From Bad to Worse

From Bad to Worse

social media culture wars

We failed to dodge the bullet.

In the early afternoon this past Sunday, I listened to a discussion between four authors — the writer Naomi Klein and New Yorker staff writers Kyle Chayka, Andrew Marantz, and Jia Tolentino — on a topic billed as the “Digital Culture Wars.” The discussion was part of a series of presentations featured at the 2024 New Yorker Festival, in which “leading artists, actors, writers, politicians, and thinkers gathered for a dynamic weekend of conversations, performances, and more….”

Although mildly interesting, the conversation struggled to fully grapple with its stated topic (“Digital Culture Wars”). Taking place in late October, a little over a week before the U.S. presidential election, an emergent sense of dread occasionally seeped into the discussion. One example of this was Klein’s hopeful invocation, which she repeated throughout the discussion, that we may still yet “dodge a bullet” — a “bullet” shot from the gun held by the U.S. electorate in order to facilitate the return of a fascistic sociopath and malignant narcissist to presidential power. Given that I was listening to the conversation twelve days after the election, I was abundantly aware that we had failed to dodge that particular bullet.

Social media has worsened us.

In late September, 2020, I logged out of my Facebook account for good. For some time I had been increasingly regretting every wasted moment of lifetime I had squandered on that platform. I can’t remember the precise last-straw moment that triggered my decision, but I do know that I have yet to squander even one moment regretting it. For a while, I continued to occasionally post a tweet on my Twitter feed, but have since abandoned the platform after its takeover and ruination by the buffoonish centibillionaire Tesla bro. I haven’t spent a moment wondering what I might be missing on that platform, either. Weighing the profound “cost” of squandered energy and time — versus any tangible “benefit” that anything of value was gained from that cost — was what finally broke the spell.

On Sunday, the New York Times published an report titled “Liberals Are Left Out in the Cold as Social Media Veers Right,” positing that the emergence in recent years of new social media platforms catering largely to conservatives — combined with the rightward drift of legacy social media platforms — “puts Democrats at a disadvantage.” Currently, a Twitter alternative called Bluesky is emerging as one of the new platforms where liberals hope to find a more hospitable social media home. Given that today’s major social media platforms are engineered to “maximize engagement” — and that maximizing engagement often leads users of these platforms to more strident and hardened political and social attitudes, and may even tempt users to tunnel deeper and deeper into mis- or disinformation “rabbit holes” — might folks intent on breaking free of such doom spirals want to jettison these platforms altogether?

Although it’s unlikely that most — if any — of the 147 Republican lawmakers who voted to overturn the 2020 U.S. presidential election results actually believed Biden lost that contest, it’s much less certain the “Stop the Steal” movement’s rank and file hadn’t at least convinced themselves to believe it. Perhaps they had to believe because they’re addicted to the spectacle; in fact it’s possible that we are all hypnotized by spectacle, nonsense and illusion. Even so, Trumpfarce 47 is still two months away from getting sworn into the White House, and the incoming administration is already failing. Voter regrets, which are already piling up, will cascade into an avalanche of dismay as the administration’s destructive and nihilistic agenda takes clearer shape. Instead of robotically reacting to every provocation social media algorithms foist upon us, is it possible to jettison strategies that have clearly failed to ward off the catastrophic outcome of the 2024 U.S. presidential contest?

Can we become less bad?

For our purposes here, defining “less bad” — as in “Can we become less bad?” — is to ask if participants of a given polity can find strategies to live together with less strife, acrimony and blame-casting. For decades, neuroscientists, social scientists and other researchers have found that combinations of genetic, neurological, psychological, environmental and other factors play significant roles in human political, social and ideological orientations. Therefore, a person’s political outlook is “a complex and multifaceted story involving socialization, conscious choice and biology.”1 Given all that, why should it surprise anyone when those subjected to scorn by people they despise fail to respond positively to such critiques? Even when the content of the criticisms heaped upon those so scorned are factually correct?

In other words, I can point out that one of the candidates in the 2024 U.S. presidential contest used language against his perceived enemies that echoed language used by the 20th Century’s worst monsters. The other candidate was the first-generation daughter of talented and hard-working immigrants who channeled her ambition with focused determination to achieve notable career successes in her own right. I can also point out that the vindictive and foul-mouthed candidate referred to his opponent using demeaning and reprehensible language, while his opponent kept her dignity and avoided responding in kind. The vindictive and foul-mouthed candidate remains utterly unfit to manage a shoddy little garbage hauling business; his opponent is eminently qualified to serve in the highest office in the land. Yet the majority of voters made a stupid choice, an immoral choice, a demonic choice, perhaps even a fatal choice. Is it a winning strategy to just tell them all to go to hell?

Perhaps there’s a better way.

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