In an essay, I write,
Even if you could somehow purge social media of every lie, it would still be a sewer. Twitter, Facebook, the New York Times, and Fox News are outrage machines. The articles and posts that attract approval and sharing are those that make people in one tribe feel more reassured that the other tribe is evil.
I agree – it’s important to remember that true facts are far more dangerous than lies. Media companies create ransom note narratives, clipping true facts from different contexts to create messages that say whatever they want them to say. There are no news organizations any more, just hostage takers
I agree with Arnold about the generally pernicious role of social media although some of my discomfort with it is likely attributable to my old age. It’s hard to tell exactly how much.
Regardless, I have a general rule for all media that any voices constantly telling you that you aren’t angry enough at a time when more people have never lived better should be purged from your media diet. That might be the right message occasionally, but when it’s an everyday thing on almost every issue, those are your conflict entrepreneurs.
Greg G, our resident social media expert, whose lifetime engagement on Twitter is self-described at 20 minutes, has weighed in on this important topic.
Question: Is Twitter merely reflecting our polarization or are they exacerbating it?
E.g. This speech was delivered recently at *Yale University*, not on social media.
“I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step.”
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-psychopathic-problem-of-the-white
Note: the speaker has obviously never fired a handgun before, but oh well.
Yeah, and that was 20 minutes too much. Twenty valuable minutes I can never get back.
Reflecting and exacerbating polarization aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact they are mutually reinforcing.
At least your purportedly highbrow Twitter hasn’t cut into your Tucker Carlson time any so you’ve got that going for you.
As I have often said, one of the biggest problems with social media is that each side uses it to amplify the dumbest things anybody on the other side said – comments that would otherwise die a natural death. And look! I only have to read your comment to find an example of that which you have personally probably retweeted already.
There is some historical basis to believe that there is a possibility that we are really underrating the actual net effect of the outrage machine, and in fact, we would miss it when it’s gone.
An analogy is to athletic team sports, which also whips up a bunch of silly rivalries which sometimes get really out of control, but in the most part is a way to substitute for, satisfy, placate, channel, and thus ‘tame’ the human instinct for group warfare in a mostly benign manner. If you focus on the seen excesses as a rationale for getting rid of sports, you are ignoring the unseen counterfactual of a world without such a simulated outlet, in which those instincts could run amok and very well manifest themselves in much more harmful ways.
So, in a way, we might prefer to keep these silly tribal and hyper-polarized rivalries in their simulated, ‘very online’ form consisting mostly of rhetoric, symbols, signals, ‘sick burns’, ‘mean tweets’, and so forth. That is, if we could also somehow compartmentalize and contain those excesses and anti-social tendencies to virtual life and prevent their impacts from contaminating other institutional functions and spilling over into serious real-world harms.
Now, there is a related – and admittedly controversial – argument that indulging in some vices are net-harm-reducing, because people are able to slake the same general thirst and temporarily neutralize a building, frustrated desire, by use of some tamer, substitute form.
It would be best to be sober and clean, but if one is going to be dependent on a substance, then having safe and legal sources of methadone or prescription narcotics is still better than having to dive into the criminal underworld to get regular fixes of heroin and fentanyl.
Likewise, back when Dworkin-MacKinnon-wave feminists were arguing against strip clubs, pornography and prostitution, they claimed that these activities encouraged men to relate to women in ways that amplified abuse and rape, and one of the counterarguments at the time was that, on the contrary, the availability of these substitute vices at low cost seemed to *decrease* the level of violent sexual assault, by providing a sanctioned diversion and form of release for lustful urges which could otherwise build to dangerously explosive, mind-warping levels.
Indeed, a lot of people these days seem to regularly get their dopamine hits and sooth their various passions and appetites or fulfill their need to play out certain dramatic patterns by indulging in modern, virtual entertainments or pleasurable vices that are alternative targets for innate psychological impulses and urges. One of the complaints about the increasing and accelerating addictiveness of these substitutes is that impersonal forces in lightly regulated competitive markets are strongly incentivized to make things as pleasurably addictive and life-capturing / zombie-making as possible (see, e.g., Natasha Schull’s “Addiction By Design”.)
Now, what I am getting at is that, especially on the right, the whole ‘online outrage economy’ seems, to someone like me, to have a completely distracting, enervating, and detrimentally satiating character. It *seems* to produce all these negative emotions and ill-will, but it is all completely tame and pointless and leaves the right, even when formally in power, in a permanently impotent cast of mind. They *seem* angry, but they are never *really* angry or motivated enough to do anything about anything, or to think truly deeply and seriously about what would be required to actually, effectively deal with any of the issues they lament and whine about. The two-minutes-hate session everyone experiences on television or online is more cathartic and sedative than anything – social media nastiness being the *actual* opium of the masses – and afterwords they feel better, more relieved, and a little more validated and venting their spleen about the latest incident of their higher status opponents rubbing their noses in the fact of their lower status and powerlessness to do anything about it. This is like feeling relief after pornographic self-abuse instead of participating in procreation. It feels similar, but one leads to something, and the other is ‘fruitless’. One is dopamine hits rewarding the path towards natural goals, the other is hits for the sake of hits, leading nowhere.
On Hanania’s latest consider the bit when Klein interviews Ponnuru:
This is part of why the Republicans always end up as beautiful losers in the role of Washington Generals against the Harlem Globetrotters. All the right has is a “complain-o-sphere” where one can come across the latest “outrage of the day”, and … what?
I started asking the anti-Joker question of “Why so unserious?” when reviewing Dreher’s Live Not By Lies a year ago, and if you follow Dreher, you’ll see he lives in the complain-o-sphere, especially lately, and I think this is a stumbling block preventing him from coming to grips with the depth of the problem and why his Soviet-based recommendations stand no chance.
But here’s the question: depending on your perspective, is this not perhaps the best one can do in terms of a mostly peaceful path to progressive / woke triumph?
Don’t you want the opposition kind of placated, distracted, lulled, narcotized, enervated, spending their acrimony in a mostly harmless and pointless ‘sport’ of online trash talking, but not backed up with any real risks or threats that compare at all to the levels of violence and discord which characterized Western life just a few decades before, as described in Burrough’s “Days of Rage”? Compared to the 70’s, all the alarmist catastrophizing about BLM and “January 6” seems exaggerated completely out of perspective to a truly absurd and ridiculous degree. But to even pretend to be so shocked by a level of political violence, damage, and upheaval below the 10th percentile of recent history is, in a paradoxical way, a kind of evidence of success in an almost Pinkerian “The Better Angels of Our Nature” sense of progress.
My point is, if I’m right about this, then it’s worth asking whether you really *want* people *not* have this nasty – but still mostly tamed and potentially even more tamable – outlet.
Imagine more people were like, say, me, who doesn’t go on social media at all, who doesn’t like nasty trash-talk, and who isn’t getting any dopamine hits and who isn’t getting any political satisfaction at all. Do you want people like me to start thinking really seriously about exactly what it would take to organize enough to finally really win and defeat the woke opposition, about how to solve all the “regime complete problems” in the implied way?
If you are, say, the CEO of a big company, you want to throw enough free candy bars at the workforce to keep them fat and happy enough to prevent them from even thinking about forming a union. You don’t want to cut out the junk food because it’s “bad for their health” only to discover them preparing a company-destroying work stoppage.
Reading William Cobbett’s Rural Rides on Kobo and I have to say that the sewer, if that concept encompasses brutally dyspepstic asperity, is not without its merits. To be honest I have no idea at all what is on Facebook and Twitter and could care less and am equally ignorant of Fox News. And I read a bare minimum of the NYT so I can’t really speak to those sites, but centuries ago people had a fine style in expressing outrage infused with healthy doses of contempt as well that wouldn’t at all be a detriment to the public discourse. If anything we could use quite a bit more scorn for the pieties of the day. I wouldn’t see that a Fantasy Iconoclast League would be less salutary than FIT.
Some perpetually relevant bombs thrown by Cobbett that would be point earners in my book:
“Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers.” An observation of which I am more guilty than most.
“As I looked up at what they call University Hall, I could not help reflecting that what I had written even since I had left Kensington on the 29th of October, would produce more effect , and do more good in the world, than all that had for a hundred years been written by all the members of this University, who devour, perhaps not less than a million pounds a year, arising from property, completely at the disposal of the ‘Great Council of the Nation’ and I could not help exclaiming to myself ‘Stand forth, ye big-wigged, ye gloriously feeding Doctors! Stand forth, ye rich of that church whose poor have given them a hundred thousand pounds a year, not out of your riches, but out of the taxes, raised in part, from the salt of the labouring man!'” – while visiting Oxford on 18 November the same year.
And my favorite is his use of the epithet ” tax-eaters ” for those on government payrolls, which alone, should qualify his birthday, 9 March 1763, and his death date, 18 June 1835, to be commemorate d as national holidays.