#1: In-group Cheems

It’s hard living in an Echo Chamber community if you don’t believe the community’s narrative. You either keep your mouth shut and feel distant from the other people, or you become a contrarian and, at best, find yourself in a lot of unpleasant interactions (at worst, you end up cut off from the community).

It is naturally difficult to ask supposedly ‘outside-of-the-box’ questions when the boxes are so insidiously and thoroughly encompassing. And of course we worry we might ‘miss out’ or risk the derision that comes from being identified as an outsider (a derision which comes from being seen as a threat to a comfortable system and is always mixed with

The crowd might believe that it is rooting out threats to its security, but in fact it is looking for threats to its identity: a crowd is united by a feeling of having discovered the right way to act and be, and nothing challenges the basis of this collective identity more than the prospect of individuals achieving admirable results by diverging fr

In them she has found something like the coterie to which she’s always wanted to belong, not the popular crowd, rather, the smaller satellite crowd that makes fun of the popular crowd—the outer circle, internally supportive and externally terrifying.