I think it's a kind of involuntary empathy in a strictly mechanical sense - feeling as if you were that person when you look at them. Because when you think about it coldly, it's not obvious why you should care that other people are embarrassing themselves.
So it's not empathy in the ethical sense. On the contrary, people who talk about "cringe" are often fiercely angry at the people making them feel this way.
It has to do with enforcing and confining oneself to acceptable social behavior, and reinforcing those boundaries for oneself.
As you say, it's involuntary, or instinctive, like many social behaviors.
> On the contrary, people who talk about "cringe" are often fiercely angry at the people making them feel this way.
Aside from blaming them for the discomfort, this is also part of the enforcement aspect.
I used to consider those discussions as bingo cards, examining each trite argument and carefully constructing responses that would dissemble them. My goal was to try to deprogram folks, to help them realize that there is a world beyond Haskell. I gave up after a uniquely unpleasant experience: A prominent Haskeller gave an extended analogy in public chat about statically-typed and dynamically-typed people. In this analogy, statically-typed people were more reliable, predictable, punctual, thrifty, and just generally better people. And of course they favored statically-typed languages.
Cringe leeds to sneer. It's obvious that the NPCs don't understand what they're saying; they spout the words, but the meanings aren't really there and so they cannot reason about their own slogans. This is contemptible, and so one tribe learns to sneer at another tribe, taking their slogans and twisting them into insults.
I think that sneer leads to sarcasm by default. Nobody can really tell whether somebody is a genuine member of a tribe, or a sneering troll highlighting the cringe of being genuine. Therefore we say two-faced slogans, like "X sucks, use X" and "thanks, I hate it" and "I am so tired of X" to indicate that we dually are members and also sneerers. We are in on our own joke of being serious about things that nobody ought to be serious about.
It's also missing a point that the original post and a lot of the internet seems to miss. Just enumerating an argument isn't enough to dismiss it, eg. "guard rails" "mansplaining", "squirrel". Just because an argument can be labelled doesn't mean it's invalid, the "guard rail" label could be applied to a nuanced argument about the cost of first order logic as a proof system jammed into all of your code (the original Hickey argument), which seems like it's worthy of not being arrogantly dismissed given the popularity of the language. Sometimes "mansplaining" is appropriate (a female might be wrong/ignorant and a male might seek to correct them), and sometimes "squirrel" is someone pointing out genuine hypocrisy (eg. the genuine hypocrisy of attacking Trumps corruption whilst ignoring blatant establishment corruption, not an argument you can totally dismiss).
Ironically this is logic itself getting meme-ified and losing it's semantic value so that the original concept (squirrel = (often) tu ququoe fallacy) is being applied incorrectly and stripped of nuance and unrerstanding.
So basically it's cringey to see stereotyped behavior. Because the fools are behaving just like bots. And they're easy to trigger and manipulate. So it becomes a game, in many communities.
But then, thoughtful introspection reveals how much of ones own behavior is predictably scripted.
That's a major component of Landmark Education's work. To help you see the scripting in your behavior. And to learn how to catch it before it get's expressed.
It's not like it's ever going away. Because it's part of being human. But you can develop a level of consciousness above all that machinery.
For example, there are paired exercises where people troll each other as hard as they can. Nothing is out of bounds. So you get to see what triggers you, and how you respond to it. But it's a safe space, with trained moderators around, in case people lose it.
Back in the day, before we got so fragile, there were exercises where participants faced each other wearing just bathing suits. Maybe 200 people in a large room, in lines about 20 people in each line. And the lines got shuffled, so everyone got to spend maybe 10 minutes silently "being with" everyone else.
This was during a retreat. After 2-3 days of ~15 hours per day in sessions, healthy meals, and no coffee, tea, tobacco, alcohol or other drugs. And only 4-6 hours sleep, with morning exercises and running. I guess that you'd call it "boot camp" today.
Just curious, but where and why are you undergoing that kind of training? I've never heard of those tactics being used outside of cult-like environments or some kind of abusive therapy. Military boot camp, maybe? It sounds extreme and unethical.
Prerequisites included a complete physical, and assessment by a professional trainer. As I recall, you had to be able to run a mile in decent time.
They videotaped each participant at the beginning, making a five minute presentation about themself. And then, near the end. The final session was devoted to watching clips from each participant's presentations. The changes were profound.
It was one of the most transformative experiences of my life. Along with hundreds of LSD trips, of course. And spending a few years as an itinerant hippie LSD dealer. And a few years of Aikido. And earning a PhD.
It was probably a lot like basic military training. But without the bits about killing people.
The New Warrior training included some of that. And it also included one on one interactions in a ring, which included unrestricted verbal abuse, which could escalate to wrestling. But no hitting, joint locks, throwing, etc.
As I said, I doubt that it would be doable today. Given how emotionally fragile many have become. And how out of shape. Not to mention how litigious.
But I do emphasize that these were all adults who participated voluntarily, with full disclosure. And you could leave, at any time. As I recall, you got your money back if you left during the first day or two.
But I disagree that this phenomenon that you (and the article writer) have described, is known as "cringe". When people talk about "cringeposting" or saying "that was so cringe", they mean the vicarious embarrassment, the feeling you get when you feel so bad for somebody that it's almost funny, when you realise that somebody is being a try-hard, and doesn't know how badly they're failing, etc.
What you have described is just commonly known as "stereotyping". People do it all the time in real life, and all the time online. Person x spouts an opinion that people in group y think everybody in group x has. That isn't cringe. Everybody has biases and stereotypes. If I see somebody from x political group saying something I've heard 1000x before, my first thought would probably be "here goes x grouper again". I would't think they are cringeposting or that they are a cringey, just that they are another classic example of some stereotype that I have developed over many years of reading articles, posts and comments by people like that.
I also think people are fooling themselves if they think they can really hide their identity behind a screen name.
Staying silent and hiding in the shadows enables that kind of future and can be seen as a pretty good cause of those sorts of things happening around the world throughout history.
What kind of stuff are your writing (about)?
There is the mocked concept of Roko's Basilisk as a new Age Pascal's Wager - than a hypothetical future AI singularity who punishes you for not leading to its existence. This is effectively the same sort of irrational punishment for what was literally unknowable - but worse as there are myraid competing ones.
The scary part is that with such a strong digital record, people recorded as having now-bad opinions are being held to account all over the place. Sometimes they go viral and lose context, making them seem truly evil. They should be fired from whatever their job is today and shunned, apparently. Or elected prime minister of Canada. It's unpredictable.
If we observe an example where we a step back from the severity of judicial repercussions of a post or comment and look at it socially. We could use the "cancel culture" ideology; where you could write something naively and be ambushed by a group that thinks your thoughts are wrong.
I am also assuming Grandparent is in a western country. There are other parts of the world where you could have contributed to an online community and later have whatever subject it was about outlawed. Thus exemplifying gp's idea.
And on a side note I felt cringey writing my response. Whatever that means.
"There may come a time when you could be jailed for what you wrote" certainly sounds hyperbolic, but then go back 20 years and imagine who then would have predicted the massive, high stakes (career and industry revenue wise) controversy over the manager of an NBA team making a comment about the freedom of Hong Kong.
Or, who could have foreseen such an interesting combination of situations such as a comedian turned Democratic senator being forced to resign by colleagues over excessive freshness with ~7 or so women, combined with many of the same people's odd disinterest in a shadowy figure who is allegedly involved in fairly significant trafficking young girls to the rich and famous, who then proceeds to commit suicide under similarly odd circumstances.
As they say, not only is the universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.
Say you're used to discussing programming languages. You and your fellows have developed a well-understood notion of why static typing is better than dynamic typing. Then along comes some fool who has watched too many Rich Hickey videos who wants to tell you that types are just guard rails and nobody would navigate by bouncing off the guard rails when they could just drive to their destination. This is cringey because you've heard this argument before, the interloper ought to know that you've heard this before and taken it into account, and it's clear that they're just repeating some argument that they've heard somewhere else.
One could have a "stupid things dynamic typers say" bingo-card, with the guard rail argument on it. One could regard the dynamic typer as a kind of NPC bot, popping up to spout the scripted phrases of his kind of person. And it's cringey to watch someone do that.
This phenomenon is what the OP is trying to describe, except that on Twitter the subject matter is unlikely to be static vs. dynamic types, but something political which covers much larger categories of people.
The fact that so many commenters here are baffled by this suggests that the phenomenon, or at least this intuitive understanding of it, is not quite as widespread as the OP (and I!) might assume, though.