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People have gone to chat on the Internet, but now again they dream of offline. What's happening?

And it's not about coronavirus




At the beginning of the year, we noticed a trend - more and more startups are talking about creating services for offline meetings of strangers. Allegedly, people are so tired of correspondence and meaningless friendship in social networks that they again want to see friends live and dream of good old communication with new people.

It sounds fine, but there is one funny thing. People who feel this desire do not want to just shut down the Internet and go outside; they don’t want to write to the “new person” in any of the billion messengers - they want a new digital service in order not to communicate in digital services.

We already wrote how Konstantin Shubin and Pavel Kozlov left Yandex to develop the Random Coffee startup . Or how designers Elizabeth Oreshkina and Eteri Saneblidze created The Breakfast- Closed breakfast club with strangers. At the same time, the founder of Rusbase, Maria Podlesnova, spoke about the imminent release of her Adele.io - a dating that will bring people together not only for romance. In parallel to the big releases, small communities on the network, publics and chatrooms in Telegram have simple Excel signs and chatbots for random distribution into pairs.

Against the backdrop of news about the pandemic, when people lock themselves in their homes, it may seem that the trend will die in its infancy. But, I think, when people go out again without fear, they will want ordinary communication more than ever.

I tried to figure out where such a request came from in a world crowded with social connections, and what generally happens with human communication.


Archaeologists have evidence that people have been drinking alcohol for at least seven thousand years. It is unlikely that in those days there were articles 228, wine and vodka lobbies and moral standards, because of which an ancient person, looking at, say, a hallucinogenic fungus, thought “yes, better drink it”. But he thought so, moral standards formed, and alcohol has historically become the most socially approved drug.

Anthropologists, biologists, and other scientists thought about the question of why a person began to drink. Alcohol did not help either banal survival, or the global evolutionary struggle. Scientists settled on the blurry "man always drank from purely hedonistic motives." That is, just like that, because I like it. Alcohol really gives a sharp release of endorphins. But you can cause such an outburst in a lot of ways, and it is alcohol that has taken root, although it also causes a fatal dependence and destroys the body.

At the end of 2016, a group of scientists led by anthropologist Robin Dunbar suggestedthat a person approved alcohol because he helped develop social connections. Harm everyone individually, but strengthened society as a whole. “Alcohol in itself works as a trigger for the endorphin system - that's why we like to drink in company. In a variety of cultures, alcohol helps make friends - although, of course, you risk becoming an alcoholic, ” says Dunbar.

But it’s interesting not only that alcohol could stick together our civilization, but that a person seems to always need a catalyst for social ties. External impulse.

This assumption is from the kind of those that at the same time give a sense of eureka-click, and raise even more questions. If social ties are so important, why has humanity always had before them so many internal blocks that need to be removed with the help of something? Why are we considered flocky, but overwhelmed with almost solipsic egocentrism? What is loneliness? The call of the wild ancestors “beware, you alone will not survive”? How can loneliness and “civic inattention” exist simultaneously - when it is absolutely normal for two strangers in an elevator to mutually pretend that each other does not exist? How can sincerity and distrust of others be appreciated at the same time? Is discomfort when meeting a person a bug or a feature?

I think these questions would never have arisen for me if two things had not happened.

First, until I was twenty I didn’t have the Internet, and all social connections were offline. In a matter of years, 95% of them turned into icons and texts on the screen. For the remaining 5%, the word “offline” appeared.

The second - in the last three months I talked with at least three startups (and heard about the same amount) whose idea is to bring people together for offline meetings. Not for dates, just for simple friendships. Business gurus always say that a startup should exist only to solve the problems of the world. If so, then something has ripened in the collective unconscious.

In other words, social connections have gone to the Internet, and now, using the same Internet, they are trying to get out of it. And if you collect all the questions above, they will sound like this: what was wrong with our communication, since we decided to translate it into a number? And what happened to digital communication, since we wanted to go back?

Simply put - what, your mother, is going on with us?


Random coffee


If you work in a large corporation, you probably feel sick from the subtitle. A relatively new and most fashionable teambuilding trend, which delighted HR and communication managers. His idea is as simple as a stick. All participants drop their names into a tablet or chatbot, the randomizer hits the names in pairs, the resulting pairs go to dinner together and talk.

Moderators insist - a five-minute meeting for a tick does not work, you need at least an hour of good communication. In their opinion, a team brings coffee together and develops horizontal connections. For colleagues who know each other well personally, it will also be easier to solve work issues.

There is a side effect that is not yet talked about against the background of enthusiastic reviews. It was not for nothing that people came up with the idea of ​​separating business and friendship relations, because mixing them together can cause strange effects. If a friend sincerely helped you, and you give him a thousand rubles in gratitude, the friend will be offended. If you give him a bottle of wine for a thousand rubles, he will be glad. At the same time, the employee is unlikely to be satisfied if the boss gives him a salary with chocolates. Because money is an attribute of business relationships, and a gift is friendship. The opinion follows: when all the colleagues are friends, they will not demand results from each other, and they will not criticize those who do the work poorly.

The counterargument is that coffee is not supposed to make everyone friends. It should make people talk a little, because colleagues stop doing it themselves. People who have never communicated in person will be even more difficult to criticize and encourage each other. They do not crawl out of workplaces, chat in chat rooms even sitting in the same room and go to rallies with displeased faces - because they are distracted from work. Even the same alcohol at corporate parties ceases to help. People are piled up with already familiar colleagues. Separate introverts pray in the corner so that it all ends soon, and they just don’t go to the next party.

Moreover, never in the history of mankind have there been more comfortable conditions for establishing new social ties. There is the Internet where you can easily find out anything about anyone, there are convenient messengers, there is propaganda of goodwill. People are no longer savages. 99.9% of strangers on the street do not wish you harm and will not eat if you turn your back. These are hothouse conditions, but for some reason fear, awkwardness and unwillingness to get acquainted do not go away. Catalysts are still needed.

“We all have a barrier that does not allow a stranger to write,” said startup Konstantin Shubin. “We all think that they will most likely refuse, this is an unpleasant sensation. If you wrote to someone and called for coffee, they expect from you that you want to get something from the meeting. You are not in an equal situation - you are as if asking. At a meeting in the Random Coffee format, you are completely equal. The bot removes all the awkwardness. ”

Konstantin Shubin and Pavel Kozlov worked at Yandex when they spied the idea of ​​a random coffee. They decided to make a startup based on it outside the company. They wrote a post on Facebook, where they invited everyone to participate in meetings - the post instantly shot, there was a wish for the sea.

“There is already a formulated trend - a request for offlineness. Previously, you could just go up and say, “hello, let's be friends”. 20 years have passed, and somewhere this thing disappeared, ”says Pavel Kozlov,“ I can chat as much as I like in groups about products or about design, or something else, but go offline and discuss face-to-face - that's completely another level of communication. This is a new sincerity. You again understand what it means to communicate offline, you understand the reaction of the person who sits in front of you, you see what is interesting to him. These are very basic human things that for some reason we began to forget. ”

When I first found out about this, I instantly bought an idea. Not in the sense that he believed in the commercial success of the startup, but simply wanted random offline meetings too. And it seemed strange to me. Because never in my life have I talked to so many interesting people. Former Wired editor-in-chief told me where he would invest money; I ended up in the same handshake from William Gibson when I spoke with artist Stelark; Chris Dancy, whom all of America calls the “most connected person in the world” told me about the mode of his night toilets, the founder of Lisa Alert Grigory Sergeyev argued with me about the use of thermal imagers in finding people.

It thrills me. But then I close Skype, turn off the computer, go out for a smoke on the porch somewhere in the outskirts of the godforsaken village of Afanasovo, and I understand that these social connections mean nothing to me. I'm still lonely. What is wrong with online meetings, if you want to go offline, as never before?


Dunbar number


The reason may lie in the same place as always - in the mechanics of the brain. The anthropologist Dunbar, who investigated the effect of alcohol on the formation of connections, concluded that our brain cannot process more than one hundred and fifty social connections (on average). One hundred and fifty connections are divided into layers according to the degree of proximity: five closest people, 15 friends and 50 good friends. Connections constantly move between layers depending on the frequency of communication. There was a friend, they didn’t communicate for a long time - he just became a good friend, but in the brain there was room for a new friend.

If this is true, and the mechanism has been formed for thousands of years along with the evolution of the brain and human communities, then now it is probably a good storm.

How many online connections will the brain be able to process, limited to an average of 150? Let's say Facebook puts a limit on five thousand friends. There is no physical possibility, not only to communicate with everyone the same, but even to monitor their updates. The algorithm will still selectively palm off only three to four hundred friends into the tape. And if you add a dozen more social networks and instant messengers to Facebook?

It turns out to be a strange situation where online communication eats away a huge share of offline, but at the same time brings an ultra-fast flow of social connections both between layers and beyond the general constraint.

The second problem is that even for processing 150 connections, the brain needs a resource that it does not always have. In a recent speech to Sberbank shareholders, psychologist Andrei Kurpatov gave a lecture entitled Digital Autism (somewhere on the subcortex I had a reminder to include a little more skepticism when I hear that name, but still). According to him, the brain processes social connections in the background, but only in an idle mode, when it is not busy with the consumption of information and orientation in space. Since we not only communicate on the Internet, but also absorb tons of content, the brain has much less time for analysis and processing.

If this is also true, a double effect is obtained - online brings complete chaos and fluidity to social relations and simultaneously selects resources for their processing. This would well explain the strange feeling when your life is full of communication and people (albeit in the form of avatars and texts), but it seems that there are no social connections at all.

I would add a couple of reinforcing factors to this. In culture and mass consciousness there is a certain generalized and averaged idea of ​​a cool and regular person, and this person looks like an ideal user of the Dunbar number. He has close people, he has many friends, a lot of friends, even more people on the periphery, and he easily communicates with everyone. Spends time with his family, constantly hangs out with a company of true friends, goes to funny parties, travels, makes new friends, fits perfectly into the work team. And constantly smiling. Even when unsociable and cynical heroes appear in pop culture, they simply drown in social connections in order to beautifully demonstrate to everyone their inactivity and cynicism in beautiful conversations.

What the average-class-man-in-classical-view does not exactly do is not sitting at the computer for ten hours and six more on the phone. Smartphones generally do not appear on the screens of mainstream cinema. And we are sitting in them, and discrepancy with the ideal concept depresses.

Thinking about it, I want to convince myself that all this is nonsense, bullies and far-fetched anxieties. But even if the reasons are different, something is definitely wrong with digital communication. No wonder there are a lot of people burning with the idea of ​​returning offline and even more of those who want to take advantage of this. But while they are burning with hope, a new alarm is growing in me - that there is no turning back.


The breakfast


A few years ago I lived in Moscow and worked in a company with a very cool product, from which I was a fan. I came to the office on the first day, and what I saw then - the premises, the collective, the culture - can be described in one word: "uber-hipsterism." If I had said such a word out loud, it would have been considered bad taste - like so many, many other things. I was surrounded by intelligent, intelligent young people interested in cutting-edge social topics, the latest contemporary art exhibitions in Berlin, indie books, festival films, and strange music that one and a half people listen to. On the tables lay books in Latin, Danish, English, beautiful booklets - the embodiment of design art.

Arriving from my village, I considered myself an absolute cattle against the backdrop of the brightest people. For a whole year I didn’t meet anyone at all and became so intimate that they began to consider me a dumb, unsociable freak. I was gnawed by a sense of my own inferiority and at the same time superiority, because they seemed to me literally not real - the characters of art house cinema, whom they tried to write out with the most interesting personalities. To join the team did not work, and we broke up. Since then, I nervously cringe from a sense of super-elitist environment.

I experienced a similar feeling when I saw The Breakfast app and talked with its founder Lisa Oreshkina.

The app, like the coffee random, makes appointments with strangers. Made entirely in English, although it works only in Moscow so far, it looks pretty darn beautiful, it works by subscription - 999 ₽ per month. But even if you are willing to pay, it just won’t work out because the application works on an invite system. Either community members or moderators can invite after they look at the description of your profile. If they approve the application and give an invite, there are only three days to activate it. Then it turns into a pumpkin. The startup is very small - it can be said of two people, Lisa herself and Eteri Saneblidze. Therefore, your application will be considered by the authors and owners of The Breakfast themselves.

“Invite is not a viral mechanics so that there will be a lot of people, but, on the contrary, that there will be very few of them, and that everyone will be cool. People are not used to it, ”says Lisa.

The first and simplest criterion by which they weed out people is the fullness of the profile. For example, people put a smiley there, send an application, get a refusal, and then write letters asking why they were refused. But the completed profiles are also strictly screened out.

“We see that a person is from creative industries, that he creates something, and that he identifies with this. We have a small percentage of people who write about their height, about the fact that they like to travel and have breakfast. This is a description that does not characterize them in any way. Either the person did not fully understand the idea of ​​Brekfast, or he has nothing more to say about himself. ”

After receiving an invite, you note that you are ready to meet, and the application assigns you a pair. While this is random, but as Lisa says, this is done not because it is easier, but because analysis and forecasting do not really work when it comes to real meetings.

“Attempts to predict human behavior and thoughts have always failed. It’s quite difficult to create compatibility by matching rough parameters like a general profession. There is still a question of goals. Some people have no idea why they should communicate if they cannot discuss something at work. We really want this to change globally. But since now 85% of people do not know how to interact with their emotions, auxiliary tools are needed. So far, we rely on the fact that almost all of the members of Brekfast are cool. “Since all people came from a waiting list or at the personal invitation of those who are already inside, everyone is at least normal with everyone, because they are already at a certain level of maturity and know how to have a good time with one another, one and a half or four.”

After the pair “got off,” one interesting moment is triggered. You can refuse to meet with the proposed person. Our editor-in-chief Vanya Zvyagin felt a pretty good self-esteem shot when he was refused three times in a row. Someone thought it was not cool enough, uninteresting, or something else, just by looking at the profile. I, in turn, did not even dare to try The Breakfast. The idea that everything is super-cool there, and I also need to prove my coolness with a beautiful photo and keywords about my personality, is horrifying.

Even if I ignore my complexes, then I think in this place the weak point of the whole idea of ​​the transition to offline communication (which came out of online, which came out of just communication) lies. For such a meeting, you not only dress well, but also try on your most sophisticated digital image. You are looking for the best and most interesting in yourself and go to a meeting to portray a cool version of yourself for an hour.

The cool version cannot say that she “just loves to travel and has breakfast.” This is exactly the kind of boredom that people want to get rid of when going on a conversation with a random person. For a one-time meeting with a stranger from the Internet, you need something in the spirit of “I understand the architecture of Moscow in the 50s”; “I love Flemish painting and Paul Thomas Anderson” or “I watch festival films in the evenings, I can talk about life in South Korea”; "I like to discuss home school education, meditation and psychotherapy" or "it is interesting to discuss the new image of a non-toxic man and Sapolsky’s work on stress."

People meet, share the best that they have, with their best facial expressions, their most presentable tone of voice, their most fulfilled public naturalness and ease, share their best experiences, and in return receive the quintessence of other people's experience, compressed in one hour.

But I do not see this as a new sincerity, as the guys at Random Coffee called it. It reminds me of the revitalization of your digital image that you have been creating since the advent of the Internet, as Dr. Frankenstein revived his monster blinded from all in a row. That is, it is not just insincerity. This is post-post-insincerity, squared and cube. And no matter how much they talk about the usefulness and coolness of this idea, I only feel anxiety that such social connections will give rise to even more falsehood, fatigue, depression, social disorders and problems of interpersonal communication.


Ratings


On the other hand, raising alarm about this can be not only stupid, but also hypocritical. In fact, the mechanics of online dating for offline meetings has been used for many years on dating sites, in dating and even ordinary social networks. From mechanics, only romance leaves - no more.

Thousands of people work on applications like Badoo and Tinder and they all live well, even though they have offices in far from the cheapest cities on our planet.

“Dating removed the taboo for meeting strangers, it has already become a part of life,” says Lisa Oreshkina, “Today, getting up and talking with a person at the bar has become much worse than 30 years ago, because there is Tinder for this. It protects you from a possible fail. Despite the fact that this feil, in fact, makes you alive, makes you feel brave, feel the heartbeat. This is the heartbeat that you are experiencing - it is very important, because if the contact is made, it becomes more significant - you feel yourself, overcome yourself a little.

All technologies that replace overcoming with comfort kill us a little. People feel it. More precisely, they feel a lack of something, but do not understand what. I think that the request for a new way of dating is also a desire to get this experience, communicate, feel, but with the necessary degree of comfort. ”

In the near future, Maria Podlesnova, the founder of Rusbase, promises to reinvent the ratings. Now she is engaged in the Adele.io project, which can be used for any meetings - both romantic, friendly, and business. And if Lisa Oreshkina does not believe in forecasting and engineering, artificial intelligence will be engaged in distribution in Adele. (I wanted to talk with them too, but the team is so busy preparing for the release that we did not have time for the publication to be published.)

Konstantin Sinyushin, CEO of the Untitled venture company, one of the best industry experts in Russia, also sees changes in the dating market. Although he does not consider them radical. “The market for online dating services has long exhausted the potential for horizontal scaling, because the main problem in dating is the possible discrepancy between the mutual expectations of both parties not only in terms of dating, but also in ways to achieve even a common goal or in the format of relationships. Therefore, the main trend in online dating now is the desire of services to most closely match some behavioral patterns of users, that is, instead of several universal services, there are many niche services. Dating as a whole does not go anywhere and, conversely, is actively developing around the world,but the influx of new active users is most seriously associated precisely with a niche coincidence of interests, because this allows you to more accurately target your audience online and to avoid the coincidence of mutual expectations at the targeting level.

And the search for interlocutors for breakfast differs from the niche services for quick and passionate sex only in the a priori uncertainty of the declared possibility of the development of events. But people remain quite deterministic people, and I know many examples of human life when a joint breakfast quickly turned into passionate sex in fact, or, on the contrary, a meeting for the sake of testing a hypothesis for quick sex did not develop into anything else, limiting itself to dinner, because we have, in addition to rational understanding of our desires, also all spontaneous reactions. In other words, different niche ratings are not even direct competitors for each other, and indirect competitors for most of them are services that are focused not on dating in real life, but on endless online correspondence. ”


Last year, we published an excerpt from the novel Endless Joke, which talked about the birth and death of a fictional video link at that time. In the story, people spent so much time at home watching television (something like TVs with cartridges instead of the Internet, a long story) that they stopped seeing each other. But of course there was a request for meetings, and video communication appeared as a technological answer to this problem.

A good decision on paper caused a bunch of oddities that people had not encountered before. For example, a conversation via video calls requires the interlocutors to constantly draw attention to each other - you will no longer be able to sit and draw scribbles in a notebook, like with a telephone handset. The interlocutor will think that you are bored. Even worse: during a video call, people saw their image as well, and it catastrophically took their attention. Seeing your face distorted by the camera is not as beautiful as it appears in your head, doubly exhausting.

And the solutions to these problems have already launched a wave of absurd solutions, such as special masks for video communication, and then special backgrounds, where everything looks perfect - both the face and the room. When people finally relaxed, hiding behind the screens, they realized that they had simply returned back to regular telephone communications.

I always recall this passage when we try to solve human problems with the help of technology, but in the end we only dig deeper into the strange whirlpools of our dual, contradictory nature.

It seems completely absurd to me that we ourselves have replaced most of the communication with digital and now, with the help of the achievements of this digital communication, we come up with how to return. At the same time, I do not exclude the possibility that in the coming years some startup with a similar idea will become the next unicorn in Silicon Valley. And it does not matter whether it will be designed for an audience of fans of dating or for some new people, under whose requests they have not yet come up with their own icon in the smartphone.

One thing remains unchanged - technology has nothing to do with it.

I mistakenly dumped on Skype my feeling of loneliness, although I communicate with cool people. In fact, I’m just a walking recorder for them, and they are future letters for me. They speak with Habr’s journalist, not Artyom Malyshev, and the journalist speaks on behalf of mass curiosity, and not his own. We did not even think of looking for people in each other, and far from technical progress is to blame for this.

For thousands of years we have been confused in the oddities of interpersonal relationships, constantly come up with solutions that create new problems that require new solutions. The blame is not online and offline, but personal blocks that each have their own. Fear of fails, mistrust, hidden motives, rejection of insincerity, inability to negotiate and understand each other with words, anything else - will not go anywhere. No matter how many comfortable interlayers appear between two people.

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