HAUS Party LIVE 🎉 — The Art of Persuasion!
Season 4 Episode 12 (4/14/2022)
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Welcome to the garden. Same garden as usual: rather infinite, somewhat protected. Today we’re trying to discover the difference between manipulation and skill. What are the limits of convinction? Is persuasion an act of violence or love? What are the borders? When was the last time you convinced somebody of something?
We have been thinking about charisma and charismatic leaders. People that are very articulate and well-spoken put forth their ideas and principles in such a persuasive and convincing manner to cast influence. Sometimes we are caught in that web of influence and it’s great. We love to be persuaded, but we are less sure that we love being persuasive. Is there a danger to persuasion? Should we be more paranoid about who we allow to have influence over us, or maybe more neurotic with the kind of influence we have over each other? On the other hand, that’s what community and social cohesion is about, so where’s the difference between these things? Where is the skill in persuasion? When does it become manipulation?
Sometimes we start with the intent of persuading, as opposed to the intent of learning. Are there persuasive personality types? In a way, we’re all being persuaded all the time in the form of advertising, often without being aware of it. If you’re aware of it, are you persuaded? Persuasion could include the theft of somebody’s agency. Persuasion by itself, in its purest form, without other conditions, is not theft of agency. It’s just opening somebody’s eyes to a new argument or information they have not been able to see before. It’s lending them a new perspective.
Is there a singular objective truth? That’s a matter of perspective, of whatever point of view you might occupy within the dynamic. Persuasion really is about inviting or imposing a point of view from or upon others, inviting or convincing somebody to share the same perspective. It’s helpful to distinguish between good faith persuasion and bad faith persuasion so we can identify how to eliminate the conditions by which the negative consequences become possible.
UX is a design tool for guiding attention that can be used to either save attention for meaningful tasks or to maximize clicks and generate ad revenue. This pattern constitutes a manipulative hijacking of attention for the purpose of maximizing profit. Next time you’re opening a newsletter, notice where the unsubscribe button is located. It’s at the very bottom and the lightest color of gray and the smallest font size available, because the designer has made it as hard as possible for you to unsubscribe. Is this a dark pattern persuasion?
There’s a distinction between intent and behavior. Persuasion changes intent. Behavior is the action or application of a certain kind of intent. Is the behavior the only thing that matters? Before we get all poststructuralist on it, we might want to remember the roots of these concepts. We could go back to Aristotle’s rhetoric and the art of persuasion. Aristotle understood that persuasion is about conviction. It’s an artfulness of argument that pertains to different faculties that we all share collectively: logos, pathos, and ethos. We attend to each other’s rational sensibilities, to our emotional sensibilities, and to the communal as a reference greater-than-self. Perhaps we might also consider bringing this back to Spencer’s idea of cultural capture and Anticapture? The art of persuasion has these surface areas — logos, pathos, ethos — that we might consider as attack vectors. Is there a threat of cultural capture here?
Individuals only have so much attention. This presents a strong attack vector for cultural capture. Of course, there are many ways to capture something. One is to block or force behaviors, like capturing executive power to force the organization or network to take actions unilaterally or with a small cohort of people that you control. Another is to capture the intent-making apparatus or the decision-making apparatus of the organization. This can happen through influence, or soft power. Perhaps persuasion lives in that realm of intent. If the persuasion is conducted in bad faith and becomes manipulative, it is a really dangerous vector for capture.
If it’s possible for people to hide things from others, they can control the information environment and tailor what people know to make it easier to persuade them. The transparency of DAOs makes it harder to persuade people in a manipulative way, although it’s still possible. When it comes to collective lorecrafting, we are wielding influence that we are coauthors of, such as the manifesto for our DAO. We all have agency in steering the direction of the collective vision, yet the governance in a DAO — or any organization — can be captured by attacking individuals who use influence to convince a majority of community members to use executive power in a way the attackers want.
The fault line is when everyone is following one influential actor, but what if it’s not one charismatic leader? The problem with organic metaphors imploying the idea of emergence is that there is no individual to hold accountable. What if culture itself is the attack vector? Instead of thinking in this dark atomic way, we might reach towards an understanding that everything is an invitation to engage. The movements can be seen as an attack by the receiver or it can be seen as a generous invitation by the receiver. There is no effective difference at the point of the memetic invitation.
We need persuasion in distributed systems like DAOs. If we remove the hard power mechanisms, what do we have left in our organizational decision-making apparatus? What’s left is family, a shared common experience. It’s a false assumption that discussion needs to be oppositional and based on persuasive conviction; we could rethink this base layer to be more familial and convivial.
There’s a whole set of skills that can be deployed in the interest of persuasion. Some of them can be pushed towards dark patterns. There are always components for sensing, adjusting, identifying risks, and working towards a result. Are these skills equivalent with manipulation?
A lot of our conversation has been focused on the drawbacks of persuasion and the negative sides. This emphasis comes from game theory: the closer we get to zero sum, or negative sum, the more we’re trying to persuade to get as much as we can out of the scenario. The move into positive sum games amounts to a different kind of persuasion that negotiates how we can benefit the most. Sometimes we don’t want to play the game. Sometimes we want to be persuaded, because diligently building trust is difficult and exhausting. Sometimes the act of persuasion becomes a way to invite someone else to persuade through the debate that ensues. We can introduce perspectives in order to visualize the opposite point, to test the limits of changing our own minds on a topic, or an invitation for the opposing point to find an entrance into the dynamics of the debate.
There’s a process of having these discussions and smashing together our seemingly opposing perspectives to stress test them. People will push their own boundaries in order to advocate for a sharply emphasized version of their view so that other people can oppose and then try to find a balance in our collective center of gravity. Individuals might cultivate a lot of awareness of where they are and what they think, but communities are more amorphous, which makes them easier to manipulate. Honing in on the collective awareness is so very difficult.
Is it easier to grow mold in a petri dish or in the middle of a rainforest? It is easier for ideas to propagate in systems with less competition. That being said, it depends on the intent of the idea we are trying to propagate. If we grow a concept in a petri dish, we can easily identify that it’s growing. If we are cultivating concepts or opinions in the wild forest of crypto Twitter, it becomes exceedingly difficult to track the evolution and impact of the ideas, as the signal-to-noise ratio just explodes.
How might we influence or persuade a community to align behind an intention without some individual rising up as a charismatic leader? What kind of cultural wedges might we put into place to steer the 80% that are just along for the ride? We must consider the various strata of collective topology in order to utilize the tools and skills of persuasion for positive impact.
When it comes down to the difference between the intention and the behavior that manifests from that intention, we can’t help but feel a bit like devils’ advocates. As they say, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” When a couple people have good intentions that start getting executed, they’re indirectly persuading others to go along with them. This diminishes the consideration of the good intentions of the whole. This can also apply when people want the good for everyone — to strive for the greater good — and they get exactly what they intended, which really amounts to a problem of scale. It’s inconceivable to account for the needs of everyone, so who is actually being considered? What flavor of persuasion — or delusion — is this?
Persuading each other to cooperate is probably not a bad thing. The one charismatic person in the room telling you they have all the answers is precisely the one that we should not be listening to. Anyone that tells you that they have a clear, solid, firm, unwavering objectivity or single point of truth is precisely the target we should be working towards critiquing and dismantling.
There’s something really exciting happening within Web3 and the globalized dispersal of our communities. These movements decenter the executive and influential authority, allowing us to question everything from the bottom up, from the top down, from the middle out, and everywhere in between. We have suddenly recognized a potent new freedom, and along with that there are many new attack vectors. Take everything you hear here at Haus Party Live with a mountain sized grain of salt and continue doing your own research. Let’s keep reaching for better questions and not rush to the easy solutions!
