Many People Have Been Saying...

The Slow Road to Immediacy, Part 3

I’m now three newsletters in on what the word “immediacy” triggered inside my brain meat as I waited for Anne Kornbluh’s book of that title (Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism) to arrive in the mail.

It may just be me, but it seems like a number of writers and thinkers seem to be nibbling at the same general ideas I’ve played with here: that we’ve taken some kind of step backward, de-socialized ourselves insofar as we’ve rejected all but the immediate, knee-jerk, off-with-their-heads approach to problems. That’s what this final installment will be about.

Here’s writer Dorothy Fortenberry in conversation with Sam Adler Bell and Matthew Sitman on the Know Your Enemy podcast. Her vision of how politics should be is heavily mediated. Her depiction of what Trump has done to the GOP and the support it’s gained is one of radical immediacy and all it entails.

Dorothy Fortenberry: He [Trump] really has reconfigured the Republican party around him personally in an extraordinary way. Like the anti-MAGA? It's just gone. Like he is the party, the party is him. The Republican party position on tariffs, or abortion, or anything is, like, what he thinks that second when he wakes up that day, and like, if he wakes up tomorrow and he's like, you know, “Free IVF for everyone; pay for it with taxes on marijuana,” that's the Republican party's position. Which is wild. And I think for a person who is not that interested in politics I think there's something appealing about the fact that he is also not that interested in politics. He is interested in him, and in having power, but, these conversations about you know, policy issues or how much are we doing XYZ economic thing, he doesn't care and neither do the voters whose votes end up making the decision. …

I don't like it when the president makes a bunch of executive actions even if they are executive actions I agree with because the kind of presidenting I want to have happen is through the legislature because it involves more people's input. You know, my vision of politics, it's a bunch of different constituencies, and the all get together in the room and they hash it out, and you have unions and activists and representatives from the local community and you don't make necessarily any of them completely happy but you hear their concerns and you try to give them the thing that they are asking for and the Trumpian version of that equation is just reversed. Like he announces what he's into and then you decide that you were always into it.

Sam Adler Bell: Or you aren't because he is now.

DF: Right.

SAB: If you're from the other side.

DF: Exactly.

SAB: I think it's also just that that version of Democratic politics which goes down and down into smaller and smaller groups and everybody has to be involved and stuff—it has felt so inefficacious for so long that even people who object to it are kinda like, “Oh what if there's just one guy, you know, and I only need to know what HE thinks? I don't need to know what my neighbor thinks. I don't need to know what the other people in my town or state think. We vote for the one guy, we see what he thinks, you know? Sometimes he gets it right, sometimes he doesn't, but I don't want to bother with it.”

DF: Absolutely. No, there's a deep longing across the political spectrum for a unitary protagonist

SAB: You only have to know one thing.

DF: Just that guy, Right?

In my first installment of this rumination, I talked about how Berger and Neuhaus’s worries (real or opportunist) over mediating structures in our small places actually helped fuel the nationalization of our politics, as movement conservatism grabbed up their thesis and ran with it. To mobilize and unify grievance in far-flung, rural places, these operators pushed the narrative that all our treasured local ways were under fire from distant, tyrannical state forces and all must rally to oppose them—under the banner of conservative Republicans, naturally. This had the effect of undermining all the particularities of the small, independent places, as they turned, like a field of synched-up radio telescopes, to focus more and more on the messages beamed at them from national pols and parties and conservative-captured or -created media.

Right on time to illustrate the point is the Kansas Reflector’s own Max McCoy reading the riot act to the Derby, KS, school board, a place 100 miles to the south of me, for rejecting social studies curriculum chosen by their own teachers after a year of work…because they don’t think it sufficiently kisses the ass or ring of Donald Trump:

We have arrived at an America in which facts don’t really matter. The truth for many of us is what we feel, not what we know. If we feel vaccines are bad, as Nichols¹ points out, then they must be. If a fact is contrary to our political worldview, then it must be wrong. We no longer live in a world of shared fact, but in a superstitious land ruled by emotion. That includes an irrational adherence to religion and a blind devotion to king (or what passes for a king) and country.

You should read the whole piece.

Recall that, absent certain socializations, certain mediations like language and critical thinking to bridge the chasm between feelings and constructive actions in society, all we have are a child’s grunting and hitting. There’s no sense in things, no throughline, no coherence. Just a mashed dopamine button.

Back to Dorothy Fortenberry, in a piece from Commonweal in 2020, where she seemed to presage Trump’s appeal along these immediacy-of-feeling lines:

What I do know is that Trump creates a feeling. More than any policy, more than any idea, he makes people feel a way that no one else makes them feel. Powerful. Connected. In on a joke. It’s a celebration and he’s the host. It’s a revival and he’s the preacher.

What’s the party platform? The same party platform as when the Cowboys play the Eagles: winning.

What’s the second term agenda? The same agenda as when William Wallace leads the Scots into battle: watering the ground with our enemies’ tears.

People have noticed that politics doesn’t seem to have much to do with their daily lives anymore. It’s on TV and their phone, but it’s no longer at their union hall or fish fry. And so, since it seems like another form of entertainment, they have decided to engage with it primarily as an expressive outlet instead. Politics is no longer the arena in which we solve our collective problems together. It’s the forum where we go to feel our feelings with and at each other. And Trump makes everything feeling bigger.

Here’s Jonathan V. Last suggesting that the problem lies in spoiled people insisting on perfection from “elites”:

[Eliot Cohen maintains that] this populist, revanchist zeitgeist is the reaction to a thorough discrediting of the elites in recent years….

It is true that Western societies have turned against their elites. But this is not because the elites have failed, or been discredited. On the whole, the elites from our waning age were more successful and effective than their counterparts from previous eras.

Instead, we ought to consider the present moment not so much a reaction to discredited elites, but as an act of self-mutilation committed by a bored, decadent society….

It is absolutely true that many Western institutions have declined over the last half century: Trust in the press, government, organized religion, and civil society has cratered. In many cases, that loss of trust has been caused by high-profile failures.

It is also true that along some vectors, modern life has stagnated rather than improved. The costs of education, housing, and healthcare have risen far out of line with wages. The concentration of wealth in the top 1 percent has increased dramatically. Assortative mating has monkeyed with economic mobility….

Last ticks off how “the elites failed us” is the takeaway of a number of political events and challenges over the past quarter century, whereas the most cockamamie horseshit and just plain confidently wrong pronouncements by heroes of the “populist” anti-elite forces get pass after pass. This is a…

…dual hermeneutic the populists use for evaluating the world. If you’re an expert who got one thing wrong, it damns you. If you’re a total lunatic crank who gets one thing right, it makes makes you bulletproof….

Trump is wrong about things all of the time, and yet is never discredited in the minds of the populists. Elon Musk—the Ivy League–educated richest man in the world—promises things all the time. The biggest, craziest promises you’ve ever seen. And they hardly ever come true. (Really, click that link.)

And yet Musk is never discredited. He’s not even an “elite.”

…Eliot [Cohen] is fundamentally right that the elites have been discredited.

It’s just that they’ve been discredited not by reality, but by cultural fiat….

There are lots of contributing factors for why the public has turned on the elites. But the main one is a drive to self-mutilation borne of decadence….

“Decadence” is an expansive term. I mean it mostly in the sense of being liberated from consequences. Because one of the (many) things our elites have done is to create an intricate web of mechanisms to prevent most people from experiencing adverse consequences from their choices.

And I want to be clear here: I view this as a good thing. The whole point of society is to soften the world’s sharp edges so as to promote human flourishing.

We don’t want people’s lives to be ruined by one bad choice. And in a world unmediated by society, that happens all the time.

This intricate web—and I’m just calling it “society,” for the sake of convenience—makes it so that people don’t have to expose too much skin in any one game. This is generally helpful, but it does create some moral hazard. Because when you don’t have skin in the game, you’re liberated to make decisions based on . . . other considerations.

This is what’s behind the “discrediting” of the elites: Not an actual discrediting. Just a belief that people can disregard the elites without anything too bad happening to them. They can put the orange man in the White House, or not wear a respirator, or let Russia plunder Europe, or skip vaccinations—and somehow it’ll all work out. Because consequences are a long way off….

The populist energy is not a reaction to facts, but a pose. People are choosing to believe that elites failed them while simultaneously choosing to believe that populist demagogues are trustworthy—despite all available evidence.

These choices are made as a form of cosplay, or LARPing, by which a fat and happy society, awash in food and luxury goods, has realized that all of its lower-order needs have been met and it is free to self-actualize by asserting dominance over whoever the nearest out-group is.

And for much of America, that out-group is the elite class which guided and maintained the social order.

Last’s end-game is implied in his diagnosis, I’m afraid: decadent Americans, too long estranged from the vital work of mediation that this big beast we call “society” bequeaths us, self-immolate in a hundred ways.

Consequences return with a vengeance now that bad choices are no longer cushioned by all the bulwarks built up by “elites” whose institutions have been dismantled and sold off for parts to further enrich faux-folk heroes with more money than god. Swaths of Americans suffer immiseration that re-teaches them the value of collective endeavor, hard-slog rebuilding, and how to eschew the easy, immediate answers. The truth that “we live in a society” is, eventually, rediscovered. The question is how far the country—and by extension, the world that, for good and ill, hangs on the United States for stability and direction—will fall before that turnaround comes and how much will be recoverable afterward.

Last is a little too pro-“elite” for my taste, a little too cavalier about how we all have our “lower-order needs met” and income inequality is a niggling concern, but the idea that decadence—perceived liberation from consequences—is a root cause, well, that resonates. Decadence implies taking for granted, whether it’s that the leopards won’t eat my face or that the boring structures that underpin democracy, the rule of law, civilization and society are actually fairly important and their loss can impact my life in some way.

Moreover, decadence derives from decay, both structural and moral. I’d say we allowed our structures to decay, such that things like income inequality, the disconnect between honest hard work and a decent standard of living, and accountability in government have accumulated. Meanwhile, we’ve permitted moral decay in places both high and low. High? The nosebleed aeries of the billionaire class who are plainly batshit insane or deeply sociopathic. Low? The MAGA horde believing they can jettison all pro-social lessons and institutions mainly because such things kinda suck. I’d further argue that while movement conservatism drove these two forms of decadence, Democrats and liberals sat shotgun and merely flapped their hands and lips about the journey.

For a more materialist angle than Last offers, here’s John Ganz, who focuses not so much on the “elite” as on the masses in question, or, the “mob,” the “rabble.”

The relatively respectable right is suddenly discovering that we are close to full employment and suggests that the angry young men take the available, well-paying—if modest—jobs. Christopher Rufo pointed out that working as a manager at Panda Express could pay well and was nothing to be ashamed of. The angry, alienated men and their tribunes aren’t having it. That’s the same “bootstraps” bullshit they’ve heard from the liberals for all these years. They don’t believe in the empty myths of honest toil and upward mobility anymore. The American dream, as far as they are concerned is, dead. In the view of the mob, undeserving women and minorities are hoarding all the treasure and it has to be ripped away from them. Every “normal” possibility open to them is humiliating. Only the massive windfalls of gambling and speculation seem like an honorable alternative.

There’s the “elites have failed us,” the rejection of the values allegedly imprinted by Berger and Neuhas’s mediating structures as well as the evidence of the weaponization of their argument in subsequent decades, the instant gratification, the clamor for immediacy.

What we are witnessing is a faultline in the coalition the right has built up this past decade. The right is now an alliance between the remnant of the bourgeois conservatives, who still more or less believe in the old social ethic—traditional norms around work, family, personal discipline, and productive labor—and what we should call the mob.

(Of course, the bourgeois conservatives are unplugged Boomer types who still think you can work a summer as a soda jerk and pay for a year of college.)

The mob is ultimately a disposition, a relation to society as a whole, an attitude, or, a phenomenological state of being, rather than a concrete social group. Like the state of poverty, of which the mob is a possible spiritual correlate, one can fall into and get out of it, just as one can join a mob and then, on reflection leave it. Some relatively “respectable” members of society can share—and very often do—attitudes with the mob. One possible definition of “right-wing” in the present era might be based on how many mob sentiments and tendencies one shares. As we shall see, the bourgeoisie and mob are not opposed so much as mutually reinforcing. The opinion-makers and intellectuals on the center-right were so fixated on the supposed left-wing mobs of the “woke era” that they ignored that they were encouraging and cultivating their own mob, platforming its exponents with affectionate curiosity. Now that mob attacks their benefactors. But the mob also has more or less constant, dedicated denizens. Today, it encompasses—but is not limited to—the worlds of inceldom, 4chan and 8chan message board culture, porn addicts, crypto bugs, Andrew Tate fans, internet Neo-Nazis, and Groypers. The mob is the domain of would-be brownshirts—if they would only log off and go into the streets. The mob is now the dominant force on “X”—much to the growing chagrin of the bougie right—because Musk made it so and he has become a chieftain of the mob.

The mob should not be identified with the “working class” the “poor” or “the people” in general. Rich and poor can be found together in the mob. Marx wrote that it contained “the scum, offal, refuse of all classes.” Hannah Arendt wrote they are the “declassés of all classes:”

The mob is primarily a group in which the residue of all classes are represented. This makes it so easy to mistake the mob for the people, which also comprises all strata of society. While the people in all great revolutions fight for true representation, the mob always will shout for the “strong man,” the “great leader.” For the mob hates society from which it is excluded, as well as Parliament where it is not represented. Plebiscites, therefore, with which modern mob leaders have obtained such excellent results, are an old concept of politicians who rely upon the mob.

The mob's natural mode of activism is anti-political and conspiratorial:

Excluded as it is from society and political representation, the mob turns of necessity to extraparliamentary action. Moreover, it is inclined to seek the real forces of political life in those movements and influences which are hidden from view and work behind the scenes.

As for Last’s argument that this mob is decadent, spoiled, its “lower-order needs met,” Ganz won’t exactly concede that ground. It’s more of a ratchet.

Like the proletariat, the mob is a creation of the capitalist economy or, as Hegel calls it, civil society — bürgerliche Gesellschaft — bourgeois society. Arendt wrote that the mob is bourgeois society’s “by-product” and “never “never quite separable from it.” It is not an accidental creation, but the necessary product of the accumulation of wealth and the production of commodities. The more wealth that’s produced, the greater the poverty. This is because poverty always expands the growth of wealth: in a market society, wealth is accumulated not through satisfaction but through the creation of needs. One might object that society, in general, is less poor than ever, that the problem of pauperization has been solved—more or less—but the minimum of what a member of society considers as necessary continually recedes into infinity. As Shlomo Avineri writes,

The historicity of needs and the development of civil society turn the minimum standard of living into a measure always relative to prevailing conditions. The main problem of the poor is that while they cannot attain that which is considered as the minimum in their particular society, they never­ the less have the felt need to achieve this level. Civil society thus succeeds in internalizing its norms about consumption into the consciousness of its members even while it is unable to satisfy these norms. This is exacerbated because civil society continuously over­ produces goods which the masses cannot buy because of their lack of purchasing power.

In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel writes:

When a large mass of people sinks below the level of a certain standard of living - which automatically regulates itself at the level necessary for a member of the society in question - that feeling of right, integrity and honour which comes from supporting oneself by one's own activity and work is lost. This leads to the creation of a rabble [Pöbel], which in turn makes it much easier for disproportionate wealth to be concentrated in a few hands.

The rabble, the mob, is not simply the condition of poverty, but a subjective experience, a disposition of mind of “inner indignation…against the rich, against society, against the government, etc.” For good reason, the member of the mob feels that the rules of society do not apply to him. What appears to respectable society as the honorable and decent possibilities afforded work and social roles is a sham and mockery of their incapacity to take on those rules, as institutionalized injustice. “[He] feels excluded and mocked by everyone, and this necessarily gives rise to an inner indignation.” The rights and duties of society spoken of in society are nonsense, just hypocrisy, and lies—as Hegel writes, it is “the non-recognition of right.” The mob does not experience their condition as merely natural but as the product of a malign and arbitrary will, direct oppression. This goes some way to explain why conspiracy thinking is the constant correlate of mob attitudes. Eventually, they do not even want to be included in society, because they reject its system of values. As Avineri writes they are “a heap of human beings utterly atomized and alienated from society, feeling no allegiance to it and no longer even wishing to be integrated into it.” Think of incels who refuse the integration back into normal sexual and romantic market relations and experience that very offer as a deeper humiliation.

Mob attitudes are not limited to the poor but are found in the rich as well, the rabble disposition also appears where there is excessive wealth and luxury: “The rich man thinks that he can buy anything because he knows himself as the power of the particularity of self-consciousness. Thus wealth can lead to the same mockery and shamelessness that we find in the poor rabble.” The rich rabble believes that it is a special breed, that its wealth proves its absolute power, and that it does not need to respect the rules of society. It is the author of those rules. It does not believe in rights, except its right to rule and accumulate. As Frank Ruda writes, “The rich rabble is marked by the ‘corruptness’ which manifests in the fact that the rabble ‘takes everything for granted for itself’ because he denies the right to any of the ethical, legal, or statist institutions…[it assumes] an economically determined state of nature, in which it can also assume the economic right of the fittest.” It also believes in conspiracy, because it experiences itself politically as a conspirator, as part of a self-interested group only working for its own ends. The rich rabble does not believe in the possibility of recognition provided by society, it only believes in envy, both in provoking it and protecting itself from it. As arrogance personified, the rich rabble experiences all efforts to control and mitigate its power as personal humiliation—as an arbitrary will being imposed upon it. It does not see the surrounding society as the positive condition for its wealth and power, but only as a hostile limitation upon the maintenance and growth of that wealth and power. They view themselves and their wealth as the only essential and real thing.

So many resonances with immediacy and instant access to whatever is sought: answers (even if wrong, so long as satisfying or confirming), action (even if in the worst possible direction, largely because of an arrogant individualistic blindness to how society enables an individual’s rise). Ganz even comes out and says it (emphases mine):

Besides conspiracy, the mob mentality gravitates towards naturalization, a belief in the possibility of access to the direct ugly truth of human life, and true existence unmediated by dishonest and dissembling social norms. The mob, both rich and poor, is attracted to ideologies that reintroduce or find the state of nature continuing by other means within the apparent lawfulness of civil society; it is fascinated by whatever reifies inequality and domination as the natural condition of man. It valorizes vitality, violence, and power and sees society as unnatural and stifling. Not only mercy but also justice are seen as “feminine” and weak. The only universal the mob can recognize is the absence of universality: a universal experience of domination and exploitation; the only way forward in life is to make sure you’re the one on top. They find the ideological reflection of their mentality in Social Darwinism, racism, misogyny, and pseudo-historical doctrines of eternal tribal warfare. After misogyny, antisemitism is perhaps the most characteristic mob ideology and it is usually found among all those who are the most extreme and committed members of the mob, because of the way it combines naturalization and conspiracy: it creates a permanent, natural anti-mob, constantly oppressing and humiliating, denying entitled recognition.

Here’s Damon Linker, pointing the finger at the internet and social media:

…politics in rural areas is more challenging, especially if it aims to enact change beyond the local level. That’s because rural regions are much less densely populated, with citizens often separated by vast distances that make political organizing and the forging of political solidarity quite difficult. What unites a struggling community in rural or exurban Georgia to others in Texas, South Dakota, and Oregon? Would they even conceive of themselves as belonging to a single political entity—a faction sharing common interests and passions rooted in common experiences and cultural outlook?

James Madison didn't think they would—and he thought this would be a very good thing. One of his biggest concerns in attempting to devise a republican system of government for the United States was the prospect of political factions forming that would be large enough to oppress other factions. The famous solution he sketched out in Federalist Paper #10 proposed that the vast size of the country would result in a proliferation of factions and interests, with none of them large or strong enough to dominate the others.

In Madison’s vision, people would gather into local factions and conduct politics in counties and towns. Conglomerations of factions and interests that dominated these counties and towns would influence politics at the state level. The only factions and interests that would be felt at the level of the country as a whole, in the nation’s capital, would be those few that managed to link up with others in different parts of the country, demonstrating a genuinely broad base of support….

When the potent catalyst of a gifted demagogue like Donald Trump is added to the digital mix, taking constant real-time shots at those who thrive under the prevailing system and its rules, a kind of political-cultural alchemy takes place. Before you know it, people who 10 years ago would have seen themselves as having little or nothing in common, from the Midwest through the Deep South to the Intermountain West, are flying flags of unified, proud defiance: The Stars and Bars, “Don't Tread on Me,” the Thin Blue Line.

That’s what social media does: It allows for the constructing of identities and the cultivation of resentments in a virtual space among likeminded people separated by vast distances in the physical world. Instead of Madison's highly differentiated republic of discrete communities with their own regional, factional interests—or the kind of slow-motion grassroots organizing we saw in the real world during the mid-20th century—we have new forms of rapid-fire, technologically facilitated solidarity among tens of millions of Americans separated by hundreds or thousands of miles but united by a sense of shared grievance and a commitment to lashing out against its sources, real and imagined.

That is populist politics in action—and it is transforming the country and much of the wider world right before our eyes.

With social- and media platform billionaire owners fawning over Trump, the news is once again full of ominous portents of disinformation. What I’m grooving with, however, is the idea that, in the words of Henry Farrell, SNF Agora Professor of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, social media doesn’t so much disinform the public but creates malformed publics.

We tend to think of the problem of social media as a problem of disinformation - that is, of people receiving erroneous information and being convinced that false things are in fact true. Hence, we can try to make social media better through factchecking, through educating people to see falsehoods and similar. This is, indeed, a problem, but it is not the most important one. The fundamental problem, as I see it, is not that social media misinforms individuals about what is true or untrue but that it creates publics with malformed collective understandings. That is a more subtle problem, but also a more pernicious one….

Making individuals better at thinking and seeing the blind spots in their own individual reasoning will only go so far. What we need are better collective means of thinking.…much of the work on human cognitive bias suggests that people can actually think much better collectively than individually, offering prospects for a different understanding of democracy, in which my pig-headed advocacy for my particular flawed perspective allows me to see the flaws in your pig-headed arguments and point them out with gusto, and vice versa, for the general improvement of our though.

…social media services are…technologies for shaping publics. Many of the problems that we are going to face over the next many years will stem from publics that have been deranged and distorted by social media in ways that lower the odds that democracy will be a problem solving system, and increase the likelihood that it will be a problem creating one….

The collective perspectives that emerge from social media—our understanding of what the public is and wants—are similarly shaped by algorithms that select on some aspects of the public, while sidelining others. And we tend to orient ourselves towards that understanding, through a mixture of reflective beliefs, conformity with shibboleths, and revised understandings of coalitional politics.

This isn’t brainwashing—people don’t have to internalize this or that aspect of what social media presents to them, radically changing their beliefs and their sense of who they are. That sometimes happens, but likely far more rarely than we think. The more important change is to our beliefs about what other people think, which we perpetually update based on social observation. When what we observe is filtered through social media, our understandings of the coalitions we belong to, and the coalitions we oppose, what we have in common, and what we disagree on, shift too….

…none of this is brainwashing, but it is reshaping public debate….People’s sense of the contours of politics - what is legitimate and what is out of bounds; what others think and are likely to do and how they ought respond - is visibly changing around us.

Think not so much in terms of Facebook’s decision not to police false information, but its decision to permit slurs against LGBTQIA+ folks. You can now say, “Homosexuality is a mental disorder,” without catching a warning or block on Facebook (note: this claim is also false). The more this is allowed, the more the discourse is polluted with slurs and dehumanization, signalling to others that slurs and polluted discourse is the way to do political discussion. It socializes users into how to talk politics and social issues (or rather, how to talk about the existence of their fellow humans). Some number of users will adopt this style of discourse, and their commentary will or can be boosted by algorithms because it’s so spicy and engaging and therefore monetizable for Facebook, so it will rise higher and higher in prominence, signalling to more and more users that this is the way everyone talks or should talk about these issues and these people. This is how you create a malformed public.

Farrell started thinking about malformed publics by thinking about how algorithms twist perceived tastes in sex, thanks to porn sites:

The example that really made me think about how this works has nothing much to do with democracy or political theory. It was the thesis of an article published in Logic magazine in 2019, about Internet porn. The article’s argument is that the presentation of porn - and people’s sense of what other people’s sexual interests are - is shaped by algorithms that respond to the sharp difference between what people want to see and what people are willing to pay for. The key claim:

a lot of people .. are consumers of internet porn (i.e., they watch it but don’t pay for it), a tiny fraction of those people are customers. Customers pay for porn, typically by clicking an ad on a tube site, going to a specific content site (often owned by MindGeek), and entering their credit card information. … This “consumer” vs. “customer” division is key to understanding the use of data to perpetuate categories that seem peculiar to many people both inside and outside the industry. … Porn companies, when trying to figure out what people want, focus on the customers who convert. It’s their tastes that set the tone for professionally produced content and the industry as a whole.

The result is that particular taboos (incest; choking) feature heavily in the presentation of Internet porn, not because they are the most popular among consumers, but because they are more likely to convert into paying customers. This, in turn, gives porn consumers, including teenagers, a highly distorted understanding of what other people want and expect from sex, that some of them then act on. In my terms, they look through a distorting technological lens on an imaginary sexual public to understand what is normal and expected, and what is not. This then shapes their interactions with others.

You think women want unsolicited dick pics? This is how you get the belief that women want unsolicited dick pics.

Contrast these “malformed publics” with the small, local groups so pastorally praised by Berger and Neuhaus in the 1970s. Instead of B&N’s patchwork of pluralism made up of these subcultural particularities, we have clots of online tribalists with a grossly distorted notion of what democratic discourse entails and is supposed to accomplish. Their socialization into such discourse was driven by algorithms that promoted the most “engaging” rage-bait, so they learned that this sort of stuff is proper for and rewarded in such fora. They stewed in chambers where disinformation circulated both as fact but also as group-membership totem and shibboleth.

Related to this malformed-publics, social-media-and-tech angle, I think, is the idea of a dichotomy of beliefs, which I first encountered via Amanda Marcotte writing about MAGA and trolls and the forced-birth movement in Salon, but now in a new, prominent piece in The New Yorker by Manvir Singh, “Don’t Believe What They’re Telling You About Misinformation.”²

The essay unpacks the difference between what Jonathan Last would call skin-in-the-game or factual beliefs and signalling or symbolic beliefs. Skin-in-the-game beliefs are beliefs about how the world actually works: traffic coming at you and the way you negotiate street crossing, where you seek help when you have a cancer diagnosis or a broken arm. Symbolic or signalling beliefs are those you hold—or claim to hold in order to preserve or communicate your membership in a group or a sense of personal identity, so, things like “Obama is a secret Muslim” or Trump is chosen by God.”

Symbolic beliefs are expressed to demonstrate membership in good standing with a group, and when partisanship blows the roof off a society, you can expect symbolic beliefs to come to the fore (“GO TEAM!”), especially when they come with few to no skin-in-the-game consequences…when they are decadent, in Jonathan Last’s terminology. They aren’t bright. They aren’t thoughtful or open-minded. To repeat, they’re posing.

The populist energy is not a reaction to facts, but a pose. People are choosing to believe that elites failed them while simultaneously choosing to believe that populist demagogues are trustworthy—despite all available evidence.

These choices are made as a form of cosplay, or LARPing, by which a fat and happy society, awash in food and luxury goods, has realized that all of its lower-order needs have been met and it is free to self-actualize by asserting dominance over whoever the nearest out-group is.

And for much of America, that out-group is the elite class which guided and maintained the social order.

So a majority of MAGA on a suburban Wichita school board can be nonplussed about shooting down a social studies curriculum for absolutely batshit, incoherent and paranoid “reasons,” even in the face of solid refutations, because they’re insulated from consequences and they’re communicating their bona fides to their political tribe, not making a factual claim subject to patient, rational, fair-minded scrutiny. Why this matters is noted by McCoy when he quotes Tom Nichols: “The death of expertise is not just a rejection of existing knowledge. It is fundamentally a rejection of science and dispassionate rationality, which are the foundations of modern civilization.”

Dispassionate rationality is not something I believe is possible—it’s often a god worshipped by guys who needed to take more humanities classes in college (R.I.P. to those, though)—but it’s not that bad to have Mr. Spock on one shoulder as long as you’ve got passionate humanist Dr. McCoy on the other, battling it out for the soul of the Captain. (Or something.)

But the very concept of democracy requires that those in power must strive to be persuadable by good reasons, good evidence, good appeals, some lingua franca of humanity accessible to all. It’s not that electeds must be blank slates, but they must be open to the notion that they may not have all the answers and that the answers they think they have may be mistaken. The alternative is close-minded holders of power who exercise fiat because they can, who owe no one an explanation—an account—whatsoever. Lack of accountability—lack of a meaningful obligation to provide a satisfying account of one’s decision and reasoning to that decision, including genuine moral and intellectual shame when caught out for naked bullshit—is a manifestation of decadence, a form of structural decay and moral rot.

We’ve allowed our structures (mediating, economic, democracy-fostering) to fall to shit in sector after sector, and in case after case, actually spun them off to a private sector that actively works to undermine those structures and the collective understanding of why they are essential to society. Which is why I’m not a huge fan of the Democrats, who capitulated far too much in this process over my lifetime, allowing much of it to happen through short-term electoral thinking and timidity.

And when structures for accountability and consequences decay, we get moral decadence, both in high office and among the public, such that Derby, Kansas, elects wingnuts to its school board who will do damage to their own children’s minds and hearts through symbolic gestures to their political tribe instead of having an informed and grave mindset focused on seeking a meaningful common good.

A final connection here, this one returning to Amanda Marcotte, to TikTok, and much more directly to the culture of immediacy and feeling that so captures us. And I do mean us, not just MAGA hordes, although it starts with Trump. The whole piece is worth reading, if only because it speaks to what the medium of TikTik is doing to us, as, well, an “immediator”:

…even when people are rational enough to reject the constant drumbeat of disinformation, there are signs the site is undermining people in subtle ways that are bad for their mental health and the larger body politic. For Slate on Thursday, Scaachi Koul wrote about her attachment to TikTok, describing it as an app that "burned hours of my life" and echoing the refrain popular with users, "All I do on this app is cry for strangers." I have to quote for length to give justice to what sounds frankly overwhelming, though she appears to mean it as praise for the site:

Soldiers coming home from service, teenagers being gifted their first car, babies being named after a late uncle. Bleaker, more gut-wrenching videos had this comment, too: videos of orphaned children in Gaza with their arms or legs missing, bodies shaking with a fear they’ll never lose. I read the same comment on TikToks featuring people who lost their homes in the Eaton fire, on that now-viral video of that L.A. resident finding his dog still alive in the rubble of his home. It’s on videos of people sitting alone at their birthday parties because no one came, clips of little kids doing their first somersaults, footage of an elderly woman returning to the house that she used to own, now bombed and decimated.

I liked feeling like I could walk into a stranger’s life and see them on the best day they ever had: a graduation, a birth, an engagement, successfully moving their ex-boyfriend out by throwing all his shit in the yard. Whatever a good day meant to these strangers, I got to witness a little piece of it, usually from the comfort of my own bed, late at night while I ran away from sleep. What was I hoping for in those moments? To borrow others’ feelings to amplify my own.

Koul defends an "algorithm [that] seemed to want to make me sob" for giving her "the brutality and the beauty of being a person in the world." From my more jaundiced view, however, the experience sounds more like an emotional roller coaster designed to sap constructive energy. That's a lot of people whose emotions she's digesting in 15-second bursts. Those emotions are detached from the context that gives our feelings deeper meaning. Having one long conversation with a good friend almost certainly grounds you deeper into your humanity than a mile-a-minute drivebys of disassociated, ping-ponging emotions from strangers. What is all the feeling for, if you're too drained to do anything about it?

I'm not the only skeptic of how the shallow manipulations of TikTok are dissuading people from having more meaningful, if more slow-moving, experiences in the real world. In a long and disturbing Atlantic article about how Americans are spending more time alone than ever before in recorded history, Derek Thompson writes, "A popular trend on TikTok involves 20‑somethings celebrating in creative ways when a friend cancels plans, often because they’re too tired or anxious to leave the house." While he sympathizes with the occasional need to chill at home, he also notes it's unsettling that it's a wildly popular discourse. Apparently, a lot of folks feel seeing people in the real world is too taxing, and it's easier to refract your urge for connection to an app that offers only an inch-deep simulacrum.

This, too, is an authoritarian's dream: people who exhaust all their emotions on an endless hamster wheel of random strangers, while becoming further disconnected from investment in their real-world community. Koul writes, "I can’t think of a better use of all that time" than weeping over people whose names she doesn't know. And not to be a fuddy-duddy, but I can think of many better uses, including using that desire to connect with people to motivate charity work, political organizing, or just throwing a dinner party. These connections give us energy and move us to do more than cry, but to take action.

I don't want to pick on Koul, who is a lovely person and clearly has a lot of empathy. That's why I'm so alarmed by TikTok. This isn't Twitter, which is awash in trolls responding to incentives that encourage antisocial emotions like bullying, and is losing users for it. TikTok manipulates people by exploiting their better selves, and repurposing it to ugly ends. The algorithm feeds people endless videos to turn their emotions up high, exhausting their empathy, so they have less to offer those they can actually help. It appeals to people's desire to think for themselves by redirecting that urge to disinformation. Places like Twitter mobilize the worst people, but TikTok does something even more sinister. It demobilizes, distracts, and depresses those who want to do better. No wonder Trump loves it.

Max McCoy’s conclusion to his piece about the Derby, Kansas, school board is basically the opposite of mine. Max says that none of the usual suspects are to blame, not disinformation, not elites, not social media, et cetera ad infinitum. Instead, it’s human nature that’s at fault.

I say, it’s all to blame, but this, too, may be a way of saying the problem is “human nature,” whatever the hell that may be.

I don’t believe in human nature. I think we’re products of our social environment far more than some ineluctable, essential substance. But by gawd, we do play the oldies a helluva lot, and cycles of construction and decay are sure on heavy rotation. Poor sods struggle, get rich, give birth to trust-fund kids who are spoiled and decadent and have no lived memory of hard times or the virtues required to get through them, so they wreck hotel rooms and squander the family fortune. The “science” of education and childrearing is not that old or well-established, and we don’t really know how brains work. Most of human history has been hardscrabble and deprived, and fairly low population both overall and in density. It’s not so much these days and it needn’t be as much as it still is. Brains don’t evolve as fast as technology and society do, but that’s thanks to an innovation called society, and species learning seems like it’s two steps forward then one step back at best.

Wonder if we’ll make it.

Part One:

Part Two:

1. That would be Tom Nichols, whose book The Death of Expertise is getting a renewed set of laurels this week, with nod from Jonathan V. Last as well. I remember being okay with the book when I first read it, but now I’m thinking I need to reread. It’s been, like 8 years, so maybe it’s time. I just kinda find Nichols annoying, which is an unfair reason to forget what he argued in that book.

2. Singh references Hugo Mercier’s 2020 book on the same topic, Not Born Yesterday. Mercier is a research collaborator with Henry Farrell, debunking the elitist libertarian argument that democracy is a dead-end experiment due to the cognitive limitations of the masses, while rule by markets or elites who allegedly understand markets (or the tech to parse markets) is to be preferred. It’s a thesis not entirely unrelated to the present discussion, see Ganz’s treatment in particular.