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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.