I think everyone, of every political persuasion – or of no persuasion – can agree that events in the USA have been troubling of late. A few months ago, I predicted that this period in American history would be one of the "most tumultuous" we'd seen recently. Unlike most of my predictions, this one are turned out to be true, although not quite in the way I expected.
At times like this it can be useful to step back, take a breath, and try to look at the bigger picture. Here are a few aspects of that big picture:
1. It's a commonplace observation that everything seems to be going crazy right now. I heard it just tonight from the cashier at the local Walgreen's. I have no idea of his political affiliation. I don't think it matters. Most people, right or left, feel this way. What could account for it?
I have a theory, borrowed from The Alphabet Versus the Goddess by Leonard Shlain. It’s kind of a pseudo-scientific book in many respects, overbroad in its historical reach, but its basic thesis is interesting. Shlain contends that every time there’s a major innovation in communication, society is destabilized and goes kind of insane for a while.

Shlain points to the development of the printing press, which led directly to the Protestant Reformation and all the chaos and war that went with it. Then there was commercial radio, which facilitated the rise of Mussolini and Hitler. There are other examples, going all the way back to the development of the written word and attendant left brain dominance, which arguably upset a more harmonious balance between the two hemispheres of the brain.
Now we have the Internet, and particularly social media (not covered, as far as I recall, in the book). Social media have obtained a presence in our lives that’s wildly out of proportion to their actual value, which, to be frank, is pretty minimal. They encourage division; the loudest and most extreme voices get the most attention, while people who hide behind screen names insult each other recklessly. They stoke hatred, mistrust, and fear. They deepen division and and encourage polarization. They make anyone who disagrees into "the enemy." And yet people feel helplessly dependent on social media, as if unable to get along without them.
Observe the panic, even hysteria, over the recent deplatforming of the alternative messaging service Parler. People are distraught at the loss of this outlet. And yet, as recently as five or ten years ago, that type of service wouldn't even have existed, and people survived perfectly well without it. In fact, I would bet that most people can survive very well without Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and even Google.
(This is not to say that the deplatforming of Parler was legitimate or even legal. The excuses given by Google, Apple, and Amazon strike me as patently phony, given the prevalence of violent rhetoric on Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms, which has not resulted in similar remedies. Parler is now suing Amazon for antitrust violations.)
Eventually we will probably find a way to integrate social media into our lives without the attendant downside. But it could take a while ... and in the meantime there will be more chaos.
2. Nevertheless, there is hope. Tim Berners-Lee, the man cited as the "inventor of the Internet" (more accurately, the inventor of the World Wide Web), is launching a whole new platform that may augment or even supplant the Big Tech-dominated Internet we have come to know.
Berners-Lee is unimpressed with the highly commercialized web and its appropriation of users' private information for corporate gain. He has apparently come up with a way around it. Given his track record, I wouldn't bet against him.
This type of entrepreneurial innovation is our best defense against the oligarchies that seek to crack down on free speech and maintain their monopolies at any cost. I think in the long run it will be successful. Modern societies are so pluralistic and diverse, it is almost impossible to impose uniform authoritarian top-down rules and enforce them effectively. It may work in China, which has no history of individualism or individual rights, but I don't think it will fare as well in the Western world.
3. It's necessary to guard against extremist thinking, which is encouraged by so many Internet sites, whether social media, blogs, or news aggregation sites. I'm not excluding this blog from the list. My blog, like a diary, is essentially a real-time record of my responses to things I've read and thought about, and no doubt I'm just as prone to overreaction and emotional reasoning as anybody else (or even more so). I was shocked when I woke up on the morning of November 4 and discovered that Trump's commanding lead had disappeared overnight, owing to very questionable ballot dumps. I continue to believe there was a lot of funny business going on, although I think Trump and his legal team did not handle the problem well.
In any event, we all need to be on guard against reacting viscerally to online headlines that are intended only to serve as clickbait. For instance, when I go to the right wing site Townhall.com, I find these headlines among the opinion pieces:
The Lib-Fascist Purge
The Progressive Purge Begins
The Conservative Purge Won't Stop with Big Tech
The US Might Soon Be Irretrievable
Townhall is a pretty far-right side, though by no means the farthest to the right. If you were to read its articles exclusively, you would probably conclude that we are in the midst of something equivalent to the Cultural Revolution in Maoist China or the killing fields of Cambodia. And yet this is a huge exaggeration. I do think Big Tech is drunk on its own real or imagined power and engaged in illegal cartel-like activity in suppressing upstart competitors, but it is not the end of democracy, capitalism, or the world.
Here is another example, from the right-wing site Ace of Spades:
Good morning, kids. Another new week in Year Zero. By the calendar on the wall, we're nine days away from the abyss, although between now and noon on Wednesday the 20th, things might happen that make even the most implausible plot points in overwrought Hollywood political potboilers look tame by comparison. Right now, I feel a bit like fellow Brooklyn native Irving Strobing. Strobing served in the US Army as a radio operator, and nearly 80 years ago, he tapped out the last messages from within the fortress cave on the island of Corregidor in the Philippines.
The post quotes Strobing's desperate communiqués as Corregidor was overrun by the Japanese, which end with: ''I know how a mouse feels. Caught in a trap waiting for guys to come along and finish it up...'' It continues:
When you read Strobing's words, the metaphors for today just reach out and grab you by the throat. While Strobing and thousands more Americans and Filipinos would endure the savagery of the Bataan Death March and then over three years of unimaginable suffering at the hands of the Japanese, liberation would ultimately come, and at a terrible cost. But in May of 1942, at that time and in that place, the situation and the future were very much in doubt. Just as it is here and now in 2021, in a nation formerly known as the United States of America.
So we are to believe, apparently, that our situation right now, on the eve of a new administration and a new Congress, is comparable to that of US troops who were being overrun by Japanese forces in World War II. Again, this is an exaggeration. And yet the power of social media – which includes blogs like Ace of Spades – can make it seem real.
I would assume that similar hyperbole can be found on left-wing sites. It can certainly be found on Twitter and Facebook. This simply underscores the point I made in #1 above. Social media have had, and are still having, a deleterious effect on the national conversation.
4. One thing that social media tend to encourage is the us-against-them, "devastating response" style of argument, which is extremely unproductive. sites like Twitchy, for instance, have made a living out of headlines celebrating a "devastating smackdown" of some liberal argument or another.
Example: I would say that the Democrats' intention to impeach President Trump only days before he leaves office is counterproductive, because it needlessly and vindictively deepens the divisions in the country, and only makes it more likely that we might devolve into some kind of civil war. Yet if I were to express this opinion on social media, I would probably be met with responses like:
Hey, we'll kick your ass in that civil war!
You racists lost the first Civil War, and you'll lose the second one!
It will be a short civil war once we bring out the nukes!
Although I've made up these responses, they're based on things I've actually read online. None of this is helpful at all. A much better response would be:
Nobody wants a civil war. There will be no winners. Let's all work together from this point forward and remember that we are all Americans.
And yet you will rarely read a response like that because social media do everything possible to discourage it. If you did try to find common ground in that way, you would be "ratioed," which, as I understand it, means that you would get more negative comments than retweets.
In short, it would be better for people to find ways to come together, find common ground, accept compromise, and heed the "better angels of their nature." Social media, unfortunately, do not encourage any of this. If you respond in that way, you'll be mocked, ostracized, and marginalized. Social media only respect people who fight back by swinging a punch – even a wild punch.
When this blog was new, USENET was still a big thing. It was the equivalent, I guess, of Twitter and Facebook now. I'm not going to go back and check, but I think I wrote a piece called "USENET Is Hell," saying that USENET allowed people to come together who have nothing in common with each other, don't respect each other, have no reason to be polite or even civil, and engage in discourse that degenerates inevitably into crude oneupmanship.
This turned out to be true, not so much about USENET, which is long gone, but about its successors. And I meant that it is literally Hell, in the sense that the higher planes of the postmortem experience are said to consist of like-minded souls of roughly equal levels of evolution, while the lower (hellish) planes consist of people who simply cannot get along. The "hells" (Swedenborg's term), in other words, are very much like USENET or, for that matter, Twitter and Facebook, inasmuch as they bring together people – or souls – who are congenitally incapable of amity.
5. Mention of the afterlife brings me to an entirely different subject. There's a new series on Netflix called Surviving Death, which deals with issues like near-death experiences, past-life recall, and other evidence for postmortem survival. I haven't watched it yet, but I've heard good things about it. You might want to check it out. It's the kind of programming we should probably support.
6. On a related note, I hear good things about Pixar's latest offering, Soul, which apparently delves into (or at least touches on) many afterlife-related issues. At the moment it's available only on the subscription streaming service Disney+.
7. Finally, I received copies of my nonfiction book The Far Horizon today. White Crow Books did a very good job with it. From visiting White Crow's site, I gather that the book is now available for preorder; the official publication date is January 19. Expect me to promote it with tedious persistence in the coming weeks.

Recent Comments