OMG, that’s an interesting project! And I originally wanted to spend this day without too much web reading.
Some of the comments are… educational.
The very fact that you think it’s acceptable to ask … disturbs me greatly. The very fact that you think it’s reasonable to want … strikes me as a symptom of … at its worst.
The request constitutes … just as much as the actual … does.
There are many people in this world … who would never walk up to a stranger and ask … We are taught from an early age not to do this, to exercise what is typically called societal restraint. It’s impolite to do this to strangers, we are taught. You are proposing a system to make the question permissible.
This illustrates that the so-called conflict between Guess culture and Ask culture cannot be solved by merely saying “here we have a opt-in subgroup which uses different communication rules”. Some things are merely difficult to guess correctly, and that can be fixed by improving the communication system. But some things are genuinely taboo… so creating a better communication system about them would cause an outrage.
At the first sight, they may both seem the same to an outsider or a clueless insider, because both are something that is simply never talked about. Therefore, as the first step, we have to find out whether X is “generally okay, just difficult to coordinate” or “forbidden”. If something is considered intrinsically wrong, creating a more reliable and more consensual communication system is solving the wrong problem. (It would also be necessary to make the system secret, or at least plausibly deniable. But that makes coordination even more difficult.) And we should actually be thankful to people who openly admit they believe it is intrinsically wrong, as opposed to e.g. rationalizing about imperfections in the communication system, etc.
(I am not sure how to feel about an argument that there ain’t no such thing as consent, because people can always be pressured into consent e.g. by ostracism; and therefore, if it is morally wrong to do X against someone’s will, then it is wrong to allow X even among consenting people. It has a point; but applied consistently it would mean you shouldn’t interact with anyone, ever. Which I guess means that the only practical way to apply this is to have a social consensus about when to use it and when to ignore it, which will be decided by the high-status people. And by the way, merely saying that there should be a way to do X, implies that X is good, which already creates a pressure on people to do X. -- Another interesting generalizable argument was that allowing consensual X is wrong, because some people would get more consent and some wouldn’t get any, and they would feel horrible; therefore it is better to keep it a general taboo, so no one feels personally rejected. -- Also, people have a right not to know that your subculture exists. = I should probably use all these to create a random activity-criticism generator. Or even a complete flamewar generator, because there are also predictable responses.)
If there is a culture with a taboo against hugging, where people who want to hug others are perceived as morally depraved and dangerous, providing “hugs” tags for people would be risky.
By the way, the system mentioned in the article used two clearly explicit steps (some commenters may have misunderstood this, or may have reacted to the early stages before the protocol was established). The protocol was: (1) opt in by wearing a tag; (2) ask people with the tag whether it is okay to do X; (3) do X. Which means that under this protocol no one should even be asked without consenting to be asked first. -- This two-step consent is probably a good idea for controversial topics, although I would like to also have a one-step alternative. For example “it is okay to ask if you can hug me” and “it is okay to hug me even without asking first”.
(I wanted to stay meta, but here is an object-level note: It would have been better to call it “Open Source Touching Project”; because other body parts were also allowed, but many people in discussions objected to the title. Also, there is a valid objection that doing some things in public may be illegal, so it is wrong to do such things at a convention without explicit permission of the organizers.)
OMG, that’s an interesting project! And I originally wanted to spend this day without too much web reading.
Some of the comments are… educational.
This illustrates that the so-called conflict between Guess culture and Ask culture cannot be solved by merely saying “here we have a opt-in subgroup which uses different communication rules”. Some things are merely difficult to guess correctly, and that can be fixed by improving the communication system. But some things are genuinely taboo… so creating a better communication system about them would cause an outrage.
At the first sight, they may both seem the same to an outsider or a clueless insider, because both are something that is simply never talked about. Therefore, as the first step, we have to find out whether X is “generally okay, just difficult to coordinate” or “forbidden”. If something is considered intrinsically wrong, creating a more reliable and more consensual communication system is solving the wrong problem. (It would also be necessary to make the system secret, or at least plausibly deniable. But that makes coordination even more difficult.) And we should actually be thankful to people who openly admit they believe it is intrinsically wrong, as opposed to e.g. rationalizing about imperfections in the communication system, etc.
(I am not sure how to feel about an argument that there ain’t no such thing as consent, because people can always be pressured into consent e.g. by ostracism; and therefore, if it is morally wrong to do X against someone’s will, then it is wrong to allow X even among consenting people. It has a point; but applied consistently it would mean you shouldn’t interact with anyone, ever. Which I guess means that the only practical way to apply this is to have a social consensus about when to use it and when to ignore it, which will be decided by the high-status people. And by the way, merely saying that there should be a way to do X, implies that X is good, which already creates a pressure on people to do X. -- Another interesting generalizable argument was that allowing consensual X is wrong, because some people would get more consent and some wouldn’t get any, and they would feel horrible; therefore it is better to keep it a general taboo, so no one feels personally rejected. -- Also, people have a right not to know that your subculture exists. = I should probably use all these to create a random activity-criticism generator. Or even a complete flamewar generator, because there are also predictable responses.)
If there is a culture with a taboo against hugging, where people who want to hug others are perceived as morally depraved and dangerous, providing “hugs” tags for people would be risky.
By the way, the system mentioned in the article used two clearly explicit steps (some commenters may have misunderstood this, or may have reacted to the early stages before the protocol was established). The protocol was: (1) opt in by wearing a tag; (2) ask people with the tag whether it is okay to do X; (3) do X. Which means that under this protocol no one should even be asked without consenting to be asked first. -- This two-step consent is probably a good idea for controversial topics, although I would like to also have a one-step alternative. For example “it is okay to ask if you can hug me” and “it is okay to hug me even without asking first”.
(I wanted to stay meta, but here is an object-level note: It would have been better to call it “Open Source Touching Project”; because other body parts were also allowed, but many people in discussions objected to the title. Also, there is a valid objection that doing some things in public may be illegal, so it is wrong to do such things at a convention without explicit permission of the organizers.)