Epistemics
I like friends who aren't inconvenienced easily.
Some people are inconvenienced easily. They like things a certain way. They don’t like to have their routine disrupted. And they have every right to be that way. It’s just that they are unlikely to be my friends. Tragic loss for them, I know.
If I had a primary filter for friendships, this would be it. I know people whose primary filters are political, or aesthetic, or financial, or intellectual. They all make sense to me.
As you may intuit from my primary filter, my definition of friendship veers toward the romantic, or religious. I demand some level of sacrifice without accounting. If a friend shows up at midnight on my doorstep, unannounced, it’s a blessing.
I would assume that these values are becoming a bit antiquated today, but I don’t know, I haven’t done the research. Anyway, enough about me.
The Question
We’re all spending more and more time online - it seems about an hour/day more every decade. It’s not crazy that a cyberpunk virtual monopoly on our time will become the standard within the next couple of decades. So I was wondering, what will this do to friendships.
Another way of posing the question: I like my old friends. I also like making new friends. Is it possible to make new friends online? Might it be easier or harder to find new friends online? Might it be easier or harder to nurture new friendships online? And would any of these friends pass through my primary filter?
Ok. That was more than one question. But you get it.
Method
In the spirit of cyberpunk, I went online to crowdsource some feedback on the topic. Specifically - to Astral Codex Ten, r/TheMotte, and r/AskReddit. The effort was definitely a partial success, as I received about 4000 words of feedback from over 50 responders. Why partial? Because it wasn’t 40,000.
Attitudes
It was fun sifting through the spectrum of responses. I was able to glean 5 varieties of attitudes towards online friendship generation: “Friendship Impossible”, “Suffering With Friends”, “Romantic (non-Romantic) Friendships”, “Mission-critical Friendships”, and “Shared I+E Friendships” . Here they are, along with some quotes (anonymized):
Friendship Impossible
The friendship impossible folks are the deep reactionaries of the group. They don’t think that the option of developing online friendships is even on the table. They often sound cranky and kinda old. And they speak with a cranky confidence.
“What’s the best place online for developing real friendships? There is no such place!”
“Friendship requires trust and most of us, I think, are biologically wired to trust people we met IRL.”
“I don’t see how you can make real friends. Most the time the people are far away from you.”
“The general reason we default to the real world is, well, it's 'real'. We're forced to spend time and that time leads to relationships.”
One person put in place strict restrictions to make sure that an online friendship doesn’t develop too far.
“I wouldn’t travel further than 40 miles to meet someone online.”
And a more intellectual naysayer had this to say:
“making friends involves too much going on "under the hood"... In addition to the obvious surface-level exchange there's communication happening that we're largely unaware of, e.g. body language, intonation, dynamic word selection ("I saw it coming", "oh, I see what you mean"), the effect of location and ambience, even possibly pheromones. Plus the synergistic effect of all of those things together.”
I have one thing to say to the Friendship Impossible crowd: you’re just plain wrong! Plenty of people have been successful at finding friends online and nurturing those relationships online and IRL. Several commenters mentioned long-distance travel to weddings and talking every day as proof. I believe them. There have even been stories of friendships built and then undone:
“We all met a few years back. We were in constant communication for years. I only met everyone IRL a few years ago when we attended our friend's wedding. We don't talk anymore. Sometimes it's better to let things go.”
And for the surest sign of a true friendship, there have been instances of online “friend-guilt”:
“Online friends from other countries have mentioned that I’ve known them for 5+ years without visiting but I’m not financially in a situation to do that(travel to meet them) yet.”
So this is good news, right!? Making friends online may not be for everybody, but it is possible. It’s a real thing. Hopefully, some of the following can shed light on how to do it.
Suffering With Friends
Yes, you’ve probably guessed it. This is the “it’s not real unless it hurts” crowd. You may have pegged me for one of these, but you won’t get a confession out of me.
Similarly to how I referenced inconvenience, the people in this group often bring up shared crises and suffering as a bedrock for a friendship. This group doesn’t deny the possibility of online friends, but they are certainly doubters.
“Adversity makes people emotionally vulnerable, revealing more of them than they'd like. Accompanying people who hang around after that can usually be assumed to like the 'real you', warts and all. My fastest progressing friendships are all traceable to times when I and some strangers had to band together through a sudden and difficult situation.”
“... respect and love is hard to build online, without actually doing things and facing struggles and life experiences together.”
Although I’m tempted to agree with this group, I think there’s a hole in their logic. Imagine meeting a person and having an incredible time together -- over and over and over again. Is this possible? I’d like to think so. Would this be an excellent foundation for a friendship? I’d like to think so. Would you be saying "so-and-so is not a friend because we haven’t suffered enough yet to really know"? You could say that. But I’d rather go with the benefit of the doubt.
Romantic (non-Romantic) Friendships
Ok, we’re not talking about sex here. We’re talking about a notional romanticism -- the chivalry of friendship and the poetry of friendship. This group (to which I relate to more than to the previous group) is also made up of online friendship skeptics. They focus on the je ne sais quoi of friendship - the magic. To this group trying to quantify and optimize friendship is like applying science to religion - it ruins it.
“Maybe friendship is more about somewhat non-compatible people finding a connection, perhaps after being thrown together against their will? So searching online for the perfectly compatible person could be exactly the wrong way to find friends.”
“Perhaps finding friends is like finding romance - there is the "similar but not too similar" thing going on there as well.”
“Trust, loyalty, and some feeling that you're both on the same level when it comes to humour, values, understanding each other's thought processes seem like the most important to me.”
And here we have a “romantic engineer” weighing in on the topic:
“There are some obvious life experience and intellectual interest candidates that maybe take you 80% of the way but a lot of the compatibility potential is in the last 20% and it’s murky. This makes serendipity a lot more important than intentionality.”
Here I have a confession to make. I may have been misrepresenting some of the quotes. In a few of the online crowd-sourcing queries I posed, I focused on the possibility of creating friend filters based on shared interests and “objective” compatibilities. So some of these “romantic” responses may have been a push-back to my cold and clinical treatment of the friendship concept.
Regardless of such allowances, I think this romanticism is misplaced. “No duh” you can’t just find friends by filtering by shared interests. Such filters not being absolutely helpful can still be significantly helpful. So I think the romantic fallacy here is simply assuming that the “last 20%” (to quote the engineer) can’t happen online. Perhaps it can.
The other thing that the romantics are missing is scale. We only meet so many people IRL. We're limited by geographies, social and professional circumstances and personality quirks (e.g. shyness). Online can run millions of friend-candidates through the shared interest filter. You (and serendipity) will still need to do the work (20%). But I think that as far as the numbers game goes, online is the way to go.
Mission-critical Friendships
“Mission-critical” are serious amigos equipped with the best best-practices supplied by the finest life coaches. They don’t want to sit around smoking pot with their online friends. They want to heal the world and make it a better place! Here they are in their own words:
“My experience is that friendship is best formed through cooperative activity towards a shared goal… even more powerful would be something to connect people with compatible skills to work on real problems matched to their interests.”
“The only online friends I ever became close enough that I genuinely thought of them as friends... came from my time working as a volunteer on a cooperative online project. I still feel wistful about those days--I don't know if I've ever felt so much a part of a community in my life.
“...a forced structure/duty that kept us around at regular hours and forced near-constant discussions to push it into the friendship zone.”
Good for you McFs! Good for you!
I’d like to agree. But…
Maybe it’s just that I can’t relate. Maybe it’s because I’m a selfish hedon who’s never joined a collective to solve “real problems”. Maybe it’s because as a post-Soviet, the idea of collectives makes me nervous.
Fuck it. I do agree! Go McFs, go!!!!!
Shared I+E Friendships
And finally we get to the normal people (or are they WEIRD*?). Shared I+E stands for Shared Interests and Experience. Of course! Just like most IRL friendships, shared interests and experiences often form the foundation of a friendship. There’s no exact formula - sometime more I, and other times more E. But it’s a straightforward concept that was echoed most often by the commenters.
“There needs to be activities eg games.”
“IRL it's easiest to make friends by pursuing a hobby, playing a sport, or joining a group with common interests. The internet is no different - if you start sharing your interests and ideas with the world, friends (and/or potential love interests) will come to you.”
“My closest friend, not counting wife and kids, was someone I got to know through the SCA, as are several other reasonably close friends.”
“but as far as building close friendships goes, it seems to work well as long as there's a baseline population of enough people with loosely similar interests to my own.”
Add to these quotes a whole bunch of positive responses from gamers. And my favorite story:
"I listen to some obscure music, and in the description of a YouTube compilation someone had uploaded, they included a link to their Discord server. I went to the Discord, spent some time there, and then six of us who really seemed to have the same sense of humor, spontaneously split off to make a separate server. This was like a year ago, and we all talk every day. The members who are not me live in:
Austin
Cleveland
Orlando
Mexico City
Horsham, UK
I've met one of them, two of the others have met each other, and we're all planning to meet up when travel restrictions ease a bit more. I don't know if this is generalizable advice, but definitely for me the key was congregating in an online area of common interest."
Thoughts
Part of my exploration of this topic was to find out HOW to make online friends. What would some of the best venues be?
Unsurprisingly, the simplest answer is gaming. If you are desperate for online friends, start playing video games. Aside from that, a healthy dose of shared experience in online activities will be a great catalyst for friendships. And I’m assuming that as we do spend more and more time online, and as the online activities become richer and more interactive, new opportunities for shared I+E will present themselves.
As a non-gamer, I wanted some alternatives sooner rather than later. Was there a shortcut to online friends? Was a social network for “true friendships” a feasible concept? And here, I think I got a less encouraging answer. A social network has great potential for generating very high “I” compatibility, but can it provide the necessary “E” to close the deal?
The Pitch
And here, my McFs come to the rescue. If we focus on joining teams to solve shared problems or to build shared projects, perhaps it’s the quickest way to fast friends. Today, M-cFs are spread out across Reddit, Discord, blogs and discussion boards. Those venues tend to do a good job focusing on the I. But none of those venues provide much E.
What if we create a social network for collaborative projects? It would be a hub for
individual⟷project matching that also provides, hosts and incentivizes the experiential project development. It would attract and select for doers who share interest, doing a lot of the filtering work required.
So if you want to run your virtual mouth about tiny houses, you can spend your days on r/tinyhouses. But if you want to work on a team to develop and prototype a modular, mass-producible tiny house model, then there’s only one place to go.
Well, currently, there’s no place to go. But maybe we should build a (virtual) place like that. Right, friend?
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*Kinship friendships versus WEIRD friendships (if you don't get it, see here).
“Could kinintensive cultures promote friendship between kin/most like, since trust will be mediated by kinship? And conversely, can WEIRD culture promote friendship through more reciprocal altruism-styled mechanism? Like recognition of certain norms concerning ”neutrality” ...
...for Weird: perhaps the opportunity to cooperate and engage in any activity is the base of friendship? Mutual gain? And also, I would connect Weird culture to thymos and prestige-baed hierarchies. Weird people might be looking for ”valuable” friends, with useful skills? While kinintensive cultures would be more prone to rely on dominance-hierarchies, but - I guess - mainly within the kin-network.”