"The revolution will be televised. It'll fade to black before out eyes. The black and white of static snow will blend into a single glow. And colors on the telescreen will flood our rooms in brilliant schemes. And everything will be as one. The story ends a smoking gun." Closing stanza, 'Robot Candidate' by Ben Krieger (2008)[0]
Really not trying to pick a side here, but to pontificate on the Capitol events without even mentioning BLM, CHAZ, or any of the other civil unrest of the past year just seems unnecessarily biased. Almost all of that was organized, enabled, and inflamed by the exact same technologies.
Can anyone recommend a commentator on recent political events that isn’t deliberately biased? Or maybe the lack of such a person is merely a reflection of the ideas the author is trying to explain.
Social media has purposefully censored such people, for example YouTubers having to use phrases like “beer bug” to refer to COVID or “the nameless party” to refer to Amber Heard — or face the censor bots. Automated narrative enforcement is built into platforms like YouTube already.
Dave Rubin might be a good option; he’s a former Democrat and what I’d describe as “mild right”.
Nobody is perfect and can have both good and bad work. I think Matt is a very gullible person who has bought into many conspiracy theories, some of which are Russian propaganda unfortunately
Taibbi openly says that Trump is incompetent and is taking advantage of his idiot supporters. I doubt that Trump supporters will consider him objective.
But this is either true or it's not. If it is, then is there really much value in giving the "other side" equal time to say "Trump is very competent. Some would say the most competent. We are patriots, not idiots."
Objectivity is a hard thing to find or determine. I consider myself somewhat objective on this issue. I have biases that run counter to most on this site(I lean right politically). I would consider Trump's incompetency to be an objective assessment when considering the massive amount of political blunders that he has made combined with the instability that he has triggered, or at least amplified. I'd say he also took advantage of his base as well, seeing how wildly different their assessment of the election is compared to the mainstream narrative.
If you disagree with me, then how would you measure or determine objectivity?
I recently discovered Axios and have been very impressed with them so far. They are the closest I've seen to the type of news coverage I'm looking for. You can see a summary of their approach here: https://www.axios.com/about/ They stick to the facts and refrain from opinion. For example:
> 3. Every item will be written or produced to inform, analyze and explain. Axios will never be a platform for incitement or argument. We will never have an opinion section.
I would recommend Sam Harris who criticizes harshly the Trump presidency and the Capitol events but who also had the most nuanced view of the BLM protests.
I am not american but from the few commentators that I heard, it seems that he is a rarety in the US, and tries to have the less bias, even if he admits that he has one.
Don't you think it's a bit of a apples to oranges comparison, the raiding of the Capitol in an attempt to supposedly kill Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi and disrupt the election certification - essentially lead by Trump - is different than mass, mostly peaceful protests - that were inflamed by the police?
Head on over to http://thedonald.win if you want to see the narratives they're believing, I check it out a few times a week, some comments from today: "Remember, it's not over til it's over," "Follow Trump's lead," etc - they don't understand, nor do they care to understand the election process - that there are poll watchers from any party that are present at the counting, they don't care to reason to understand they lost the election. They also have bought into a whole bunch of different conspiracy theories - they consider the Democrats as tyrants when it's Trump who's clearly attempting a coup to become a tyrant, suggesting maybe he'll even be President for 3 terms, etc; there's countless proof points relating to his behaviour that he's a tyrant wannabe.
I don’t like Trump, didn’t vote for him, and want him to go back to the reality TV fantasyland from whence he came. But the “counternarrative”, displayed aptly by your comment here, strikes me as very hypocritical and not attempting to understand the Trump supporters’ narrative.
You're assuming I don't understand the Trump supporters' narrative or where it comes from. There's plenty of proof points that that multiple people at the riot, infiltration of the Capitol, was planning more than just breaking shit and disrupting it; there are also anonymous FBI leaks, maybe they're not true - aside from the truth of people at the riot chanting "Hang Mike Pence" - that Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi were targets to assassinate; https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-01-15/capitol-ri...
The cause is Trump et al's rhetoric of lies to rally his base, along with the problem with the political system and mainstream media - more specifically, the duopoly and how mainstream media conglomerates that perpetuate whatever industrial complex fed narratives for "their side" want, leading to only two core mainstream narratives for either the Democrats of Republicans.
Andrew Yang's main policy proposals would break apart the duopoly - expanding the narratives - and take power away from the current mainstream media companies:
- Freedom Dividend/UBI so people can think clearly with less stress,
- Ranked Choice Voting so people aren't wasting their vote and don't feel obligated to vote one of two incumbents,
- Democracy Dollars to wash out lobbyist money from industrial complexes/bad actors by a factor of 8:1 (via $100/year to every eligible voter to contribute to politician of choice),
- Journalism Dollars - same idea, each citizen can "vote" with money allocated to them for journalism - local or national to cover what they have interests in knowing about.
I think I'm forgetting another core policy - but also he wants to implement a government option for healthcare similar to "Medicare For All" - but not killing off private insurance due to the consequences of disrupting that industry immediately - will all strengthen Democracy because it's strengthening, taking care of, people.
Hilarious way to cop out of responding to well explained points and reasoning, and if that's overwhelming to you - I guess you've never written or read an essay before. I'm happy to answer any questions you may have if anything doesn't make sense or confuses you. If you felt overwhelmed by everything I said, you could also just read it slower - if you even bothered to read it before responding. It sounds like you don't put much effort into honest conversation though. I added some spacing to my previous comment, hope that helps you be less overwhelmed.
That seems like a very narrow definition of "bias". You demand not only that news be reported from your perspective but that other news be brought into the analysis before you are willing to listen to someone? Isn't that going to lead to the standard rehash of the BLM arguments instead of understanding of what happened among the Trump base?
I mean, how do you know you aren't just looking for an excuse? It's very upsetting to see people on "your side" doing stuff like attacking their own government. Are you absolutely sure you don't want to talk about left violence just to make yourself feel better?
False equivalence is insidious and you would do well to reflect on that. More broadly, seeking an "unbiased" source is a bit of a fool's errand. The best you can do is seek "honest" sources, and the difference is massive.
It’s not about equivalence. If you’re going to talk about a phenomenon, but leave out all the examples which make your “side” look bad, it just seems like straight bias. I’d prefer commentators leave their identity at the door and just explore the ideas and events themselves.
Do you also feel that any discussion of BLM, CHAZ or left-wing violence must include a mention of violence by Trump supporters and the events of the Capitol in order to be unbiased?
The article is about technology leading to subcultures and echo chambers, subsequently leading to political actions. Leaving out some prominent examples of such (eg. last summer) just seems like bad writing to me.
> Really not trying to pick a side here, but to pontificate on the Capitol events without even mentioning BLM, CHAZ, or any of the other civil unrest of the past year just seems unnecessarily biased.
I disagree.
BLM (e.g.) was about protesting against police brutality and racism. These are bad things in themselves. The fact that some of the protests turned violent is bad, but it was not their intent. In the course of 2020, how many millions of people marched in support of BLM movement? 15-26:
Meanwhile the insurrection was about fighting the results of a valid election. The purpose of gathering was bad in itself (notwithstanding the delusion that the election was stolen) and the violence only added to the badness.
Lastly, major political leaders on both sides condemned the violence occurring at BLM:
The article and my comment are not about determining which was better or more justified. If you’re going to talk about social media leading to political action, but you leave out the single biggest political action of the last year, it’s hard to see that as anything but biased. At best, it’s deeply uninformed.
This kind of debate is likely to go nowhere. As outlined in the article, "reality" varies based on where you get what you consider "information."
One perspective is that centuries of systemic racism lead to Black Lives Matter protests, which were largely peaceful. Social media was a tool used to organize the protests, but did not lead to them.
One perspective is that decades of polarization has led to more extreme views further from an objective reality, which was further enabled and amplified by social media.
One of those realities argues that a massive conspiracy coordinated a secret interference with the election, so that Joe Biden won (but Republicans were allowed to gain quite a few seats in Congress.)
(Yes you can tell which reality I believe, and I can't quite figure out what reality is believed by those that support the invasion of the Capitol building. Perhaps someone can educate me.)
If you cannot agree on some of the above perspectives, then we aren't starting from a shared reality in which we can debate which comments are justified, which are biased, which are uninformed.
Your insistence that the necessity of Black Lives Matter protests is an equivalent phenomenon to the demagoguery of Donald Trump suggests that you do not believe there is systemic racism, that police unequally target and murder black people, that perhaps the election was actually stolen.
Using social media for disinformation campaigns is not equal to using social media to organize peaceful protests. The fact that 7% of those protests involved some kind of violence (which includes escalation by police, counter-protests, opportunistic looters and yes, perhaps some protestors who have plenty of reason for anger escalating to violence) does not take us to the conclusion that social media caused these protests. They were not based on a disinformation campaign. They were based on violent events that took place.
The belief that the election was stolen is not based on violent events taking place. The claims of evidence have all been hand-waving, such as misunderstanding the Blue wave due to a much higher percentage of mail-in ballots going to Democrats, which was caused by disinformation about mail-in ballot fraud.
Looks like we're debating which reality is based on facts, and it does need to be debated. If we had a shared reality, then perhaps there could be debate on what data points need included in an article exploring social media used in disinformation campaigns, but we do not share the same perspective on what is reality.
> barring any large scale and unforeseeable changes to our digital media environment.
#AbolishCopyright. Truth is nature's natural state. It wasn't until symbols were invented that we got lies. But information in the long run likes to settle into true states. Copyright slows down the spread of truth and makes it harder for information to resolve into true states.
When lies have it so easy, you see the catastrophic effects like we did on January 6th.
I don't follow. Facts aren't covered by copyright, so how do copyright laws hinder their spread?
>It wasn't until symbols were invented that we got lies.
This is probably a loose slogan, but it's not correct. People used to share greatly embellished stories with oral traditions before written language. Even before spoken language, chances are people deceived one another. Deception only requires recognition that others have different knowledge and a willingness to exploit that.
pseudo intellectual drivel. at what point do people finally realize that "thought pieces" on substack just don't mean shit in the real world?
this is what Lenin would have derided as "bourgeoise intellectualism"...sitting in your herman miller chair, sipping craft bourbon, writing postmodern pablum on your M1 macbook....wow feel the winds of change
Same reason that people were streaming themselves burning down buildings and looting stores last summer: in-group morality. When your social group thinks you’re doing the right thing, you have no reason to hide your actions.
Absolutely. Again, I’m not choosing a side here, just trying to observe phenomena. My own politics don’t fit neatly into a box.
I think one could accurately describe both as explosions of long-standing resentment, legitimate reasons to be upset, and lack of trust in institutions, finally ignited by social media making it easy to construct exaggerated or outright false narratives.
To me, they are categorically different. One has “answerable” policy objectives, the other does not. One is mostly peaceful, the other mostly violent. One invites a broad base of support, the other is more isolated.
They were acting like the BLM and antifa rioters they witnessed all last summer, who streamed their bad deeds, but faced little consequence (in fact they got media support).
A credible belief in a presidential pardon may have been part of the reckoning. Impeachment, in tying the acts specifically to an impeachable act involving the putative pardoner, may have taken that card off the table.
(1) The availability of digital streaming increases the political 'temperature'. Everyone at the capitol was grandstanding for the digital audience. Look amongst the flags as the crow pushes past barricades. See the selfie sticks. Crazy gets clicks.
(2) But the availability of streaming also reduces the number of participants. People are lazy. If they can, they will participate from their couch rather than walk in the street. If they can scream on twitter, and feel validated as that screaming makes news, they won't bother to march in the streets.
(3) Commentators ignore the FOMO that drove mass protests in the past. Many, especially young people, would turn out to a rally or protest not because they much cared about the subject but because they wanted to see what was happening. They were curious. But digitization means we all have intimate knowledge of everything in real time. So much of the motivation for non-crazy participants, the curiosity of the masses, is gone.
So .. while the digitization of protest has resulted in an increase in the number of extremists, imho we aren't seeing the truly massive turnouts of decades past. Those who do show are more likely to riot, but the majority will riot from behind their keyboards. That is something very different than historical protest movements.
> (1) The availability of digital streaming increases the political 'temperature'.
I see points like this made a lot, and it seems to fail to my mind for Occam's razor reasons. Media makes a difference at the margins, sure, but clearly the reason for the higher "temperature" is the more extreme rhetoric from our leaders.
Trump led his followers into the pit of a Big Lie about evil people stealing an election, and much of the republican party and its media ecosystem followed him there. (And this was just the final expression of a rhetorical style and relationship with the truth that he had applied through the whole administration.) Why can't that be the primary reason for the high "temperature" and not some abstract idea about media?
If we want people to behave like grownups we need to put grownups in charge, basically. If you tell people that the presidency is being stolen they're going to try to steal it back.
> If we want people to behave like grownups we need to put grownups in charge, basically.
This seems to be a very popular idea, I hear it recommended quite regularly.
But what does it really mean? The word "grownup" in this context, if we were to unpack that into extremely high dimensionality (attributes, behaviors, etc), what would that look like? And, would the description have no objective flaws?
In this case, it "really means" picking candidates who will not lie to their supporters and inspire a violent uprising against congress in an attempt to stay in office.
I'm not proposing a rigorous test here which all candidates must pass. I'm pointing out that attempts to finger "digital media" as the root cause of the problem are flawed, and the much simpler reason (albeit less palatable to half the electorate) is simply that we failed to choose a grownup for a leader.
> In this case, it "really means" picking candidates who will not lie to their supporters and inspire a violent uprising against congress in an attempt to stay in office.
Donald Trump passed this rather modest standard prior to this event at the Capitol, did he not?
Or if that's too logically rigorous for you: do you think it is generally quite true that people "behaved like grownups" prior to Donald Trump's presidency?
> I'm not proposing a rigorous test here which all candidates must pass.
Fair enough. But I often wonder: might thinking in such terms provide some value? Let's say that just for fun, us brainiacs here at HN decided to start some sort of an open source collaborative effort where we would crowd source the consideration and documentation of things like a rigorous, highly-dimensional test upon which political candidates could be scored, the scoring of which would be backed up by citations, and all of this would then add to the collective information in our memeplex ecosystem.
The author touches upon this general notion:
> Last summer I argued that, in the context of information superabundance, the Database now precedes the Narrative. Digitization has made possible the dissemination and storage of information at unprecedented scale and speed. To the degree that your view of the world is mediated by digitized information, to that same degree your encounter with the world will be more like an encounter with a Database of unfathomable size than with a coherent narrative of what has happened. The freedom, if we wish to call it that, of confronting the world in this way also implies the possibility that any two people will make their way through the Database along wildly divergent paths.
Do you think such an initiative could possibly provide at least some value to overall humanity?
> I'm pointing out that attempts to finger "digital media" as the root cause of the problem are flawed, and the much simpler reason (albeit less palatable to half the electorate) is simply that we failed to choose a grownup for a leader.
At the risk of coming off as "snarky"....does something not seem even a little bit "off" when you write such things? The "offness" I refer to is the excessive simplicity and incorrectness, and the corresponding irony.
a) I've noted my take on the excessive simplicity and incorrectness of your "grownup" heuristic above.
b) "attempts to finger "digital media" as the root cause of the problem are flawed"
- does the author actually make the claim that digital media is "the(!) root cause"? By my reading, they went to some lengths to establish that they were not thinking in these terms:
>> It’s hard to know where to begin, of course; the situation has many interlocking layers. The most notable and disturbing elements have been well covered, and we continue to learn more about the event each day. The picture, it seems, only grows darker. For my part, I’ve been especially interested in thinking through the role of digital media in these events and what it portends for the future. Here, then, are a few reflections for your consideration along those lines.
>> In light of the complexity and gravity of the situation, which transpired just days ago (although it may already seem like weeks), I feel obliged to stress that this is a tentative exercise in thinking out loud. I’ll begin with a few comments about the labels and categories we use to think about digital media before turning to a more direct analysis of last week’s events and what they reveal about our media environment. More than is usually the case, the following discussion lacks a tight, well-ordered structure, so I’ve supplied the numbering to provide some sense of how my thoughts were grouped together. Think of what follows not so much as an argument but as a series of interlocking perspectives on the same phenomenon.
But historically there is ample evidence that changes in media and communications have profound effects on societies. This is the premise of Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (https://www.worldcat.org/title/printing-press-as-an-agent-of...), much of Hanna Arendt's work, that of the Frankfurt School.
Changes in writing, mathematics, printing, accounting, distribution and computation have had profound effects, often directly tied to periods of conflict: the Reformation, revolutions of 1776--1848 (widespread literacy), the Boer, Spanish-America, and First World wars (yellow journalism), the Second World War and cold wars of Jim Crow, the Red Scare, McCarthyism, and Father Coughlan, as well as the more recent Rwandan civil war (radio and audio recording, playback, and amplification).
Television, Internet, social media, and adtech delivered the "Twitter Revolutions" --- fine when they were in Egypt, Tunisia, and Ukraine, less so in Washington, DC.
True enough, but the notion of the "Big Lie" itself, and the archetype for which it was named, were driven by the age of radio. The idea that social media is uniquely to blame here seems laughable to me.
The operational concept here is not the specific technology, but the relationship of that technology to others of its time.
Radio was the most engaging and direct medium of its age. Paired with magnetic tape recording, a speech or address could be simultaneously broadcast through multiple stations simmultaneously to an entire country (of at least European scale) at high fidelity on a few hours' notice. The allies marvelled at this ability, as their own capabilities were either restricted to single-studio live broadcasts, or vastly lower-fidelity recordings on wire or shellac disks.
Mobile-device-delivered, datacentre adtech-targeted, computational propaganda social media are now, as was radio in 1935, the pinacle of mass media. And similarly destructive.
> While the events of January 6th were the result of a confluence of factors that were in large measure independent of digitization, the event itself could not have happened apart from the general context created by digitization.
I don't think we can claim that. Imagine a media environment akin to the late 90s - largely broadcast media, post-revocation of the Fairness Doctrine - and a president who enjoyed the appreciation of a lower/middle-class conservative constituency that was pro-2nd Amendment.
The President claims the election was fraudulent. That the opposition was stealing power - a violation of the Constitution and everything the country stands for.
It's not hard to imagine getting a similar reaction to 1/6/21.
What a decidedly mealy-mouthed, tepid waste of words. 13 observations, each addressed hastily and with questionable conclusions. People have forgotten how to write. I cannot discern an overarching theme or point. This is the substack equivalent of a tweetstorm. It needs serious editing before it's ready for others to read.
With that said, I think there's a kernel of an interesting idea in point 7. The author mentions Marshall McLuhan but doesn't really make a connection I thought would be made with the invocation, which is that McLuhan's famous exhortation that "The medium is the massage" warned and foretold of the incredible psychic power of owning the means of media production. One could easily extend this into an examination of the manifold global power brokers who power the online dissident right, as well as the origins and applications of right-wing accelerationism.
But to do that, one would need to actually study the people that make them uncomfortable from their own eyes, rather than engaging in rote application of one's pet theories and theorists. I hope the author eventually gets to that point.
61 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadI hope people will also put this in the broader context of human psychology.
Check out this book: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt.
[0] http://www.songfight.org/songpage.php?key=robot_candidate
Can anyone recommend a commentator on recent political events that isn’t deliberately biased? Or maybe the lack of such a person is merely a reflection of the ideas the author is trying to explain.
Dave Rubin might be a good option; he’s a former Democrat and what I’d describe as “mild right”.
“You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists.”
Yeah, let’s avoid that.
If you disagree with me, then how would you measure or determine objectivity?
> 3. Every item will be written or produced to inform, analyze and explain. Axios will never be a platform for incitement or argument. We will never have an opinion section.
Head on over to http://thedonald.win if you want to see the narratives they're believing, I check it out a few times a week, some comments from today: "Remember, it's not over til it's over," "Follow Trump's lead," etc - they don't understand, nor do they care to understand the election process - that there are poll watchers from any party that are present at the counting, they don't care to reason to understand they lost the election. They also have bought into a whole bunch of different conspiracy theories - they consider the Democrats as tyrants when it's Trump who's clearly attempting a coup to become a tyrant, suggesting maybe he'll even be President for 3 terms, etc; there's countless proof points relating to his behaviour that he's a tyrant wannabe.
The cause is Trump et al's rhetoric of lies to rally his base, along with the problem with the political system and mainstream media - more specifically, the duopoly and how mainstream media conglomerates that perpetuate whatever industrial complex fed narratives for "their side" want, leading to only two core mainstream narratives for either the Democrats of Republicans.
Andrew Yang's main policy proposals would break apart the duopoly - expanding the narratives - and take power away from the current mainstream media companies:
- Freedom Dividend/UBI so people can think clearly with less stress,
- Ranked Choice Voting so people aren't wasting their vote and don't feel obligated to vote one of two incumbents,
- Democracy Dollars to wash out lobbyist money from industrial complexes/bad actors by a factor of 8:1 (via $100/year to every eligible voter to contribute to politician of choice),
- Journalism Dollars - same idea, each citizen can "vote" with money allocated to them for journalism - local or national to cover what they have interests in knowing about.
I think I'm forgetting another core policy - but also he wants to implement a government option for healthcare similar to "Medicare For All" - but not killing off private insurance due to the consequences of disrupting that industry immediately - will all strengthen Democracy because it's strengthening, taking care of, people.
I can’t really respond to your comment if you just write a block or rambling text that has little connection to anything.
I mean, how do you know you aren't just looking for an excuse? It's very upsetting to see people on "your side" doing stuff like attacking their own government. Are you absolutely sure you don't want to talk about left violence just to make yourself feel better?
I disagree.
BLM (e.g.) was about protesting against police brutality and racism. These are bad things in themselves. The fact that some of the protests turned violent is bad, but it was not their intent. In the course of 2020, how many millions of people marched in support of BLM movement? 15-26:
* https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-flo...
On a 'per capita' basis, what was the rate of violence for all of that activity? They were overwhelmingly peaceful:
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/16/this-summ...
Settle and Portland were the main two exceptions:
* https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1302643852545646594
Should we go into the violence instigated by the authorities against peaceful BLM protestors?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_photo_op_at_St._J...
Meanwhile the insurrection was about fighting the results of a valid election. The purpose of gathering was bad in itself (notwithstanding the delusion that the election was stolen) and the violence only added to the badness.
Lastly, major political leaders on both sides condemned the violence occurring at BLM:
* https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/09/01/fac...
* https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/01/07/fac...
Whereas some political leaders seemed to encourage aggression/violence at MAGAstock.
One perspective is that centuries of systemic racism lead to Black Lives Matter protests, which were largely peaceful. Social media was a tool used to organize the protests, but did not lead to them.
One perspective is that decades of polarization has led to more extreme views further from an objective reality, which was further enabled and amplified by social media.
One of those realities argues that a massive conspiracy coordinated a secret interference with the election, so that Joe Biden won (but Republicans were allowed to gain quite a few seats in Congress.)
(Yes you can tell which reality I believe, and I can't quite figure out what reality is believed by those that support the invasion of the Capitol building. Perhaps someone can educate me.)
If you cannot agree on some of the above perspectives, then we aren't starting from a shared reality in which we can debate which comments are justified, which are biased, which are uninformed.
Clearly technology has affected politics in the last five years. That doesn’t mean it was the sole source of said political action.
This seems so tritely obvious to me I don’t know why it needs to be debated.
Using social media for disinformation campaigns is not equal to using social media to organize peaceful protests. The fact that 7% of those protests involved some kind of violence (which includes escalation by police, counter-protests, opportunistic looters and yes, perhaps some protestors who have plenty of reason for anger escalating to violence) does not take us to the conclusion that social media caused these protests. They were not based on a disinformation campaign. They were based on violent events that took place.
The belief that the election was stolen is not based on violent events taking place. The claims of evidence have all been hand-waving, such as misunderstanding the Blue wave due to a much higher percentage of mail-in ballots going to Democrats, which was caused by disinformation about mail-in ballot fraud.
Looks like we're debating which reality is based on facts, and it does need to be debated. If we had a shared reality, then perhaps there could be debate on what data points need included in an article exploring social media used in disinformation campaigns, but we do not share the same perspective on what is reality.
#AbolishCopyright. Truth is nature's natural state. It wasn't until symbols were invented that we got lies. But information in the long run likes to settle into true states. Copyright slows down the spread of truth and makes it harder for information to resolve into true states.
When lies have it so easy, you see the catastrophic effects like we did on January 6th.
>It wasn't until symbols were invented that we got lies.
This is probably a loose slogan, but it's not correct. People used to share greatly embellished stories with oral traditions before written language. Even before spoken language, chances are people deceived one another. Deception only requires recognition that others have different knowledge and a willingness to exploit that.
Ah, this is a good point, thanks! Will need to tweak my terms.
this is what Lenin would have derided as "bourgeoise intellectualism"...sitting in your herman miller chair, sipping craft bourbon, writing postmodern pablum on your M1 macbook....wow feel the winds of change
It struck me that the instinct to show off to online followers is more powerful than the instinct to hide from the consequences of the crime.
In that sense, the promise of online notoriety seemed to propel the mob as much as, or more than, any deeply held ideology.
I’m curious: do you see categorical similarity between the events of January 6 and the events of the summer of 2020?
I think one could accurately describe both as explosions of long-standing resentment, legitimate reasons to be upset, and lack of trust in institutions, finally ignited by social media making it easy to construct exaggerated or outright false narratives.
To me, they are categorically different. One has “answerable” policy objectives, the other does not. One is mostly peaceful, the other mostly violent. One invites a broad base of support, the other is more isolated.
(2) But the availability of streaming also reduces the number of participants. People are lazy. If they can, they will participate from their couch rather than walk in the street. If they can scream on twitter, and feel validated as that screaming makes news, they won't bother to march in the streets.
(3) Commentators ignore the FOMO that drove mass protests in the past. Many, especially young people, would turn out to a rally or protest not because they much cared about the subject but because they wanted to see what was happening. They were curious. But digitization means we all have intimate knowledge of everything in real time. So much of the motivation for non-crazy participants, the curiosity of the masses, is gone.
So .. while the digitization of protest has resulted in an increase in the number of extremists, imho we aren't seeing the truly massive turnouts of decades past. Those who do show are more likely to riot, but the majority will riot from behind their keyboards. That is something very different than historical protest movements.
I see points like this made a lot, and it seems to fail to my mind for Occam's razor reasons. Media makes a difference at the margins, sure, but clearly the reason for the higher "temperature" is the more extreme rhetoric from our leaders.
Trump led his followers into the pit of a Big Lie about evil people stealing an election, and much of the republican party and its media ecosystem followed him there. (And this was just the final expression of a rhetorical style and relationship with the truth that he had applied through the whole administration.) Why can't that be the primary reason for the high "temperature" and not some abstract idea about media?
If we want people to behave like grownups we need to put grownups in charge, basically. If you tell people that the presidency is being stolen they're going to try to steal it back.
This seems to be a very popular idea, I hear it recommended quite regularly.
But what does it really mean? The word "grownup" in this context, if we were to unpack that into extremely high dimensionality (attributes, behaviors, etc), what would that look like? And, would the description have no objective flaws?
I'm not proposing a rigorous test here which all candidates must pass. I'm pointing out that attempts to finger "digital media" as the root cause of the problem are flawed, and the much simpler reason (albeit less palatable to half the electorate) is simply that we failed to choose a grownup for a leader.
Donald Trump passed this rather modest standard prior to this event at the Capitol, did he not?
Or if that's too logically rigorous for you: do you think it is generally quite true that people "behaved like grownups" prior to Donald Trump's presidency?
> I'm not proposing a rigorous test here which all candidates must pass.
Fair enough. But I often wonder: might thinking in such terms provide some value? Let's say that just for fun, us brainiacs here at HN decided to start some sort of an open source collaborative effort where we would crowd source the consideration and documentation of things like a rigorous, highly-dimensional test upon which political candidates could be scored, the scoring of which would be backed up by citations, and all of this would then add to the collective information in our memeplex ecosystem.
The author touches upon this general notion:
> Last summer I argued that, in the context of information superabundance, the Database now precedes the Narrative. Digitization has made possible the dissemination and storage of information at unprecedented scale and speed. To the degree that your view of the world is mediated by digitized information, to that same degree your encounter with the world will be more like an encounter with a Database of unfathomable size than with a coherent narrative of what has happened. The freedom, if we wish to call it that, of confronting the world in this way also implies the possibility that any two people will make their way through the Database along wildly divergent paths.
Do you think such an initiative could possibly provide at least some value to overall humanity?
> I'm pointing out that attempts to finger "digital media" as the root cause of the problem are flawed, and the much simpler reason (albeit less palatable to half the electorate) is simply that we failed to choose a grownup for a leader.
At the risk of coming off as "snarky"....does something not seem even a little bit "off" when you write such things? The "offness" I refer to is the excessive simplicity and incorrectness, and the corresponding irony.
a) I've noted my take on the excessive simplicity and incorrectness of your "grownup" heuristic above.
b) "attempts to finger "digital media" as the root cause of the problem are flawed"
- does the author actually make the claim that digital media is "the(!) root cause"? By my reading, they went to some lengths to establish that they were not thinking in these terms:
>> It’s hard to know where to begin, of course; the situation has many interlocking layers. The most notable and disturbing elements have been well covered, and we continue to learn more about the event each day. The picture, it seems, only grows darker. For my part, I’ve been especially interested in thinking through the role of digital media in these events and what it portends for the future. Here, then, are a few reflections for your consideration along those lines.
>> In light of the complexity and gravity of the situation, which transpired just days ago (although it may already seem like weeks), I feel obliged to stress that this is a tentative exercise in thinking out loud. I’ll begin with a few comments about the labels and categories we use to think about digital media before turning to a more direct analysis of last week’s events and what they reveal about our media environment. More than is usually the case, the following discussion lacks a tight, well-ordered structure, so I’ve supplied the numbering to provide some sense of how my thoughts were grouped together. Think of what follows not so much as an argument but as a series of interlocking perspectives on the same phenomenon.
- ...
But historically there is ample evidence that changes in media and communications have profound effects on societies. This is the premise of Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (https://www.worldcat.org/title/printing-press-as-an-agent-of...), much of Hanna Arendt's work, that of the Frankfurt School.
Changes in writing, mathematics, printing, accounting, distribution and computation have had profound effects, often directly tied to periods of conflict: the Reformation, revolutions of 1776--1848 (widespread literacy), the Boer, Spanish-America, and First World wars (yellow journalism), the Second World War and cold wars of Jim Crow, the Red Scare, McCarthyism, and Father Coughlan, as well as the more recent Rwandan civil war (radio and audio recording, playback, and amplification).
Television, Internet, social media, and adtech delivered the "Twitter Revolutions" --- fine when they were in Egypt, Tunisia, and Ukraine, less so in Washington, DC.
The Big Lie cannot exist without mass media.
Radio was the most engaging and direct medium of its age. Paired with magnetic tape recording, a speech or address could be simultaneously broadcast through multiple stations simmultaneously to an entire country (of at least European scale) at high fidelity on a few hours' notice. The allies marvelled at this ability, as their own capabilities were either restricted to single-studio live broadcasts, or vastly lower-fidelity recordings on wire or shellac disks.
Mobile-device-delivered, datacentre adtech-targeted, computational propaganda social media are now, as was radio in 1935, the pinacle of mass media. And similarly destructive.
> While the events of January 6th were the result of a confluence of factors that were in large measure independent of digitization, the event itself could not have happened apart from the general context created by digitization.
I don't think we can claim that. Imagine a media environment akin to the late 90s - largely broadcast media, post-revocation of the Fairness Doctrine - and a president who enjoyed the appreciation of a lower/middle-class conservative constituency that was pro-2nd Amendment.
The President claims the election was fraudulent. That the opposition was stealing power - a violation of the Constitution and everything the country stands for.
It's not hard to imagine getting a similar reaction to 1/6/21.
With that said, I think there's a kernel of an interesting idea in point 7. The author mentions Marshall McLuhan but doesn't really make a connection I thought would be made with the invocation, which is that McLuhan's famous exhortation that "The medium is the massage" warned and foretold of the incredible psychic power of owning the means of media production. One could easily extend this into an examination of the manifold global power brokers who power the online dissident right, as well as the origins and applications of right-wing accelerationism.
But to do that, one would need to actually study the people that make them uncomfortable from their own eyes, rather than engaging in rote application of one's pet theories and theorists. I hope the author eventually gets to that point.