Category: Politics

eXodus: Bluer Skies for Social Media or Just a Short Breath of Fresh Air?

social media

As of today, the social media platform BlueSky has grown to about 25 million users, which is still a fraction of the 600 million on X, but the recent spike at the former is attributable to people abandoning the latter. After Elon Musk acquired and rebranded Twitter, fired the accountability team, reinstated Trump, and then devoted both X and personal resources to supporting that campaign, the election was the final straw for many who fled to bluer skies.

Built as a “decentralized” platform, BlueSky takes an approach often advocated by Mike Masnick (who sits on the board) as a way to rescue the good of social media from the bad. But as I have argued for more than a decade, much of the harm caused by social media is too subtle to be designed out of the system. Even the best (or best-intended) social platforms are simply bad for democracy. BlueSky’s decentralized architecture may be more effective at weeding out haters and disinformation campaigns and providing users with greater control over what they see, block, etc., but this changes nothing about the reasons social platforms are fundamentally hazardous.

I am just about 50 pages into David Golumbia’s posthumously published magnum opus, Cyberliberatarianism:  The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology, and one view David and I share is that social media’s organic harms to democratic institutions simply outweigh its benefits as a “social” forum. We discussed this in the podcast we recorded in October 2021 and generally agreed that there is no technological solution for many of the medium’s inherent pitfalls. My short list of those pitfalls includes the following:

Provocative Nonsense Isn’t Just a Joke

It is natural to post and share short-attention-span editorial material like memes. Some of the best educated people I know post this kind of content all the time, and once in a while, I like or share the ones I find funny or on point. But when the subjects of these micro-editorials are political and provocative, they are not wholly distinguishable from “Q drops” as fuel added to a fire. Perhaps the most dismaying example of this is the profusion of memes applauding, or at least winking at, Luigi Mangione for allegedly shooting United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

A subject worthy of its own post (including a report that Mangione made a ghost gun ), the point worth summarizing in this post is that social media has eroded the moral barriers to political violence. Political violence is an inevitable biproduct of the erosion of democratic norms because a party’s destructive conduct (and indeed UH has blood on its hands) invites violence about which many will feel at least ambivalent, if not enthusiastic. Of course, as Dr. King warned, violence only multiplies violence, but as a novel feature of this vicious cycle, social media offers dopamine hits of provocative nonsense that allows even the observers of violence to laugh at, feel self-righteous about, or at least excuse conduct that should be rejected as a principle of functional democracy.

Aggregated Narcissism is the Ignorance of Crowds

Known formally as the Dunning-Kruger effect, microdoses of “information,” combined with the enticement to comment and share, feed that human frailty which allows us to pretend to know more about a particular subject than we do. Then, solidifying and amplifying our ignorance, social media provides “connection” to others who share the same uninformed belief. Thus, while many of us look aghast at the kind of unqualified nutjobs the next administration would tap for leadership of important departments, we must also acknowledge it is not Trump fans alone who have abandoned the notion of expertise concurrent with the growth of digital technology and social media.

Ignorance on topics ranging from vaccinations to NATO is just as deeply rooted in “progressive” politics as the right wing, and social media feeds the beast, partly due to the “IKEA Effect.” Akin to Dunning-Kruger, the IKEA Effect describes the satisfaction derived from completing a DIY project, only instead of assembling a desk without cracking any veneer, social media promotes and rewards the project of doing one’s own research, even to arrive at a conclusion that may be wholly untethered to reality. These psychological effects cannot be “programmed out” of the medium or countered with fact-checking. At best, they can be understood, much as my generation learned to understand the effects of watching too much television.

A Community of Frenemies is not a Community

“Jealousy” and “faction” are two words that appear with great frequency in the founders’ writings advocating adoption of the Constitution and creation of the United States. Whether the subject is election procedure, national defense, taxation, etc., The Federalist and other seminal writings all warn against faction as inherently destructive to common purpose, and out of that debate evolved the tradition of compromise and collaboration as necessary for keeping the Republic. But today, infighting among likely political allies is rampant thanks to social media, and it would be a mistake to believe that the mechanisms at work in the hostile takeover of the GOP are unique to the right-wing.

Although Golumbia presents an excellent case that Silicon Valley ideologies have always been grounded in right-wing, even fascistic, principles—and that bros like Zuckerberg and Musk have intentionally tilted the game in that direction—even “organic” interactions reveal that a prominent individual on the left will be attacked in a hate-storm if she critiques some unfounded position held by “progressives.” Thus, regardless of where people claim to sit on the political spectrum, one result of social media has been to scorn the idea of collaboration itself—a folly which has now become self-fulfilling prophecy because the reelection of an anti-democratic administration justifies the anti-collaborative spirit from which it drew power in the first place.

Disrupting the Purpose of Republicanism

Because social media amplifies and atomizes infighting, even the most dedicated and serious elected officials may find themselves in political jeopardy if they compromise or collaborate on the “wrong” issues. Representative government (republicanism) does not work well under 24-hour surveillance by the electorate—let alone an electorate animated by the Dunning-Kruger effect—or worse, professional trolls hired to attack the apostate the moment she steps out of line.

If one stammers at the upside-down world in which Liz Cheney is a “RINO,” social media made this alternate reality axiomatic by the same means that it became reasonable for so-called progressives to label President Obama a “warmonger.” The ordinary, even boring, job of governance has always operated behind the headlines of hot-topic issues. But due to the obligation to feed social media, nearly all politics are now performative, and the Member of Congress who does not entertain (i.e., does not deliver snappy comments on social media) may have a short and/or ineffective career.

No question that performance is always a part of politics, but social media enables more performative nonsense to flood the zone than was possible in the pre-digital era. Historically, a high-profile hearing, like a Senate confirmation hearing, would mainly be observed by the public through snippets and commentary edited by whichever news network we watched in the evenings. Meanwhile, low-profile hearings didn’t provide much opportunity to feed soundbites to constituents.

But speaking as someone who has watched a lot of back-burner hearings as part of his job, it is obvious that many are held for purely performative reasons because, of course, every Member has a social media person on staff who can make noise with a few provocative clips. That the substance of the hearing may be moot—or that most Americans won’t know it happened—doesn’t matter. The political value of the performance is enabled by social media, and this is a significant, and in my view negative, change to the nature of republicanism.

BlueSky is Nice but Can’t Fix the Problem

Yes, BlueSky is better (for now), and yes, I joined and started following people I believe to be thoughtful in their defenses of American democracy, etc. But the major adverse effects of social media cannot be eliminated either by design or the ethics of managers willing to keep hands off the algorithms. The affordances of the medium occur between the core technology and psychological responses to the experience—a thesis tragically supported by the fact that children can be coaxed into suicide by the material on their phones.

On that note, it will be interesting to see whether BlueSky supports platform accountability through legislation like the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), or a proper reading of Section 230, which was never meant to be blanket immunity for all providers hosting user content. Because ever since the so-called techlash of 2016, both the providers and their “digital rights” network have continued to push the narrative that somehow “restoring” the noble intent of the original internet should be the goal. But the original intent of the net’s first evangelists was not so noble (see Golumbia’s life work), and I think we all know Einstein’s definition of insanity.

Photo by: charlieblacker

Well, Now What?

I haven’t posted here since before the election, and admittedly, it has been difficult to resist escapism and simply stop giving a damn. That the United States (and with it the democratic world) is now in jeopardy is not in doubt. Rather, the questions for the moment are the order in which institutions will begin to break and what the reactions and counter-reactions will be to the first cracks in the foundation. From there, it is possible, even likely, that we will begin to ride the volatile extremes of history to which most living Americans are unaccustomed.

Amid all the commentary on social media, including the posts of many emigrees to BlueSky, there appears to be little acknowledgement that uncertainty defies prediction, but this is only natural. Uncertainty is frightening, and prediction, analysis, and editorial offer a semblance of mental sanctuary, even if they may be illusory. But the uncomfortable truth endures—that the details about the kakistocracy being assembled to “lead” the nation barely matter. Unqualified and stupid is unqualified and stupid. And things are going to break.

Speaking of escapism, I watched the movie Twisters the other night, but unfortunately, the very Hollywood narrative still prompted thoughts about the folly of the incoming administration. The protagonist, Addy (Kiernan Shipka), is an Oklahoma native and storm chaser who has figured out a way to diffuse tornadoes and, thereby, spare lives and property. Although the science underlying the plot may be far-fetched, the subject of human intellect versus deadly nature is real, as are the thousands of civil servants who protect, rescue, and recover when nature devastates whole communities.

Trump said he would take a sledgehammer to the administrative state, and with the nomination of so many incompetent lackeys to head major departments, he is poised to make good on that promise. But because this is what Americans voted for, it is tempting to say screw ‘em. Citizens who chose, even unwittingly, to dismantle the administrative state should accept that, for instance, tornadoes are just God’s little Shop-Vacs cleaning up excess Oklahomans from time to time. That is, after all, the logical conclusion of abandoning science and competence for the religiosity and magical thinking that now underwrites the Former Republican Party (FRP). There may be few atheists in Tornado Alley, but without NOAA, FEMA, and other federal agencies, more people will die praying.

Federal agencies are manned by both extraordinary individuals and slackers. When politicians want to hype the waste in government, they overemphasize the slackers and ignore the dedicated experts who save lives (and money) every year. When political hacks and outright loons are appointed to head agencies, we can expect the attrition of the extraordinary and promotion of the slackers. Then, when critical systems begin to break, people will react, panic, and, quite often, turn violent. It could be mines collapsing, or it could be poor readiness and response to a weather event. It might be another mismanaged pandemic worse than COVID-19 or a catastrophic disruption in national security. Odds are, it will be many systems breaking at the same time, but will people blame the idiots they elected, which is tantamount to blaming themselves?

If readers wonder what any of this has to do with the usual fare on this blog, which is often focused on copyright and criticism of Big Tech, the theme is defense of democratic institutions. I have devoted over a million words to defending copyright because it is an instrument of democracy that combines the values of free expression, the free market, and permission—all of which the major tech leaders abhor. Their only interest in free expression is its usefulness as data; their conduct is monopolistic, not competitive; and they have openly advocated abandoning the notion of permission with plenty of help from “progressive” academics and organizations like the EFF.

It may be obvious to millions now that Elon Musk’s defenses of the speech right are Orwellian bullshit, but it’s the same lie that Silicon Valley leaders have been selling for more than twenty years. From Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996) to the alleged importance of generative artificial intelligence (GAI), the rhetoric remains that government institutions only stand in the way of “better living through technology.” That is the underlying, Galt-like hubris of the tech bros: they can fix or improve everything if we just abandon pesky, inefficient democracy.

The paradox of having an aversion to conspiracy theories is blindness to actual conspiracies. And unfortunately, Occam’s Razor points to the rational conclusion that tech oligarchs are the primary force behind the useful idiocy of the next administration. As discussed in an earlier post, if Peter Theil’s unvarnished scorn for democracy represents the motive for anointing J.D. Vance—and if reorganizing society into a system of corporate “patchworks” is the goal—then Trump’s job would be to wreck the administrative state, after which Vance is the putative young, energetic populist to preside over an ersatz democracy that is, in truth, some version of the corporate “patchwork” concept.

Contempt for the state is a rhetorical common ground shared by tech-utopians, Trumpians, and (frankly) so-called progressives who either don’t understand, or care, why the United States has been the most important democracy in the world. Its institutions are not perfect, but we have demonized those institutions in the patois of this era’s version of the Robber Baron—the tech oligarch. Not even the gun manufacturers can quite match Silicon Valley for conflating regulation of their industry with encroachment on our “freedoms.”

Returning to Twisters, the tech bros would have us believe that government only stifles the kind of bold innovation Addy represents. But in truth, their metaphorical avatar is Riggs (David Born), who invests in storm analysis technology to fund his scheme of scooping up property from families who are wiped out by tornadoes. So, although it is true that imperfect government oversight or regulation can yield irrational results, the absence of competent institutions will make America about as innovative and effective as the former Soviet Union. Various unpredictable events may militate against that outcome, but as the popular cliché insists, when people tell you who they are and what they intend to do, believe them.

In a bittersweet moment at a local bookstore yesterday, I saw that David Golumbia’s book Cyberlibertarians: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology has been posthumously published. I was honored to have been asked by David to read the manuscript, but he passed away from cancer before I could send him complete thoughts. As the description states, “Leveraging more than a decade of research, David Golumbia traces how digital evangelism has driven the worldwide shift toward the political right, concealing inequality, xenophobia, dishonesty, and massive corporate concentrations of wealth and power beneath the utopian presumption of digital technology as an inherent social good.” Golumbia is right that digital tech is a social and political Trojan Horse, but what we do with that knowledge now that the enemy is inside the walls is anybody’s guess.

Photo by: Emagnetic

Too Much Democracy Can Kill Democracy: Social Media as a WMD

democracy

It may be true that “democracy dies in darkness,” but it can also be wiped out in blinding light. If Donald Trump is reelected, it will have been 20 years after the launch of Facebook and 18 years after the launch of Twitter—less than one generation for the “greatest invention for democracy” to be the proximate cause of the death of democracy.

When I started writing this blog in 2012, the 5th of November was celebrated by internet defenders who seemed to think that Guy Fawkes of the English Powder Plot of 1605 was a rebel and a hero. This fallacy was based on conflating history with the graphic novel and movie V for Vendetta, whose tyranny-fighting protagonist wears a “Guy Fawkes” mask, which became the symbol of hackers calling themselves Anonymous. Then, by extension, the mask became a symbol of advocating John Perry Barlow’s idealistic notion of the morally superior, purely democratic internet against the anachronistic laws of “weary” republics.

Of course, the real Guido Fawkes had more in common with the January 6th insurrectionists than any champions of democracy. The intent of the Powder Plot, led by Robert Catesby, was to restore the authority of the Catholic Church, which would have killed the nascent progress of republicanism in England. In this light, the plot was one of many forebears to American Christian nationalists, eager to have Trump blow up the secular administrative state the same way Fawkes & Friends were supposed to blow up Parliament and the Protestant monarch in one move.

As often happens in history, the catastrophe of the Powder Plot was averted by individuals listening to their own better angels. Uncomfortable with killing any Catholic members of Parliament, the conspirators sent an anonymous letter to Lord Monteagle, who dutifully reported the plan. Thus, Fawkes was found in the cellar waiting for the signal to light the 36 barrels of gunpowder, which would have indeed blasted all of Parliament, King James I, and the king’s family into the River Thames. How this conflagration might have altered the course of American history—and, therefore, democracy in general, is impossible to know, but it is doubtful that the Puritan adventure beginning in 1620 would have transpired in the same way, if it happened at all.[1]

In contrast to gunpowder, social media is an insidious weapon that erodes the foundations of republicanism from the virtual cellar occupied by our lesser angels—steadily degrading not just truth, but the value of truth.[2] This was not every platform founder’s intent, of course. Jack Dorsey appears to have had a late-stage realization of the damage Twitter could cause, but it is not at all surprising that under the control of Elon Musk, the rebranded X does not even pretend to “beg forgiveness” for its manipulations of reality.

The architects of the American Constitution and leaders of the Federalist cause understood that direct democracy was synonymous with chaos. When they used the word democracy, it was almost pejorative, referring to a heedless mob that might swallow the pursuit of “ordered justice.” In short (and with the possible exception of Jefferson), they recognized that too much democracy would be fatal to sustainable democracy, but this is exactly what social media has fostered—a form of direct democracy undermining a collaborative understanding of the American experiment.

Even if Trump loses, the project of restoring the cultural foundations of the American Republic will be far from over. As author and journalist Sebastian Junger said at a conference I recently attended, the project is generational—one that must begin now to benefit our grandchildren. Hosted by the Hannah Arendt Center (HAC) at Bard College, Junger was one of several speakers who offered a critique of the Left from within the Left—exemplifying the kind of discussion I believe is essential, but which social media makes nearly impossible. In fact, Junger specifically blasted “the phones,” focusing primarily on their addictive qualities, but clearly in regard to platforms creating and exacerbating political divisions.

That discussion on the Left will only happen if Trump loses. If he wins, chaos will ensue followed by reactions to that chaos, and it will be hard not to shrug at, or even endorse, extreme reactions. After all, Trump promises violence and fascism, which will spark violent responses that are both natural and justified. But if that nightmare is not our fate, then the project of saving democracy from latent authoritarianism will require the work of Liberals and Conservatives, who must confront the fact that social media has been the indispensable catalyst in reshaping a concept of America that would tolerate, let alone almost elect, a manifestly dangerous individual to be President.

Sustaining any republic requires policy that fosters reasoned compromise behind the theater of politics, but thanks to the free soapboxes in every citizen’s hand, all policy is now political, and all politics are now performative. Social media softened the ground to create the ideal landscape for a populist charlatan to rise to power despite (or even because of) his open hostility for the Constitutional order. But Trump’s supporters are not alone in abandoning that faith.

Even before the revelations of 2016 that data gathered from modest online activity could be weaponized to engineer political outcomes around the world, it was clear that the narcissism inherent to using social platforms provoked acute, often poorly articulated, outrage—including responses to rumor and conspiracy with no foundation in fact. That folly is not unique to any ideology or political party because it is a psychological relationship to the medium itself that we are far from resolving.

Then, with the addition of powerful actors who control the data and algorithms, a significant, albeit hard to measure, number of world-shaping events have been triggered by what amounts to online pranks. Even the most ambitious and most powerful democracy ever invented has been punked to the edge of extinction by the dark arts of internet trolls. All those tech boosters who claimed there was a wall of separation between adolescent cyberspace and adult real life were simply wrong.

Social Media Platforms Are Narcissism Machines

By coincidence, I recently met one of the student fellows at HAC, who is visiting Bard from Ukraine and studying human rights. Noting that there will not be another election in her country unless and until they win the war with Russia, she referred to a frustration with her contemporaries, who as young Americans, do not intend to vote this week. I asked if those students offered reasons for their reluctance, and she told me the two main explanations that came to mind were 1) that the outcome didn’t really matter; or 2) that if the candidate they vote for “let’s them down,” they will feel guilty about having cast the vote.

The first sentiment that voting doesn’t matter is a familiar cynicism of youth. But what the second sentiment implies is a heightened degree of narcissism that I believe is fair to associate with the digital-native generations. The notion that any President could be perfect in the administration of that unfathomable office suggests first, a childlike innocence about human beings and the complexly dangerous world we occupy; and second, an arrogance that one’s own idea of “perfection” is well founded. This is an astoundingly naive way to evaluate the mere mortals we might elect to be President of the United States, though it is consistent with the kind of “purity-test” mentality that shapes the rhetoric of the digital-native generations.

The phenomenon is observable in real-time because social platforms are venues where political allies become irreconcilable antagonists the moment a member of the tribe dares to criticize the tribe’s thinking or conduct. The critic becomes the apostate, earning herself at least a virtual, if not a literal, stoning. Examples abound, but in this moment, I am thinking specifically of progressive activist Brianna Wu, who has the integrity to criticize the extremism, antisemitism, and ahistorical narratives animating many anti-Israel protestors and, consequently, is bombarded by personal attacks and death threats from people who consider themselves liberal or “progressive.”

Those responses, like many of the protests themselves, are narcissistic and performative. The American Liberal repeating the mantra “settler colonialism” is barely distinguishable from the Conservative who claims that Christianity is under attack in the U.S. There is no intellectual, let alone moral, difference between the Right’s generic attacks on DEI and the Left’s attacks on Jews in academia and in their private lives. But again, the common denominator is social media, designed and managed to stoke, promote, and reward righteous outrage, not discourse.

Unfortunately, social media draws everyone into its gutter. While I believe that a figure like Trump could never have obtained political power without the insane environment of these platforms, even rational opposition cannot afford to cede the alligator pit as a battlefield. Although Harris, other candidates, and brave Conservative apostates do not engage in the outlandish, incoherent, and fascistic messaging exhibited by Trump, merely fighting fire with fire on social platforms demands a juvenile and sad derivative of the discourse that wrote the nation into existence. It is a meager dividend from our investment in the “greatest tool for democracy ever invented.”

Waiting to find out whether Trump will be reelected is like waiting to learn whether the nation has Stage IV cancer. Everything is on hold while millions of Americans ask the same question, albeit from different perspectives:  are we at the brink of civil war? In this regard, there are not two sides. Specific policies notwithstanding, Harris means a continuation of the American experiment and the possibility that we can at least try to have difficult conversations on both the Left and Right. Trump means chaos and who the hell knows what comes next? If we manage to dodge the bullet, maybe, just maybe, we can admit that social media was the gun that fired it.

[1] Civil unrest would likely have ensued, but if Rome were indeed reinstated, it’s entirely possible that anti-Catholics like John Winthrop would have been executed rather than allowed to establish New England.

[2] It is not only Trumpians who are immune to counterfactuals in their world view, and although social media does not cause this human frailty, it does exacerbate it.

Image: N. Currier. (1846) Destruction of tea at Boston Harbor. , 1846. [New York: N. Currier] [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/91795889/.