WaPo’s Matt Bai became despondent over social media back in September:
Rarely has the corrosion of social media been so plainly exposed as it has been since last week, after the horrific killing of Charlie Kirk. First came the prurient images of a man’s dying moment, a kind of Zapruder GIF spreading at the speed of light. Then the usual performative posts, issued as if we were all awaiting the poster’s personal statement on the tragedy, devoid of substance and intended mainly to convey moral superiority. These were followed by President Donald Trump himself (on his very own social media platform) vowing to take vengeance on his political opponents. And finally, the self-righteous stomping of contrarian views, resulting in damaged careers, because there’s no point in having an online mob if you can’t give it someone to trample.
He has three blames, none, he says, original with him:
- Companies care about money, not societal health;
- We’re no good at detecting falsehoods;
- Folks prefer epistemic bubbles for its self-affirmation, rather than the ego-rotting civic squares where your opinions will almost certainly be cut to ribbons by everyone trying to move up the social prestige ladder.
But we’re talking about complex human behaviors, and these blames strike me as being at a secondary level. Instead, I’m think of this:
Overpopulation. This is one of my recurring themes, and as Turchin notes[1], one of the characteristics of overpopulation is that those who consider themselves heirs to the elite, namely the literal heirs, as well as embittered also-rans, make the entire ship of civilization unstable and liable to capsizing, by which I mean the elite and elite wannabes engage in both overt and covert warfare. Another characteristic of such over-population is a lack of useful, positive purpose for those scrabbling to advance their fortunes. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop, goes the old saying, and while not universal, it often seems that those lacking a strong, positive purpose find their own purposes and rationalizations for employing any means, even foul, to accomplish those goals.- Publishing cost. One of the attractive qualities of current social media is the putative cost. Facebook is free, as are many platforms of that class, although some would argue that the divulgence of certain information by users is another cost, and I’m inclined to agree. Personal blogs can range in cost from virtually nothing, at least last time I looked, through a couple of hundred dollars for something in UMB’s[2] class, and presumably onwards and upwards. My point is that, compared to he newspapers of, say, the 1980s, this is an insanely cheap way to be published, and that is a … negative. If it costs little to nothing to churn out lies, much like National Enquirer of the aforementioned bygone era did, then, if that generates an opening to move up the social prestige ladder and your conscience is weak, then why not? But if it’s costly, then it becomes an investment that generally should be protected by running a professional operation, including honest reporting and all that goes along with it. Having memories of National Enquirer, since they covered Bigfoot and other dubious phenomenon that interested me in my foolish youth, I can report that their product was sensationalistic crap: bad physical product, bad editorial control, bad everything. They, and one or two other publications, were the exceptions that proved the rule. When the Web came along and costs dropped, National Enquirer … died. Much like the professional porn mags, they couldn’t compete when suddenly lower costs flooded the market with terrible, amateur competitors. Similarly, quality publications, like the local newspaper, generally were out-competed by low-cost competitors who didn’t have the physical plant and thus could spit out any old thing and not pay for poor quality, and then pass on their savings to their audience. The inability of audiences to distinguish falsehoods is because they hadn’t any practice; previous to the Web, the Editor of the publication and his minions fact-checked reporters’ submissions, and the good editors made sure to separate fact from derived opinion. Now, left and right, the lack of cost means that poor quality and outright falsehoods are acceptable, because the storm of information conceals the sources of the fallacious reporting; thus are the necessary feedback loops obscured and even outright broken. All by the mistake of thinking money, either big profits or zero cost, is linked to morality.
OK, so there’s probably more, but those are two reasons for media, social or commercial, to have become toxic.
1 I can recommend Turchin and Nefedov’s Secular Cycles, and Turchin’s War and Peace and War on this subject. I have not ventured beyond Chapter 1 of Turchin’s Ages of Discord, but this seems more technical and more valuable for those with the patience to wade through the math. I believe it did address this subject was addressed, where it notes the time span of internecine warfare is roughly that of two generations, because those liable to fight to the death over the issues of the day have to, in fact, die before compromise or even capitulation can occur.
2 UMB, you know, Unsightly Mental Blemishes. The blog you’re reading right now, yeah?
