The Atlantic: “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life have been Uniquely Stupid”

The former CIA analyst Martin Gurri predicted these fracturing effects in his 2014 book, The Revolt of the Public. Gurri’s analysis focused on the authority-subverting effects of information’s exponential growth, beginning with the internet in the 1990s. Writing nearly a decade ago, Gurri could already see the power of social media as a universal solvent, breaking down bonds and weakening institutions everywhere it reached. He noted that distributed networks can protest and overthrow, but never govern. He described the nihilism of the many protest movements of 2011 that organized mostly online and that, like Occupy Wall Street, demanded the destruction of existing institutions without offering an alternative vision of the future or an organization that could bring it about.

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Second, the dart guns of social media give more power and voice to the political extremes while reducing the power and voice of the moderate majority. The “Hidden Tribes” study, by the pro-democracy group More in Common, surveyed 8,000 Americans in 2017 and 2018 and identified seven groups that shared beliefs and behaviors. The one furthest to the right, known as the “devoted conservatives”, comprised 6 percent of the U.S. population. The group furthest to the left, the “progressive activists”, comprised 8 percent of the population. The progressive activists were by far the most prolific group on social media: 70 percent had shared political content over the previous year. The devoted conservatives followed, at 56 percent.

These two extreme groups are similar in surprising ways. They are the whitest and richest of the seven groups, which suggests that America is being torn apart by a battle between two subsets of the elite who are not representative of the broader society. What’s more, they are the two groups that show the greatest homogeneity in their moral and political attitudes.

Jonathan Haidt

Interesting article going through the nefarious effects of social media on public discourse and democratic institutions, from government to education. I read about most elsewhere over the years, but this is a good and comprehensive summary. One of the crucial things to remember is that most of the activity (or rather noise) on social media is generated by small contingents of people on extreme ends of the political spectrum – and that these people paradoxically are more similar than they would like to admit.

• The traditional punishment for treason is death, hence the battle cry on January 6: “Hang Mike Pence”. Right-wing death threats, many delivered by anonymous accounts, are proving effective in cowing traditional conservatives, for example in driving out local election officials who failed to “stop the steal”. The wave of threats delivered to dissenting Republican members of Congress has similarly pushed many of the remaining moderates to quit or go silent, giving us a party ever more divorced from the conservative tradition, constitutional responsibility, and reality.

• But when the newly viralized social-media platforms gave everyone a dart gun, it was younger progressive activists who did the most shooting, and they aimed a disproportionate number of their darts at these older liberal leaders. Confused and fearful, the leaders rarely challenged the activists or their nonliberal narrative in which life at every institution is an eternal battle among identity groups over a zero-sum pie, and the people on top got there by oppressing the people on the bottom. This new narrative is rigidly egalitarian––focused on equality of outcomes, not of rights or opportunities. It is unconcerned with individual rights.

  The universal charge against people who disagree with this narrative is not “traitor”; it is “racist”, “transphobe”, “Karen”, or some related scarlet letter marking the perpetrator as one who hates or harms a marginalized group. The punishment that feels right for such crimes is not execution; it is public shaming and social death.

Illustration by Nicolás Ortega. Source: “Turris Babel”, Coenraet Decker, 1679

But on some key points I think the author doesn’t go deep enough and somewhat underestimates their gravity. A huge issue is that people not only support extreme views online, but on top of that many support such views without even personally believing in them, in order to garner social clout and standing inside their group. In other words, for some it’s socially advantageous to overtly disseminate extreme views on social media – see also the performative wokeness of an increasing number of corporation, which they can use as cover for their anything-but-progressive business practices. This is something that should be discouraged, but alas, I have no suggestions how to accomplish that.

The proposal to have user verification as a precondition for gaining the algorithmic amplification would have little to no effect in my opinion. There are plenty of verified individuals sharing extreme views under current rules, including prominent figures such as politicians, because it serves their agenda and, as mentioned above, improves their status within their social group. Verified or not, these incentives in favor of extreme discourse remain unchanged.

Fundamentally, these opposing attitudes of the far-left and far-right may have a common origin in American puritanism: the drive to neatly separate good from evil, pure from impure, and impose these moral judgements on everyone else. The real world is more diverse and nuanced than extremists care to admit, and part of the stupidity of conversations on social media is precisely this tendency to reduce complex topics to narrow ideological positions and to label people into predefined categories based on summary interactions.