I have little to say publicly about events of the last few weeks not because I don’t have opinions, but because we now exist in a social structure in which expressing them rarely serves any helpful purpose.
If I say that a lot of people have said a lot of very stupid things, and frequently that the stupidest things have attracted the most attention, I am not saying anything that goes beyond common sense.
If you don’t think that this is happening to some extent on all sides of the political spectrum, there’s probably little point to reading further in this essay.
If it seems like I’m beginning with some intentionally tortuous sentences to reduce the risk of knee-jerk reactions turning one or another eyes of Sauron on me, you’re right about that.
The question is why the (frequently crazy) things being said and transmitted are being said and transmitted in the way that they are. Far beyond anonymous commenters and fringe elements, people of reasonable prestige and pedigree are mindlessly sloganeering and bullying, then often finding themselves quite surprised when they get in trouble for saying and doing uncontroversially controversial things. Dynamics that are more familiar to us from the depths of social media (dogpiling, flame wars, doxxing, death threats, etc.) have spilled out into the arenas of public protest and campus activism.
Yet even though the dynamics are the same, it’s not clear that the people are. We aren’t seeing inveterate online crackpots mobilizing offline in response to Middle East developments. Rather, a much broader swath of society is being caught up in parroting speech that they either seem to have mindlessly adopted or that they truly don’t seem to understand. I can point to Kenneth Roth’s interview not because I necessarily agree with it but because it casually obeys standards of civil discourse that have been been dropped broadly across the board.
I have heard people who would otherwise be deemed “reasonable” by societal standards calling for ethnic cleansing and worse of either Israel or Gaza. Some of these calls are truly sincere, but others seem strikingly disconnected from the practical implications of their words, as though the meaning of their words started and ended with their performance. That, in turn likely affects why their speakers are surprised at subsequent reactions: they are not accustomed to performances reverberating beyond their initial context.
In my book Meganets, I deal with the consequences of the fact that online life has brought with us an unprecedented situation of an abundance of content being generated at an exponentially greater rate than ever before. The result has been a kind of self-sorting, as the comparatively primitive algorithms of “engagement” cause our systems to group people together by their social and political affinities. Far beyond a “filter bubble,” it creates narrative bunkers of the kind I’ve described in the past. These narrative bunkers don’t just gate what gets let in, but they cause a social reinforcement mechanism within each group that proves to be very powerful, such that outside social forces become far less powerful.
The result is that large-scale forces of social normativity, of the sort that dominated in the last half of the 20th century, have lost a tremendous amount of influence. Prior to mass media, homogeneous groups weren’t particularly aware of one another. In the age of mass media, they became aware of one another, but their interactions were mediated through a stabilizing (if somewhat oppressive and hardly pure) discourse set by a national class of elites. You didn’t hear from other groups directly, but heard their statements and positions via the media and politicians that spoke of those other groups. That created a tremendous mediating buffer, albeit one that benefitted those controlling the mediation.
Now, however, we have the fragile situation in which every little narrative bunker, be it online or offline or academic or religious or what-have-you, is granted a license to reinforce itself in all its unchecked excesses, except with the possibility that at any point circumstances may abruptly expose any little narrative bunker to the wider world and put the clash between its internal discourse and the discourses of so many other narrative bunkers on full display. That is what has happened in the last few weeks. People accustomed to saying things that were wholly uncontroversial, even encouraged, within their narrative bunkers, and who were subject to few if any checks outside those bunkers, suddenly were assessed by drastically different normative standards, and the results were combustible.
What’s troubling is that all it took was a decade or two of hermetic isolation of discourse for civil discourse to turn into self-reinforcing agitprop, even in a number of “intellectual” or “rational” spaces, where self-assertion of moral superiority came to substitute for logic and argument. These spaces have always existed, but their drastic multiplication, and the near-violent expression when triggered by the intrusion of the rest of the world, is a significant and destabilizing force. The multiplicity of protests is a new development, and demographic explanations are not convincing. It’s the underlying change to human social organization itself.
I don’t think this situation is hopeless, but I also think it isn’t going to be fixed through any amount of ostracism or shaming. To protect themselves from being caught out, people will increasingly fragment their identities based on what is acceptable in each different context in which they exist—but this fragmentation is going to be more severe than the differences in self-presentation we’re all accustomed to, because the approval within a narrative bunker is so all-consumingly strong. How that gets balanced against the usually-silent-but-occasionally-deafening disapproval from outside the narrative bunker will take some time to stabilize. Traveling outside of one’s preferred narrative bunker (for work, say) will become more intrinsically alienating. That psychological pressure will have far-reaching effects.