I was recently at a party when someone I hadn’t seen in a while said, “I found out that two of my cousins are actually Trump supporters. Like, actual Trump supporters. Seriously. Like they actually support Trump. I couldn’t believe it.”
I couldn’t believe it. It’s one thing to talk with disdain about your political opponents, but how striking that she genuinely couldn’t fathom that Trump supporters are real, or at least that any would find themselves in distant relation with her. This political species making up about a half of the American electorate (not to mention his international admirers), it is at best irrational to impute such an unlikelihood to this kind of discovery. But given our desperate need (in the service of everybody calming down a bit) for proactive efforts at understanding each other a little better, the development of this sentiment may well be a kind of vice.
Forget for a moment any moralising about charity in politics and think strategically. Perhaps your only concern is, understandably, keeping him out of office. Fine. But to defeat something, you must understand it. And treating this quite plausible political threat as a kind of strange alien which does not so much befriend as contaminate our loved ones, and which can have no other explanation than as a manifestation of our most base intolerance and bigotry, probably isn’t quite “steel-manning” the opposition.
Political hatred is nothing new, of course, and there will always be more and less antagonistic periods in the US’s continual development (remember that the vice president used to be whoever came second in the election, an entertaining policy to imagine active in the last few presidential cycles), but something does seem decidedly more openly nasty about modern US politics; gone are the days of clandestine bitterness — now even the pretence of propriety has been dropped in favour of common name-calling.
There are probably two reasons for this. The first is that Trump is a genuine anomaly. He swears. He insults. He asks Theo Von what cocaine is like. He attempts to prevent democratic elections. He is a convicted felon. Worse still, he appears to bring out the worst in otherwise generally professional politicians. (The recent dick joke made by the spotlessly charismatic 44th president at the DNC can hardly be blamed on Trump, but it is difficult to imagine him doing the same at the expense of John McCain or Mitt Romney.)
Why has such child’s play become so politically mainstream? The answer perhaps lies in the second reason: social media. Politicians are the nervous hostages of voters, who at present are the nervous hostages of malicious algorithms designed to cultivate self-assurance and righteousness with artistic precision.
We often hear that social media is something of a “new public square” where ideas are efficiently trialled and debated, while providing a decidedly meritocratic possibility for basically anybody’s response to appear right underneath a tweet by the President himself. But I see it as a sort of no-man’s land. Step into it, and your life immediately gets worse. You may blow something up. You may blow yourself up. You may find another country’s government is suddenly attacking you.
Really, though, social media is best described as a utopian paradise. I mean in the etymological sense: utopia from ou topos, “no place”. Paradise from paradeisos, “enclosed park”. A place that is not real, and at the same time a walled garden. Less a public square, whose contents are contingent and out of your control, and more a private estate designed from the ground up to keep out anything which may disillusion you of the space.
Ingeniously, the conviction is encouraged that we are its architects, furnishing the plot with autonomous follows and subscriptions, and with an array of painless mechanisms for muting or blocking the vexatious topics and people. But anyone paying attention knows that we are instead helpless addicts to an algorithmic generation beyond our comprehension. It is not your stated preferences but the unconscious microseconds of difference between how long you spend here or there which determine what kind of material you are fed (remember it is called a feed).
In 2012, a story began circulating about an enraged father storming into a Target outside of Minneapolis, demanding to see the manager. His daughter, still in high school, had received coupons from the company advertising cribs and maternity clothes, which he believed was inappropriate. Days later, that same father apologised to that same manager, having found out that his daughter was due in August.
Statistician Andrew Pole, reported the New York Times, had created a “pregnancy-prediction model” which analysed the purchasing habits of Target’s female customers, assigning a probability based on correlative spending decisions. The daughter’s behaviours were picked up by the system, and thus is explained how Target figured out that a girl was pregnant before her own father did.
This story is perhaps dubious, but the fact that it is so believable proves that we already know how recommended content is really produced. We have all heard stories of people who swear that they only needed to mention dog food in audial range of their (sometimes inactive) computer for it to begin advertising pet food to them. True or not, the paranoia it invokes proves at least one thing: many of us are fearful that we do not even know when and how we are being monitored.
And not monitored by some despotic government (though why not that too!), but by advertisers, who want not to quell political dissent but to simply curate content, figuring out what you will buy, and watch, and read, and selling it to you for the low cost of your zombified attention.
Not you and me, though. Because we know all of this, and we are enterprising in our efforts to defy it. We follow people intentionally whom we disagree with. We engage in conversations and debates online. Our feeds are an impressive and virtuous balance of Left and Right.
Do not fall for this trap: it is smarter than you think. It is smarter than you. Remember that disagreements can be enjoyable, and entertaining or winnable disputes are allowed in your garden. After all, what is more rewarding than “interacting” with the “other side” by publicly exposing their ignorance and stupidity?
When was the last time you had your mind significantly changed as a result of such an interaction? The unfortunate reality is that the extent to which you enjoy disagreeing with someone (including revelling in righteous anger, and being congratulated for it) on social media is inversely proportional to the seriousness of the threat they pose to your worldview. This is why online arguments gravitate around either smarminess in flawless victory, or dull rage at how unthinkable a position is, and tragically evade the productive space in-between.
The thing about a town square is that you don’t get to choose who’s there. You don’t get to amplify voices based on your interests. You certainly don’t get the murky town council doing this for you without you even realising based on a painstaking surveillance project.
Whatever it is, we spend a lot of time there. And in comprehensively regulating what kind of people we politically interact with, social media at the same time dictates our very understanding of the terms of the debate.
I believe a significant number of political arguments are at base about language. Disputed definitions are often the foundation of political disagreement. But our vocabulary can only ever be a result of how those we are surrounded by use and understand terms, and if people spend enough time separated by selective algorithms during the evolution of our political semantics, linguistic speciation will inevitably ensue. Our words begin drifting from their original referents, and we end up developing a different vocabulary from our opponents without realising it.
Thus the time wasted feuding over labels that simply represent different concepts depending on who speaks them: “democratic”, “woke”, “racist”, “woman”. Bafflement arises as a result of encountering contradictory concepts, so when our definitions begin to vary, confronting a person who negates our view of the world is not just upsetting, but confusing. It is as though we have been met with a contradiction. The empathetic friend who is not a feminist. The rational neighbour who is not a capitalist. The cousin I love who is a Trump supporter.
Yes, social media is a utopian paradise. It should be avoided at all costs.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/