Haidt makes an excellent observation about the mid-20th century unity being an aberration due to the technology of the time:
> Gurri is no fan of elites or of centralized authority, but he notes a constructive feature of the pre-digital era: a single “mass audience,” all consuming the same content, as if they were all looking into the same gigantic mirror at the reflection of their own society.
Something I think we overlook is that America was more fractious prior to the mid-20th century, but the stakes were lower because our institutions were more distributed and more local. The federal government had a vastly smaller scope back then, but so did nationwide and multinational corporations. Differences in world view are less significant when the bureaucrats and executives with power over your life live nearby instead of in another city and state. Our current structure, with a homogenous federal government and nationwide corporations arose against the backdrop of that unity.
What I see missing from Haidt's analysis is increased federalism and localism as a solution. Aside from maybe California, our individual states remain vastly less fractious than the nation as a whole. Here in Maryland, for example, our Republican governor has an approval rating over 70% in both rural and urban areas. That's not because the state doesn't have ideological diversity--a third of the state voted for Trump. But the extremes are compressed compared to the nation as a whole--Baltimore isn't San Francisco but neither is Carroll County rural Alabama. Not only that, it's hard to get folks in Carroll County worked up about Baltimore they way they get worked up about San Francisco, and vice versa.
This might be a weird outcome of the inability of large groups to process nuance. Groups seem to struggle with the idea that things can be done one way in one place and another way in another place - and struggle in a way that individuals seem not to.
Groups - even small government types, weirdly - seem to fall into a trap whenever something goes wrong. The answer to a challenge is "centralise power, then do things my way". Never mind that power is difficult to coerce, rarely does things your way and any mistakes made are standardised and amplified accross an entire country.
I recall in the early days of the COVID crisis where the US banned working COVID tests (I forget if it was the CDC or some other government body) in favour of their own faulty one, which totally scuppered any chance of controlling the disease. Foreseeable outcome of the strategy. But despite that sort of thing being easy to pick, groups don't argue for parallelism in an emergency.
> What I see missing from Haidt's analysis is increased federalism and localism as a solution.
I'm theoretically in favor of this, but ... one of the reasons we need a bigger, more powerful federal government is to have a governmental entity that can take on the massively more powerful private entities (corporations) that exist. No state government can take on Walmart or Amazon. The federal government can (or could, if it chose to).
If you weaken the power of the federal government (which ironically is what i interpret "increased federalism and localism" to mean), who deals with the titans?
> Differences in world view are less significant when the bureaucrats and executives with power over your life live nearby instead of in another city and state.
How do you reconcile this with jim crow-era terrorism, for example? The movements were local and very loosely organized on even a regional level, but the bureaucrats wielded incredible power over individuals in their jurisdiction. There were definitely other factors but top-down power was important in the weakening of those structures.
I'm not necessarily for centralization, nor do I think our current system is good or has us on a healthy path by any means. I'm just not convinced stakes were lower in the early 20th century.
And population. In 1900 California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Utah had like 2.5 mil people combined. 20 years earlier it was half that.
I don't think corporations had a smaller scope back then. Look up the Grange movement, trust busting and the progressive party. They were all responses to corporations having too much power, in fact control over many aspects of life and complete economic power over certain industries and groups of people. Government intervened, something which might not be possible right now.
Totally agree. Thinking social media is the cause of the current divide is naive. It's certainly a mean to make it evident. Perhaps a catalist. But it's certainly not the cause.
>The federal government had a vastly smaller scope back then, but so did nationwide and multinational corporations.
This sounds wrong. see railroad workers in the western states or mining towns in western PA or West Virginia. People literally had to fight paid soldiers their employers sent to control their lives. I'd say that's pretty huge scope.
I think this is close but I have an impression that local governance is poorly served by the internet. A lot of local news has collapsed, and people read severely centralized news from a few counties. The audience, therefore, of these sites in tremendous and heterogeneous, and they would rather focus on topics of common interest. So there may be nothing written whatsoever about your congressperson, but both Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi have ice cream scandals.
During the 2016 election, when I had my ballot, I tried to just Google everything on there. The most alarming thing I noticed was the absolute lack of any press on the House of Representatives candidates. I had nothing to go on except a short biography of each candidate (in one article), and one of them had a YouTube channel of little substance.
In practice, so many of America’s problems, and so many problems that Americans are very conscious of, are local issues over which the president has little to no control. Zoning, rent, real estate, roads, education, policing. Locally governed, locally funded, locally hired.
But the local press is gutted. For any of these topics, the audience is microscopic compared to “the president dumped feed in the Khoi pond”.
Here's an idea: the single-topic, short-lived political party.
Imagine a political party created to achieve one focused accomplishment, and then literally dissolved once it's been achieved.
The more bipartisan support the accomplishment has, the better. Say a political party whose primary focus is to get term limits for members of the US Congress, a topic with broad bipartisan support [1].
People of all political persuasions could join from across the country. The people in this party might differ in major ways, but they agree strongly on this one topic.
Maybe they sign a legal contract to bind them to both vote in favor of term limits if they're elected, and to elect to bring that up to a vote on the floor of US Congress until it's passed. Some consequence would have to exist I suppose. But with that would come the small, focused party's endorsement, and resources from its supporters.
> Differences in world view are less significant when the bureaucrats and executives with power over your life live nearby instead of in another city and state.
This statement is ambiguous. I see two obvious interpretations:
1. Differences in worldview are less important when the bureaucrats with power over your life live nearby.
2. Differences in worldview are smaller when the bureaucrats with power over your life live nearby.
In Illinois there's a pretty major divide between Northern and Southern IL. A lot of people draw that line well north of Springfield.
I would say it broadly follows what some are calling the "Rural-Urban divide" - certainly the suburban areas are included. With some wrinkles of course. DeKalb is definitely "northern", but Mendota is definitely more "southern".
States can be very heterogeneous and divided. It largely depends on the topic. There is a lot of resentment towards the populated areas by those in the rural areas when it come to things like gun laws. Right now, they have a republican govenor who they might feel they can trust to veto certain things, but in general the rural areas feel their voice isn't heard on that subject and are instead subjected to the will of the urban area.
I would like to see the source where the MD governor has a 70% approval rating in urban areas. My guess is that many of those areas are ones that voted for him, not against him.
In rural PA, it's been a running a joke that the state should just have NJ annex Philly since it exhibits large political influence on the rest of the state and their wishes tend to align with the policies of NJ.
>What I see missing from Haidt's analysis is increased federalism and localism as a solution.
There are problems with Haidt's analysis and your proposed solution. The idea that society has become fractious because of technology masks a real division that has always existed among people. There's always been in-groups and out-groups which often fight each other with the in-groups usually dominating all levels of society within a given region. For example, in "red states" LGBT folks often have to keep their identity a secret or at very least pretend to bow to the dominant group which in theory gives them some protection. Of course, this is an illusion as many trans and gay/lesbian/bi folks find themselves murdered more so in hostile regions than not despite passing or hiding their sexual orientation.
What social media has done is give out-groups such as LGBT folks a means to voice their views, share their lives, and basically live as if the dominating groups don't have a say in living. This has basically made in-groups furious because in the past, a simple act of lynching would bring such out-groups to heel but now with the power of having mutual aid across the internet through GoFundMe, random meetups, and chat apps like Discord such acts of physical and structural violence don't stick as well. A family in a rural red state can't force their gay son to act straight when they can safely move out to another city even before the age of majority thanks to friends online paying for their bus ticket. No more can the local church lock down minorities in their community when they can up and leave thanks to social media connecting folks to others that have the means to help.
Essentially, society is breaking up because the means to unify via absence of freedom to flee local tyrannies and brutalities has been diminished greatly. It's not that people are experiencing the equivalent of the tower of babel from the Bible, it's that people are recreating their own colonial ventures to far away lands to avoid persecution much like religious minorities did when coming to North America. Instead, they're just fleeing to other states or countries with friends.
This is why one faction of conservatives "want to reduce [the federal government] to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." Progressives see that notion as dangerous because they consider the government as an essential tool for solving serious problems that ruin the lives of real people. But their successes will be short lived if an expansion of government power leads to a long term disintegration of our country. Perhaps we would be better off just letting some problems fester instead of forcing government solutions.
> a single “mass audience,” all consuming the same content, as if they were all looking into the same gigantic mirror at the reflection of their own society.
And yet, it seems society has never been so much polarized. Seems a bit like the "hipster effect"
Completely agree I went from we should be two nations to federal govt should much less powerful one way to get started is remove federal tax and instead have states collect all taxes then pass it to federal government
But from the very basic metric of not wanting people to have bad things happen to them, when you see promoters of state powers intent on using it to tear down civil rights as fast as possible, strong state power in the current political environment seems like a major regression for many people in the country.
OK sure, some people want more local power. Why? Lower taxes? Or maybe because they don't like Oberfell or Casey.
It's important to look at consequences of changes.
> Something I think we overlook is that America was more fractious prior to the mid-20th century, but the stakes were lower because our institutions were more distributed and more local.
Donald Trump always struck me as a character out of a western. Only in 'western' times he would have just 'owned' one town.
While I am a big fan of Jonathan Haidt, and have read several of his books, I can't help but feel that this is written from a point of view that is entirely too impressed with (if also afraid of) technology.
Peter Turchin predicted escalating levels of polarization in the US, reaching a peak around 2020, without any need to look at social media. The level of political polarization now, while high, is less than the late 1850's. I also think he's more impressed with AI-generated content than is warranted; unpaid zealots can crank the stuff out in more than enough quantity.
Turchin blames elite overproduction; it seems a much more fundamental issue than social media. Haidt even provides evidence for that here:
"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."
Now, don't get me wrong, I am no fan of FB or Twitter, but I don't think Haidt's take on this is accurate. The stupidity of current discourse uses social media, of course, because that's the dominant media, but I don't believe they caused it.
“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.“
Calling Occupy nihilistic is strikes me as blinkered, and shows the neoliberal bias of the author. Occupy is where the 99% vs. 1% lens arose, which is a reasonable description of concentration of wealth and power across Western countries and especially the US. Occupy attempted to employ more empowering and less alienating peer-to-peer governance.
Occupy didn’t “succeed”, probably due to both internal and external forces, but it wasn’t nihilistic.
> Banks and other industries have “know your customer” rules so that they can’t do business with anonymous clients laundering money from criminal enterprises. Large social-media platforms should be required to do the same. That does not mean users would have to post under their real names; they could still use a pseudonym. It just means that before a platform spreads your words to millions of people, it has an obligation to verify (perhaps through a third party or nonprofit) that you are a real human being, in a particular country, and are old enough to be using the platform. This one change would wipe out most of the hundreds of millions of bots and fake accounts that currently pollute the major platforms. It would also likely reduce the frequency of death threats, rape threats, racist nastiness, and trolling more generally. Research shows that antisocial behavior becomes more common online when people feel that their identity is unknown and untraceable.
Yet anonymity/pseudonymity is incredibly valuable- it is easier to change your mind and be open to new ideas, you can be more honest and direct, and less fearful of bad actors. The author of this post clearly thinks the entire net to be composed of nothing but Facebook/Twitter/Instagram and the like, but the definition of "social media" can be extended to any 1 or more machines which can send and receive IP datagrams between each other. The internet was doing just fine when people owned more of their communications, running servers or at least using infrastructure run by fellow human beings, rather than consuming content from a handful of global feeds susceptible to these social Sybil attacks.
Just outlaw or intensely regulate these massive, centralized/proprietary social media algorithms so that we can return to what was before, all while retaining the gift of anonymity.
> Congress should update the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which unwisely set the age of so-called internet adulthood (the age at which companies can collect personal information from children without parental consent) at 13 back in 1998, while making little provision for effective enforcement. The age should be raised to at least 16, and companies should be held responsible for enforcing it.
That won't change anything if parents keep buying smartphones for their 10 year olds.
> Recent academic studies suggest that social media is indeed corrosive to trust in governments, news media, and people and institutions in general.
The author uses the term social media here in this statement without much differentiation. Elsewhere though, he has differentiated “old school” social media from modern “social media.” I think he should have made that more clear here. He expressed earlier that the effects of “old school” social media were pretty benign.
I would like to propose that the term social media has become varied and ambiguous enough that it loses its value when introspecting on its modern effect. I’ve personally taken to no longer use the term “social media” and instead try to use variations on “profit media”, “engagement media”, and “highly mechanized.” These better capture (for me) the essence of what most modern supposed “social” platforms are really about.
I have to speculate that the reason why "social media is indeed corrosive to trust in governments, news media, and people and institutions in general" is oftentimes because it highlights their apparent failings (biases, lies, etc). That is, the problem is not primarily one of people failing to trust in trustworthy institutions, but due to a hyper-focus (retweeting) on the failings of those institutions.
As we communicate more, we find we don't agree as much as we thought we did, and that is divisive. Social media allows us to highlight and amplify the information about our disagreements.
It looks like every human era has its anxieties. Suddenly many of us got widespread access (if we dared), not only to 'all knowledge' (such as it is) including all of human history (much previously covered-up or lost), but to what's going through everyone's minds (and ever has). Bound to blow some of them. Biblicly speaking, "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not grasped it."
I'd say the first 10 years of the 21st century were a hell of a lot stupider. We blew a budget surplus on tax cuts for the wealthy. We started two wars that lasted the better part of 20 years, one of which was waged against a country that had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11. Oh, and we didn't win either of them.
We completely ignored the rise of China and any threat it posed, assuming all the while they'd become good capitalists and fall in love with Democracy.
Bankers tanked our economy so we bailed out them (bipartisan no less!), but not the average Americans they screwed. We turned our intelligence agencies against our own people.
Heck, compared to the first 10 years of the 21st century, the previous 10 years have been a relative period of enlightenment. In fact most of the problems over the last 10 years stem from the stupendously dumb decisions we made from 2000 to 2009.
I don't think it is safe to say that more independents means less partisanship. If people are going independent because they see themselves as somewhere between Rs and Ds, then sure. But if they go independent because they think the Rs are not right enough, or the Ds are not left enough, then that is only an example of magnifying partisanship.
This is the dumbest thing I have seen come from Jonathan Haidt.
If social media is this powerful a destabilizer of societies, I wonder how Haidt explains first world countries like Germany, Canada, and most of the rest of the planet that have social media but haven't fallen into the same sort of divisiveness the US has.
This idiocy was all organized on social media. The convoys are overwhelmingly unpopular among larger Canadian society, but social media allowed them to organize in an echo chamber.
No comment on Germany, but I would be betting on things being similar there, not different.
My personal theory is that before social media, a lot of the people involved in this would have been bullied or shamed into not doing this by their peer group. But social media lets you set your peer group without geographical restrictions.
I'm not one to downplay how bad the divisiveness in US politics is, but if you look a bit closer you'll see the EXACT same dumbsh*t happening in DE and CA, perhaps with less obviousness.
Take a closer look at what is happening in Germany's armed forces, Canada's use of emergency powers to remove...truckers.
The world has lost its collective mind, just as sure as if The Singularity or First Contact was happening tomorrow.
Meaning, the promise of the open 'net has been subverted and this is what we get. Facebook Pograms, the O.J. of NYC (Orange Joke) becoming PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, VV thinking he's the second coming of Ivan the Terrible.
This would all honestly make a lot more sense if Terry Crews was President.
Odd comment coming the day after far right and far left candidates won more than half the votes in the French presidential election, with the center left and right collapsing and centrist Macron getting under 30% (despite having moved significantly to the right on cultural issues).
I can only speak for Germany, but Social media here still is much, much less widely adopted than in the US, because sharing one's life with strangers is culturally not as well regarded as it is in the US. This also applied before social media - telling one's life story to strangers was just not done.
Now, this is changing for younger generations, but even they are still not nearly as willing to share as their American counterparts.
It may just be a matter of time but here the Q-Anons and other divisive, Anti-Democratic groups are still more fringe than over there
Does the USA have a common national identity to rally around anymore; what do a Floridian, a California, and Minnesotan have in common in the 2020's? America has always been a melting pot of different cultures. You can tell a story about how the "american dream" united Americans in the past but you can also argue that dream has been degraded over the years. Even things such as the constitution and bill of rights are being disputed in various ways.
Are you intimately familiar with modern life in the US and (Germany/Canada)? Because divisions you see from the inside might not be obvious from the outside.
This thread is the prototypical example of what Haidt is talking about. I have no interest in taking part in this comments section other than to make this observation.
"He noted that distributed networks "can protest and overthrow, but never govern.""
That's exactly right. Except it seems, so far, like those who effectively control the networks by acting as intermediaries between its users, can suppress protest and protect themselves from being overthrown.
Because we’ve massively overinvested as a society in trivial meta navel-gazing like The Atlantic, and massive underinvested in technically knowledgeable conversation, teaching, and execution.
Overall, red side wants things to stay the same or go back, and blue side wants things to change. If the gap between them is widening, it's because blue side is trying to change things too rapidly. Red side seems to want to go back to 1950 at the earliest; it doesn't seem to me like they're increasingly backing up into 1800s or earlier. But the blue side is increasingly pushing for things that many are not ready to even consider: children transitioning into other genders, reparation-like policies, socially enforced changes to fundamentals of language. Many reds are still getting used to the last changes, like gay marriage. Society is just not set up to handle constant massive change to traditional mores. You can have one or two things change in a decade and people will adapt, but the current velocity is not sustainable.
Social media companies encourage manufactured outrage by providing controversial and divisive 'extreme' content for "engagement metrics". We know this from the Facebook leaks, court cases and common sense.
The solution to this suggested in this article is to give them more power over individual information by making giving your name and address to the company mandatory. No thank you. I don't think expanding one of the core parts of the problem while annihilating the capability for people in repressive countries to shield themselves is any solution at all.
i feel like i'm out of touch. the premise is that most Americans don't like/agree with the political aspects of their social media: to which i wonder, why don't they disengage? even in 2022, it's not hard to find people who don't talk partisan politics. it's not hard to find people who value epistemics. the web-like portions of the internet make this easy. Google "rationalist community" and the first result is LessWrong. Google "neutral political news" and you get allsides.com. moreover, find just one person associated with a single thing you value and you can connect with them, chat with or browse who they're following, and recurse connections until you've embedded yourself in an environment of people you enjoy associating with.
this stuff is in easier reach than it's ever been. if you expect to consume the firehose and enjoy it, you're disillusioned: never has a single source appealed to every individual on the planet. you have to select your peers. curate your connections. if a friend repeatedly blasts you with bad political takes, cut or reduce the connection. the digital web isn't that different from the irl web in this aspect. it's your responsibility to craft connections that benefit your life. FB/Twitter/etc are tools to use in that (and far from the only ones), but you cannot abdicate your responsibility and expect good results.
[+] [-] rayiner|3 years ago|reply
> Gurri is no fan of elites or of centralized authority, but he notes a constructive feature of the pre-digital era: a single “mass audience,” all consuming the same content, as if they were all looking into the same gigantic mirror at the reflection of their own society.
Something I think we overlook is that America was more fractious prior to the mid-20th century, but the stakes were lower because our institutions were more distributed and more local. The federal government had a vastly smaller scope back then, but so did nationwide and multinational corporations. Differences in world view are less significant when the bureaucrats and executives with power over your life live nearby instead of in another city and state. Our current structure, with a homogenous federal government and nationwide corporations arose against the backdrop of that unity.
What I see missing from Haidt's analysis is increased federalism and localism as a solution. Aside from maybe California, our individual states remain vastly less fractious than the nation as a whole. Here in Maryland, for example, our Republican governor has an approval rating over 70% in both rural and urban areas. That's not because the state doesn't have ideological diversity--a third of the state voted for Trump. But the extremes are compressed compared to the nation as a whole--Baltimore isn't San Francisco but neither is Carroll County rural Alabama. Not only that, it's hard to get folks in Carroll County worked up about Baltimore they way they get worked up about San Francisco, and vice versa.
[+] [-] roenxi|3 years ago|reply
Groups - even small government types, weirdly - seem to fall into a trap whenever something goes wrong. The answer to a challenge is "centralise power, then do things my way". Never mind that power is difficult to coerce, rarely does things your way and any mistakes made are standardised and amplified accross an entire country.
I recall in the early days of the COVID crisis where the US banned working COVID tests (I forget if it was the CDC or some other government body) in favour of their own faulty one, which totally scuppered any chance of controlling the disease. Foreseeable outcome of the strategy. But despite that sort of thing being easy to pick, groups don't argue for parallelism in an emergency.
[+] [-] PaulDavisThe1st|3 years ago|reply
I'm theoretically in favor of this, but ... one of the reasons we need a bigger, more powerful federal government is to have a governmental entity that can take on the massively more powerful private entities (corporations) that exist. No state government can take on Walmart or Amazon. The federal government can (or could, if it chose to).
If you weaken the power of the federal government (which ironically is what i interpret "increased federalism and localism" to mean), who deals with the titans?
[+] [-] giraffe_lady|3 years ago|reply
How do you reconcile this with jim crow-era terrorism, for example? The movements were local and very loosely organized on even a regional level, but the bureaucrats wielded incredible power over individuals in their jurisdiction. There were definitely other factors but top-down power was important in the weakening of those structures.
I'm not necessarily for centralization, nor do I think our current system is good or has us on a healthy path by any means. I'm just not convinced stakes were lower in the early 20th century.
[+] [-] richardfey|3 years ago|reply
I have read somewhere that for most of humanity's history city-states were the norm; modern nations are an exception in this sense.
Now, if we could have more federalism but at the same time spare the constant war state part...it could be a positive outcome.
[+] [-] rr808|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tstegart|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rmbyrro|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmead|3 years ago|reply
This sounds wrong. see railroad workers in the western states or mining towns in western PA or West Virginia. People literally had to fight paid soldiers their employers sent to control their lives. I'd say that's pretty huge scope.
[+] [-] whiddershins|3 years ago|reply
And many people seem completely unable to process this.
[+] [-] thatjoeoverthr|3 years ago|reply
During the 2016 election, when I had my ballot, I tried to just Google everything on there. The most alarming thing I noticed was the absolute lack of any press on the House of Representatives candidates. I had nothing to go on except a short biography of each candidate (in one article), and one of them had a YouTube channel of little substance.
In practice, so many of America’s problems, and so many problems that Americans are very conscious of, are local issues over which the president has little to no control. Zoning, rent, real estate, roads, education, policing. Locally governed, locally funded, locally hired.
But the local press is gutted. For any of these topics, the audience is microscopic compared to “the president dumped feed in the Khoi pond”.
[+] [-] karmelapple|3 years ago|reply
Imagine a political party created to achieve one focused accomplishment, and then literally dissolved once it's been achieved.
The more bipartisan support the accomplishment has, the better. Say a political party whose primary focus is to get term limits for members of the US Congress, a topic with broad bipartisan support [1].
People of all political persuasions could join from across the country. The people in this party might differ in major ways, but they agree strongly on this one topic.
Maybe they sign a legal contract to bind them to both vote in favor of term limits if they're elected, and to elect to bring that up to a vote on the floor of US Congress until it's passed. Some consequence would have to exist I suppose. But with that would come the small, focused party's endorsement, and resources from its supporters.
Does such a thing exist? Has it ever?
[1] https://mclaughlinonline.com/2018/02/08/ma-poll-voters-overw...
[+] [-] thaumasiotes|3 years ago|reply
This statement is ambiguous. I see two obvious interpretations:
1. Differences in worldview are less important when the bureaucrats with power over your life live nearby.
2. Differences in worldview are smaller when the bureaucrats with power over your life live nearby.
I think #2 is true and #1 is false.
[+] [-] RajT88|3 years ago|reply
I would say it broadly follows what some are calling the "Rural-Urban divide" - certainly the suburban areas are included. With some wrinkles of course. DeKalb is definitely "northern", but Mendota is definitely more "southern".
[+] [-] giantg2|3 years ago|reply
I would like to see the source where the MD governor has a 70% approval rating in urban areas. My guess is that many of those areas are ones that voted for him, not against him.
In rural PA, it's been a running a joke that the state should just have NJ annex Philly since it exhibits large political influence on the rest of the state and their wishes tend to align with the policies of NJ.
[+] [-] ladyattis|3 years ago|reply
There are problems with Haidt's analysis and your proposed solution. The idea that society has become fractious because of technology masks a real division that has always existed among people. There's always been in-groups and out-groups which often fight each other with the in-groups usually dominating all levels of society within a given region. For example, in "red states" LGBT folks often have to keep their identity a secret or at very least pretend to bow to the dominant group which in theory gives them some protection. Of course, this is an illusion as many trans and gay/lesbian/bi folks find themselves murdered more so in hostile regions than not despite passing or hiding their sexual orientation.
What social media has done is give out-groups such as LGBT folks a means to voice their views, share their lives, and basically live as if the dominating groups don't have a say in living. This has basically made in-groups furious because in the past, a simple act of lynching would bring such out-groups to heel but now with the power of having mutual aid across the internet through GoFundMe, random meetups, and chat apps like Discord such acts of physical and structural violence don't stick as well. A family in a rural red state can't force their gay son to act straight when they can safely move out to another city even before the age of majority thanks to friends online paying for their bus ticket. No more can the local church lock down minorities in their community when they can up and leave thanks to social media connecting folks to others that have the means to help.
Essentially, society is breaking up because the means to unify via absence of freedom to flee local tyrannies and brutalities has been diminished greatly. It's not that people are experiencing the equivalent of the tower of babel from the Bible, it's that people are recreating their own colonial ventures to far away lands to avoid persecution much like religious minorities did when coming to North America. Instead, they're just fleeing to other states or countries with friends.
[+] [-] nradov|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Grover_Norquist
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] raverbashing|3 years ago|reply
And yet, it seems society has never been so much polarized. Seems a bit like the "hipster effect"
[+] [-] lifeplusplus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rtpg|3 years ago|reply
OK sure, some people want more local power. Why? Lower taxes? Or maybe because they don't like Oberfell or Casey.
It's important to look at consequences of changes.
[+] [-] parenthesis|3 years ago|reply
Donald Trump always struck me as a character out of a western. Only in 'western' times he would have just 'owned' one town.
[+] [-] rossdavidh|3 years ago|reply
Peter Turchin predicted escalating levels of polarization in the US, reaching a peak around 2020, without any need to look at social media. The level of political polarization now, while high, is less than the late 1850's. I also think he's more impressed with AI-generated content than is warranted; unpaid zealots can crank the stuff out in more than enough quantity.
Turchin blames elite overproduction; it seems a much more fundamental issue than social media. Haidt even provides evidence for that here:
"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."
Now, don't get me wrong, I am no fan of FB or Twitter, but I don't think Haidt's take on this is accurate. The stupidity of current discourse uses social media, of course, because that's the dominant media, but I don't believe they caused it.
[+] [-] avidphantasm|3 years ago|reply
Calling Occupy nihilistic is strikes me as blinkered, and shows the neoliberal bias of the author. Occupy is where the 99% vs. 1% lens arose, which is a reasonable description of concentration of wealth and power across Western countries and especially the US. Occupy attempted to employ more empowering and less alienating peer-to-peer governance.
Occupy didn’t “succeed”, probably due to both internal and external forces, but it wasn’t nihilistic.
[+] [-] linuxhansl|3 years ago|reply
1. "The human mind avoids nothing as much as thinking." -- Unknown, quoted by my dad
2. "We used to agree on the facts, and than argue about what do do. Now we simple disagree on the facts" -- Friend of Mine
3. "The quickest way to release stress hormones from the brain, unfortunately, is to 'beat' up someone else." -- My therapist
(1) Leads to humans always gravitating towards an explanation that reliefs them from thinking. Simple, short, populist messages are perfect for that.
(2) Has us end discussions before we even get to talk about what to do.
(3) Has us make feel good when we can "beat" up someone else on social media.
IMHO, it is bringing these three together in social media, and more importantly doing so mostly subconsciously, that makes this so toxic.
Edit: Layout
[+] [-] sweetbitter|3 years ago|reply
Yet anonymity/pseudonymity is incredibly valuable- it is easier to change your mind and be open to new ideas, you can be more honest and direct, and less fearful of bad actors. The author of this post clearly thinks the entire net to be composed of nothing but Facebook/Twitter/Instagram and the like, but the definition of "social media" can be extended to any 1 or more machines which can send and receive IP datagrams between each other. The internet was doing just fine when people owned more of their communications, running servers or at least using infrastructure run by fellow human beings, rather than consuming content from a handful of global feeds susceptible to these social Sybil attacks.
Just outlaw or intensely regulate these massive, centralized/proprietary social media algorithms so that we can return to what was before, all while retaining the gift of anonymity.
[+] [-] theandrewbailey|3 years ago|reply
That won't change anything if parents keep buying smartphones for their 10 year olds.
[+] [-] travisgriggs|3 years ago|reply
The author uses the term social media here in this statement without much differentiation. Elsewhere though, he has differentiated “old school” social media from modern “social media.” I think he should have made that more clear here. He expressed earlier that the effects of “old school” social media were pretty benign.
I would like to propose that the term social media has become varied and ambiguous enough that it loses its value when introspecting on its modern effect. I’ve personally taken to no longer use the term “social media” and instead try to use variations on “profit media”, “engagement media”, and “highly mechanized.” These better capture (for me) the essence of what most modern supposed “social” platforms are really about.
[+] [-] natsup123490|3 years ago|reply
As we communicate more, we find we don't agree as much as we thought we did, and that is divisive. Social media allows us to highlight and amplify the information about our disagreements.
[+] [-] 8bitsrule|3 years ago|reply
It looks like every human era has its anxieties. Suddenly many of us got widespread access (if we dared), not only to 'all knowledge' (such as it is) including all of human history (much previously covered-up or lost), but to what's going through everyone's minds (and ever has). Bound to blow some of them. Biblicly speaking, "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not grasped it."
[+] [-] tharne|3 years ago|reply
We completely ignored the rise of China and any threat it posed, assuming all the while they'd become good capitalists and fall in love with Democracy.
Bankers tanked our economy so we bailed out them (bipartisan no less!), but not the average Americans they screwed. We turned our intelligence agencies against our own people.
Heck, compared to the first 10 years of the 21st century, the previous 10 years have been a relative period of enlightenment. In fact most of the problems over the last 10 years stem from the stupendously dumb decisions we made from 2000 to 2009.
[+] [-] egberts1|3 years ago|reply
The article is blowing smokes up where the sun doesn’t shine.
Meanwhile, http://www.stevenwwebster.com/negative-partisanship-rabid.pd...
[+] [-] oh_sigh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathlover2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] echlebek|3 years ago|reply
This idiocy was all organized on social media. The convoys are overwhelmingly unpopular among larger Canadian society, but social media allowed them to organize in an echo chamber.
No comment on Germany, but I would be betting on things being similar there, not different.
My personal theory is that before social media, a lot of the people involved in this would have been bullied or shamed into not doing this by their peer group. But social media lets you set your peer group without geographical restrictions.
[+] [-] jprd|3 years ago|reply
I'm not one to downplay how bad the divisiveness in US politics is, but if you look a bit closer you'll see the EXACT same dumbsh*t happening in DE and CA, perhaps with less obviousness.
Take a closer look at what is happening in Germany's armed forces, Canada's use of emergency powers to remove...truckers.
The world has lost its collective mind, just as sure as if The Singularity or First Contact was happening tomorrow.
Meaning, the promise of the open 'net has been subverted and this is what we get. Facebook Pograms, the O.J. of NYC (Orange Joke) becoming PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, VV thinking he's the second coming of Ivan the Terrible.
This would all honestly make a lot more sense if Terry Crews was President.
[+] [-] rayiner|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] suction|3 years ago|reply
It may just be a matter of time but here the Q-Anons and other divisive, Anti-Democratic groups are still more fringe than over there
[+] [-] throw_nbvc1234|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redmen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oh_sigh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1121redblackgo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mymythisisthis|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|3 years ago|reply
That's exactly right. Except it seems, so far, like those who effectively control the networks by acting as intermediaries between its users, can suppress protest and protect themselves from being overthrown.
[+] [-] the_optimist|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blindmute|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petermcneeley|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DoItToMe81|3 years ago|reply
The solution to this suggested in this article is to give them more power over individual information by making giving your name and address to the company mandatory. No thank you. I don't think expanding one of the core parts of the problem while annihilating the capability for people in repressive countries to shield themselves is any solution at all.
[+] [-] wallacoloo|3 years ago|reply
this stuff is in easier reach than it's ever been. if you expect to consume the firehose and enjoy it, you're disillusioned: never has a single source appealed to every individual on the planet. you have to select your peers. curate your connections. if a friend repeatedly blasts you with bad political takes, cut or reduce the connection. the digital web isn't that different from the irl web in this aspect. it's your responsibility to craft connections that benefit your life. FB/Twitter/etc are tools to use in that (and far from the only ones), but you cannot abdicate your responsibility and expect good results.