Haha I agree completely about the timeless nature of this dynamic. One of the monster Unix greybeards who took me under their wings when I was a sapling had a T-Shirt: "The sports team from my area is inherently superior to the sports team from your area", the point being (it was explained to me) that such statements are in fact true or false given context (given that this was San Diego in about 2003, generally false).

A critical feature of the (trivially superior) hacker culture from back then was that we did pass such judgements. Not always with complete consensus (vi/emacs), but pretty often (Windows sucks).

Passing judgement, and more importantly, sharing judgement with your in-group, is the root instinct at play here, IMHO.

The ability to organize into groups with a common purpose is, I think, the key evolutionary leap that allowed us to outcompete every other species on Earth. And having shared idols and taboos, whether religious or software-based, is the primary instinct for keeping the group together.

When someone says that Obsidian is better than Notion, they are merely following a million-year-old instinct embedded deep in our hardware.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

Most, if not literally all, large early societies were very rigidly structured and authoritarian. I think we still have a lot of that instinct within us. How logically ridiculous and dumb is it that we trend towards societies that all have one person be the big boss leader of hundreds of millions, if not billions? All the while they inevitably make decisions that tend to piss off just about everybody, yet we keep doing the exact same thing and hoping it'll be different with the next guy. It makes no sense whatsoever.

But it makes perfect sense if we go the other way, and consider that society was not the product of people coming together but people being assimilated. Chimps, for instance, have reasonable enough intelligence to come together into fairly decent sized groups for mutual benefit. But these group sizes peak out at around 150 chimps which is definitely, also in humans, around the peak size before you start getting into major social issues of scale.

And the interesting thing is that those chimps will then go to war against other chimp groups, and take the spoils - including the other group's women. Yet they lack that additional higher level thought to think 'Hey we've completely conquered and dominated these guys who were also doing okay on their own. What if we now forced them to work for us?' And not only work for us, but now you've got a way bigger pack ready to go conquer, and assimilate, other packs even more reliably.

The missing link, to me, is a chimp Genghis Khan.