Metaphor is a craft of language, but helps us organize concepts in our head. That symbiosis is ethically fraught and we're occasionally vulnerable to being tricked, so I want to explore that a little here.
Shift of metaphor can be helpful to understanding. But we conceive of understanding as involving perceived truth, and metaphors are tricky because parts of them, by design, are not literal truth. In a metaphor, you have to know which part is the intended structural truth and which other part is just along for the ride.
An impromptu metaphor
If you and I are out in a forest and have brought a picnic lunch, you might say “Where
do we eat? There's no table or chairs.”
To which I might respond,
pointing to a fallen log with two large, well-placed stones,
one on each side,
“Pull up a chair.”
The stones are not chairs. They probably cannot even be pulled. To process this metaphor, you must sort out which parts I intend (that a chair can be sat upon, that the arrangement of the stones and the log is such that they might suffice to accommodate an impromptu lunch), and which parts I don't intend. Pulling up a chair is again metaphorical. I just mean “sit down” but have worked the idea into the prior metaphor. The sense of the log as a table might work for sandwiches but if we'd brought soup, which requires a more level surface, it might not have.
We use language to play these games routinely. You are not tricked by this metaphor because you see the context, what it's being used for. It will be gone soon enough. All good.
The “Facebook friend” metaphor
But there are situations that are more complicated, that persist, that have very powerful implications. Facebook offers us the ability to have “friends.” You may not see this as a metaphor. Many people enumerate their friends and assume the terminology is literal. But it is not. It's a metaphor.
A friend arrives, someone you like well enough, but they do not socialize well with your other friends. Are they not then your friend, if you do not add them at Facebook? If someone is annoying after they're added and you remove them, are they no longer your friend?
I have come to see the Facebook paradigm as a bad metaphor, even an obfuscated one. It's hard to notice that it's a metaphor at all. This leads to problems. People feel bad about “unfriending” someone because it seems like they are telling the person they are not their friend. That was avoidable, I think, by better choice of metaphor.
I think of “Facebook friends” not as the role of “friend” but “party guest.” I find this makes things easier. Facebook could have used such a metaphor. It's OK that it didn't. But it matters that you see that they could have. Because then you can think about “Facebook friends” in a way of your choosing.
Once you see it's a metaphor, you realize only parts of it apply. Not all of it. Rather than “unfriend” I think about kicking a guest out of a party. It's hard sometimes, but it's not friend-level hard. And it explains why some people that are Facebook friends are not in fact my friends. Sometimes parties have extra people along. It's not a commitment.
Metaphor is important. It helps us understand new situations. Facebook got a lot of mileage out of using the friend metaphor because people immediately understood the space of how to use the system. A lot didn't have to be explained.
The “computer desktop” metaphor
The same success happened when computers adopted the “desktop metaphor.” People knew about file folders and about organizing things in groups, so the older idea of a hierarchical file system organized in other ways, like as a book outline, was suddenly the less interesting way to think about things. The graphical view had immediate appeal.
But sometimes the desktop metaphor breaks down. I was once helping my mom understand the Apple desktop and she said “so when I open a folder, that means I have it in my hands and no one else can look at it, right?” Well, no, it doesn't mean that. But maybe that's a misdesign. The metaphor certainly suggests that's a reasonable interpretation. So there are limits to even benign metaphors in what they can do for us.
The “membership” metaphor
If you're a member of a club, you can join it online and talk to its members. But have you wondered why your gas station wants you to join? It's because in competition in marketplaces, they've figured out that people like to do things with things they feel part of. So they have a better chance of you going there because “you're a member.” Never mind that there are no meetings, and you have no interest in talking to anyone that works there. That one fact will do something in your mind that changes your perception. Metaphor at work.
It also explains why charities want you to join them. Isn't it enough that you gave them money? No, because it might have been a one-time thing. If they want more money later, it lands differently if a stranger says “hey, you gave me money, so you have to give me more” or if an organization you joined says, “hey, we haven't seen you in a long time, old friend. how about a bit of support?” And yet those are pretty much the same except the latter is through the membership metaphor. It makes you less mad at a communication being unsolicited.
So watch for metaphors. Understand their implication. They offer powerful good, and they risk tricking you. You even might find that being a member of a religious or political organization makes you feel like you need to get along with and support others in that organization, even when that organization gets captured. Membership metaphor at play again. Beware. It might still be an organization you're caring about. You might want the contact. You might want to help. But do it by thinking, not by reflex.
Final Thoughts
So I'm saying metaphor matters. Whether metaphors, or their employers, are friendly and helpful or trying to trick us is hard to cleanly define. I'm not trying to tell you how to do that. I'm saying it's worth knowing you might need to. Life is a jungle. Sometimes it helps to have a map or guidebook, sometimes a machete—metaphorically speaking, of course.
Author’s Notes:
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This post began as part of another post I was writing. After a while, some of these get long, so breaking them off and giving them a life of their own seems like the way to go.
The image generated with help from abacus.ai's ChatLLM (Claude Opus 4.8 as primary assistant and for vision/analysis, Nano Banana Pro for image generation), with light post-processing in Gimp to do cropping, prefer grayscale, and add back desaturated color, and finally to scale things down for reduced image size and ultimately faster web download, The image analysis was needed because there were some editing errors that Nana Banana Pro kept making, and I had to show them to Claude for it to see what instructions to give to repair them. That only sometimes worked, which is why I had to do more of the final parts by hand than I usually do.
