I had an idea to try something new. Every week or two, I’ll tee up an article, podcast, video, or other piece of media (preferably NOT from Substack) for interested folks to discuss. If people don’t like the extra emails, let me know and I think I can activate separate settings.
Apr 27, 2022·edited Apr 27, 2022Liked by Marie Kennedy
I think he is correct when it comes to the specific institutions he is addressing - and these are very big institutions: media, education, elected government. And also correct when it comes to the fringe having taken a kind of hold of those very big institutions. His article is a scary one and a depressing one, especially as I don't see how any of his recommendations could realistically happen. And yet... I am mainly only scared or depressed when I contemplate those institutions and the many outrages associated with those institutions (running the gamut from minor like Evergreen college protests to major like the Jan. 6 capitol invasion). Otherwise, life goes on in a way that remains not so scary and depressing. Perhaps I am simply a glass-half-full old-fashioned progressive. Or as I am now more inclined to say, a radical moderate or a post-progressive. But I feel this sense of "it's not as all bad as all that" with good reason...
I live in San Francisco. I work at a nonprofit social services agency that considers social justice to be a key value. My colleagues are racially diverse, with a range of sexual orientations and gender identities, and they come from very diverse economic and cultural backgrounds. One would think my agency would be a hotbed of woke radicalism. But not so much. There are fringe voices at my agency and they do attempt very unseemly things. But they are not the majority and the majority often blows off their nonsense. The majority doesn't care about things like Twitter or what is happening at universities or what outrageous thing some member of congress says. When the fringe has tried to act up, they have been shut down by things like majority feelings of disdain and disinterest, and by that great healer, time. I remember not so long ago when a particularly ardent woke colleague talked about how the "boulder" of a movement that he & his allies were pushing would crush me and other moderate voices. Reality intervened; there was no crushing. Instead, extremists eventually left after getting nowhere.
My perspective is supported by my specific job. I run both peer support volunteer trainings and a community council. The vast majority of people in my trainings are young people who perhaps see themselves as woke, but in a training that is about creating empathetic connection in which people see each other as individuals with both commonalities & differences... toxic binary thought is given little light. And many are recent college grads who, again, live in the woke hothouse of SF. People offline are very different than their personas online, and my half-glass-full perspective has been supported by witnessing the strong embrace of my agency's values, values that center both individuality and empathy. Especially recently. There has been a similar lack of hysteria on the community council. Certainly there has been the occasional thing, like an insistence on announcing pronouns and land acknowledgments and the like. These insistences flame up and then they... blow away. Most council members are there to make sure a system that works continues to work, and they have little interest in continuing performative gestures beyond the space of a few meetings.
This is not to diminish the challenges that heterodox thinkers face in higher education, politics, and the media. Circular firing squads and canceling are both real. But these areas are not where most people live. And I can't help but stick to my hope that those institutions are in the grip of a localized fever that will burn itself out.
I know that my experience may be a minority one in the Bay Area. I've certainly seen plenty of examples of toxic and divisive behavior here, in government and in media and elsewhere. But when I also see just as many personal examples of non-toxic behavior, I'm able to stay hopeful. And when I can see political examples of San Franciscans - of all people! - rejecting the most divisive of political figures in our recent ousting of certain toxic school board members and our even more recent (and overwhelming) choice of a reasonable candidate for state assembly over a long-time and always toxic political figure... well, if San Franciscans can reject incendiary bullshit, then it becomes hard to become too sad or depressed by Haidt's very glass-half-empty article. I think the Exhausted (or perhaps, Irritated) Majority is very much alive, despite the fringe voices that have taken control of certain institutions.
I was heartened and rather surprised that Haidt is on the board of Braver Angels, a group that I belong to as well. He should know, as a member, that there are many, many, many people out there who don't subscribe to such divisive belief systems.
Thank you for one of the most hopeful and encourging reports I've seen for some while.
I live in the Bay Area as well, and alas I have seen the organization I work most with become less functional as they, with the best of intentions, embrace ideologies which are often antithetical to their original values. This is an organization I would have hoped to have the heart and skills to resist the trend. When there is a conflict between their original values and the values of the new ideologies, the latter tends to win (because it's more of a take-no-prisoners pushy ideology, where disagreement is framed as hatred, etc).
Besides random differences, I wonder if there are characteristics that can be correlated with how susceptible organizations are to takeover. In your case it sounds like your organization provides important services which can be directly perceived as improving people's lives in ways that neo-progressives can respect. What I'm getting at is that there is already a high-traction outlet for the positive altruistic impulses originally motivating many of the idealistic folks susceptible to the new ideology. In some cases, I think idealistic folks feel their only way to personally weigh in for social justice is to help force the organization to conform to the new ideology, redirecting some substantial part of its energies from the original mission to a new more social-justice framed mission. Maybe having an existing mission and practice which is respected even by the new ideology, gives less space for "tear down the old oppressive system and rebuild our new morally pure utopia" energies to develop? That your org is already diverse (by the criteria approved of in the new ideology) is another real help, I imagine, so there's no compelling need to rid the space of oppressor population groups to make room for a proportionate-or-better set of oppressed members.
Do you think there is anything like that going on? Other ideas about how your org can continue so well, even in SF?
I think you are correct in that my agency provides important services that improve people's lives, and even more, those people are from particularly vulnerable populations (i.e. seniors, people with cancer/HIV/other life-threatening illnesses, residents of government housing, etc.) and whose demographics are broad. It is hard to insist that an agency is ethically behind the times when workers know that they are supporting people who genuinely need support and it is hard to say that our model is outdated when it centers empathy, respect for difference, and empowerment.
There certainly have been outraged naysayers, but they are a distinct minority - and, interestingly enough, the outrage came mainly from leadership positions. Our direct service workers and volunteers are actually doing the work (and many did their work in-person during the pandemic, unlike leadership); the impression I get from many is that it is a luxury (and a bore) to agitate about ideology when the work they accomplish literally entails getting people connected to food, money, housing, emotional support. That work is hard, but it also feeds the soul, to put it in the most corny of terms. There was an interesting response to the HR-mandated training we had recently on supporting trans colleagues (and which almost entirely focused on use of pronouns)... leadership found the training enlightening, while the direct service folks I talked to often found it to be a foolish waste of time best suited to young, white college grads. Keep in mind that these direct service folks are often people of color, not college educated, and literally supporting trans clients in their work.
There may be other factors at play as well. Fortunately, our Development program and our ED our strong fundraisers, so we have consistently been able to give raises and bonuses to everyone, but in particular to our direct service staff. Money is always meaningful, especially here in the super expensive Bay Area. We also resist, as much as possible, hierarchical ways of interacting with each other, despite there being a hierarchical structure in place (as with all agencies). Because we center peer-based relationships with our clients, we try to center that with colleagues as well. Despite having @ 70 staff (and over 500 volunteers), we very much believe in the supportive 'family model' of agency culture. This means lots of personal check-ins, but it's worth it to make sure people are heard and understood.
All of this is not to say that we haven't had difficulties. Racial Reckoning USA really brought out the worst in our leadership team. What was frustrating to me was how out of step these leaders were with their own program staff. I'm in a unique position in that I train all staff members, and so I was able to hear from them and note the differences in perspectives between program heads and program staff. Dealing with what amounted to an angry cabal of leaders who wanted to force change, despite not getting buy-in from their own teams, was very trying. I think what made the struggle turn out well is that the two people who were seen as the opposition to this group (the Executive Director and me, the longest-serving staff member) made sure to stay the course while trying as best as we could to hear demands. People made demands and they got some but not all of their demands met (e.g. we hired various consultants to support DEI efforts and increase collaborative decision making, but we refused to eliminate certain programs that were perceived as not serving enough black & brown people). Because many of these agitators were coming from an all-or-nothing perspective, that meant that meeting them halfway was not sufficient... so they left. And we were then able to promote existing staff, so that actually worked out well.
I have to say, it also helped that both me and the executive director are people of color who once did direct service work ourselves at the agency, and so accusations of racism or being out of step with the workers didn't really land well. Also, if people want to yell at me, I can get loud too. It is very important to be patient with people but it is also important to not just roll over and capitulate to performative nonsense that helps no one. What helps people is actual work being done, actual money to pay people better, and actual respect for the experiences of the people who are doing the actual work.
Apr 27, 2022·edited Apr 27, 2022Liked by Marie Kennedy
I think that Haidt is generally right, though he mainly focuses on likes and retreats, and doesn't really go into the engagement algorithms that show us increasingly radical content to keep the reader angry. There are really three things wrong with something like twitter:
1 -- it encourages people to go for the cheap hit instead of saying anything perceptive. This is Haidt's primary point, and I think he's right on target. I've noticed this in myself in NYT comments: if I want likes, I have to go with short pithy comments that are more insulting than illuminating.
2 -- economically, it wants to encourage you to stay on the site, and like facebook and youtube, it does so by trying to get you angry. This all falls out of machine learning algorithms that are optimizing for ad revenue.
3 -- there's no sense of community, and indeed, it isn't clear how many people are even real people, compared with bots. From point 2, these companies are happy to show ads to bots, but bots are just another way to ramp up the level of aggression on a forum. This should be solvable -- the IRS manages to validate your identity pretty effectively, and it should be possible for any of these sites to validate your identity and display your nationality, even while preserving your anonymity by letting you choose an anonymizing screen name.
Haidt nails 1 and 3 pretty effectively, and has pretty good proposals to at least advance the ball.
Substack, with its frequent requirement that commenters be paying subscribers, can generate an echo chamber effect where the only people commenting on an article are those who like the author enough to pay them $50/year.
See Bari Weiss's substack for an example of how cheap shots in an echo chamber can result in something as trivial as twitter, though more long-winded. If you read her articles, you'd think the US is the second coming of 1930s Germany, when the worst anti-Semitic attack in US history was actually instigated by her beloved Fox News anchors ranting about HIAS.
I think he's mostly correct. He doesn't just blame social media, he pinpoints specific changes to features and algorithms that are driving this and that lines up with what I've scene. One thing I'll add is that I don't think all social media is equally bad. Twitter is uniquely toxic in a way that most other platforms aren't because it combines a global permanent audience with people's real identities (in many cases). It also happens to suck in a lot of media people and various key establishment figures that in turn means, even if you don't want to spend time on Twitter, you are deeply affected by Twitter if you consume media.
I was reminded to return to this by this morning’s interview of Haidt in Persuasion. The more I think about it, the more I feel like this deserves it’s own post, but in short, I feel like he’s overstated the impact of social media specifically and understated the impact of the internet more broadly and the ubiquity of smartphones in the 2010s, specifically. Smartphones took “the internet” from a distinct “place” you would visit in windows of time to something interwoven with our everyday life. It’s why people have to be reminded that “Twitter is not real life.”
I’m not as pessimistic as Haidt- America withstood an actual civil war so I wouldn’t write us off yet— but I do think this is a human civilization-level shift in the way we network with each other. He references the printing press, which I think is a fair comparison, but after a few bloody centuries humanity came out on the other side MUCH better. We are using our old morals and methods of cultural persuasion in an entirely different, dramatically more responsive system. I don’t think the fix will be technological; I think our morals and cultural norms will need to mutate to compensate.
I don’t think Substack has a huge impact one way or the other. I think it’s better than Twitter for the ability to reward nuance, but also arguably “worse” in that it creates far higher network bonds between likeminded people who are motivated to degrade outsiders. So, jury’s out, but it’s not going to be smartphone-level disruption to civilization.
"Flashback" is a good word. There is something nostalgic to watching it now, and trying to put my finger on it, I would say that he's very good at coming up with ideas that are (a) fun and (b) more fun if you approach them with an attitude of emotional openness.
It does feel like the internet has moved away from that. There's lots of amazing content -- the video series you posted about special relativity looks great -- but it feels like there's a prevailing attitude of, "only a sucker would spend time browsing the internet and wanting to connect emotionally."
Oh, man, speaking of nostalgic, remember this? http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/ (His line about taking a google maps tour of the place you grew up reminded me of it)
Just realized that I didn't answer either of your questions to ponder!
(1) Over-simplified it because basing his ideas on what is happening in media, government, education (mainly higher education). I don't disagree with his assertions. But my personal experience leads me to believe that he has a certain tunnel-vision...
(2) I don't think Substack makes any relevant impact at all, because I think most people are not prone to fringe divisiveness and so don't need a contrarian safe space like Substack. I mean, the literal percentages of people that Haidt notes in his article are large in terms of numbers but small in terms of percentage to the population overall. That said, I surely do love the contrarian safe space that Substack has created LOL. This is a good place to find commonalities.
My first thought -- it's a good essay, I enjoyed it, and I agree with many of the things he says but . . . I'm not sure that reading it makes me feel any better informed or helps me think through the issues with any additional clarity.
I worry that the essay is written to primarily be read by people who already think there's a problem -- who already feel like the experience of being politically and socially engaged in 2022 is annoying and unpleasant -- who will nod along and go, "yes, that describes my experience."
Perhaps I'm asking too much. Trying to explain everything that's wrong with the last 10 years of American life is impossible. Heck, it's probably impossible to come up with a capsule description of how social media has shaped people's experience without resorting to cliche.
If I was trying to come up with a description of what was wrong I wouldn't start with epistemic bubbles, or a fractured public. I think I'd want to try to figure out if we're seeing an increase in people thinking, "all the problems are somebody else's fault" and, if so, what would be driving that.
To my mind that essay indulges a bit in, "all the problems are somebody else's fault" (For example, this doesn't seem like it would prompt introspection -- "In other words, political extremists don’t just shoot darts at their enemies; they spend a lot of their ammunition targeting dissenters or nuanced thinkers on their own team. In this way, social media makes a political system based on compromise grind to a halt.")
That said, I like the metaphor of giving everyone dart guns. That is not a description that I've seen before and feels well crafted.
Well, Haidt had some pretty good proposals. It doesn't explain everything, of course, because a lot of the economic insecurity that I think is hurting small town life comes from smallish US factories now competing with China, and that has little to do with Haidt's issues with social networks.
One side effect of the war in Ukraine is that western nations are looking more carefully at the risks of dealing with authoritarian nations. Ironically, Xi's ascension in China probably hurts China's position here, since you might have hoped that the Politburo would be careful not to do anything too stupid that would damage China's economic integration with the world. But Xi, if he goes rogue the way Putin did, could make much crazier tradeoffs.
That's a good point. Let's look at his proposals (numbering for my own use):
1) "Reforms should reduce the outsize influence of angry extremists and make legislators more responsive to the average voter in their district. One example of such a reform is to end closed party primaries . . . "
2) "[R]educe the power of either political party to game the system in its favor, for example by drawing its preferred electoral districts or selecting the officials who will supervise elections. These jobs should all be done in a nonpartisan way."
3) Reforms to slow the speed of social media (for example changing the "share" button).
4) "Perhaps the biggest single change that would reduce the toxicity of existing platforms would be user verification as a precondition for gaining the algorithmic amplification that social media offers. . . . [B]efore 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. "
5) "One of the first orders of business should be compelling the [social media] platforms to share their data and their algorithms with academic researchers."
6) "The most important change we can make to reduce the damaging effects of social media on children is to delay entry until they have passed through puberty. 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."
7) "More generally, to prepare the members of the next generation for post-Babel democracy, perhaps the most important thing we can do is let them out to play. Stop starving children of the experiences they most need to become good citizens: free play in mixed-age groups of children with minimal adult supervision."
All of those seem like good ideas, none of them seem likely to solve the problems but, as I say, I think the issues that he's wrestling with a large and complex and I wouldn't expect any one set of changes to resolve them.
The thing that strikes me as interesting about them, is that I've seen the summary that, "the left feels like it's constantly losing politically and the right feels like it's constantly losing culturally." I think of Haidt as being (probably) a centrist Democrat politically but being sympathetic to the right's feeling of cultural loss. I think those suggestions as a whole would address some of the Democrats political concerns (gerrymandering, non-partisan elections) and do little to address the right's culture wars concerns (I think it would be a good thing if changes to the algorithmic feeds reduced twitter mobs, but I'm not sure that, overall, it would do much to reduce complaints about "cancel culture") and, to some extent, weakening social media would strengthen traditional media which I don't mind, but the right is often critical of.
That's not an argument against them -- _I_ think they're good ideas -- but is interesting.
Yeah, I don't see what you can do about "the right feels like it's constantly losing culturally" without engaging seriously and civilly with people on the right. Twitter isn't designed to do that -- if I try to civilly probe someone about what I think of as their racist tweets, I'm virtually certain to be called a racist myself.
I can see a lot of places where progressives are overstepping, at least to my mind. Some of these are trivial, but make us look like idiots, while others are more substantive:
1 -- Trans rights. I think that any adult trans person should have the same protections as any other protected class. But, I'm concerned that we're teaching younger children that they can choose to be boys or girls, and it all will happen by magic. IRL, according to the detransition page on wikipedia, and other sources, if a child starts on puberty blockers, they're very likely to progress to full medical transition (90ish percent transition), while dysphoric children that go through puberty typically revert to a cis identity (75-80 percent revert). Considering the lifelong medical issues involved in actual medical transition, I'd think you'd want to avoid sending children down the medical transition path when they just might be children unhappy with their typical gender roles.
Relatedly, and trivially, celebrating Lia Thomas's victory, when it is pretty clear that she won because she went through male puberty, makes us look like idiots.
2 -- CRT. Never have three letters been so misrepresented. I think that most people on the right don't have any problem teaching US history including its full ugliness, of which there is much. But pretending that there has been no progress since 1960 in fighting racism is just bizarre. Yet companies like my employer, a multi-trillion dollar tech company headed by an immigrant from India, constantly offer up courses that teach us that the US is, today, a white supremacist country, and white people can't help but oppress people of color, as if we were living in Mississippi in 1958. A lot of people get exposed to these courses, so when they read that "CRT is just an obscure legal theory taught only in law schools," we progressives lose credibility. In our company it is particularly silly, since the company is full of people of color who came here voluntarily from all over the world.
3 -- Schools. Somewhat similar to CRT, white progressives have been pushing the notion that to achieve racial equity, admission to selective public schools needs to change to a lottery system (NYC), and advanced math courses need to be abolished (CA). In a country where all parents believe their kids are above average, this is a good way to throw away another 10% of the electorate. See VA's most recent electoral results for example.
Of course, wealthy students will get around these restrictions, if nothing else, by tutoring.
4 -- Overall fragility. Whether we're talking about Donald McNeil being fired for using the N-word in a discussion, Andrew Sullivan being told that he can't come to the office because he makes his coworkers feel "unsafe," or students generally trying to block controversial speakers from college campuses, we seem to be exaggerating weakness and fragility. It makes us look, well, weak, and that's not the way to win elections.
There is, of course, no way to engage in a discussion of these issues without risking one's job, even if the discussion occurs entirely away from the office.
As a tangent I remembered that the proposal I like best to try to change the social media landscape is Paul Romer's digital ad-tax: https://adtax.paulromer.net/
The idea being that pushing at least part of the business model towards subscription services rather than ads would change the incentives for how sites treated users. If you believe that diagnosis then substack is part of the solution.
I'm not certain it would work -- there are plenty of examples of exploitative subscription based business models -- but I think it's an idea worth taking seriously.
As far as your examples of progressive overreach I would say (1) all of those examples are hard to resolve at a broad level of generality. They very quickly get into specific empirical questions that I don't feel up to speed on. In general, I don't look at those and think there's an easy 100% correct answer. I also think that passing laws to try to put new restrictions on any of those seems like a terrible idea. I'm all in favor of people making arguments about, "here's the evidence I'm looking at, and here's the direction it pushes me in" as long as we can agree that there's some counter-evidence as well and that it's not a cut-and-dried question.
Of the items you listed the one that I have the strongest opinion about is the debate about gender-affirming care, and that's because the laws in, say, Idaho or Texas seem so obviously bad to me.
I don't have a firm opinion on what standard should be used to approve either puberty blockers or surgery, but I feel strongly that there shouldn't be a legal barrier in situations where there is approval from a doctor.
One obvious point of comparison would be the restrictions on abortion (such as waiting period or required ultrasound) which advocates claimed would reduce the chance of people making rash decisions and opponents claimed would limit access.
I acknowledge that there is a bit of experimentation going on. We have limited information about what is the best standard of care and assessment process for transgender patients, but I would still much rather see caregivers trying to answer those questions than legislatures.
Sorry, that ended up being a longer tangent than I intended.
I agree that using the legal system is simply the wrong way to address any of these issues. Laws are generally blunt instruments, and in these areas, the difference between reasonable and unreasonable behavior is way too subtle for the legal system to arbitrate. Indeed the involved individuals should be in charge of deciding on gender affirming care and/or abortions, and teachers should be setting their course content.
There are plenty of non-legal mechanisms to address the situation where a teacher is teaching something outlandish to their students: parents can complain to the teacher, to the principal and the board of education.
I don't think that the Republican politicians who are passing these laws are operating in good faith for the benefit of their constituents. But progressives do ourselves no favor if we pretend there's nothing to even discuss here.
I identify as liberal, I have opinions about the various issues you've mentioned, and sometimes I read other people's opinions that piss me off (not talking about you here), but I also don't have any reason to fear or object to them being topics of discussion.
I read that one a week or two ago, so: Facebook sucks (as does Fox) because it is run by an evil human, who politically aligns with authoritarians so he assists other authoritarians, which creates an authoritarian vortex.
The issue of social media in general is that people can use the social equivalent of DDoSing to go after people; a lot of crusades are being conducted by people who are using followers as a form of zombie computer to create said DDoS. This is bad, generally, but it's a just a tactic or method that can be used by anybody.
The right-wing being 'stupid' is a separate phenomenon; but crazy right-wingers saying crazy stuff extends back over the lifespan of the US. Now you can see it, and they have got organized. The phenomena of hard left types organizing is an ideological commitment on their part, and the 'cancellations' people like Haidt freak out about are simply left-wing types adopting old school right-wing tactics. (Assassinating MLK was surely a case of cancellation, yes? As were lynchings.)
Haidt seems to be mourning the death of a certain kind of symposium-style intellectual environment that is or used to be an elite 'safe space', and that acted as a silo for various strands of elite thinking. Problem with that is that your elite types gradually seceded from the rest of the country a while back for various reasons, mostly amounting not wanting to deal with damn dirty hoi polloi. (Why talk Jane Q. Lowereducationalattainment when you can jet off to Davos instead? Note that Jane Q. might also be named Gabriella or Esperanza or LaToya.) In a time in which a esteemed Professor can and does expose his or her attack surface on social media, the situation can develop that Esperanza or LaToya can then punch through the esteemed professor's armor. This makes that kind of person unhappy, for perfectly obvious reasons. The distinction is that Gabriella Q. Lowereducationalattainment has been dealing with that situation in their lives or on the internet for years and decades, so they expect that situation, whereas the esteemed professor might find it a bit of a surprise which we need to Do Something About. (Think of it as the 9/11 attack: the US had been engaged in combat, complete with bombs and collateral damage, throughout the 90's, not to mention the sort of terrorism that had been prevalent in the Near East for a couple of decades, but no one expected the same people to attack Manhattan because....reasons. Needless to say, it's quite one thing if a soldier dies due to a terrorist attack in a far-off country, but quite another thing if Important People are confronted with the spectre of burning high rises. Nota Bene: Important People are mostly shrugging off ~500 times as many deaths from Covid - the scale of the problem is too large to grasp for many, even amoung very important people.)
The same applies to billionaires, athletes, media personalities and so on. The obverse is the the kind of effects normal schlubs have grown used to in daily life have massively multiplied as, say, guys who like exposing themselves have found new ways to flash all kinds of random women.
The overall effect is degrading and also degrades the discourse and here we are.
elm
i think he has the right idea, and i am not sure he has the right causes
I want to participate in the conversation, but I also don't want to read the article. I right clicked it open. I will be back if I can bring myself to read it.
I think he is correct when it comes to the specific institutions he is addressing - and these are very big institutions: media, education, elected government. And also correct when it comes to the fringe having taken a kind of hold of those very big institutions. His article is a scary one and a depressing one, especially as I don't see how any of his recommendations could realistically happen. And yet... I am mainly only scared or depressed when I contemplate those institutions and the many outrages associated with those institutions (running the gamut from minor like Evergreen college protests to major like the Jan. 6 capitol invasion). Otherwise, life goes on in a way that remains not so scary and depressing. Perhaps I am simply a glass-half-full old-fashioned progressive. Or as I am now more inclined to say, a radical moderate or a post-progressive. But I feel this sense of "it's not as all bad as all that" with good reason...
I live in San Francisco. I work at a nonprofit social services agency that considers social justice to be a key value. My colleagues are racially diverse, with a range of sexual orientations and gender identities, and they come from very diverse economic and cultural backgrounds. One would think my agency would be a hotbed of woke radicalism. But not so much. There are fringe voices at my agency and they do attempt very unseemly things. But they are not the majority and the majority often blows off their nonsense. The majority doesn't care about things like Twitter or what is happening at universities or what outrageous thing some member of congress says. When the fringe has tried to act up, they have been shut down by things like majority feelings of disdain and disinterest, and by that great healer, time. I remember not so long ago when a particularly ardent woke colleague talked about how the "boulder" of a movement that he & his allies were pushing would crush me and other moderate voices. Reality intervened; there was no crushing. Instead, extremists eventually left after getting nowhere.
My perspective is supported by my specific job. I run both peer support volunteer trainings and a community council. The vast majority of people in my trainings are young people who perhaps see themselves as woke, but in a training that is about creating empathetic connection in which people see each other as individuals with both commonalities & differences... toxic binary thought is given little light. And many are recent college grads who, again, live in the woke hothouse of SF. People offline are very different than their personas online, and my half-glass-full perspective has been supported by witnessing the strong embrace of my agency's values, values that center both individuality and empathy. Especially recently. There has been a similar lack of hysteria on the community council. Certainly there has been the occasional thing, like an insistence on announcing pronouns and land acknowledgments and the like. These insistences flame up and then they... blow away. Most council members are there to make sure a system that works continues to work, and they have little interest in continuing performative gestures beyond the space of a few meetings.
This is not to diminish the challenges that heterodox thinkers face in higher education, politics, and the media. Circular firing squads and canceling are both real. But these areas are not where most people live. And I can't help but stick to my hope that those institutions are in the grip of a localized fever that will burn itself out.
I know that my experience may be a minority one in the Bay Area. I've certainly seen plenty of examples of toxic and divisive behavior here, in government and in media and elsewhere. But when I also see just as many personal examples of non-toxic behavior, I'm able to stay hopeful. And when I can see political examples of San Franciscans - of all people! - rejecting the most divisive of political figures in our recent ousting of certain toxic school board members and our even more recent (and overwhelming) choice of a reasonable candidate for state assembly over a long-time and always toxic political figure... well, if San Franciscans can reject incendiary bullshit, then it becomes hard to become too sad or depressed by Haidt's very glass-half-empty article. I think the Exhausted (or perhaps, Irritated) Majority is very much alive, despite the fringe voices that have taken control of certain institutions.
I was heartened and rather surprised that Haidt is on the board of Braver Angels, a group that I belong to as well. He should know, as a member, that there are many, many, many people out there who don't subscribe to such divisive belief systems.
Thank you for one of the most hopeful and encourging reports I've seen for some while.
I live in the Bay Area as well, and alas I have seen the organization I work most with become less functional as they, with the best of intentions, embrace ideologies which are often antithetical to their original values. This is an organization I would have hoped to have the heart and skills to resist the trend. When there is a conflict between their original values and the values of the new ideologies, the latter tends to win (because it's more of a take-no-prisoners pushy ideology, where disagreement is framed as hatred, etc).
Besides random differences, I wonder if there are characteristics that can be correlated with how susceptible organizations are to takeover. In your case it sounds like your organization provides important services which can be directly perceived as improving people's lives in ways that neo-progressives can respect. What I'm getting at is that there is already a high-traction outlet for the positive altruistic impulses originally motivating many of the idealistic folks susceptible to the new ideology. In some cases, I think idealistic folks feel their only way to personally weigh in for social justice is to help force the organization to conform to the new ideology, redirecting some substantial part of its energies from the original mission to a new more social-justice framed mission. Maybe having an existing mission and practice which is respected even by the new ideology, gives less space for "tear down the old oppressive system and rebuild our new morally pure utopia" energies to develop? That your org is already diverse (by the criteria approved of in the new ideology) is another real help, I imagine, so there's no compelling need to rid the space of oppressor population groups to make room for a proportionate-or-better set of oppressed members.
Do you think there is anything like that going on? Other ideas about how your org can continue so well, even in SF?
I think you are correct in that my agency provides important services that improve people's lives, and even more, those people are from particularly vulnerable populations (i.e. seniors, people with cancer/HIV/other life-threatening illnesses, residents of government housing, etc.) and whose demographics are broad. It is hard to insist that an agency is ethically behind the times when workers know that they are supporting people who genuinely need support and it is hard to say that our model is outdated when it centers empathy, respect for difference, and empowerment.
There certainly have been outraged naysayers, but they are a distinct minority - and, interestingly enough, the outrage came mainly from leadership positions. Our direct service workers and volunteers are actually doing the work (and many did their work in-person during the pandemic, unlike leadership); the impression I get from many is that it is a luxury (and a bore) to agitate about ideology when the work they accomplish literally entails getting people connected to food, money, housing, emotional support. That work is hard, but it also feeds the soul, to put it in the most corny of terms. There was an interesting response to the HR-mandated training we had recently on supporting trans colleagues (and which almost entirely focused on use of pronouns)... leadership found the training enlightening, while the direct service folks I talked to often found it to be a foolish waste of time best suited to young, white college grads. Keep in mind that these direct service folks are often people of color, not college educated, and literally supporting trans clients in their work.
There may be other factors at play as well. Fortunately, our Development program and our ED our strong fundraisers, so we have consistently been able to give raises and bonuses to everyone, but in particular to our direct service staff. Money is always meaningful, especially here in the super expensive Bay Area. We also resist, as much as possible, hierarchical ways of interacting with each other, despite there being a hierarchical structure in place (as with all agencies). Because we center peer-based relationships with our clients, we try to center that with colleagues as well. Despite having @ 70 staff (and over 500 volunteers), we very much believe in the supportive 'family model' of agency culture. This means lots of personal check-ins, but it's worth it to make sure people are heard and understood.
All of this is not to say that we haven't had difficulties. Racial Reckoning USA really brought out the worst in our leadership team. What was frustrating to me was how out of step these leaders were with their own program staff. I'm in a unique position in that I train all staff members, and so I was able to hear from them and note the differences in perspectives between program heads and program staff. Dealing with what amounted to an angry cabal of leaders who wanted to force change, despite not getting buy-in from their own teams, was very trying. I think what made the struggle turn out well is that the two people who were seen as the opposition to this group (the Executive Director and me, the longest-serving staff member) made sure to stay the course while trying as best as we could to hear demands. People made demands and they got some but not all of their demands met (e.g. we hired various consultants to support DEI efforts and increase collaborative decision making, but we refused to eliminate certain programs that were perceived as not serving enough black & brown people). Because many of these agitators were coming from an all-or-nothing perspective, that meant that meeting them halfway was not sufficient... so they left. And we were then able to promote existing staff, so that actually worked out well.
I have to say, it also helped that both me and the executive director are people of color who once did direct service work ourselves at the agency, and so accusations of racism or being out of step with the workers didn't really land well. Also, if people want to yell at me, I can get loud too. It is very important to be patient with people but it is also important to not just roll over and capitulate to performative nonsense that helps no one. What helps people is actual work being done, actual money to pay people better, and actual respect for the experiences of the people who are doing the actual work.
I think that Haidt is generally right, though he mainly focuses on likes and retreats, and doesn't really go into the engagement algorithms that show us increasingly radical content to keep the reader angry. There are really three things wrong with something like twitter:
1 -- it encourages people to go for the cheap hit instead of saying anything perceptive. This is Haidt's primary point, and I think he's right on target. I've noticed this in myself in NYT comments: if I want likes, I have to go with short pithy comments that are more insulting than illuminating.
2 -- economically, it wants to encourage you to stay on the site, and like facebook and youtube, it does so by trying to get you angry. This all falls out of machine learning algorithms that are optimizing for ad revenue.
3 -- there's no sense of community, and indeed, it isn't clear how many people are even real people, compared with bots. From point 2, these companies are happy to show ads to bots, but bots are just another way to ramp up the level of aggression on a forum. This should be solvable -- the IRS manages to validate your identity pretty effectively, and it should be possible for any of these sites to validate your identity and display your nationality, even while preserving your anonymity by letting you choose an anonymizing screen name.
Haidt nails 1 and 3 pretty effectively, and has pretty good proposals to at least advance the ball.
Substack, with its frequent requirement that commenters be paying subscribers, can generate an echo chamber effect where the only people commenting on an article are those who like the author enough to pay them $50/year.
See Bari Weiss's substack for an example of how cheap shots in an echo chamber can result in something as trivial as twitter, though more long-winded. If you read her articles, you'd think the US is the second coming of 1930s Germany, when the worst anti-Semitic attack in US history was actually instigated by her beloved Fox News anchors ranting about HIAS.
I think he's mostly correct. He doesn't just blame social media, he pinpoints specific changes to features and algorithms that are driving this and that lines up with what I've scene. One thing I'll add is that I don't think all social media is equally bad. Twitter is uniquely toxic in a way that most other platforms aren't because it combines a global permanent audience with people's real identities (in many cases). It also happens to suck in a lot of media people and various key establishment figures that in turn means, even if you don't want to spend time on Twitter, you are deeply affected by Twitter if you consume media.
I was reminded to return to this by this morning’s interview of Haidt in Persuasion. The more I think about it, the more I feel like this deserves it’s own post, but in short, I feel like he’s overstated the impact of social media specifically and understated the impact of the internet more broadly and the ubiquity of smartphones in the 2010s, specifically. Smartphones took “the internet” from a distinct “place” you would visit in windows of time to something interwoven with our everyday life. It’s why people have to be reminded that “Twitter is not real life.”
I’m not as pessimistic as Haidt- America withstood an actual civil war so I wouldn’t write us off yet— but I do think this is a human civilization-level shift in the way we network with each other. He references the printing press, which I think is a fair comparison, but after a few bloody centuries humanity came out on the other side MUCH better. We are using our old morals and methods of cultural persuasion in an entirely different, dramatically more responsive system. I don’t think the fix will be technological; I think our morals and cultural norms will need to mutate to compensate.
I don’t think Substack has a huge impact one way or the other. I think it’s better than Twitter for the ability to reward nuance, but also arguably “worse” in that it creates far higher network bonds between likeminded people who are motivated to degrade outsiders. So, jury’s out, but it’s not going to be smartphone-level disruption to civilization.
A (slight) antidote to feeling depressed about the internet: https://www.ted.com/talks/ze_frank_my_web_playroom
(your comment about smartphones reminded me of his comments about "life is being lived there . . . somewhere up in that weird dense network")
That was a sweet flashback to what feels like a much more innocent era!
"Flashback" is a good word. There is something nostalgic to watching it now, and trying to put my finger on it, I would say that he's very good at coming up with ideas that are (a) fun and (b) more fun if you approach them with an attitude of emotional openness.
It does feel like the internet has moved away from that. There's lots of amazing content -- the video series you posted about special relativity looks great -- but it feels like there's a prevailing attitude of, "only a sucker would spend time browsing the internet and wanting to connect emotionally."
Oh, man, speaking of nostalgic, remember this? http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/ (His line about taking a google maps tour of the place you grew up reminded me of it)
I hadn't seen that before, and it's very cool -- in a nostalgic Wired Magazine kind of way.
Just realized that I didn't answer either of your questions to ponder!
(1) Over-simplified it because basing his ideas on what is happening in media, government, education (mainly higher education). I don't disagree with his assertions. But my personal experience leads me to believe that he has a certain tunnel-vision...
(2) I don't think Substack makes any relevant impact at all, because I think most people are not prone to fringe divisiveness and so don't need a contrarian safe space like Substack. I mean, the literal percentages of people that Haidt notes in his article are large in terms of numbers but small in terms of percentage to the population overall. That said, I surely do love the contrarian safe space that Substack has created LOL. This is a good place to find commonalities.
My first thought -- it's a good essay, I enjoyed it, and I agree with many of the things he says but . . . I'm not sure that reading it makes me feel any better informed or helps me think through the issues with any additional clarity.
I worry that the essay is written to primarily be read by people who already think there's a problem -- who already feel like the experience of being politically and socially engaged in 2022 is annoying and unpleasant -- who will nod along and go, "yes, that describes my experience."
Perhaps I'm asking too much. Trying to explain everything that's wrong with the last 10 years of American life is impossible. Heck, it's probably impossible to come up with a capsule description of how social media has shaped people's experience without resorting to cliche.
If I was trying to come up with a description of what was wrong I wouldn't start with epistemic bubbles, or a fractured public. I think I'd want to try to figure out if we're seeing an increase in people thinking, "all the problems are somebody else's fault" and, if so, what would be driving that.
To my mind that essay indulges a bit in, "all the problems are somebody else's fault" (For example, this doesn't seem like it would prompt introspection -- "In other words, political extremists don’t just shoot darts at their enemies; they spend a lot of their ammunition targeting dissenters or nuanced thinkers on their own team. In this way, social media makes a political system based on compromise grind to a halt.")
That said, I like the metaphor of giving everyone dart guns. That is not a description that I've seen before and feels well crafted.
He does have a way with visual metaphors!
Well, Haidt had some pretty good proposals. It doesn't explain everything, of course, because a lot of the economic insecurity that I think is hurting small town life comes from smallish US factories now competing with China, and that has little to do with Haidt's issues with social networks.
One side effect of the war in Ukraine is that western nations are looking more carefully at the risks of dealing with authoritarian nations. Ironically, Xi's ascension in China probably hurts China's position here, since you might have hoped that the Politburo would be careful not to do anything too stupid that would damage China's economic integration with the world. But Xi, if he goes rogue the way Putin did, could make much crazier tradeoffs.
That's a good point. Let's look at his proposals (numbering for my own use):
1) "Reforms should reduce the outsize influence of angry extremists and make legislators more responsive to the average voter in their district. One example of such a reform is to end closed party primaries . . . "
2) "[R]educe the power of either political party to game the system in its favor, for example by drawing its preferred electoral districts or selecting the officials who will supervise elections. These jobs should all be done in a nonpartisan way."
3) Reforms to slow the speed of social media (for example changing the "share" button).
4) "Perhaps the biggest single change that would reduce the toxicity of existing platforms would be user verification as a precondition for gaining the algorithmic amplification that social media offers. . . . [B]efore 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. "
5) "One of the first orders of business should be compelling the [social media] platforms to share their data and their algorithms with academic researchers."
6) "The most important change we can make to reduce the damaging effects of social media on children is to delay entry until they have passed through puberty. 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."
7) "More generally, to prepare the members of the next generation for post-Babel democracy, perhaps the most important thing we can do is let them out to play. Stop starving children of the experiences they most need to become good citizens: free play in mixed-age groups of children with minimal adult supervision."
All of those seem like good ideas, none of them seem likely to solve the problems but, as I say, I think the issues that he's wrestling with a large and complex and I wouldn't expect any one set of changes to resolve them.
The thing that strikes me as interesting about them, is that I've seen the summary that, "the left feels like it's constantly losing politically and the right feels like it's constantly losing culturally." I think of Haidt as being (probably) a centrist Democrat politically but being sympathetic to the right's feeling of cultural loss. I think those suggestions as a whole would address some of the Democrats political concerns (gerrymandering, non-partisan elections) and do little to address the right's culture wars concerns (I think it would be a good thing if changes to the algorithmic feeds reduced twitter mobs, but I'm not sure that, overall, it would do much to reduce complaints about "cancel culture") and, to some extent, weakening social media would strengthen traditional media which I don't mind, but the right is often critical of.
That's not an argument against them -- _I_ think they're good ideas -- but is interesting.
Yeah, I don't see what you can do about "the right feels like it's constantly losing culturally" without engaging seriously and civilly with people on the right. Twitter isn't designed to do that -- if I try to civilly probe someone about what I think of as their racist tweets, I'm virtually certain to be called a racist myself.
I can see a lot of places where progressives are overstepping, at least to my mind. Some of these are trivial, but make us look like idiots, while others are more substantive:
1 -- Trans rights. I think that any adult trans person should have the same protections as any other protected class. But, I'm concerned that we're teaching younger children that they can choose to be boys or girls, and it all will happen by magic. IRL, according to the detransition page on wikipedia, and other sources, if a child starts on puberty blockers, they're very likely to progress to full medical transition (90ish percent transition), while dysphoric children that go through puberty typically revert to a cis identity (75-80 percent revert). Considering the lifelong medical issues involved in actual medical transition, I'd think you'd want to avoid sending children down the medical transition path when they just might be children unhappy with their typical gender roles.
Relatedly, and trivially, celebrating Lia Thomas's victory, when it is pretty clear that she won because she went through male puberty, makes us look like idiots.
2 -- CRT. Never have three letters been so misrepresented. I think that most people on the right don't have any problem teaching US history including its full ugliness, of which there is much. But pretending that there has been no progress since 1960 in fighting racism is just bizarre. Yet companies like my employer, a multi-trillion dollar tech company headed by an immigrant from India, constantly offer up courses that teach us that the US is, today, a white supremacist country, and white people can't help but oppress people of color, as if we were living in Mississippi in 1958. A lot of people get exposed to these courses, so when they read that "CRT is just an obscure legal theory taught only in law schools," we progressives lose credibility. In our company it is particularly silly, since the company is full of people of color who came here voluntarily from all over the world.
3 -- Schools. Somewhat similar to CRT, white progressives have been pushing the notion that to achieve racial equity, admission to selective public schools needs to change to a lottery system (NYC), and advanced math courses need to be abolished (CA). In a country where all parents believe their kids are above average, this is a good way to throw away another 10% of the electorate. See VA's most recent electoral results for example.
Of course, wealthy students will get around these restrictions, if nothing else, by tutoring.
4 -- Overall fragility. Whether we're talking about Donald McNeil being fired for using the N-word in a discussion, Andrew Sullivan being told that he can't come to the office because he makes his coworkers feel "unsafe," or students generally trying to block controversial speakers from college campuses, we seem to be exaggerating weakness and fragility. It makes us look, well, weak, and that's not the way to win elections.
There is, of course, no way to engage in a discussion of these issues without risking one's job, even if the discussion occurs entirely away from the office.
As a tangent I remembered that the proposal I like best to try to change the social media landscape is Paul Romer's digital ad-tax: https://adtax.paulromer.net/
The idea being that pushing at least part of the business model towards subscription services rather than ads would change the incentives for how sites treated users. If you believe that diagnosis then substack is part of the solution.
I'm not certain it would work -- there are plenty of examples of exploitative subscription based business models -- but I think it's an idea worth taking seriously.
As far as your examples of progressive overreach I would say (1) all of those examples are hard to resolve at a broad level of generality. They very quickly get into specific empirical questions that I don't feel up to speed on. In general, I don't look at those and think there's an easy 100% correct answer. I also think that passing laws to try to put new restrictions on any of those seems like a terrible idea. I'm all in favor of people making arguments about, "here's the evidence I'm looking at, and here's the direction it pushes me in" as long as we can agree that there's some counter-evidence as well and that it's not a cut-and-dried question.
Of the items you listed the one that I have the strongest opinion about is the debate about gender-affirming care, and that's because the laws in, say, Idaho or Texas seem so obviously bad to me.
I don't have a firm opinion on what standard should be used to approve either puberty blockers or surgery, but I feel strongly that there shouldn't be a legal barrier in situations where there is approval from a doctor.
One obvious point of comparison would be the restrictions on abortion (such as waiting period or required ultrasound) which advocates claimed would reduce the chance of people making rash decisions and opponents claimed would limit access.
I don't claim to be an expert, but I haven't seen any studies that show that those have _improved_ the psychological outcomes, but there is evidence that shows that restricting access is costly: https://www.ansirh.org/sites/default/files/publications/files/the_harms_of_denying_a_woman_a_wanted_abortion_4-16-2020.pdf
I acknowledge that there is a bit of experimentation going on. We have limited information about what is the best standard of care and assessment process for transgender patients, but I would still much rather see caregivers trying to answer those questions than legislatures.
Sorry, that ended up being a longer tangent than I intended.
I agree that using the legal system is simply the wrong way to address any of these issues. Laws are generally blunt instruments, and in these areas, the difference between reasonable and unreasonable behavior is way too subtle for the legal system to arbitrate. Indeed the involved individuals should be in charge of deciding on gender affirming care and/or abortions, and teachers should be setting their course content.
There are plenty of non-legal mechanisms to address the situation where a teacher is teaching something outlandish to their students: parents can complain to the teacher, to the principal and the board of education.
I don't think that the Republican politicians who are passing these laws are operating in good faith for the benefit of their constituents. But progressives do ourselves no favor if we pretend there's nothing to even discuss here.
I agree completely.
I identify as liberal, I have opinions about the various issues you've mentioned, and sometimes I read other people's opinions that piss me off (not talking about you here), but I also don't have any reason to fear or object to them being topics of discussion.
I read that one a week or two ago, so: Facebook sucks (as does Fox) because it is run by an evil human, who politically aligns with authoritarians so he assists other authoritarians, which creates an authoritarian vortex.
The issue of social media in general is that people can use the social equivalent of DDoSing to go after people; a lot of crusades are being conducted by people who are using followers as a form of zombie computer to create said DDoS. This is bad, generally, but it's a just a tactic or method that can be used by anybody.
The right-wing being 'stupid' is a separate phenomenon; but crazy right-wingers saying crazy stuff extends back over the lifespan of the US. Now you can see it, and they have got organized. The phenomena of hard left types organizing is an ideological commitment on their part, and the 'cancellations' people like Haidt freak out about are simply left-wing types adopting old school right-wing tactics. (Assassinating MLK was surely a case of cancellation, yes? As were lynchings.)
Haidt seems to be mourning the death of a certain kind of symposium-style intellectual environment that is or used to be an elite 'safe space', and that acted as a silo for various strands of elite thinking. Problem with that is that your elite types gradually seceded from the rest of the country a while back for various reasons, mostly amounting not wanting to deal with damn dirty hoi polloi. (Why talk Jane Q. Lowereducationalattainment when you can jet off to Davos instead? Note that Jane Q. might also be named Gabriella or Esperanza or LaToya.) In a time in which a esteemed Professor can and does expose his or her attack surface on social media, the situation can develop that Esperanza or LaToya can then punch through the esteemed professor's armor. This makes that kind of person unhappy, for perfectly obvious reasons. The distinction is that Gabriella Q. Lowereducationalattainment has been dealing with that situation in their lives or on the internet for years and decades, so they expect that situation, whereas the esteemed professor might find it a bit of a surprise which we need to Do Something About. (Think of it as the 9/11 attack: the US had been engaged in combat, complete with bombs and collateral damage, throughout the 90's, not to mention the sort of terrorism that had been prevalent in the Near East for a couple of decades, but no one expected the same people to attack Manhattan because....reasons. Needless to say, it's quite one thing if a soldier dies due to a terrorist attack in a far-off country, but quite another thing if Important People are confronted with the spectre of burning high rises. Nota Bene: Important People are mostly shrugging off ~500 times as many deaths from Covid - the scale of the problem is too large to grasp for many, even amoung very important people.)
The same applies to billionaires, athletes, media personalities and so on. The obverse is the the kind of effects normal schlubs have grown used to in daily life have massively multiplied as, say, guys who like exposing themselves have found new ways to flash all kinds of random women.
The overall effect is degrading and also degrades the discourse and here we are.
elm
i think he has the right idea, and i am not sure he has the right causes
I want to participate in the conversation, but I also don't want to read the article. I right clicked it open. I will be back if I can bring myself to read it.
Ok, I skimmed it. Looks like the answer is Social Media according to him.