While the concepts of evolution were abstracted from observations of changes in biological phenotypes through geographical and chronological space, the concepts involved with biological evolution, such as winners survive and losers disappear, are as applicable to other spaces in which entities find themselves in competition, such as political systems.
This came to mind while reading the latest Sullivan noir analysis of today’s American society:
And the reason this dystopian scenario is so credible is not just the fault of these political actors. It’s ours too — thanks to the impact of social media. I think we’ve under-estimated just how deep the psychological damage has been in the Trump era — rewiring the minds of everyone, including your faithful correspondent, in ways that make democratic discourse harder and harder and harder to model. The new Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, is, for that reason, a true must-watch. It doesn’t say anything shockingly new, but it persuasively weaves together a whole bunch of points to reveal just how deeply and thoroughly fucked we are. Seriously, take a look.
The doc effectively shows how the information system necessary for democratic deliberation has, in effect, been jerry-rigged in the last decade to prevent any reasoning at all. It’s all about the feels, and the irrationality, and the moment, which is why Trump is so perfectly attuned to his time. And what’s smart about the documentary is that it shows no evil genius behind this unspooling, no sinister plot deliberately to destroy our system of government. One of the more basic motives in American life — making money — is all you now need, the documentary shows, to detonate American democracy at its foundation.
For Facebook and Google and Instagram and Twitter, the business goal quickly became maximizing and monetizing human attention via addictive dopamine hits. Attention, they meticulously found, is correlated with emotional intensity, outrage, shock and provocation. Give artificial intelligence this simple knowledge about what distracts and compels humans, let the algorithms do their work, and the profits snowball. The cumulative effect — and it’s always in the same incendiary direction — is mass detachment from reality, and immersion in tribal fever.
There is nothing that guarantees or sanctifies the American political system and, therefore, American society. Despite the cries of the false prophets, to drive home the point, God has never come down and printed on a rock, America will always survive, nor, for that matter, America is perfect.
But that belief in our invincibility is what drives too many of us. Here we are, in a mad struggle to impose ideologies from both ends of the spectrum, as if they had been literally handed down from on high.
And that is a small, but significant, part of the problem: that we know. That we know what God thinks, that we know how to reorder society because of some leftist text, that we know because Alex Jones[1] huffed and grunted out a message that confirms what QAnon seems to be saying, because Trump contradicts himself and reality and we know that must really mean something.
Enough! Enough!
Our hubris, our arrogance, makes us think we know how to run society a priori, and that absolutism is part of what forces people to join our political cults simply out of self-defense. The other side is out to take away certain rights – and the veracity of each of those claims that rights will be taken away doesn’t matter – and therefore everyone who values those rights has to join the other cult.
I’m angry, I’m upset, all over what I think is the result of a number of people greedily vying for power. That’s a subject for another post, because my brain is starting to freeze up. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at the contretemps ordinary Americans find themselves in. I think Professor Turchin would say that since we lost our last avowed existential enemy, the Soviet Union, and therefore the overriding reason to stick together (asabiya, to use his terminology), we were doomed to see all the unleashed egos and hubris from both ends of the political spectrum collide in an awful melee. The arrival of the Web appears to have exacerbated the event. And – in a topic for another post – I suspect compartmentalization, which is a fancy word for saying I’m not responsible for anything outside my bailiwick! has its part of the blame to bear as well.
Will American society survive the Web? I don’t know. Stay tuned – but don’t drink the Kool-Aid.
