Strange times
Doomscrolling through it
“Technology has produced a melding of journalism and politics, to the degradation of both…”
– George Will
The Metaverse is not quite a “reality” yet, but it seems like people are already living parallel lives. One in a physical world of friendships and work and recreation. The other in a digital world of hysteria.
In his Washington Post column last week, George Will laments the social and political demise brought about by technology. First it was the radio, then it was the television, and now we’re all illiterate zombies, our emotions being flung around like a pinball by the levers of partisan hacks.
This analysis might seem harsh until you spend a few minutes on social media. The level of absurdity on Twitter is truly a sight to behold. Here in Arizona, gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, a former newscaster, frequently demeans reporters face-to-face and then publishes the video clips on her social media feeds. It would be easy to ridicule this kind of digital bombast as performance art, but that would be a mistake, because the actors are fully committed to playing the part. Our parallel worlds are colliding.
There are no boundaries in the meta-political sphere. No reference to tradition, except to wield as a tool to pull on people’s heartstrings. Nostalgia. Patriotism. Righteousness. Available on the cheap. No respect for facts or objective truth. Just one big pinball machine.
Rusty Bowers, the Arizona Republican who bucked the way-too-online-extremists in his party and told the truth before the January 6th committee, warned of the danger of falling back into the days when “rhetoric ruled … much more powerfully than the truth.”
Truth is a mixed bag in American history. There is a great book called Infamous Scribblers about the “rowdy beginnings” of American journalism. The newspapers of the early republic did not differentiate between news and opinion. The papers were openly partisan and loose with facts. The point of a newspaper was to inform, entertain, and persuade.
Journalistic ethics and standards didn’t emerge until later. These guardrails held steady for a time … before collapsing into a digital free-for-all.
As the gate-keepers of news were overthrown, so began the era of instant, obligatory hot takes on every developing story.
The difference between the Revolutionary Era and today is the scope and ease of broadcasting. The landscape is much more complicated today, with radio and cable TV, podcasts and blogs, social media and the dark web.
There’s also weaponized disinformation — paid and volunteer trolls who intentionally stoke fear, anger, and confusion. This is easy to do on social media. It would have been much harder to “flood the zone with shit” in the days of printed pamphlets and newspapers.
Of course, technological change is not the only reason why people are angry and confused. Observing the last few decades of United States history, there is much to be angry about. Our society would have been vulnerable to demagoguery, regardless of the communication tools at hand. We live in a confusing time, generally, for reasons I would attribute to the weakening of cultural and civic institutions.
A recent article in Education Next makes an argument that, to improve the academic and social outcomes for our kids, we should take away their phones. This is a feasible solution for raising well-adjusted kids, but it doesn’t do much to address the broader epistemic and civic crises facing America right now.
To fix those, we’re going to need the adults to tone down their antisocial online behavior.
One glimmer of hope in this madness is the emergence of better online platforms. Substack is an example of a company working to subvert the logic of the attention economy, where charlatans thrive. You can still find rowdy content on Substack, but it’s more like the classic rowdiness of the mid 2000s, rather than the nihilistic chaos of the late 2010s. Substack has created a sustainable home for independent journalism, and is now building more interactive features.
History has shown that technological iterations can lead to big changes. If we’re going to emerge from this chaotic era with pieces intact, it’s going to take a process of peaceful simmering. Twitter is not built for peaceful simmering. Meta clearly doesn’t care what happens to society.
One way for us to cool our collective jets is to take a small step away from destructive online platforms and spend a bit more time on more thoughtful ones.
Or you could always go retro and crack open a good book.
