It's interesting to have a conversation with people over politics these days, sometimes it's like people don't live in the same reality anymore. It's probably not far from the truth.
To a first approximation, nothing is verified, people see a number on social media as a proxy for accuracy. Even if it's completely wrong, it doesn't matter because you're among friends.
Memes let insane ideas spread like a virus, the only criterion is whether they can survive against other memes. Grounding in reality is an idea's death sentence, because of the bullshit asymmetry principle.
And now the tools are there for anyone to generate bullshit at a scale commensurate to their wallet.
I shudder to think what this means for elections. At least I appreciate that the article attaches some numbers to it.
True. But in the physical world, ideas (or memes, if you will) are bound to people and can only survive, if the carrier survives. The idea of curing headaches with striking your head with a hammer does not spread, because the carrier dies. On the interweb, that connection is no longer there. An idea is independent and can spread without direct human involvement. We are like a tundra species finding itself in a rainforest: completely unprepared, lacking both immunity and the ability to keep up with the environment as it changes.
For me, what really drove home how bad it is is that I know otherwise normal people in real life who think that many Haitian immigrants are eating people's pets. To even find that plausible there was a lot of racist misinformation they needed to have already internalized to the point that "don't live in the same reality" seems very accurate.
Though one bit of hope is that for me politics has never been that much different. My first foray into real political discussion was people in high school trying to convince me global warming wasn't real or that allowing gay marriage was a slippery slope to bestiality. Even back in 2008, before social media was what it is today, there was still tons of misinformation.
> And now the tools are there for anyone to generate bullshit at a scale commensurate to their wallet.
Democratizing propaganda. Not sure the previous state of affairs where propaganda was accessible to the ruling class and their media corporations was better, it might have just seemed that way because there appeared to be less conflict when it came to them telling you what was in "your own best interest".
I do have to say though, I certainly am enjoying watching the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the prior monopoly holders on propaganda though, lashing out desperately in the face of their waning influence. They want so desperately to censor the commoners (for our own good, naturally).
As the other person mentions, much of the strident political stuff one sees online is generated by foreign state actors, so not democracy. But alongside that, a significant amount is generated by content creators in other parts of the world who realized they could cash in on America's internal problems. This has been well known since the reportage on North Macedonian content farms during the 2016 election. People falsely pretending to be from your country for profit-making isn't democracy, either.
Yes really. Those "authoritarian state actors" were already "generating misinformation", but even if it wasn't, the fact that it is more accessible to more people means it is democratizing.
As if this polarization does anything but atomize and disenfranchise people even further. As if people cannot communicate and work together with people who aren't in the exact same cult as them are more than LARPing slaves spitting on their own equipment that shows cartoons of the other during their 24/7 of hate. As if the people and companies whose fortunes are exploding further are "gnashing their teeth".
As if people who fantasize about putting people in virtual pens (thinking of Yarvin here) give one singular fuck about you or anyone you care about.
> They want so desperately to censor the commoners (for our own good, naturally).
"the commoners", i.e. Peter Thiel gushing to Epstein about balkanization... you're getting played like a piano.
edit: I should have phrased that last bit differently, we are all getting played like a piano. Factual reality itself, which "normal" people need to survive and defend themselves against sociopaths and assorted groups, is under attack, and I suspect by many parties who don't even like each other. What they all hate honesty and open discussion.
Hence the bubbles. We're all in dimly lit clubs and just repeat stuff that originates from who knows where. We never ask. But it's just us, sticking it to "the man" who cannot possibly have his fingers in it. I'm so tired of it, and I really want that to come across :P
You appear to be unhinged. After you calm down, I would be happy to overlook this thing you have written here and pretend it never happened if you would like to attempt a more rational conversation about my previous comment.
It's mostly just that we are worried that anyone seeking to regulate the platforms is mostly just seeking to control said platforms and get them to spread their version of the truth. Something we already see with CNN, NBC, Fox News, etc.
Yes. Don't regulate the platforms, the platforms aren't the problem. Go after the actual sources spreading misinformation - many of which will likely be connected to the very same government you want to act as cop and censor - and support better critical thinking in education. Rather than making it illegal for platforms to moderate content, refuse to use platforms that don't.
Bet on your beliefs, and the highly liquid prediction markets make that feasible
Conversing about politics has been a fool’s errand for a very long time in the US, practically this whole century so far. It has zero benefit except solidifying that you have the same the value system as people that already agree with you, or who can pretend to.
The parties have failed in their primary goal of winning friends and influencing people, only rapidly losing affiliation in favor of partyless while the actual partisans think there is going to be a koolaid colored wave of support for a decade straight, seemingly mentally incapable of noticing absolutely nothing has changed or will change in the composition of seats.
Focus on what you can control, if your view of reality is more accurate, whether you want the accurate view or not, don't worry about discussing, just trade it.
> Other people sharing their perspectives and stories is a big reason I'm no longer a Republican.
wow a developed pre-frontal lobe level of empathy, amazing. that isn't even a counterpoint without knowing what your affiliation became, because the whole point is that the crowd is leaving the parties. but thanks for sharing your journey.
> This assumes markets are fair.
doesn't assume that at all, it assumes I can extract value from them
> that isn't even a counterpoint without knowing what your affiliation became
In early 2017 I changed from Republican to Democrat.
> seemingly mentally incapable of noticing absolutely nothing has changed or will change in the composition of seats.
US Senate and House majorities have tipped over to the other party repeatedly over the past 20y. Surely that's more than 'nothing', even if not some overwhelming wave.
> wow a developed pre-frontal lobe level of empathy, amazing
Being condescending and suggesting folks are mentally incapable (in any sense) won't help you make friends or encourage readers to take your ideas more seriously. Unless perhaps your only goal is pumping prediction markets.
the parties are losing voters and unaffiliated (independent) is the largest voting bloc now while having nearly zero representation in Congress, I think there is 1 independent current seat the House and 2 independents in the Senate
partisans are loud, berating the unaffiliated for not adding power to their cause-du-jour as if the unaffiliated are the one other side themselves. loud enough that the unaffiliated may not actually know that they are in the majority now because most people are independently having the same reaction to partisans.
my goal is pointing out that its the majority opinion now.
but you might be on to something, both partisans and non-partisans don’t notice that partisans blocs are minority voting blocs now.
There were times and places in history where truth was valued, respected, and rewarded.
You could not employ N writers even if you had the money, because there were not enough good writers. And they needed to care about remaining adjacent to reality, or their reputation would (rightfully) be ruined as a fraud. Things were slow enough that the average person could see that they were being bullshat. These were the golden ages of human progress.
They aren't scaled down between election cycles. The media ecosystem is almost fully captured by the billionaire class. We've seen directly how they change coverage and policies tilting things. Fox News never shut down between elections. They are always in campaign mode and the money keeps rolling in.
As long as you can use those writers to operate a business near profitably then they are really cheap, but FOX can’t profitably employ 100,000 writers.
We've seen what it means for elections. Donald Trump was elected while claiming "Haitians are eating your pets and dogs" among tons of other absolutely insane things. The conservative party fought a war against education and they won resoundingly. The US is a deeply stupid and ignorant and, now especially, corrupt country.
I recently watched a film about Umberto Eco, Umberto Eco: A Library of the World (2022). (It has an eerie sense of “last words” from the “maestro” of letters as the film was produced after his death).
I’m therefore unsure who to credit with the assemblage or arching themes. Nevertheless, one is about the internet. I perceived in his words a duality—-the internet is “limitless memory” as well as “lost memory”. And not just the immediate connotation of repository of lost ideas, but in the sense we as human beings, with the Internet at our fingertips, are losing our memory to it.
Turning this idea around in my mind I imagined such a thing as _Instagram Brain_, where your memory contains only the last “bird on a branch”. (Reflecting, I watch a lot of woodworking and furniture making videos, and I can only remember the last one.)
Now some of my intellectual interests intrude on this infinite semiotic chain. Adding M.Eco’s imaginary conditions, where more information than we’ve ever had access to somehow becomes less useful, the image of the internet as a “complete graph” of knowledge comes to my mind’s eye. What a tangle. Everything connected to everything else—-numinous and beyond comprehension. (I wonder what M. Eco would have made of Chat technology? More’s the pity.)
And finally I get to the political point. By comparison the film gave my imagination a sidelong image of politics. What if, in this stage of the digital revolution, we are all striving to find some mental refuge from the mass-complete-graph (and Instagram Brain): a little corner of HN where colleagues warn each other about this or that dangerous virus or zero-day. A daytime dose of enervating 24h news for the 65+ crowd.
Like this. And more. I wonder at the American two party system and today’s political divide. (The president is literally calling the Democratic Party “traitors”. What a cockup.)
A hypothesis forms: partisanship (as a “function”) makes a tearing bifurcation of the “complete graph” of social knowledge and culture. This is our nations’s social immunity in action. We’ve reached some limit of the social-mind’s capacity to be so highly interconnected, and a function is tearing through everything faster than we can comprehend the individual parts.
Sure, It’s just a fanciful idea. The furthest extent of a Chain of Semiotic reasoning before I’m bored. Maybe the result is a false idea (short of “belief” since I know it’s hypothetical). Still, some people walk away from the computer (read internet, or whatever mass media which produces “Instagram Brain” effects) in full faith, belief and without a doubt, because they “did their research”.
Scientists and other learned individuals might balk at my subjects and turns of reason. Don’t take it literally, but poetically. If I have been at all successful your mind’s eye might glimpse a vision where we Americans, as a people, are not so far apart as it might seem. We are suffering through a black turn of the Digital Revolution, and rather than, as a group, dividing into a million opinions we have split only in two. LOL.
IMO, the interconnection of the internet is heavily to blame for how divisive politics have gotten, but I offer a different method of action: Prior to the internet, most people only regularly interacted with people in a relatively limited cultural band. When venturing out of that cultural band, you largely came across people interacting on heightened levels of good behavior, because of in-person hospitality norms. We might have had assumptions based on stereotypes of other groups, where a Bay Area city slicker might think of the average Kentuckian as a bit backward perhaps a bit bigoted, and the Kentuckian might have imagined the Bay Area type as a bit pretentious, but any individual of the other group you happened to meet probably seemed fine.
The internet blew that illusion up. Rather than dispelling stereotypes, transparency confirmed them, to an even greater extent than everyone thought. Urban people got to see first hand that rural areas were full of deranged bigots who are perfectly primed to believe wild lies about foreigners eating people's pets, and the rural people saw that the urbanites really dismissed them out of hand as speed bumps on the path of progress. Paradoxically, both sides had been imagining that the political divide was smaller than it really was.
I need to contemplate this notion the internet removed the veil of presumed good character.
Is this something you’ve read about? Is there a general consensus in some circles the more we learn, the less we like each other?
I think of social media in some ways like costume; I’m putting on the social costume of the group i want to belong to. Opposed to how you might address someone at the grocery store or fellow neighbor in a chance encounter. Then it’s the relationship of sharing mundane life together with the politeness or grace (dignity?) you afford to people when you meet them in person.
The classic advertising gambit has the Goth helping the Soccer Mom with her groceries to the car. Under the hairspray and makeup is the child who has a notion of helping mom, and is therefore only wearing a costume (which, in my networked idea, becomes another node we all already expect and a condition that seems to paralyze teenagers).
To a first approximation, nothing is verified, people see a number on social media as a proxy for accuracy. Even if it's completely wrong, it doesn't matter because you're among friends.
Memes let insane ideas spread like a virus, the only criterion is whether they can survive against other memes. Grounding in reality is an idea's death sentence, because of the bullshit asymmetry principle.
And now the tools are there for anyone to generate bullshit at a scale commensurate to their wallet.
I shudder to think what this means for elections. At least I appreciate that the article attaches some numbers to it.