It's A Bunch Of Insecure People Whining Into A Screen
A few days ago a reader sent me a link to this Twitter thread on “The Lord of the Flies Theory of Millennials” and it’s blowing my mind.
The basic premise is that generations of children (now young adults) have grown up in an environment without adult guidance, where power is gained through means that are unrecognisable to normal society, and where the punishment for non-conformity is incredibly severe.
Contrary to Dave Chappelle’s assurances, Twitter is a real place. And it’s raised our children.
In my article, Calling A Ceasefire In The Culture Wars, I wrote about the “terminally online hordes” polluting our discourse. But I hadn’t fully appreciated how different the psychology of these online hordes is.
John was even less convinced.
John:
Over the course of 2022 I went to many actual cultural events and exhibitions like concerts, museums, festivals, church services, a pride march, sporting events, Vegas, historical sites, galleries, nature preserves, films, lectures, parades, and even a 4/20 event, and everyone was totally groovy at every single one of them. People balled up their fists, but it was to fist bump with all and sundry. There was no protesting or ugliness. Here in Pittsburgh we have Anthrocon, the giant Furries festival which is about the weirdest thing you have ever seen, and no one seems to have a problem with it. In real life people of all kinds get along with each other quite well where culture is involved. They are also willing to share their culture with others, particularly if they can make some money from it.
So it's not a "culture war", since there is very little actual culture involved. It's more like a bunch of insecure people whining into a screen.
Steve QJ:
“So it's not a "culture war", since there is very little actual culture involved. It's more like a bunch of insecure people whining into a screen.”
I think you're being a bit too literal about the word "culture" there. It's like saying social media isn't "social." That's just what the thing is called.
But I'm also often surprised by how much people underestimate the impact of what people see on their screens and what they do in real life. Just as a quick example that I included in the article, Payton Gendron killed 11 people in cold blood last year because of things he read on his screen.
I don't understand where the idea that there's this clearly defined line between people's attitudes online and their attitudes in real life comes from.
John:
There are over 330,000,000 people in this country, and chances are very good that some of them absolutely nuts, with or without a screen. And I would argue that "social media" isn't any more social than television is. You are blathering with a bunch of strangers the vast majority of whom you will never hear of again. None of you owe each other anything, like people IRL do. In real life we owe each other politeness and cordiality. We have to wait in line and defer to people with mobility issues.
You don't start arguments with others unless you are one of the people who are nuts. Social media is mostly a cry in the dark, and there is little actual culture involved.
Steve QJ:
“There are over 330,000,000 people in this country, and chances are very good that some of them absolutely nuts, with or without a screen.”
Yes, of course, this is absolutely true. And obviously you have to be mentally unstable to massacre innocent people in the first place. The point is, when you take somebody who's "absolutely nuts," and feed racist propaganda into their brains, you now have an absolutely nuts person who might, for example, travel to a supermarket with an assault rifle and livestream his killing spree.
You can argue that Gendron wouldn't have killed those people if he was sane. I agree. But he also wouldn't have killed those people if he hadn't been indoctrinated online. His manifesto lays this fact out pretty clearly.
And yes, 99% of the time, online arguments are between two random people and the stakes if neither of them changes their mind are very low. But these people vote, these people interact with other members of society. And their behaviour is informed by those conversations and by the general sense of a group that their online bubbles give them.
Sure they might express themselves a little more rudely or freely behind the veil of anonymity, but to pretend that their beliefs are meaningless in the offline world seems a little naive to me.
John:
You know that crazy, racist propaganda predates the internet by a lot, right? There used to be be books, tracts, and 'zines promoting some pretty sick ideas. Besides exhibiting a lot of troubling behavior which was essentially ignored by the authorities, this Gendron asshole had the one thing in common with virtually all of these mass shooters, and that was no girlfriend. Calling Doctor Freud. There are no prom pictures from any of these maniacs. But that's too troubling for a lot of people to think about, and how do you even solve that problem? In any case Gendron will never leave custody, and there is no gang ready to crash him out of jail or people trying to raise money for his legal defense fund. He is no danger to the public anymore.
How was social media involved in the other 29 murders that occurred in Buffalo this year, or the 333 murders in Baltimore, or the 600 in Chicago in 2022? Does anyone know...or care?
Steve QJ:
“How was social media involved in the other 29 murders that occurred in Buffalo this year, or the 333 murders in Baltimore, or the 600 in Chicago in 2022? Does anyone know...or care?”
What's your point here? That online radicalisation is only a problem if it accounts for every murder in a given calendar year? Can you think of any type of crime that has a single cause?
Yes, racist propaganda predates the internet. But the ability to communicate said racist ideas to millions of people with zero credentials or effort, does not. The ability to share said racist ideas with millions more in anonymity does not. The ability for like-minded racists to gather by the thousands to absorb and amplify said racist ideas, does not.
So while I'm delighted that Gendron is no longer a threat to the public, his victims and their families might be a little more focused on the damage he's already caused, no? Not to mention the fact that Gendron 2.0 is likely reading those racist ideas right now.
And, to bring us back to the point of the article, the "antiracists" calling everything "white supremacy" and saying he's racist because he has white skin and perpetuating the lie that black people and white people are fundamentally different can only be pushing him further into that bubble. This is one aspect of the damage the culture war causes.
John:
When the KKK was a big deal in the 1920s they had millions of members, and thousands of them regularly marched around DC. It was all by paper, and what kind of credentials do you think someone declaring themself a Grand Kleagle had? You paid a printer and boom, thousands were reading whatever garbage you wanted to put out there.
Online radicalization only counts for a tiny fraction of murders in this country versus the drug business alone, and that's without even counting overdoses. How much is social media driving all of that, which by body count is a much, much bigger problem? Is anyone even looking at that?
Steve QJ:
“When the KKK was a big deal in the 1920s they had millions of members, and thousands of them regularly marched around DC.”
Okay my friend, you win. Ideas, especially bad ideas, spread at exactly the same rate in the social media age as they did when the printing press was first invented. Printing tens of thousands of flyers and distributing them by hand to strangers is exactly as easy and inexpensive as firing off a few tweets to your followers while you're taking a dump.
Social media had no impact on Jan 6th. No impact on the BLM riots. No impact on COVID denialism or COVID hysteria.
Never mind the fact that a single account on Twitter can have more followers than the KKK ever did. Or that online cesspools like 4chan and 8chan get around 22 million visitors every month.
And yes, the fact that people die of drug overdoses means we should be totally indifferent to other types of death or the motives behind them. Nobody is capable of caring about both simultaneously. In fact, until social media is driving 100% of human suffering we should ignore the enormous influence it has.
It’s strange reading this conversation back. Because even though it only took place a couple of weeks ago, my sense of how online culture has shaped our minds, our discourse, and even our grip on reality has completely shifted.
It’s not just about the rate at which bad ideas spread, it’s the way the internet has shaped people’s thoughts and behaviour.
I’ve been wrestling for at least a year with the question of how discourse has so quickly become so zany. Why we’re suddenly grappling with questions like what a woman is and whether classical music is white supremacy. And while I knew the answer had something to do with social media, I hadn’t fully appreciated that the problem was the online environment itself.
Expect an article or two on this topic in the coming weeks.
"And I would argue that 'social media' isn't any more social than television is." I'm so old I remember when there was ONLY television. Three networks. The entire country glued to the "boob tube." Parents worried about the plug-in drug.
But if you couldn't bear a celebrity, or even non-celebrity, female on the Tonight Show and you wanted to abuse her profanely and even threaten to rape or kill her and to reveal her address and phone number to countless numbers of other unhinged zanies, your options were to call the switchboard at NBC and hold the phone forever, only to be hung up on ten seconds into your rant, or you could write a letter to the woman c/o The Tonight Show, New York, NY. You were able to reach one or two people that way.
A difference in degree is a difference in kind. The speed and immediacy, combined with the anonymity, of social media has put us on a whole new playing field. Almost nothing about television was social, excepting the interchanges with the small number of people in the same room watching it with you. Social media is nothing BUT social.
Don't underestimate the contribution of 24-hour news, with the advent of CNN and an exponential increase in cable movie channels in the '80s. Before CNN, news came from half hour to one hour news shows in the morning and evening, and from the local newspaper, and the radio. If you wanted more news than that you subscribed to various magazines and periodicals. But the news WAS more balanced then, as the Fairness Doctrine was still in place, mandating equal time for political candidates, which Reagan got rid of because old-school conservative snowflakes were tired of having to listen to and present views outside their constipated bubble.
Because CNN had to fill 24 hours a day now with news, we got a lot more attention on the important stuff, but also a lot of stupid crap too, including people and stories which should never have been on the news. That was also the dawn of the beginnings of reality TV, like the live rescue of a little girl who'd fallen down a hole in the ground, and later, the OJ chase.
Nut groups like the KKK took advantage of this and created news with rallies & marches & so forth because they knew it would make the news. Whatever was outrageous and eye-catching leads. Or as Don Henley sang back then, "We all know that crap is king, give us your dirty laundry!"