THE ROAD TO PERDITION

Continuing the discussion of peace and prosperity being the greatest threat to a Republic, leading to its citizens tearing it apart, it’s as obvious as the nose on one’s face that the revolutionary power of social media is creating a situation that - while we can identify it from previous outbreaks through history - presents challenges never before faced. Its very ubiquity is its power.

The other week, I talked with a Guy In The Business I know who literally lives on his phone, and he was complaining that the phone had become a “doom machine.” As he put it, every morning he wakes up and has to check his messages. “And way too much of it is people who are angry over something they didn’t know happened till they read it on social media.

I got off Nextdoor about six weeks after I signed on. Over those six weeks of discovering exactly how fucking ignorant and stupid everyone who lived around me was - or at least a significant number of them - I didn’t like living in my neighborhood. You can enlarge that to the country. It used to be the idiots were just someone ranting in a bar, or that neighbor everyone knew to stay away from. But they were isolated morons. Now, they can find each other - across the neighborhood, the city, the country, the damn planet!

Our politics, institutions, and reality itself seem to be fractured..

What happened is, the algorithms discovered that the best way to “engage” people is emotionally, and the emotion most likely to promote engagement is hate. And since the basis of the profits the social media companies create is from engagement... Well. They’re not going to reform themselves, not when there is Money To Be Made From All this.

But we have to realize that the online garbage, whether it’s political or scientific misinformation or flat-out racism, is created because there’s an audience for it. When we talk about “engagement,” we are talking about ourselves. We are the ones clicking. We are often the ones telling the platforms, “More of this, please.”

Author Richard Seymour writes in his book The Twittering Machine, if social media “confronts us with a string of calamities—addiction, depression, ‘fake news,’ trolls, online mobs, alt-right subcultures—it is only exploiting and magnifying problems that are already socially pervasive.” He goes on, “If we’ve found ourselves addicted to social media, in spite or because of its frequent nastiness … then there is something in us that’s waiting to be addicted.”

It’s worth asking: What if the internet feels miserable, and makes those of us posting and reacting feel miserable, because so many people are miserable in the first place?

Misery is measurable. By global standards, Americans are relatively happy. But there’s reason to worry: Between 1959-2014, average life expectancy in the United States increased by nine years. Since then, that has reversed and the pandemic led to a sharp decline; life expectancy dropped a full year in 2020. From 2005 to 2019, an average 70,000 Americans died “deaths of despair,” such as overdose and suicide. Economic trends show declining social mobility. Mental-health issues are on the rise, especially among young people. The surgeon general warned this month of “devastating” consequences, quoting a 2019 survey that found that “one in three high school students and half of female students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, an overall increase of 40% from 2009.” He cited stressors such as climate change, racial injustice, and income inequality.

I’ve been asking myself, why were there no school shootings when I was in school? It’s not just that there was limited access to guns. It was that we didn’t despair enough to even think of such things.

What happens when the”drunk at the bar” finds all the other drunks at all the other bars?

Alienated and angry people have built communities around shared grievances. Millions of Americans feel left behind, under siege, and out of opportunities. The acceptance and fellowship online communities bring, be they Substack blogs or Facebook groups, or my online scale modeling club with its international membership, allows people who may feel alone for whatever reason to find others who are similarly situated. When there are true believers and cynical grifters around to start or join those groups, these feelings frequently turn to hate. Believe it or not, that scale modeling site had arguments break out over the scale models, arguments that went way “off the rails” a couple times.

The problem is, people are evolved to have conversation directly; if we can’t see a person’s face who we’re talking to, or at least hear the emotional tone in their voice, we lose probably 50 percent of the full communication. No matter how many “emoticons” get used online, it’s not the same thing. A statement that is “innocent” or designed to be “funny” in full context can be taken the exact opposite way.

Misery is a powerful grouping force. In a famous 1950s study, the social psychologist Stanley Schachter found that when research subjects were told that an upcoming electrical-shock test would be painful, most wished to wait for their test in groups, but most of those who thought the shock would be painless wanted to wait alone. “Misery doesn’t just love any kind of company,” Schachter memorably argued. “It loves only miserable company.”

“Misery loves company.” This is often the reasoning for trolls. I personally picked up a couple of online stalkers, who I later came to understand were harassing me because I’m a person doing things they wish they could and never will. There are studies that prove this, that emotions of all kinds are highly contagious on the web - but most especially the negative ones. Gresham’s Law - “bad money drives out good” - applies to more than economics. A study by Harvard social scientists Amit Goldenberg and Stanford’s James J. Gross found that people “share their personal emotions online in a way that affects not only their own well-being, but also the well-being of others who are connected to them.” Of all the emotions expressed, anger seems to spread furthest and fastest. It tends to “cascade to more users by shares and retweets, enabling quicker distribution to a larger audience.”

The people who invented the internet thought that connecting the world would be an unmitigated good. It’s true that widespread internet access and social media make it far easier for the average person to hear and be heard by many more of their fellow citizens. Which turns out not to be an “unmitigated good.”

People who - before the internet - were alienated and isolated, can now find each other. And they can now reach the rest of us. The result is that the average internet user now has more exposure than all previous generations to individuals who, for any number of reasons, are hurting. Do they bring us all down?

In an essay titled “Facebook Is Other People,” (you can read the whole thing on his Substack blog - https://kevinmunger.substack.com/p/facebook-is-other-people ) Professor Kevin Munger writes: “Millions of Americans are miserable. The internet has ‘gotten worse’ because Americans are not OK. Near-universal internet access means that there are immiserated, lonely people spending many hours a day online. The breakdown in the social fabric, climbing ‘prime-age’ unemployment and high rates of addiction and mental illness manifest themselves in our mutually-constructed online spaces. There is a misery that wants to make itself known--to inflict itself on the world--that social media enables. We are reaping what we've sown; the interconnectedness enabled by the internet and the gains from open communication/cooperation cannot succeed while so many are left behind.”

Munger quotes from Chekhov’s famous story “Gooseberries”:

“Just look at this life: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, impossible poverty all around us, overcrowding, degeneracy, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lies….Yet in all the houses and streets it’s quiet, peaceful; of the fifty thousand living in a town, there is not one who would cry out, or become loudly indignant. We see those who go to the market to buy food, eat during the day, sleep during the night, who talk their nonsense, get married, grow old, complacently drag their dead to the cemetery; but we don’t see or hear those who suffer, and the horrors of life go on somewhere behind the scenes. Everything is quiet, peaceful, and only mute statistics protest: so many gone mad, so many buckets drunk, so many children dead of malnutrition....

“At the door of every contented, happy man somebody should stand with a little hammer, constantly tapping, to remind him that unhappy people exist, that however happy he may be, sooner or later life will show him its claws, some calamity will befall him—illness, poverty, loss—and nobody will hear or see, just as he doesn’t hear or see others now. But there is nobody with a little hammer, the happy man lives on, and the petty cares of life stir him only slightly, as wind stirs an aspen—and everything is fine.”

Until it isn’t. As to solutions, Munger finally asks: “What kind of content moderation system is robust to millions of broken, embittered peopled willing to spend thousands of hours inflicting pain on a society that let them slip through the cracks?”

Marjorie Taylor Greene got her personal account permanently banned from Twitter yesterday. But today she’s back. At Parler, at Gab, at every right wing comms site. You and I might not hear anything more from this professional troll, but the people who will hear from her are the ones most at risk from hearing the crap she spouts. When Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey or the others get grilled by Congress, the subtext is this: if their companies could only implement the proper moderation policies, remove a few of the most toxic personalities, and change the way content is recommended, the problem would go away.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is merely the most recent proof that’s not true.

Yes, the leaked Facebook Papers do show how Facebook’s obsession with growth exacerbated civic problems globally. Most of the big internet companies have standardized privacy invasion and surveillance as the basis of their business model. Their algorithms accelerated dangerous things like QAnon. Their algorithms give a natural advantage to the most shameless users. The platforms aren’t just exposing reality; they’re warping it.

A Yale study of almost 13 million tweets found that users who expressed outrage were rewarded with engagement, which made them express yet more outrage. The platforms don’t just spark unrest and incubate hatred; they also reveal a depressing truth about the state of this country. In a recent essay, the journalist Joseph Bernstein asked whether social media is “creating new types of people, or simply revealing long-obscured types of people to a segment of the public unaccustomed to seeing them.” Both things can be true.

Technology is only part of the battle. The platforms provide the supply, but people—the lost and the miserable and the left-behind—provide the demand.

The problem isn’t technology. It’s the existence of major inequality, a weak social safety net, a lack of accountability for unchecked corporate power. The technology allows people to distract themselves with conspiracies and Big Lies, that deflect them from seeing what has happened to them.

How do you solve this? I don’t really know. I do know that getting off Facebook 18 months ago turned out to be an act of mental health. A person like me, who likes to argue ideas, needs to be careful where those arguments happen, because passion and attachment can accelerate anything.

An editor of a magazine I used to contribute to let me know today that he’s retiring at the end of the month. He reminded me that when the company publishing the magazine was purchased by a private equity partnership several years ago, I told him “You will live to regret this. Those people are conscienceless thieves.” And then he told me that when difficulty arose in the pandemic, the corporate owners stopped paying the people who created the content - the writers. I wrote him back that his e-mail reminded me of the scene in “Broadcast News” (a very prescient movie I just saw again Saturday night) in which the News Division President asks Holly Hunter’s character, after she has told him why he shouldn’t do something he has decided to do, “What’s it like, being the smartest person in the room?” and she replies, “It’s awful!”

And the people who wrecked that very nice little magazine won’t suffer for so doing. They won’t sacrifice a penny. They’ll just close the business, write it off the books, and move on to the next victim.

When I look back at the past 40 years, at all the changes that have happened, what I see is the OPPOSITE of “progress.”

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