the Shouting Class is a tiny minority of society that dominates much of our political discourse, thanks in part to the bullhorn created by the technology of social media.
…the greater energy, zeal, and time commitment of the Shouting Class, combined with the bullhorn of social media, tips the balance of social media’s emotional effect dramatically toward the negative.
People who are chronically angry and bitter are unpleasant to be around. In the real world, most of us try to avoid such people. But Twitter draws such people like flies. As does combative politics.
For normal people with normal families, Twitter politics is like war. We’re not interested in it. Unfortunately, it is interested in us.
I don’t think this is true unfortunately. In conversations with ‘regular people’ about politics, would you really say that most people you know don’t like to just stand around and talk about how terrible the other side is and mock it/them incessantly? Even in person I’d say that’s the vast majority of political discussions are, even though I think most people still avoid starting such discussions, once they’ve started, they can’t resist joining in the bitterness.
There’s a small minority that does it compulsively and derives the meaning of life from it, but there’s a much larger segment of the population (perhaps the majority) that still enjoys the excitement and sense of superiority they get from being in the audience and rooting for their team. Otherwise I don’t see how this tiny minority could be so successful at keeping everyone’s attention.
Right. I particularly remember the fall of 2008 before Obama’s election. The amount of bitter, mocking hate that was directed at Sarah Palin whenever I was around (mostly Democrat-voting) friends or family who assumed they were in like political company – and which was openly echoed by nearly everybody – was really astonishing. Well, at least, by the standards of the time, not by 2021. Over-the-top expressions of Bush Derangement Syndrome was a similarly in-person / in-real-life occurrence too, not just in media / academic milieus. Talk radio was no picnic either.
I think one difference has been that, in the past, it was very easy to intellectually isolate and socially segregate oneself away from these passionately political people and noxious conversations, and filter all of that out your life. With the combination of social media and recent political developments, all that stuff breaks through the filters and obnoxiously forces itself into your awareness and life in terms of unavoidably affecting one’s personal interests, like it or not.
As Kabul falls, so predictably, to the Taliban and the executions start taking place of all Afghans betrayed by “America”, it’s good to remember the Palin Derangement Syndrome in 2008 which replaced BDS, and was later replaced by TDS.
It’s hard to escape now, and the Dem shouters’ make it harder: “Silence is violence”.
“For normal people with normal families, Twitter politics is like war. We’re not interested in it. Unfortunately, it is interested in us.”
I think this is an important point in the bigger political landscape. For most people, politics, that is, forcing other people to do what you want them to at an increasingly fine grain level, is uninteresting and unappealing. When people complain about Republicans not having a plan or platform, I think this is important to keep in mind: How do you operationalize “Leave me the hell alone?”
I don’t have a good answer, of course. Is a better position to remove the Civil Liberties Act and no longer have any legal protections to seek after, or should one try to get political affiliation and everything else listed there? In any case, I think the politician who can operationalize leaving people alone into some sort of platform will have an advantage in a few years time.
How do you operationalize “Leave me the hell alone?”
That is my never-answered question as well. How does any politician win an election (& re-election) on a platform promoting: personal responsibility, “you do you & let me do me,” reduce the size of the welfare state, shrink the federal government to supporting only the enumerated powers strictly interpreted, etc., etc., etc.
I wish more people were familiar with Charles Sumner’s “Forgotten Man” essay, with Reagan’s words on government programs & “eternal life on earth,” and with G. B. Shaw’s simplistic but oh so true, “A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on Paul’s support.”
Reagan’s speeches alone could form the basis for a whole poli-sci semester class titled, ” That government is best that governs least” (various attributions)
Actually, most Pauls don’t want Peter to be robbed to pay them. What politicians and intellectuals do is convince them that 1) it’s not robbery and/or 2) you deserve it no matter where it came from.
The root of the problem is “identity politics” (i.e., bio-Leninism).
Literally everything in life that concerns more than one individual necessarily involves members in different classes or categories of identity. If the statistical distributions of interactive or procedural outcomes becomes a morally-weighted ideological matter, then *literally everything* becomes political. That’s why, as with Protestant Christianity among the Puritans (everything in life concerns God’s Will) and Marxism in Socialist / Communist countries (everything is life has an arguably ‘economic’ character), “woke” feels so special and aggressive. Everything is potentially ‘problematic’ and thus potentially subject to the same kind of eagerly punitive scrutinizing and demands that are humanly impossible to satisfy, because identity groups naturally do not have statistically equivalent properties. Even ripping apart the entire traditional structure of social organization – something we are on our way to trying – will not, in the end, be enough. You can denazify Germany and de-imperialize Japan, but the current effort at like Mao’s efforts to de-Sinofy the Chinese, de-Americanizing America (i.e., “fundamentally transform” it) won’t produce anything but tears.
The last Schelling Fence was “Equal Opportunity” and neutral, identity-blind processes. Once proof beyond a reasonable doubt of intentional discrimination was no longer required, it was just a matter of time until we arrived at the “Equity Society” of plenary police power wielded to impose mandatory equal outcomes.
But everything is an outcome, so everything is now political: your whole life, everything you do, every word you say, every breath you take.
Noah Smith is part of the problem (https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1415493380864233473)
This is quite aggressive, angry, and mean. Smith very much fits the definition of “People who are chronically angry and bitter are unpleasant to be around”.
He even notes that he likes Shouting People when they happen to be shouting for what he likes.
Here’s a simple hot take. People in positions of authority are doing Woke stuff because they kind of belief in it or at least don’t have any framework for rejecting the fundamental premises that drive it so they can never truly object to “the same but MORE!”
Trump had plenty of Twitter followers, and it hasn’t stopped Biden from saying he would nuke them from the sky. If you give some people a few bad facts and a little mood affiliation they will let things spin out of control.
I was going to say, this is pretty rich coming from Noah.
David Eagleman at Stanford has been working on wearable tech that, it seems to me, could turn Twitter into a torture device.
You put on the vest and you feel the sentiment on your skin. For the moment, the pain and discomfort of Twitter is not yet literal and carceral. But when you wear this technology on your skin, or with the kind of Kafkaesque adaptation I have in mind, the unpleasant people on Twitter inflict physical pain on people through electrodes or perhaps, later on, needles.
Twitter pain can change people’s “beliefs” as we know. We see this already.
Flatworms and politicians recoil from pain. Pain is administered, via Twitter, to politicians or movie stars or banjo players. The victim recants, begs the pain to stop. Dorsey’s torture squad claims another victory.
By making a politician experience discomfort and displeasure, what the unpleasant people on Twitter do is change his “beliefs” so that he says one thing on Monday and then he does the opposite on Tuesday.
Eventually as the technology improves we’ll accept that people don’t have beliefs or opinions. We’ll admit that people adopt positions and make announcements based on the pain inflicted via Twitter. Instead of pointing to some kind of consciousness inside our heads or to a mental process involving deliberation or rationality, we’ll all just accept that we’re scared of being punished by Dorsey’s enforcers.
The new dominant national trait is…shrill contentiousness.
“People who are chronically angry and bitter are unpleasant to be around. In the real world, most of us try to avoid such people. But Twitter draws such people like flies.”
Doesn’t that imply that people will eventually tire of Twitter? Tweets are like self-created bumper stickers, except distributed over the internet. People eventually learned to ignore, or at least not give much thought to, bumper stickers.
Years from now we are going to look back and think to ourselves “how did we not know that social media was at least as damaging to people’s health as cigarettes were?”
It should be made illegal for social media accounts to be held by minors, just like it’s illegal to minors to smoke cigarettes. Fine the social media companies $100k for each violation.
You’re seeing the fruit of a generation raised on it right before your very eyes. These kids get hooked on it at such a young when they are still developing intellectually and psychologically. They can’t think logically, and they can’t divorce their emotions from their ability to think. They use the phrase “I feel like…” entirely too much. What ever happened to “I think that…”?
We should have warning labels (perhaps even pictures) like we do on cigarette cartons. Pictures of people who disfigure themselves for likes on Instagram or post the most ridiculous pictures thinking that they’re making themselves look important. The Ad Council should be running campaigns that replace “don’t drink and drive” with “don’t post without thinking”.
Social media is a cancer on the face of this earth. We spent centuries getting to the point where we could have reasoned debate in a non-passionate way, and that was how we built the modern society all around us. A big part of that was the written word. And social media has taken us back to the stone age intellectually.
Instagram is just straight pictures. It uses algorithms to make it intentionally more addictive. It’s designed to manipulate. It’s really no different than the free cigarettes that the tobacco companies used to hand out.
We need to ban social media and their products the same way we did with cigarettes. Fine them for posting pictures of people who didn’t consent to be in them, just like we did with second hand smoke. Make people show an ID every time they log in. Make them click through and certify consent forms every time they log in saying “this will rot your brain” just like cigarettes will rot your lungs. Tax the bejesus out of them.
I know the libertarians won’t like it, but at some point we have to decide as a country that this product and the companies that offer it are doing more harm than good.
Best choices now:
a) get off Twitter, limit Facebook to positive family stuff
b) support a Digital Utilities Commission to force Big Tech to NOT censor stuff that is First Amendment legal.
c) look for more explicitly conservative/ Christian/ and/or Republican social media.
I’m not yet so keen on Gab nor Parler.
Here’s what Gab sent me (ending):
“Facebook and YouTube are the woke authoritarian corners of the balkanized internet.
Gab and Bitchute are the exciting wild west home of free speech corners of the balkanized internet.
Parler is the GOP establishment corner of the balkanized internet.
Twitter is the Progressive establishment corner of the internet.
This fragmentation and balkanization will only accelerate as we learn that there are two very different visions for the future of the internet and indeed for the future of our country.
The question is: which side are you on?”
I continue to worry about PC-woke fascists. I think I’ll try both Gab and Parler a bit more. By writing on my blog, then sending gab/ parler links. Not sure that will work. It’s so much work, and Robin Hanson is so prolific on Twitter, as are so many others …