Nothing has changed since Jerry Pournelle wrote 40 years ago when discussing online forums:
>I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do.
This is what killed Usenet,[1] which 40 years ago offered much of the virtues of Reddit in decentralized form. The network's design has several flaws, most importantly no way for any central authority to completely delete posts (admins in moderated groups can only approve posts), since back in the late 1970s Usenet's designers expected that everyone with the werewithal to participate online would meet a minimum standard of behavior. Usenet has always had a spam problem, but as usage of the network declined as the rest of the Internet grew, spam's relative proportion of the overall traffic grew.
That said, there are server- and client-side anti-spam tools of varying effectiveness. A related but bigger problem for Usenet is people with actual mental illness; think "50 year olds with undiagnosed autism". Usenet is such a niche network nowadays that there has to be meaningful motivation to participate, and if the motivation is not a sincere interest in the subject it's, in my experience, going to be people with very troubled personal lives which their online behavior reflects. Again, as overall traffic declined, their relative contribution and visibility grew. This, not spam, is what has mostly killed Usenet.
[1] I am talking about traditional non-binary Usenet here
>This, not spam, is what has mostly killed Usenet.
Usenet had a nonstop spam generator called Google Groups that shit it up for years. It wasn't just intentional spam but clueless people came in through there and bumped 20+ year old threads.
The other factor related to the decline was ISP's stopped bundling usenet service in the 2000's.
There are sill a handful of active groups but unfortunately at least a third of the remaining active lost access when the Google spam service stopped.
One of the projects on my agenda is a classifier that detects those people on social media by detecting "signs of hostility." This was hung up for a while because I thought the process of making a training set would kill me [1] (not seeing these people was a major motivation for the project) but now I'm more optimistic. I still gotta make a generic ModernBERT + LSTM + calibration classifier though.
We had a very naive version of this at a company I worked for about 25 years ago. It was called “asshole detective”. We captured about 200 user comments and dredged through them by hand and scored particular words and phrases. Then we summed up the scores of each post in a thread. If a user was more than a couple of standard deviations outside the mean it’d flag them as an asshole. After reviewing this over a few weeks we found it was surprisingly good at singling out persistent assholes. It did however never action anything - that was up to a moderator to do.
I imagine it’d be good at getting rid of a lot of modern plagues on social media as they seem to have a small, predictable and shitty vocabulary.
I wish you the best of luck, but these days the main problems you're going to be facing are political, not technical. What makes people start to display "signs of hostility" these days is almost always tribal politics, and when you ban that, you are (at least from their POV), engaging in politically-motivated censorship. If it gets any kind of traction or visibility, your tool will be pinpointed as a weapon of The Enemy for suppressing truth and entrenching the powers that be, and you'll start getting threats to match.
Not to say you shouldn't do it, but you should be aware of what you're signing up for.
Indeed. I found it strange that the paper (https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/acbwg_v1 ) doesn't even mention the experiences from other social media and discussion fora, nor alternative tactics such as blocking users. The experiment was conducted until March 2024 so it's already outdated; nowadays, even if you unfollow Elon Musk's preferred accounts, you will be exposed to them anyway.
> When I scroll through social media, I often leave demoralized, with the sense that the entire world is on fire and people are inflamed with hatred towards one another. Yet, when I step outside into the streets of New York City to grab a coffee or meet a friend for lunch, it feels downright tranquil.
Alternative explanation: The online world is "real" and the real-life interactions are "fake", at least as far as political opinions are concerned.
The social conventions for online and face-to-face interactions are still markedly different (with good reason). When face-to-face, we generally care a lot more about maintaining a pleasant conversational environment and usually avoid things that would insult or hurt the person we are talking with. The focus is also a lot more about everyday issues and a lot less about abstract political topics like it would be online.
All of this means that face-to-face, we will probably talk a lot less about divisive political topics than we would do online.
But it does not mean we have fewer opinions on those topics, only that we won't show them so easily.
So it could be that the online discourse really is a truthful mirror of the political division of society, only that in real life, those divisions are much more hidden behind layers of politeness.
> All of this means that face-to-face, we will probably talk a lot less about divisive political topics than we would do online.
I see your point — I think more than a couple Twilight Zone episodes that Serling penned explored the "monsters" that are within us.
But I disagree. Because I think when you are face-to-face you're more likely to see nuance in your option and others. "I hate gays!" you say. But then you find yourself chatting with your neighbor and his husband and have been thankful for them, on several occasions, for helping you get your car started in the winter, or whatever.
"Black people scare me!" But then you have to admit that the two black families that go to your church are not threatening at all....
> Black people scare me!" But then you have to admit that the two black families that go to your church are not threatening at all....
They are still racist pricks. The ones at church are just the “good ones” who do a good enough job of code switching - ie so the racists say “you’re not like most Black people”.
Prior to ubiquitous mobile Internet and social media, we had geographic boundaries around communities. Now those lines are being rapidly blurred, and there's bleedover in regional thought into some semblance of broader online community.
But the point is that the observation that the world seems nuts and a liberal city in the West feels cosmopolitan isn't necessarily wrong - the liberal West is a global minority. Illiberal views are the global majority. What did we expect when we started merging thought globally? And most of the world isn't even 'online' yet in sense they've joined these spaces, they're marginally connected based on how you measure it, or in their own regional spaces.
Or, online discourse has polarised opinion through The Algorithm promoting inflammatory, divisive content. In real life, when people talk, they see the other person as a human with more understandable motivations, and tend to find a lot more common ground.
So perhaps instead of "in real life, those divisions are much more hidden behind layers of politeness"; "in real life, divisions turn out to be largely illusory (or more moderate; or more understandable) once you get to know someone".
Most people in real life only have deep conversations with like minded people. In the polite company you just don’t talk about politics, religion or other divisive topics.
There is no illusion about how most rural Christian Americans think about gay people, minorities, liberal west coast elites, Muslims, etc.
How does the alternate theory work ? The evidence here suggests that instigation on social media is usually targeted and limited to a handful of accounts. If it were indeed the case that people are more real online and more towards the right politically, then we shouldn't observe this concentration. It would be more diffused.
> The social conventions for online and face-to-face interactions are still markedly different (with good reason). When face-to-face, we generally care a lot more about maintaining a pleasant conversational environment and usually avoid things that would insult or hurt the person we are talking with. The focus is also a lot more about everyday issues and a lot less about abstract political topics like it would be online.
It's an interesting theory, and I almost want to agree, but I can assure you that the same approximate percentage of extremist idiots exist in real-world NYC as online. If you doubt me, go to the fountain in Washington Square Park pretty much whenever, and you will meet them.
Most people are moderate on most issues. That's just statistics...and it's actually backed up by all sorts of polling.
> Most people are moderate on most issues. That's just statistics...and it's actually backed up by all sorts of polling.
Moderate-ness is, more or less, a fallacy. People believe that since we have A and B that the correct answer must be somewhere in the middle - intuitively, you would think, somewhere really in the middle. Like if I want fried chicken, but my friend wants to eat-in to get something healthy, then the right answer is getting something out to eat that's somewhat healthy.
So, people who are unaware on issues are "naturally" moderate, because intuitively it seems to make a lot of sense.
But, not actually. If we just look at history, choose virtually any point, when are the moderates right? Almost never. The 3/5ths compromise was shit, for instance. Civil Unions? Remember those? Yeah, that was stupid and we should've just given homosexuals marriage. I mean, what were moderates saying during the Civil Rights movement in the 60s? I'll give you a hint... it was not good. Yeah, that aged like milk too.
You would think, given the history of failure that is moderate policy, people might be a tad hesitant to be moderate on an issue. You would think, they might dig deeper.
But no. We all have this idea that this point in time, and in this particular place, is unique. Our politics, now, are much different. No no, you see, it's not the same. This time we are right.
Of course, this is slightly better than social conservatism, which has a track record of always being bad. Forever. In every culture. Across the entire globe. But no guys, this time it's right! Never mind Confucianism or whatever, this is different!
Polling can’t even accurately figure out if people are going to vote R or D two weeks from the poll. Color me skeptical that public opinion polling in anything more complex is more accurate and not simply used to itself shape public perception and opinion.
Even polling “experts” like Silver regularly make huge misses on binary questions (his Florida bet) let alone stuff like the Selzer poll. It’s really hard to take any complex issue polling seriously. It’s a tough sell to convince me that sure, these binary choice election polls with a verifiable result (the election) are wrong, but totally unverifiable public opinion polling with possibly framed questions represent reality.
Most people are fine, even online. As the article says, it's really just a small group that's completely out of control. Maybe people are a bit more direct and blunt over text, but that's a different thing than what the article is about.
We've all had that mad idiot ranting at the pub. You smile and nod and move somewhere else. What's his potential audience? Not so much. That same person is now Tweeting >500 times a day, replying to all sorts of posts with misinformation and (typically) vitriol and insults. All of these people are quite unpleasant in real life too (well, until they get Buzz Aldrin'd anyway).
This article is rife with wishful thinking and honestly I don't know if society has ever been as harmonious as I feel like it alleges. As if there was a time where everyone just got along and things were great and you could get an egg cream for a quarter after the sock hop.
I seriously question whether there was ever a time where the masses weren't influenced by "a few people", for better or worse.
The numbers don't move me and can't be the sole arbitrator of truth when the direction of humanity is involved.
So while I'm not surprised that people report feeling less inclined toward inflammatory media after disengaging it, I just don't believe that there is a grand collective that we can return to that is free from the influential few.
The issue is that there are many masses and many fews at odds to find their pair and wont to view the others as the outrageous ones.
People can hardly curate outfits at their own discretion. They're going to defer to people who are deferring to what amounts to a cell of 3-4 guys linked to a larger apparatus of taste to find out what to wear, what to watch and what to think.
That's just the way it is.
The average person is well-meaning and reasonable up unto the this eerie point in their life where they feel existentially threatened and thrust on the stage of public opinion for the criticism of others.
So I think that suggesting that society isn't toxic in it's current form and all it is is that we're just viewing the world through this funhouse lens because of a few bad guys on social media is a conceited perspective because the world as it is indeed is a carnival of ideas surrounding the marketplace and the internet is its pavilion, not its public square.
And to dare to suggest that there is in fact one single true direction for people to choose demands contending against all the goofy ways people are turning and admitting that things are as bad as they appear, in spite of whatever ways we can come up with to assume the good faith of the common man.
The irony is that this same outlet will unapologetically make its bones off the incessant reporting on all the ways that society is under peril. Sometimes obscuring these reports with solicitations to fund this effort.
I can only say that it is worse now than at any other time I have lived (I say this at 61 years old, white guy, FWIW).
There's a complete lack of ... unity? Everything including the weather is now pigeon-holed into something political (and therefore "tribal"). Sock hops and the soda fountain were before my time, but I can speak for the 70's and say it was not this crazy.
Nut jobs like The John Birch Society (just to pick on one group of the era) were not given a global megaphone. Say what you want about newspapers, etc. but the "Fourth Estate" had to earn reader's trust, could not expect to just act to inflame the fringe elements of society.
I think what makes this time worse than the past (with respect to the idea that the past was bad too; see the sibling Jim Crow comment) is that in the present everyone is a target.
Was it Marshall McLuhan say something about man devolving into tribalism with the expansion of digital media? The individuation of the literate mind as opposed to the shared vision of the tribal, oral mind; new technology replacing one thing and simultaneously bringing back another from the past.
I want to say that the notion of unity was subsidized by a faith in liberal democracy. Even during the 60s and the 70s, my impression as that the language of activists back then, and consequently the conceptualization of their ideals, didn't stray far from a common dialect of the establishment, rooted in some kind of shared interpretation of democracy during that time. At least in a shared interpretation fundamentally, with conflict stemming from subsidiary ends.
Maybe what we're faced with now is the natural progression of the dissolution of a shared interpretation for social cohesion and whatever's meaningful behind why we want to bond with each other. So we tear away from each other in order to come back together. And it will never be exactly how it was before and maybe that's for the better in the end. Because what it took to get here wasn't great to begin with.
> The average person is well-meaning and reasonable up unto the this eerie point in their life where they feel existentially threatened and thrust on the stage of public opinion for the criticism of others.
This is how I feel for the past 8 years or so; like I've been forced to become more and more deranged, because it seems like everyone either fully supports or tacitly agrees with an insane narrative that one way or another paints me or people like me as an enemy.
I can't just take what anyone says at face value anymore, or give the benefit of the doubt. I know that as soon as they say a key word, or behave in a specific way, or even just dress in a specific way that I'm dealing with some kind of narrative that is openly hostile. It may not even be that I disagree, just that I don't want to signal myself that way. I just want to form my own opinions, but that's usually difficult and often insulting to other people. People flip like a switch as soon as they sense you're not going to fully agree with them.
The postmodern bent of our discourse is really hard to deal with because you get immediately deconstructed into one of maybe a dozen categories when you say/do anything: lib, grifter, shill, racist, snowflake, bootlicker, chud, commie, fascist, creep, etc.
I can't even cut my hair without someone categorizing me based off of it.
I mostly consume media through an RSS feed nowadays, and it hasn't helped at all, although I now don't have as much "content" to deal with emotionally.
With RSS I don't have to relitigate arguments and ideas in my own head in order to feel secure as much as before, but the way I interact with people is still deeply warped by the entire discourse.
we live in a society where we can't really voice, our opinions or grievances towards specific groups or cultures or issues as it is deemed politically incorrect, so a lot of that has moved online, behind anonymity. Anonymity also plays an amplifying role. Larping as the target group and in many instances it becomes even easier to manipulate this much is true, but this is the price of forcing all of the healthy debates away from the off-line world because we fear offending.
The contrast between the online off-line world that the author in the article alludes to is indicative of this. It's the unspoken role where we all know that speaking out has consequences often that impacts are economic well-being. There would be no way to get farm something for which there is no demand for...
> we live in a society where we can't really voice, our opinions or grievances towards specific groups or cultures or issues as it is deemed politically incorrect
I'm not sure what that means when I see people say that.
Is it "People don't like it when I'm a dick so I have to hide when I do it?"
Because if it's not that, just say what you think. I'd like to think I do, in public with co-workers, etc. They judge me then by that and I kind of deserve their judgement (which ever way it goes).
There's constant examples of the trend that GP pointed out happening all the time. I'm pretty surprised that someone with so much internet activity hasn't noticed.
For instance, just a few days ago, a very popular TikTokker doxxed a father and asked his followers to report that father to CPS to try to get his kids taken away for expressing an opinion that they didn't like. That opinion? That children can't consent. The TikTokker isn't in jail, and he didn't lose his platform or otherwise suffer any consequences, because even though he did an extremely evil thing, his opinion was aligned with the "politically correct", and the father's opinion was "politically incorrect".
There are many, many instances of this happening - I've both seen them online, and witnessed it personally.
If you haven't seen it yourself, you're probably in a social bubble.
Or, it's criminal everywhere in the West except the USA. And not just dick opinions, pointing out the German politicians are not too bright has been criminalized now.
I think a big part of why influencers like Andrew Tate can speak unchallenged on social media is that anyone with the life experience, wisdom and social-media-savvy needed to be a better online role model for young men knows perfectly well that, due to the dynamics of such discourses, becoming that online role model will utterly destroy their life.
I agree, but even online is now heavily censored. It's harder and harder to find a place to express even slightly non-PC opinions. In my opinion this is not gonna produce good results in the long run.
You're way underplaying the aplifying role of anonymity and connectedness. I have not observed a decrease in peoples willingness to discuss "politically incorrect" topics in real life out of fear.
I have however observed an increasing intolerance for diverging opinions, especially coming from the "politically incorrect" group.
They are not afraid of being called out, they have become intolerant of being called out.
I don't know that I agree with this. I think my information bubble is largely liberal-flavored, and my experience doesn't align with this. I've instead found that those who otherwise embody the most "political correctness" are often the least tolerant of having their views challenged. In fact, my experience has been that the more vocally "progressive" a user is, the more likely they are to resort to cheap zingers and gotchas (politically-correct ones, of course) when their views are challenged (even politely!), instead of engaging in a cooperative way.
I saw this the most in the pre-Musk Twittersphere, but it has metastisized since then. Of course, it's unclear if these types are genuine, trolls, or simply a product of the medium itself, so take it with a grain of salt.
> You're way underplaying the aplifying role of anonymity and connectedness
Fully agree with this, though. I suspect this draws out the worst behavior regardless of professed political/moral affiliation
The answer is yes, and also yes towards that question for most other media. The fact propaganda is an industry is the issue. As soon as you have a population of people of sufficient mass, it becomes worthwhile to invest in attempting to influence the mindshare in some way towards a profitable end. This will be true for as long as we make use of propaganda for selling products, controlling votes, and how people think and behave. People might think it is only for the masses, but given their individual value you can probably be sure that all influential people in this world are also propagandized into making decisions that benefit other latent interests.
I'm not sure how you get out of the fact that game theory suggests there will always be people operating selfishly like this and reaping benefit from it as such. You see it in ecosystems too. It is a perfectly valid evolutionary strategy to learn to rob a nest vs making your own way. The question is how we balance these realities about our animal selves and even try and counter them for collectively beneficial reasons, that also won't just be subverted for someone else. Especially as technology grows to be more esoteric and powerful in the future.
Ads companies like google and facebook make their core business to put ads on your face. Same as, someone pays them loads of money for them to show you ads, so you can buy things you don't want or need.
So when you use any of their "products", you are the product. This is nothing new. I hope that is not new to you.
That said, their business spy also is good for spy agencies, so they take care of each other's business.
And please don't ever say "social media" or "social plataforms" because those are not social. Those are indeed anti-social platforms. You can call them that.
Take a look at twitter and what is has become. It was already bad.
I find it nearly impossible to avoid divisive content online. There are so many cool things in the world, but I can't find them because my timelines are all flooded with culture war. I wish I could find a platform that would listen to me when I say "show fewer posts like this."
Readit News
>I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do.
This is what killed Usenet,[1] which 40 years ago offered much of the virtues of Reddit in decentralized form. The network's design has several flaws, most importantly no way for any central authority to completely delete posts (admins in moderated groups can only approve posts), since back in the late 1970s Usenet's designers expected that everyone with the werewithal to participate online would meet a minimum standard of behavior. Usenet has always had a spam problem, but as usage of the network declined as the rest of the Internet grew, spam's relative proportion of the overall traffic grew.
That said, there are server- and client-side anti-spam tools of varying effectiveness. A related but bigger problem for Usenet is people with actual mental illness; think "50 year olds with undiagnosed autism". Usenet is such a niche network nowadays that there has to be meaningful motivation to participate, and if the motivation is not a sincere interest in the subject it's, in my experience, going to be people with very troubled personal lives which their online behavior reflects. Again, as overall traffic declined, their relative contribution and visibility grew. This, not spam, is what has mostly killed Usenet.
[1] I am talking about traditional non-binary Usenet here
Usenet had a nonstop spam generator called Google Groups that shit it up for years. It wasn't just intentional spam but clueless people came in through there and bumped 20+ year old threads.
The other factor related to the decline was ISP's stopped bundling usenet service in the 2000's.
There are sill a handful of active groups but unfortunately at least a third of the remaining active lost access when the Google spam service stopped.
But continuining to ignore it into the 2000s was clearly nonsensical.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/22/business/facebook-content-mod...
I imagine it’d be good at getting rid of a lot of modern plagues on social media as they seem to have a small, predictable and shitty vocabulary.
Not to say you shouldn't do it, but you should be aware of what you're signing up for.
Hopefully there will be follow-up studies.
Dead Comment
Alternative explanation: The online world is "real" and the real-life interactions are "fake", at least as far as political opinions are concerned.
The social conventions for online and face-to-face interactions are still markedly different (with good reason). When face-to-face, we generally care a lot more about maintaining a pleasant conversational environment and usually avoid things that would insult or hurt the person we are talking with. The focus is also a lot more about everyday issues and a lot less about abstract political topics like it would be online.
All of this means that face-to-face, we will probably talk a lot less about divisive political topics than we would do online.
But it does not mean we have fewer opinions on those topics, only that we won't show them so easily.
So it could be that the online discourse really is a truthful mirror of the political division of society, only that in real life, those divisions are much more hidden behind layers of politeness.
I see your point — I think more than a couple Twilight Zone episodes that Serling penned explored the "monsters" that are within us.
But I disagree. Because I think when you are face-to-face you're more likely to see nuance in your option and others. "I hate gays!" you say. But then you find yourself chatting with your neighbor and his husband and have been thankful for them, on several occasions, for helping you get your car started in the winter, or whatever.
"Black people scare me!" But then you have to admit that the two black families that go to your church are not threatening at all....
They are still racist pricks. The ones at church are just the “good ones” who do a good enough job of code switching - ie so the racists say “you’re not like most Black people”.
(yes I’m Black).
But the point is that the observation that the world seems nuts and a liberal city in the West feels cosmopolitan isn't necessarily wrong - the liberal West is a global minority. Illiberal views are the global majority. What did we expect when we started merging thought globally? And most of the world isn't even 'online' yet in sense they've joined these spaces, they're marginally connected based on how you measure it, or in their own regional spaces.
So perhaps instead of "in real life, those divisions are much more hidden behind layers of politeness"; "in real life, divisions turn out to be largely illusory (or more moderate; or more understandable) once you get to know someone".
There is no illusion about how most rural Christian Americans think about gay people, minorities, liberal west coast elites, Muslims, etc.
It's an interesting theory, and I almost want to agree, but I can assure you that the same approximate percentage of extremist idiots exist in real-world NYC as online. If you doubt me, go to the fountain in Washington Square Park pretty much whenever, and you will meet them.
Most people are moderate on most issues. That's just statistics...and it's actually backed up by all sorts of polling.
When you zoom in on a small area, sure. But globally? Pick a card and you'd have to squint to say most people are moderate on most issues.
Examples:
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2015/11/18/global-support...
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/06/25/global-divide-...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/02/28/who-likes...
Moderate-ness is, more or less, a fallacy. People believe that since we have A and B that the correct answer must be somewhere in the middle - intuitively, you would think, somewhere really in the middle. Like if I want fried chicken, but my friend wants to eat-in to get something healthy, then the right answer is getting something out to eat that's somewhat healthy.
So, people who are unaware on issues are "naturally" moderate, because intuitively it seems to make a lot of sense.
But, not actually. If we just look at history, choose virtually any point, when are the moderates right? Almost never. The 3/5ths compromise was shit, for instance. Civil Unions? Remember those? Yeah, that was stupid and we should've just given homosexuals marriage. I mean, what were moderates saying during the Civil Rights movement in the 60s? I'll give you a hint... it was not good. Yeah, that aged like milk too.
You would think, given the history of failure that is moderate policy, people might be a tad hesitant to be moderate on an issue. You would think, they might dig deeper.
But no. We all have this idea that this point in time, and in this particular place, is unique. Our politics, now, are much different. No no, you see, it's not the same. This time we are right.
Of course, this is slightly better than social conservatism, which has a track record of always being bad. Forever. In every culture. Across the entire globe. But no guys, this time it's right! Never mind Confucianism or whatever, this is different!
Even polling “experts” like Silver regularly make huge misses on binary questions (his Florida bet) let alone stuff like the Selzer poll. It’s really hard to take any complex issue polling seriously. It’s a tough sell to convince me that sure, these binary choice election polls with a verifiable result (the election) are wrong, but totally unverifiable public opinion polling with possibly framed questions represent reality.
We've all had that mad idiot ranting at the pub. You smile and nod and move somewhere else. What's his potential audience? Not so much. That same person is now Tweeting >500 times a day, replying to all sorts of posts with misinformation and (typically) vitriol and insults. All of these people are quite unpleasant in real life too (well, until they get Buzz Aldrin'd anyway).
We just need to send them to the moon to improve a bit.
I seriously question whether there was ever a time where the masses weren't influenced by "a few people", for better or worse.
The numbers don't move me and can't be the sole arbitrator of truth when the direction of humanity is involved.
So while I'm not surprised that people report feeling less inclined toward inflammatory media after disengaging it, I just don't believe that there is a grand collective that we can return to that is free from the influential few.
The issue is that there are many masses and many fews at odds to find their pair and wont to view the others as the outrageous ones.
People can hardly curate outfits at their own discretion. They're going to defer to people who are deferring to what amounts to a cell of 3-4 guys linked to a larger apparatus of taste to find out what to wear, what to watch and what to think.
That's just the way it is.
The average person is well-meaning and reasonable up unto the this eerie point in their life where they feel existentially threatened and thrust on the stage of public opinion for the criticism of others.
So I think that suggesting that society isn't toxic in it's current form and all it is is that we're just viewing the world through this funhouse lens because of a few bad guys on social media is a conceited perspective because the world as it is indeed is a carnival of ideas surrounding the marketplace and the internet is its pavilion, not its public square.
And to dare to suggest that there is in fact one single true direction for people to choose demands contending against all the goofy ways people are turning and admitting that things are as bad as they appear, in spite of whatever ways we can come up with to assume the good faith of the common man.
The irony is that this same outlet will unapologetically make its bones off the incessant reporting on all the ways that society is under peril. Sometimes obscuring these reports with solicitations to fund this effort.
There's a complete lack of ... unity? Everything including the weather is now pigeon-holed into something political (and therefore "tribal"). Sock hops and the soda fountain were before my time, but I can speak for the 70's and say it was not this crazy.
Nut jobs like The John Birch Society (just to pick on one group of the era) were not given a global megaphone. Say what you want about newspapers, etc. but the "Fourth Estate" had to earn reader's trust, could not expect to just act to inflame the fringe elements of society.
Was it Marshall McLuhan say something about man devolving into tribalism with the expansion of digital media? The individuation of the literate mind as opposed to the shared vision of the tribal, oral mind; new technology replacing one thing and simultaneously bringing back another from the past.
I want to say that the notion of unity was subsidized by a faith in liberal democracy. Even during the 60s and the 70s, my impression as that the language of activists back then, and consequently the conceptualization of their ideals, didn't stray far from a common dialect of the establishment, rooted in some kind of shared interpretation of democracy during that time. At least in a shared interpretation fundamentally, with conflict stemming from subsidiary ends.
Maybe what we're faced with now is the natural progression of the dissolution of a shared interpretation for social cohesion and whatever's meaningful behind why we want to bond with each other. So we tear away from each other in order to come back together. And it will never be exactly how it was before and maybe that's for the better in the end. Because what it took to get here wasn't great to begin with.
This is how I feel for the past 8 years or so; like I've been forced to become more and more deranged, because it seems like everyone either fully supports or tacitly agrees with an insane narrative that one way or another paints me or people like me as an enemy.
I can't just take what anyone says at face value anymore, or give the benefit of the doubt. I know that as soon as they say a key word, or behave in a specific way, or even just dress in a specific way that I'm dealing with some kind of narrative that is openly hostile. It may not even be that I disagree, just that I don't want to signal myself that way. I just want to form my own opinions, but that's usually difficult and often insulting to other people. People flip like a switch as soon as they sense you're not going to fully agree with them.
The postmodern bent of our discourse is really hard to deal with because you get immediately deconstructed into one of maybe a dozen categories when you say/do anything: lib, grifter, shill, racist, snowflake, bootlicker, chud, commie, fascist, creep, etc.
I can't even cut my hair without someone categorizing me based off of it.
I mostly consume media through an RSS feed nowadays, and it hasn't helped at all, although I now don't have as much "content" to deal with emotionally.
With RSS I don't have to relitigate arguments and ideas in my own head in order to feel secure as much as before, but the way I interact with people is still deeply warped by the entire discourse.
The contrast between the online off-line world that the author in the article alludes to is indicative of this. It's the unspoken role where we all know that speaking out has consequences often that impacts are economic well-being. There would be no way to get farm something for which there is no demand for...
I'm not sure what that means when I see people say that.
Is it "People don't like it when I'm a dick so I have to hide when I do it?"
Because if it's not that, just say what you think. I'd like to think I do, in public with co-workers, etc. They judge me then by that and I kind of deserve their judgement (which ever way it goes).
For instance, just a few days ago, a very popular TikTokker doxxed a father and asked his followers to report that father to CPS to try to get his kids taken away for expressing an opinion that they didn't like. That opinion? That children can't consent. The TikTokker isn't in jail, and he didn't lose his platform or otherwise suffer any consequences, because even though he did an extremely evil thing, his opinion was aligned with the "politically correct", and the father's opinion was "politically incorrect".
There are many, many instances of this happening - I've both seen them online, and witnessed it personally.
If you haven't seen it yourself, you're probably in a social bubble.
https://www.youtube.com/@HealthyGamerGG
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I have however observed an increasing intolerance for diverging opinions, especially coming from the "politically incorrect" group.
They are not afraid of being called out, they have become intolerant of being called out.
I saw this the most in the pre-Musk Twittersphere, but it has metastisized since then. Of course, it's unclear if these types are genuine, trolls, or simply a product of the medium itself, so take it with a grain of salt.
> You're way underplaying the aplifying role of anonymity and connectedness
Fully agree with this, though. I suspect this draws out the worst behavior regardless of professed political/moral affiliation
Dead Comment
I'm not sure how you get out of the fact that game theory suggests there will always be people operating selfishly like this and reaping benefit from it as such. You see it in ecosystems too. It is a perfectly valid evolutionary strategy to learn to rob a nest vs making your own way. The question is how we balance these realities about our animal selves and even try and counter them for collectively beneficial reasons, that also won't just be subverted for someone else. Especially as technology grows to be more esoteric and powerful in the future.
And please don't ever say "social media" or "social plataforms" because those are not social. Those are indeed anti-social platforms. You can call them that.
Take a look at twitter and what is has become. It was already bad.
Just think about how embarrassing some friends or family can be. Think about why you went online in the first place.
Online you can easily post several hundred times a day, and/or reach a huge audience.
To the contrary, the bigoted relative was no longer invited to various get togethers.