I was always a sort of gullible person. I think I just liked to believe things, and in them. But this idea really captured me. It was the frightening image of it first, every single person in a country doing the same thing, at the same time. I didn’t even feel comfortable in Catholic Mass when the monotonous, somber group prayer started. But at the scale of a billion people? I used to watch a lot of Star Trek with my dad, and this was Borg shit. It was also just confusing on a practical level because the billion jumpers weren’t drones. They were people, just like me, and I didn’t want to die. Why would they? Naturally, I assumed, they’d have to be fooled into doing it by a megalomaniacal supervillain. But how could he pull it off?
But a lot has changed since 1993.
Today, almost half the global population is connected to the internet by the supercomputing smartphones that live in our pocket. That’s 3.5 billion people. More significantly, the way we access “news,” or live information about the world, has paradigmatically changed...
Ubiquitous mobile internet dramatically increased our immersion in media, but ubiquitous social media dramatically increased the speed at which ideas travel and, perhaps more significantly, deeply socialized the dynamic. We no longer learn about the world from institutions, or even the illusion of them. We learn about the world from people we care about. This binds our sense of truth to tribal identity, and that is a powerful, fundamentally emotional connection. It’s also now operating at the scale of a planet. Today, a single piece of information — a tweet from your president, an update from the World Health Organization, video footage of police brutality — is polarized and shared across our social network. From there, it can reach hundreds of millions of people, often furious, in less than an hour.
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Not every revolution is a net disaster, just most of them. Political violence around the world has far more often led to destruction and widespread human misery than it has to peace and prosperity. France, Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, countless nations of the Middle East, and Africa — for most people in most nations on this planet, throughout most of recorded history, revolution has preceded authoritarianism, poverty, and death. Americans have a unique blindness to the subject, as our own violent insurrection preceded directly the founding of our nation, the most stable liberal government in history, and that story is a central part of our mythology. We are a prosperous, heroic country, and we credit our existence to a righteous founding war for freedom. But history is more complicated than legend. The U.S. Founding Fathers did not just change their government. On victory they set immediately to separating powers and guaranteeing that future change, while possible and expected, would come slowly in increments. Today the word “democracy” is sacrosanct among Americans, but we don’t and never have had a democracy. This is an absence by design. An inherently unstable form of government, our Founding Fathers believed, without exception, democracy would lead to chaos, and that chaos would lead to tyranny. The architects of our nation therefore designed a democratic republic, with a representative democracy, and at founding that looked a lot like a system of firewalls between masses of people and power. Local leaders elected state leaders, and state leaders elected national leaders. With our rules for political change themselves drafted in such a way as redrafting them would be slow and difficult, it was checks and balances all the way down. The United States does not owe its prosperity to dramatic change, but to an historically rare stability.
Even absent social media, the speed at which rapid political change is possible in America has been accelerating for two centuries. Checks have eroded. Balances have become less balanced. At the same time, the federal government has grown more powerful, and the executive branch commands more of that power than ever. For years, support from the political establishment, itself a kind of moderating function, has not been entirely necessary to succeed in presidential politics. It was only a matter of time before the weakness was exploited. In 2016, America elected a reality television star to the most powerful edifice of political power, at the head of the largest economy, and in command of the most powerful military, in human history. Today, beyond all doubt, anyone can be the president. But even with so unpredictable an office as our presidency the United States is a more stable nation than most. In addition to the genius framework of our government and a couple hundred years of binding, national identity, we are supported by a strong economy, abundant arable land, and friendly neighbors. A far more significant concern is we are now living in a world of smaller nuclear powers with fewer resources that are many of them one trending hashtag away from violent insurrection, and there is no telling what governments, or gangs, will take power in their place. The threat of a fallen nuclear state would of course affect us all. In this way, a meme-induced international mass hysteria would not even be necessary for global cataclysm. A national hysteria, in almost any corner of the world, would do just fine. But there will be international crises. Twitter may have started as a fun place to share jokes, but it has long since morphed into a virtual battleground for ideological war. While most of the conflicts are civil, at least a few have pit governments against each other, and such conflicts will undoubtedly proliferate. We have already watched national leaders threaten each other on the platform, in real time, egged on by crowds of millions. The question is not if a real war, in the physical world, can be started in this environment. We all know it can. Without some dramatic course correction, the question is only when.
Many people correctly intuit something is wrong with social media, and they wonder if it can be fixed with government regulation. It cannot. A federal law prohibiting all politicians at every level from sharing to the popular platforms would be a compelling, partial solution to the specific threat of state-backed, mob-initiated conflict. Legislation of this kind would also be positioned to survive a consumer shift to disintermediated, decentralized social media. But it would not address the central problem with social sharing at scale, and is anyway not the sort of regulation being prescribed. Our loudest regulatory enthusiasts are almost entirely censorship oriented, and they suspiciously tend to map their censorship prescriptions to their personal politics. This alone should be enough of a warning that we shut the notion down. Alas, the conversation rages on, and no one is focused on the principle issue. Content moderation is irrelevant. The greatest possible danger of social media is the catalyzation of mass, relatively instant global action on incomplete or incorrect information. It is true our next information disaster could conceivably take color from whatever sort of speech is at the moment socially unacceptable. But if an idea is already perceived as socially unacceptable to so dramatic a degree as top-down censorship of its discussion is politically feasible, it almost certainly lacks the cultural support for any kind of rapid global movement. The hysteria we’re most at risk of will likely relate in some misguided way to an idea most people already generally value, but it will also be, in some aesthetic sense, new. To be so swept up emotionally as one is moved to immediate physical action, in the physical world, a person must be either very scared or very angry, and the mundane inspires neither of these emotions. We’re not in danger of painful speech, we’re in danger of temporary madness, and the only madness we are existentially vulnerable to is almost impossible to predict with any kind of specificity. It is from this unpredictable madness we need protection. But how can we protect ourselves from an idea that doesn’t yet exist?
Anger is the binding agent of every mob, from the scale of a few to the scale of a few billion. It feels good to be angry, and when we’re in it we don’t want to let it go. Our greatest defense against madness, then, would be calming down while on some powerful, primal level wanting the opposite. This is something small groups of men have struggled with for as long as we’ve existed, but it has not been until the last few years that a single fit of rage could almost instantly infect the planet. Social media has been an integral part of culture for a period of time that represents seconds of human existence, and we have already seen the emergence of globally-destabilizing conflict because of it. Conflicts of this kind will continue to emerge, and there is no reason to believe we’ve seen the most destructive of them. For the first time in history, we actually have to find a way to manage our impulse toward meme-induced hysteria. At its simplest, a little mental hygiene might be helpful. The notion we all suffer from confirmation bias needs to be normalized, and discussed. When relaying some emotionally-charged story, it is worth relaying first how this kind of story makes you feel in general, and the sort of things you might be missing. Admittedly, in the fever of rage, this will be incredibly difficult. But what about the other end? When receiving a piece of information that evokes anger, could one reflect on the bias of a source, be it a journalist or a friend? Who is the bearer of this bad news, and what are their values? If you had to guess, how would you think they wanted this piece of information to make you feel? Angry? To what end? Getting comfortable with being wrong would also help, as would expecting people around us to be wrong. This, by the way, is something that happens more than it doesn’t. People are constantly wrong. Stories are constantly corrected. That we are not yet skeptical of every new piece of information we receive, with so much evidence all around us now that misinformation is not the exception but the rule, is indication that skepticism of this kind is simply not something we are meaningfully capable of on our own.
Even absent social media, the speed at which rapid political change is possible in America has been accelerating for two centuries. Checks have eroded. Balances have become less balanced. At the same time, the federal government has grown more powerful, and the executive branch commands more of that power than ever. For years, support from the political establishment, itself a kind of moderating function, has not been entirely necessary to succeed in presidential politics. It was only a matter of time before the weakness was exploited. In 2016, America elected a reality television star to the most powerful edifice of political power, at the head of the largest economy, and in command of the most powerful military, in human history. Today, beyond all doubt, anyone can be the president. But even with so unpredictable an office as our presidency the United States is a more stable nation than most. In addition to the genius framework of our government and a couple hundred years of binding, national identity, we are supported by a strong economy, abundant arable land, and friendly neighbors. A far more significant concern is we are now living in a world of smaller nuclear powers with fewer resources that are many of them one trending hashtag away from violent insurrection, and there is no telling what governments, or gangs, will take power in their place. The threat of a fallen nuclear state would of course affect us all. In this way, a meme-induced international mass hysteria would not even be necessary for global cataclysm. A national hysteria, in almost any corner of the world, would do just fine. But there will be international crises. Twitter may have started as a fun place to share jokes, but it has long since morphed into a virtual battleground for ideological war. While most of the conflicts are civil, at least a few have pit governments against each other, and such conflicts will undoubtedly proliferate. We have already watched national leaders threaten each other on the platform, in real time, egged on by crowds of millions. The question is not if a real war, in the physical world, can be started in this environment. We all know it can. Without some dramatic course correction, the question is only when.
Many people correctly intuit something is wrong with social media, and they wonder if it can be fixed with government regulation. It cannot. A federal law prohibiting all politicians at every level from sharing to the popular platforms would be a compelling, partial solution to the specific threat of state-backed, mob-initiated conflict. Legislation of this kind would also be positioned to survive a consumer shift to disintermediated, decentralized social media. But it would not address the central problem with social sharing at scale, and is anyway not the sort of regulation being prescribed. Our loudest regulatory enthusiasts are almost entirely censorship oriented, and they suspiciously tend to map their censorship prescriptions to their personal politics. This alone should be enough of a warning that we shut the notion down. Alas, the conversation rages on, and no one is focused on the principle issue. Content moderation is irrelevant. The greatest possible danger of social media is the catalyzation of mass, relatively instant global action on incomplete or incorrect information. It is true our next information disaster could conceivably take color from whatever sort of speech is at the moment socially unacceptable. But if an idea is already perceived as socially unacceptable to so dramatic a degree as top-down censorship of its discussion is politically feasible, it almost certainly lacks the cultural support for any kind of rapid global movement. The hysteria we’re most at risk of will likely relate in some misguided way to an idea most people already generally value, but it will also be, in some aesthetic sense, new. To be so swept up emotionally as one is moved to immediate physical action, in the physical world, a person must be either very scared or very angry, and the mundane inspires neither of these emotions. We’re not in danger of painful speech, we’re in danger of temporary madness, and the only madness we are existentially vulnerable to is almost impossible to predict with any kind of specificity. It is from this unpredictable madness we need protection. But how can we protect ourselves from an idea that doesn’t yet exist?
Anger is the binding agent of every mob, from the scale of a few to the scale of a few billion. It feels good to be angry, and when we’re in it we don’t want to let it go. Our greatest defense against madness, then, would be calming down while on some powerful, primal level wanting the opposite. This is something small groups of men have struggled with for as long as we’ve existed, but it has not been until the last few years that a single fit of rage could almost instantly infect the planet. Social media has been an integral part of culture for a period of time that represents seconds of human existence, and we have already seen the emergence of globally-destabilizing conflict because of it. Conflicts of this kind will continue to emerge, and there is no reason to believe we’ve seen the most destructive of them. For the first time in history, we actually have to find a way to manage our impulse toward meme-induced hysteria. At its simplest, a little mental hygiene might be helpful. The notion we all suffer from confirmation bias needs to be normalized, and discussed. When relaying some emotionally-charged story, it is worth relaying first how this kind of story makes you feel in general, and the sort of things you might be missing. Admittedly, in the fever of rage, this will be incredibly difficult. But what about the other end? When receiving a piece of information that evokes anger, could one reflect on the bias of a source, be it a journalist or a friend? Who is the bearer of this bad news, and what are their values? If you had to guess, how would you think they wanted this piece of information to make you feel? Angry? To what end? Getting comfortable with being wrong would also help, as would expecting people around us to be wrong. This, by the way, is something that happens more than it doesn’t. People are constantly wrong. Stories are constantly corrected. That we are not yet skeptical of every new piece of information we receive, with so much evidence all around us now that misinformation is not the exception but the rule, is indication that skepticism of this kind is simply not something we are meaningfully capable of on our own.
by Mike Solana, Pirate Wires | Read more:
Image: uncredited
