West towns in some movies (were these real?) where you had to check your weapons before entering. And the thread of conflict topics is much weaker than the thread of shared cultural production around non-conflict topics. This took some active design and policing early on, but is now mostly self-sustaining.

Similarly, war rooms cannot ignore peace-time cultural capital building imperatives entirely. That would be intolerably bleak and nihilistic for most humans. So there’s usually also a thread of positive non-conflict cultural production going on. But it’s kept limited to a level where it does not distract too much from the business of waging war. There’s an unspoken “don’t forget, we’re at war” sentiment in the air.

Though the spectrum from war rooms to peace rooms is full, the distribution is not uniform. It’s bimodal. It’s hard for a single cozyweb enclave to either maintain a stable 50-50 war-peace posture or switch gears often enough to hit that ratio on average. Switching gears from war to peace or vice-versa is a traumatic pivot involving significant loss of membership that may not be recoverable. This means most cozyweb enclaves are stable 80-20 or 20-80 war-peace. Most people also have baseline warmaker or peacemaker personalities. If you’re a baseline peacemaker like me, you view your peace-room memberships as your home zone and your war-room memberships as a tourism zone. If you’re a baseline warmaker, it’s the reverse.

War-making online is well-understood and the culture of war rooms resembles online gaming guilds (ironically, I found this reading via an old Yak Collective study group session). But peace-room culture, which interests me much more, is far subtler and much harder to create and cultivate, especially when you go from narrow, well-defined cultural production like memes, stylized fiction like SCP, or photography, to more ambitious and diffuse things like “research,” or complex projects like building open-source rovers. For example, the Yak Online Governance primer, based on 2 years of weekly study sessions, was remarkably hard to pull together. The Summer of Protocols is one of the toughest cultural projects I’ve undertaken, despite being generously funded.

This shouldn’t be surprising. Making peace is much harder and far less glamorous than making war, and mostly involves building up compounding positive potential flywheels rather than countering war-making forces directly. To snowclone the line about markets, in the short term, peace-making is a voting machine, but in the long term it is a weighing machine. It rests not on trying to build bridges or getting warring parties to set aside hostilities and negotiate, but on building up big and compounding reserves of peace-power assets. Peace is not the absence of war, but the presence of flywheels of generativity. It is war, not peace, that is negatively defined —by an absence of such flywheels.

This is a hard-to-grok notion. Our culture valorizes wars and spins heroic narratives around them. It treats peace as a zone of parasitic weakness that only exists by the grace of “good” warmakers “winning” the peace for the cowering weaklings to enjoy for a while. An example of this self-congratulatory macho understanding of war and peace is the proposition: strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create bad times, bad times create strong men.

It’s easy to understand war-time economic production, stockpiling armaments, and exciting maneuvering in conflicts. But it’s harder to appreciate the extent to which pivoting to wartime arms production rests on redirecting accumulated momentum in peace-flywheel assets. And if there’s enough momentum, war can in fact be indefinitely held at bay (this is the old, fraying notion of the democratic peace restated in more basic terms). The famed American war economy of WW2 was not built up from scratch but a pivot of a set of powerful peace-time economic and cultural production flywheels. The arsenal of democracy was a pivot of the peacetime wealth economy. Car factories became tank factories. Butter-making energy shifted to gun-making energy. But if the flywheels had been more powerful and more uniformly distributed worldwide, the pivot might not have been needed at all.

In the recent Dark Forest Collective roundtable Yancey pulled together to discuss the anthology, I took the contrarian position arguing that the dark forest and cozyweb were (or at least, should be) temporary conditions of retreat and that we should be figuring out how to reclaim the public for peace. But what does this even mean and how do you do it?

I think you do it by building up unstoppable momentum in cozyweb peace-room cultural production flywheels while the war rooms are busy fighting negative-sum wars over what’s left of the public spaces. Once the momentum is high enough, you can stop hiding and go public. You don’t end wars by arguing for peace or imposing “order” by force after “winning.” That sort of peace won by war is fragile and unsustainable. It is a delusion harbored by self-styled “strong men” during their 15 minutes of strength.

You actually end wars by making peace too valuable to miss out on.

The old line, “if you want peace, prepare for war; if you want war, prepare for peace,” is bullshit. Terry Pratchett had it right:

“If you would seek war, prepare for war.’”

“I believe, my lord, the saying is ‘If you would seek peace, prepare for war,’” Leonard ventured.

Vetinari put his head on one side and his lips moved as he repeated the phrase to himself. Finally he said, “No, no. I just don’t see that one at all.”

―Terry Pratchett,Jingo