Quote:
Originally Posted by All-In Flynn
I think this is like saying nukes are no big deal because war isn't a new problem. The internet and social media have fostered a shockingly rapid democratisation of social proving processes formerly vested in institutions like the press. Fact-checking sites and so forth are just attempts to bolster institutional authority, to preserve the role of curator of public discourse. But they only work if you're already prepared to accept curation: how many Trump supporters have you seen accept that the Clintons actually don't sleep on sheets woven from baby-skin just because (((Snopes))) said so?
"Social proving processes formerly vested in institutions like the press" is a relatively recent phenomenon and the idea that, for instance, the local newspaper was the arbiter of popular truth is also a relatively recent phenomenon.
The press and popular media have undergone periods of deep publish mistrust. For most of the 19th century and the early 20th century, newspapers were often a little like the internet: they were sensationalist, transparently partisan, and fabulist. Modern journalistic conventions and norms were just that -- modern conventions. Horace Greely started the New York Tribune to be a partisan weapon, not quiet partisan rancor; it a major daily with a huge circulation in a big city, and it was so obviously ideological he hired Karl ****ing Marx to write for him. The paper was so hated the Irish tried to burn it to the ground during the Civil War.
So i think the idea that we're dancing around is something like norm guardianship -- there are people who maintain system norms over time and hold the political process accountable to fundamental, rational truths -- but prior to the modern era (so say, prior to WWII) -- that was never holistically true that power was vested in the press.
The idea was never that the press was the steward of truth, or that people necessary dealt from a well of shared facts and had common arbiters of truth. The reality was more like highly vibrant partisan sectors (labor unions, partisan rags, industry trade papers, etc.) that competed not for all readers of some holistic polity but for audiences that they knew to be self-interested and motivated to read highly partisan news. Be careful that what seems like a permanent and unchanging facet of American life is really both something recent AND a bit of small-l liberal wishcasting.
As I said: all of the moral panic from here is flowing from the basics of that simple fact; *why* is a guy selling placebo brain juice and impugning the character of the parents of dead school children so popular? Why can't you talk sense into these people with Snopes links?
You've identified the problem; an old institution (the idea of a rational, non-partisan press beholden to modern journalistic norms of non-bias, presenting facts to an educated and socially integrated population themselves motivated by high minded ideals) is crumbling. No amount of fact checking is going to sanitize it. The institutions and norms of the last ~50-70 years in the press are largely crumbling due to a well-funded, high coordinated, increasingly global propaganda campaign waged by the right-wing to discredit it, but the institutions and social norms that provided a social context for a non-partisan, discourse-seeking press is ALSO crumbling.
THAT sort of context, as I said, is really nothing new at all. And a big, coordinated, decades-long disinformation campaign to discredit political opponents is pretty basic and everlasting property of attempts to influence collective social opinions. It's as old as the hills. I acknowledge social media, search engines, algorithms, etc. may be like nuclear weapons; could be. But I think the far, far bigger problem is that in many cases
the left isn't even fighting in the war.
The most trivial problem I see is in the area of motivated reasoning. So we see are the right selling lurid fantasies about immigrant crime and black indolence and how together they are sapping white vitality and taking all the treasures and public assistance that rightfully belong to white people, the most crudely flattering nonsense to America's dog**** right-winger classes, and what people conceive of as the 'left' response is something like Pants on Fire Five Pinocchio scales + technocratic mumbo jumbo about the refundability threshold of child tax credits coupled with a Vox Explainer of what that might mean, and when that falls flat and we elect a crypto fascist game show host, we sometimes veer into self-pitying sneering about needing to educate and read books and stuff. Double down on the old norms and insist the audience is failing.
And so what you see is our voters and people sympathetic to us are lost and adrift and unclear as to what we collectively think and want, and they too are audience for constant right-winger propaganda campaigns meant to confuse, and meanwhile the right-wingers are getting a constant stream of highly targeted partisan and ideological news content meant to keep them agitated and reflexively angry and motivated.
I think we can get into lots of reasons why social cohesion was lost, why the old institutions are failing, why the press isn't especially fit for the role of norm guardianship, about the legal framework around the First Amendment, about regulation, breaking up social media.
But I remain convinced that the left's policies have a natural and inherent numeric advantage insofar as we advocate on behalf of the masses. We *should* be able to motivate people to our way of thinking, and move politics away from fascist barbarism. The fact is that the modern American right-wing gestalt isn't
that popular. But while they are a minority of people, they are united, and motivated, and colluding effectively, and well-funded, and they're seizing power without hesitation, and we're clinging to the old norms that decry that as uncouth. So that they've weaponized information and communication for highly partisan and ideological ends, and we're just sitting around calling them Pinocchio and Pants on Fire while people clamor for something more from us, wanting to know what practical and meaningful things we can do for them.
I am not suggesting you can defeat Alex Jones and return back to the era of Walter Cronkite and the nightly newsboys broadcasting truth to America. Those days are gone, the social context that produced them are over, the era of partisanship and ideological motivated reasoning is here, and the algorithms and social media probably aren't going anywhere. The task before us to to channel our inner Horace ****ing Greely and put ourselves in the same kind of headspace that he did; he recognized that he was living in a slavocracy horror show and started a paper that unapologetically crusaded for abolition and universal suffrage. He didn't unleash fact checkers to see if southern newspapers claims that freed black slaves would slaughter whites by the thousands and rape their white daughters were true, he didn't cherish access to Jefferson Davis's government in Richmond and he didn't turn the Tribune editorial page over to the 19th century equivalent of Bari ****ing Weiss in the interest of fairness and non partisanship.
tl;dr summary: true, rational discourse only works in a social context where we have a population ready to accept curated facts and the like. We don't have the luxury of living in such a time and place, at least not anymore, so don't squander our natural advantages in motivated reasoning and leave he playing field open to racists and selfish zillionaires looking to build even bigger fortunes. The immediate post WWII era is over, the era of huge growth and shared prosperity and the social integration and cohesion that followed (that allowed for a flourishing 'non partisan' press promoting rational discourse) is over, the world is evolving, and the Grab What You Can Era is here. And the right is way ahead of the left on this. Don't let a nostalgia for a waning era and a set of cultural tics lose sight of what is necessary.
Last edited by DVaut1; 08-08-2018 at 01:38 AM.
