A recent article in The Atlantic argues that the internet functions as a transformative "justification engine" rather than a "brainwashing machine." The truth is more complicated.
I keep thinking of the disinformation efforts that propped up President Biden for four years, maintaining the fiction that he was fully functional. When it comes to information and media, this is the most consequential story so far this century. And it was not caused by the Internet.
I'm curious - do you believe that the detailed health assessments written by Biden's physician, released by the White House, were part of this conspiracy? (for years?)
Do you give any credence to the speculations that Donald Trump is suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, especially as there is a family history of it and he is now the oldest person ever elected President? I know, the joke is that given his baseline, how could one tell? But those are some big red flags, which makes one wonder about stuff like "In Springfield, they're eating the dogs. The people that came in. They're eating the cats. They're eating -- they're eating the pets of the people that live there."
"social media provides unprecedented exposure to attitudes they would otherwise be—and indeed used to be—sheltered from.".....https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-madness-of-intelligentsias...... 'A perceptive piece by Times columnist James Marriott eloquently put the case that Elon Musk’s concept of TwitterX as a great Global Town Square - whilst on the face of it a highly attractive idea - could, counter-intuitively in fact be a terrible idea: “The idea that society needs a town square is a fallacy of recent invention. It is not necessary that citizens debate with one another on digital networks of vast scale. Successful democracies require voters to live in relative ignorance of one another.... Social media offers conservatives infinite opportunities to become infuriated by the eccentricities of poly-gendered humanities PhD students with whom they would never otherwise come into contact.” This is well said... and goes right to the heart of basic philosophical questions about how a society can best cohere and its people co-exist in relative peace and harmony. But it also poses – albeit implicitly - an awkward look-in-the-mirror challenge to Western Liberalism’s cherished image of itself.'
"Before social media, humanity already had mass communication through television, radio, and newspapers, and it’s easy to overstate how central social media platforms are in shaping large-scale public opinion today." Must disagree here. What I'm afraid you're missing is the crack cocaine-like dopamine effect, especially on young minds, of scrolling through rationalizing opinions of beautiful, charismatic and compelling faces speaking right into your face and interacting with you in comments. I didn't read political opinions in newspapers or watch the news much until young adulthood, and I was a nerd, but now TT targets children like an ice cream truck. The rationalizations of Oct 7 and the massive, youthful pro-Hamas protests are a perfect example of the unprecedented influence of social media on immature minds. Mao would be proud.
I can't disagree about the addictiveness of social media, and not just for young minds. I'm 60 and I spend too much time looking at my phone, and I see it all around me. It's addictive b/c people don't like to be bored, and it's enticing to have an entertainment and social connection machine sitting in your pocket whenever you get slightly bored.
But I'm totally not convinced that its addictiveness has the political effects that Warzel and his friends worry about. When we reach into our pockets to pull out that entertainment machine, we look for stuff that we already like and enjoy. If we are not already inclined to believe Trump's crazy stories about the election and Jan 6, we'll ignore, laugh at, or get mad at posts that promote them. If we love Trump and want to believe him, we'll find justifications on talk radio or TV or at church or the bar even if we don't use social media.
Addictiveness is definitely an issue, but I was focusing on the brainwashing effectiveness of social media. It harnesses our deepest human drives, to connect, belong and gain status, in whole new and addictive ways that are especially devastating to young minds.
I think this is largely true, but misses an important point—how ideas, and especially moral standpoints, get bundled into “being online together” these days. For example, depending on what it is you “like and enjoy” and reach for in the entertainment machine, you’re more or less likely to encounter certain political or social viewpoints, in part because we’re all expected to “take a side” or communicate our allegiance to one camp or another as a matter of performing identity and group belonging, and a heterogeneity of viewpoints is discouraged. So if all your friends/ family/ social circle are into social justice, feminism, gay pride, and other generally prosocial liberal values, AND they also keep saying “globalize the intifada” you’re much less likely to question the justification of that last bit, because you’ve already tested your trusted social circle via other value alignments.
Moreover, the nature of being online these days is such that actually debating the merits of this or that belief/ value is greatly discouraged—akin to being “hopped up on mob energy” perhaps, as the commenter above put it. (Which I don’t think was better or worse but just about the same?) This is not only due to polarization, I think, but also because having a nuanced conversation online with strangers is difficult. Online, we are less likely to give one another the same benefit of the doubt we would in person to people we already know—friends, neighbors, colleagues, family, etc. Conversations tend to devolve. Healthy skepticism and fact-checking is often viewed with hostility as “enemy ideology”, in both left or right leaning circles. Secondly, given it is not humanly possible to be constantly skeptical and vigilant about every single topic, yet it’s increasingly demanded of us to perform our political identity alongside all others, it’s no wonder we tend to defer certain rationalizations to the group. Over time, it may even amount to a shift in worldview.
Idk. Didn’t people used to congregate in literal town squares or gathering areas and get all hopped up on mob energy off whatever nonsense was being spewed? That seems even more dopamine triggering than social media.
Most people only ever had contact with a few dozen people their whole lives during most of history, so the sudden face to face intimacy with thousands is unprecedented. The underlying social drivers are the same, sex, status, power, belonging, but the playing field is a whole new game.
"The rationalizations of Oct 7 and the massive, youthful pro-Hamas protests are a perfect example of the unprecedented influence of social media on immature minds. Mao would be proud."
All you're providing evidence of here is the intelligence-sapping influence of some kind of media on your own mind. There are no "pro-Hamas" protests -- this is total fiction. And the fact that the massive protests in question are dominated by the young strongly suggests that they have a healthier relationship with the media they're consuming than those who who affect to be 'mature' whole tacitly endorsing a genocide.
The "crack cocaine-like dopamine effect" is exactly the kind of claim Williams criticizes, and I'd honestly be surprised if there were a study that gave people crack, let a comparison group consume social media, and found the same effects on the brain.
Sounds like a nice, heaping portion of fear-mongering to me.
I’ll leave it to the author of the original comment to weigh in if they were using a figure of speech or not, but I think a nuance is needed here. There are, in fact, studies about the addictiveness of social media, its effects on human behavior, cognition, etc. It’s tricky to parse the results because it seems that it can affect some people very profoundly, while others not a whole lot. So, if anything, the more apt drug comparison is probably weed or cigarettes. Some people get very addicted and it alters their lives and health profoundly; others can casually engage here and there and live to be a mostly healthy 100 year old. Does that mean that we should discount the ill effects of either? No. Should we convulse in a moral panic about it? Also no.
Furthermore, I think the more salient issue about social media is not that it’s “bad” or “addictive” but that it does profoundly change how we engage with one another and with information. It’s not a neutral, and just because it’s not the first profound technology change in communication, doesn’t mean it’s something we can dismiss out of hand. Is it to blame for all our ills? I don’t think so. But I do think it’s a big amplification factor, esp via the social identity/ being online culture.
Massive topic. Another factor here that seems to have been overlooked is the enormous impact the introduction of widespread anonymity has on society and the unprecedented ease with which people can now craft alter egos.
You mention you don’t run into QAnon believers on the streets (neither do I) and attribute that to being sheltered which no doubt is true to some extent. But QAnon, like so many modern conspiracy theories and fringe beliefs, is a product of anonymity. It couldn’t have become so widespread in a society where its proponents faced the inevitable real-world backlash that proposing and seriously entertaining such outlandish theories invites. Anonymity gives budding bad ideas a safe place to grow and mature.
What keeps discourse adequately grounded and civil is the concern one must have for how their proposed ideas will reflect on their reputation. This isn’t a wholly positive effect, but when there is no accountability for saying stupid but intriguing things and the reach of those things is potentially unlimited, it breeds gross misperception and rampant wishful thinking.
I feel like the internet has been a paradigm shift in the way you and some others in the comments have hinted at—it lets people see a far larger swath of society’s views in a less frictionful way than ever before, and discovering that so many think disagree with you and think you’re insane (and vice versa) is demoralizing. Regardless of whether the internet is a justification machine or a brainwashing machine, it will change the view of society of anyone who spends time on any of its “public squares.” People were previously much more separated from the ideas of those unlike them, and by default people have an egocentric bias where they tend to believe others think like them. Even if the new ideas people are exposed to neither change their beliefs nor are used to rationalize them, they will change people’s perceptions of what “everyone else” believes.
I personally think many of the concerns about the internet are justified (though on both sides of the political spectrum) but I think perhaps greater knowledge of how divergent everyone’s beliefs are could explain the pessimism about the internet so many seem to feel.
Have you read David Samuels article in Tablet Magazine about Obama and Rapid Onset Political Enlightenment? I think it does a better job than the Atlantic article in explaining what has happened. https://www.tabletmag.com/feature/rapid-onset-political-enlightenment . I am not sure how to evaluate the 'television is 5 times as influential as
a news source' paper. In a world where the boundary between politics and everything else seems to have ruptured, even figuring out 'what is news' is difficult. Is this discussion news? If not why not?
I also believe that you are mistaken in concluding that the drive for status today is the same drive for status that has always been with us. Dan Pink wrote a book -- Drive: the Surprising Truth about what Motivates us. There is a very funny youtube cartoon summary or him speaking about it here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc It was a bestseller when it was published in 2019. Dan Pink's argument is that human motivation is largely intrinsic and that the aspects of this motivation can be divided into autonomy, mastery, and purpose. It's big takeaway is that you cannot reward people with money into doing what you want, and indeed it is often counter-productive. Once they have 'enough' -- a number that varies for each individual -- they want their jobs to be fulfilling, rather that just more-well-paid.
Conspicuously absent from his book is the notion of people being primarily motivated by
status. Now you might think, ya, ya, but he wants to talk about intrinsic motivation so of course he won't focus on status which is external validation. But he doesn't even mention it in order to explain it away, or decide that status is just the natural outcome of pursuing mastery and purpose, or that status is valuable because it gives you autonomy. It is as if, when doing his research, he so rarely met people who wanted to discuss the status they were pursuing that it wasn't worth a mention. And I think that this is what has changed.
Status used to be one of those things, like being wealthy, which you are not supposed to directly aim for, but which ought to be the natural outcome of living your life well. Pursuing it directly was every bit as vulgar as 'only being in it for the money'. Celebrities existed but they were generally considered crass. That was then -- now, 'influencer' is what all the kids want to be when they grow up, and competing for *likes* and *thumbs* is part of everybody's business. There's no longer anything shameful about making status-seeking your full time job. And this is a change in focus, which I think is significant.
Of course, with it, we may have got an enormous increase in preference falsification -- and how do you go about measuring that? -- which has produced a disconnect between the esteem by which high-status people expect to be held, and the actual feelings that people have for such people.
It seems to me that beginning with his first book The Shallows How the Internet is Changing the Way we Think, Read and Remember, and more importantly his new book Superbloom Nicholas Carr provides a very perceptive understanding of how we are now being driven mad by our toxic media. http://www.nicholascarr.com
Briefly, there are two avenues that may be underexplored in this otherwise solid response piece.
1. "The real currency of the internet" may encompass both attention and status: salience. It can preceed and dominate attention, while "status" itself is a kind of social salience. If you encounter someone, algorithmically or otherwise, and they have many followers, likes, are attractive etc, you work your way backwards to connect these loose "status metrics" with those salient features that must have earned them. You are primed and anchored in a context that demands rapid fire attributions.
2. The claim about "efficiently erasing dissonance" seemed a bit strong, but your response seemed to focus on the shoppability of the marketplace of rationalizations. Importantly, both of these may overly focus on the cognitive and intellectual elements of dissonance rather than the sentiments and emotions often underpinning them.
If I am feeling impatient and overwhelmed, and I receive a notification on my phone about some story that further tests my patience, then I might take to social media to express in extreme terms my heightened dissatisfaction as if it were fully sourced from the story. Such attribution errors are standard human operation.
Akin to cognitive offloading, we might habituate to this "outlet" for our dissonance, but offloading is not the same as erasing. We might expect our outrage to receive likes, responses or retorts, and it might amplify or dispel this dissonance as a function of the effect we perceive it having on others. Rationalization may not play too strong a role until we are asked to justify ourselves in some manner. Salience once again plays a huge role here, resulting in the temptation of attribution errors such as "killing the messenger."
I don’t think the claim about social media’s role in shaping large-scale opinion is overstated. In fact, this is precisely why there’s so much panic around it—because social media isn’t just changing opinions; it’s fundamentally reshaping deeply held worldviews and perceptions. And when perceptions change, society will inevitably change as well.
Do you have a concrete example for "social media is fundamentally reshaping deeply held worldviews and perceptions"? Because this sounds suspiciously like the marketing pitch of most social media companies. :)
I can assure you I have no stakes in any digital platform companies (though, in some ways, I wish I did; it would certainly pay more than what I currently earn from my Substack). My interest lies purely in understanding human behaviour and how our world is changing. As for evidence—yes, solid evidence and insights drawn from both my own empirical research and multidisciplinary studies. I can understand you asking for it, but these will be presented in detail through my own Substack articles, and I trust you’ll understand why.
I didn't assume that you have a stake in one of those companies. I *did* assume, though, that you'd fallen for their self-aggrandizing claims, such as when people repeated the claims made by Cambridge Analytica about the impact of CA's work that later turned out to be BS.
Interesting as always! I live in Portland, oregon, which is very liberal but very much not an elite intellectual center like SF, Boston, NYC (or London in your neck of the woods), etc. Among some of my friends, I see a major change from the pre social media days.
Basically the only political topics the less politically engaged/informed among them ever hear about or bring up is whatever is the topic du jour of the left outrage mob on Instagram or tiktok. It tends to be less often outright fascist lies like it often is on the right. But it's still usually at least quite blinkered and is a very different dynamic than the pre social media days. There's also the now pretty strong evidence of mental health harms, which are observed around the world.
Which is to say, I agree with most of the points you make. I just think you don't want to go too far in your debunking-elite-story-time story. Sure maybe right now our propaganda problem is still mostly Murdoch and Limbaugh's fault. But I wouldn't be so quick to say digital distribution and media creation isn't/won't be as revolutionary as previous large communication technologies.
(Though the AI revolution/takeover might happen too soon for us to ever know what the stand alone effects of smart phones and the internet would have been over the medium to long term)
Nice piece and I agree with many aspects, especially the neglect of how the left needs to look at how social media is shaping their views too.
But one thing you’re missing (I think) is in the oversimplification of the “social media is destroying society” arguments. Much of this literature (but not all) at least postulates mechanisms, each with their own merits and empirical evidence. But you paint it all with a wide brush to dismiss it as a straw man.
For example, if you spend time with sociologists or anthropologists you’ll hear just how much social media is changing how social capital is formed or eroded. This touches on your point about status but goes further. Social media is excellent at building “bonding” social capital: bringing people who previously couldn’t find each other together and allowing them to form communities with not just shared bonds, identity and experiences, but solidifying values, norms and perspectives. This is great for patients with rare diseases like ALS or cancer. But in these shared norms, distortions occur, like in Lyme disease groups and other “contested illnesses”.
What is shifting is the bridging social capital built through broadcast media is eroding as broadcast becomes less salient in many people’s lives, especiallly the young. And as bonding social capital increases via social media, you get a net effect of polarization as two groups cannot see eye to eye.
This is clearly a simplification of the complex process of polarization, which has many mechanisms including Josh Darr’s work on the decline of local news. But the point is that social media and the internet are indeed changing society in many profound ways. As information consumers have now become information producers, there are boind to be shifts. Whether this is “destroying society” is a subjective judgement, but it is still reasonable to discuss and be concerned about these shifts even while broadcast media remains important. Sure, some of the coverage is Chicken Little-esque, but that doesn’t make all the mechanisms discussed bunk. Each one needs to be evaluated in their own merits.
"Speaking personally, my offline life is dominated by highly-educated, well-mannered liberal and lefty professionals. It's only when I log onto social media that I encounter people who believe in QAnon, think vaccines contain microchips, or view George Soros as a gay Jewish space vampire."
I am fortunate that I straddle both worlds in my offline life. I have relatives who are lefty academics along with some friends who believe that latest right-wing conspiracy theories. All my highly educated family and friends tend to be believe (and talk about) the same things. It's seems like a very sophisticated orthodoxy. My right-wing friends tend have wide variety of anti-establishment beliefs, but no real worldview that binds them together.
The liberal orthodoxy, while very well thought out, fails when it encounters something it can't explain and thus ignores it. A perfect example would be the grooming gangs scandal - NONE of my educated friends had even heard of it before. Or the race and IQ debate. Or crime statistics. I bring up any of these things and suddenly the educated become neophytes.
This orthodoxy, which seems to have come about after the second world war, is in serious need of reform, which is why I think we are in epistemic crisis. Smart people on the right are shooting holes in the belief system and its founding myths. The only defense on the left seems to be calls for censorship.
One of the largest problems created by algorithmic feeds on social media is societal atomization. If everyone has a tailored stream of information, we increasingly lack a common ground of truths and convictions as a country. This in turn is a real danger to the survival of democracy in my opinion, because democracy depends on a strong backbone of civil society standing up for it, if it ever was challenged. I don't see this happening in a fractured individualistic society.
There's some risk of this, but it's overstated. The real threat to the "common ground of truths and convictions" is the fact that those in power and those who want power recklessly lie, and while this has always been the case to some extent, they're motivated to do so now more than ever because our societies are unsustainable and our resources thinning. Averting/ameliorating the mounting crises would require totally rethinking the flow of power and wealth, and so we get a constant stream of desperate bullshit pumped into our media to force us to think otherwise, or to direct our frustrations at each other.
Well timed article, @conspicuouscognition, given Mark Zuckerberg's announcement of a return to free speech.
Why is it that everyone else are "evidence foragers" while the authors of 'The Internet Is Worse Than a Brainwashing Machine' Charlie Warzel and Mike Caulfield can create their own original thought?
People can make up their own minds. Social media is a democratising revolution. We do have free will. If they couldn't, and it wasn't, and we didn't, Kamala Harris would have won a 90%+ landslide.
Perhaps the impact of screens more broadly and the Internet on trust and status anxiety (by facilitating more alone time and unrealistic social comparison) is part of the deeper dynamic at play.
Great aggregate piece as well as a persuasive critique of the Atlantic article in a fair and argued manner. Also like the reference to Mercier’s book. Thank you.
I keep thinking of the disinformation efforts that propped up President Biden for four years, maintaining the fiction that he was fully functional. When it comes to information and media, this is the most consequential story so far this century. And it was not caused by the Internet.
Yes, it's an interesting example - I originally planned to include it in the article.
I'm curious - do you believe that the detailed health assessments written by Biden's physician, released by the White House, were part of this conspiracy? (for years?)
Do you give any credence to the speculations that Donald Trump is suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, especially as there is a family history of it and he is now the oldest person ever elected President? I know, the joke is that given his baseline, how could one tell? But those are some big red flags, which makes one wonder about stuff like "In Springfield, they're eating the dogs. The people that came in. They're eating the cats. They're eating -- they're eating the pets of the people that live there."
"social media provides unprecedented exposure to attitudes they would otherwise be—and indeed used to be—sheltered from.".....https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-madness-of-intelligentsias...... 'A perceptive piece by Times columnist James Marriott eloquently put the case that Elon Musk’s concept of TwitterX as a great Global Town Square - whilst on the face of it a highly attractive idea - could, counter-intuitively in fact be a terrible idea: “The idea that society needs a town square is a fallacy of recent invention. It is not necessary that citizens debate with one another on digital networks of vast scale. Successful democracies require voters to live in relative ignorance of one another.... Social media offers conservatives infinite opportunities to become infuriated by the eccentricities of poly-gendered humanities PhD students with whom they would never otherwise come into contact.” This is well said... and goes right to the heart of basic philosophical questions about how a society can best cohere and its people co-exist in relative peace and harmony. But it also poses – albeit implicitly - an awkward look-in-the-mirror challenge to Western Liberalism’s cherished image of itself.'
"Before social media, humanity already had mass communication through television, radio, and newspapers, and it’s easy to overstate how central social media platforms are in shaping large-scale public opinion today." Must disagree here. What I'm afraid you're missing is the crack cocaine-like dopamine effect, especially on young minds, of scrolling through rationalizing opinions of beautiful, charismatic and compelling faces speaking right into your face and interacting with you in comments. I didn't read political opinions in newspapers or watch the news much until young adulthood, and I was a nerd, but now TT targets children like an ice cream truck. The rationalizations of Oct 7 and the massive, youthful pro-Hamas protests are a perfect example of the unprecedented influence of social media on immature minds. Mao would be proud.
I can't disagree about the addictiveness of social media, and not just for young minds. I'm 60 and I spend too much time looking at my phone, and I see it all around me. It's addictive b/c people don't like to be bored, and it's enticing to have an entertainment and social connection machine sitting in your pocket whenever you get slightly bored.
But I'm totally not convinced that its addictiveness has the political effects that Warzel and his friends worry about. When we reach into our pockets to pull out that entertainment machine, we look for stuff that we already like and enjoy. If we are not already inclined to believe Trump's crazy stories about the election and Jan 6, we'll ignore, laugh at, or get mad at posts that promote them. If we love Trump and want to believe him, we'll find justifications on talk radio or TV or at church or the bar even if we don't use social media.
Addictiveness is definitely an issue, but I was focusing on the brainwashing effectiveness of social media. It harnesses our deepest human drives, to connect, belong and gain status, in whole new and addictive ways that are especially devastating to young minds.
I think this is largely true, but misses an important point—how ideas, and especially moral standpoints, get bundled into “being online together” these days. For example, depending on what it is you “like and enjoy” and reach for in the entertainment machine, you’re more or less likely to encounter certain political or social viewpoints, in part because we’re all expected to “take a side” or communicate our allegiance to one camp or another as a matter of performing identity and group belonging, and a heterogeneity of viewpoints is discouraged. So if all your friends/ family/ social circle are into social justice, feminism, gay pride, and other generally prosocial liberal values, AND they also keep saying “globalize the intifada” you’re much less likely to question the justification of that last bit, because you’ve already tested your trusted social circle via other value alignments.
Moreover, the nature of being online these days is such that actually debating the merits of this or that belief/ value is greatly discouraged—akin to being “hopped up on mob energy” perhaps, as the commenter above put it. (Which I don’t think was better or worse but just about the same?) This is not only due to polarization, I think, but also because having a nuanced conversation online with strangers is difficult. Online, we are less likely to give one another the same benefit of the doubt we would in person to people we already know—friends, neighbors, colleagues, family, etc. Conversations tend to devolve. Healthy skepticism and fact-checking is often viewed with hostility as “enemy ideology”, in both left or right leaning circles. Secondly, given it is not humanly possible to be constantly skeptical and vigilant about every single topic, yet it’s increasingly demanded of us to perform our political identity alongside all others, it’s no wonder we tend to defer certain rationalizations to the group. Over time, it may even amount to a shift in worldview.
Idk. Didn’t people used to congregate in literal town squares or gathering areas and get all hopped up on mob energy off whatever nonsense was being spewed? That seems even more dopamine triggering than social media.
Most people only ever had contact with a few dozen people their whole lives during most of history, so the sudden face to face intimacy with thousands is unprecedented. The underlying social drivers are the same, sex, status, power, belonging, but the playing field is a whole new game.
"The rationalizations of Oct 7 and the massive, youthful pro-Hamas protests are a perfect example of the unprecedented influence of social media on immature minds. Mao would be proud."
All you're providing evidence of here is the intelligence-sapping influence of some kind of media on your own mind. There are no "pro-Hamas" protests -- this is total fiction. And the fact that the massive protests in question are dominated by the young strongly suggests that they have a healthier relationship with the media they're consuming than those who who affect to be 'mature' whole tacitly endorsing a genocide.
The "crack cocaine-like dopamine effect" is exactly the kind of claim Williams criticizes, and I'd honestly be surprised if there were a study that gave people crack, let a comparison group consume social media, and found the same effects on the brain.
Sounds like a nice, heaping portion of fear-mongering to me.
I’ll leave it to the author of the original comment to weigh in if they were using a figure of speech or not, but I think a nuance is needed here. There are, in fact, studies about the addictiveness of social media, its effects on human behavior, cognition, etc. It’s tricky to parse the results because it seems that it can affect some people very profoundly, while others not a whole lot. So, if anything, the more apt drug comparison is probably weed or cigarettes. Some people get very addicted and it alters their lives and health profoundly; others can casually engage here and there and live to be a mostly healthy 100 year old. Does that mean that we should discount the ill effects of either? No. Should we convulse in a moral panic about it? Also no.
Furthermore, I think the more salient issue about social media is not that it’s “bad” or “addictive” but that it does profoundly change how we engage with one another and with information. It’s not a neutral, and just because it’s not the first profound technology change in communication, doesn’t mean it’s something we can dismiss out of hand. Is it to blame for all our ills? I don’t think so. But I do think it’s a big amplification factor, esp via the social identity/ being online culture.
Massive topic. Another factor here that seems to have been overlooked is the enormous impact the introduction of widespread anonymity has on society and the unprecedented ease with which people can now craft alter egos.
You mention you don’t run into QAnon believers on the streets (neither do I) and attribute that to being sheltered which no doubt is true to some extent. But QAnon, like so many modern conspiracy theories and fringe beliefs, is a product of anonymity. It couldn’t have become so widespread in a society where its proponents faced the inevitable real-world backlash that proposing and seriously entertaining such outlandish theories invites. Anonymity gives budding bad ideas a safe place to grow and mature.
What keeps discourse adequately grounded and civil is the concern one must have for how their proposed ideas will reflect on their reputation. This isn’t a wholly positive effect, but when there is no accountability for saying stupid but intriguing things and the reach of those things is potentially unlimited, it breeds gross misperception and rampant wishful thinking.
I feel like the internet has been a paradigm shift in the way you and some others in the comments have hinted at—it lets people see a far larger swath of society’s views in a less frictionful way than ever before, and discovering that so many think disagree with you and think you’re insane (and vice versa) is demoralizing. Regardless of whether the internet is a justification machine or a brainwashing machine, it will change the view of society of anyone who spends time on any of its “public squares.” People were previously much more separated from the ideas of those unlike them, and by default people have an egocentric bias where they tend to believe others think like them. Even if the new ideas people are exposed to neither change their beliefs nor are used to rationalize them, they will change people’s perceptions of what “everyone else” believes.
I personally think many of the concerns about the internet are justified (though on both sides of the political spectrum) but I think perhaps greater knowledge of how divergent everyone’s beliefs are could explain the pessimism about the internet so many seem to feel.
Have you read David Samuels article in Tablet Magazine about Obama and Rapid Onset Political Enlightenment? I think it does a better job than the Atlantic article in explaining what has happened. https://www.tabletmag.com/feature/rapid-onset-political-enlightenment . I am not sure how to evaluate the 'television is 5 times as influential as
a news source' paper. In a world where the boundary between politics and everything else seems to have ruptured, even figuring out 'what is news' is difficult. Is this discussion news? If not why not?
I also believe that you are mistaken in concluding that the drive for status today is the same drive for status that has always been with us. Dan Pink wrote a book -- Drive: the Surprising Truth about what Motivates us. There is a very funny youtube cartoon summary or him speaking about it here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc It was a bestseller when it was published in 2019. Dan Pink's argument is that human motivation is largely intrinsic and that the aspects of this motivation can be divided into autonomy, mastery, and purpose. It's big takeaway is that you cannot reward people with money into doing what you want, and indeed it is often counter-productive. Once they have 'enough' -- a number that varies for each individual -- they want their jobs to be fulfilling, rather that just more-well-paid.
Conspicuously absent from his book is the notion of people being primarily motivated by
status. Now you might think, ya, ya, but he wants to talk about intrinsic motivation so of course he won't focus on status which is external validation. But he doesn't even mention it in order to explain it away, or decide that status is just the natural outcome of pursuing mastery and purpose, or that status is valuable because it gives you autonomy. It is as if, when doing his research, he so rarely met people who wanted to discuss the status they were pursuing that it wasn't worth a mention. And I think that this is what has changed.
Status used to be one of those things, like being wealthy, which you are not supposed to directly aim for, but which ought to be the natural outcome of living your life well. Pursuing it directly was every bit as vulgar as 'only being in it for the money'. Celebrities existed but they were generally considered crass. That was then -- now, 'influencer' is what all the kids want to be when they grow up, and competing for *likes* and *thumbs* is part of everybody's business. There's no longer anything shameful about making status-seeking your full time job. And this is a change in focus, which I think is significant.
Of course, with it, we may have got an enormous increase in preference falsification -- and how do you go about measuring that? -- which has produced a disconnect between the esteem by which high-status people expect to be held, and the actual feelings that people have for such people.
Interesting thoughts - thanks
It seems to me that beginning with his first book The Shallows How the Internet is Changing the Way we Think, Read and Remember, and more importantly his new book Superbloom Nicholas Carr provides a very perceptive understanding of how we are now being driven mad by our toxic media. http://www.nicholascarr.com
Briefly, there are two avenues that may be underexplored in this otherwise solid response piece.
1. "The real currency of the internet" may encompass both attention and status: salience. It can preceed and dominate attention, while "status" itself is a kind of social salience. If you encounter someone, algorithmically or otherwise, and they have many followers, likes, are attractive etc, you work your way backwards to connect these loose "status metrics" with those salient features that must have earned them. You are primed and anchored in a context that demands rapid fire attributions.
2. The claim about "efficiently erasing dissonance" seemed a bit strong, but your response seemed to focus on the shoppability of the marketplace of rationalizations. Importantly, both of these may overly focus on the cognitive and intellectual elements of dissonance rather than the sentiments and emotions often underpinning them.
If I am feeling impatient and overwhelmed, and I receive a notification on my phone about some story that further tests my patience, then I might take to social media to express in extreme terms my heightened dissatisfaction as if it were fully sourced from the story. Such attribution errors are standard human operation.
Akin to cognitive offloading, we might habituate to this "outlet" for our dissonance, but offloading is not the same as erasing. We might expect our outrage to receive likes, responses or retorts, and it might amplify or dispel this dissonance as a function of the effect we perceive it having on others. Rationalization may not play too strong a role until we are asked to justify ourselves in some manner. Salience once again plays a huge role here, resulting in the temptation of attribution errors such as "killing the messenger."
Good points - thanks!
I don’t think the claim about social media’s role in shaping large-scale opinion is overstated. In fact, this is precisely why there’s so much panic around it—because social media isn’t just changing opinions; it’s fundamentally reshaping deeply held worldviews and perceptions. And when perceptions change, society will inevitably change as well.
Do you have a concrete example for "social media is fundamentally reshaping deeply held worldviews and perceptions"? Because this sounds suspiciously like the marketing pitch of most social media companies. :)
I can assure you I have no stakes in any digital platform companies (though, in some ways, I wish I did; it would certainly pay more than what I currently earn from my Substack). My interest lies purely in understanding human behaviour and how our world is changing. As for evidence—yes, solid evidence and insights drawn from both my own empirical research and multidisciplinary studies. I can understand you asking for it, but these will be presented in detail through my own Substack articles, and I trust you’ll understand why.
Totally understand and I'll keep an eye out.
I didn't assume that you have a stake in one of those companies. I *did* assume, though, that you'd fallen for their self-aggrandizing claims, such as when people repeated the claims made by Cambridge Analytica about the impact of CA's work that later turned out to be BS.
Interesting as always! I live in Portland, oregon, which is very liberal but very much not an elite intellectual center like SF, Boston, NYC (or London in your neck of the woods), etc. Among some of my friends, I see a major change from the pre social media days.
Basically the only political topics the less politically engaged/informed among them ever hear about or bring up is whatever is the topic du jour of the left outrage mob on Instagram or tiktok. It tends to be less often outright fascist lies like it often is on the right. But it's still usually at least quite blinkered and is a very different dynamic than the pre social media days. There's also the now pretty strong evidence of mental health harms, which are observed around the world.
Which is to say, I agree with most of the points you make. I just think you don't want to go too far in your debunking-elite-story-time story. Sure maybe right now our propaganda problem is still mostly Murdoch and Limbaugh's fault. But I wouldn't be so quick to say digital distribution and media creation isn't/won't be as revolutionary as previous large communication technologies.
(Though the AI revolution/takeover might happen too soon for us to ever know what the stand alone effects of smart phones and the internet would have been over the medium to long term)
Interesting - yes, maybe you're right..
Nice piece and I agree with many aspects, especially the neglect of how the left needs to look at how social media is shaping their views too.
But one thing you’re missing (I think) is in the oversimplification of the “social media is destroying society” arguments. Much of this literature (but not all) at least postulates mechanisms, each with their own merits and empirical evidence. But you paint it all with a wide brush to dismiss it as a straw man.
For example, if you spend time with sociologists or anthropologists you’ll hear just how much social media is changing how social capital is formed or eroded. This touches on your point about status but goes further. Social media is excellent at building “bonding” social capital: bringing people who previously couldn’t find each other together and allowing them to form communities with not just shared bonds, identity and experiences, but solidifying values, norms and perspectives. This is great for patients with rare diseases like ALS or cancer. But in these shared norms, distortions occur, like in Lyme disease groups and other “contested illnesses”.
What is shifting is the bridging social capital built through broadcast media is eroding as broadcast becomes less salient in many people’s lives, especiallly the young. And as bonding social capital increases via social media, you get a net effect of polarization as two groups cannot see eye to eye.
This is clearly a simplification of the complex process of polarization, which has many mechanisms including Josh Darr’s work on the decline of local news. But the point is that social media and the internet are indeed changing society in many profound ways. As information consumers have now become information producers, there are boind to be shifts. Whether this is “destroying society” is a subjective judgement, but it is still reasonable to discuss and be concerned about these shifts even while broadcast media remains important. Sure, some of the coverage is Chicken Little-esque, but that doesn’t make all the mechanisms discussed bunk. Each one needs to be evaluated in their own merits.
Fair enough - good points. Thanks for the comment
"Speaking personally, my offline life is dominated by highly-educated, well-mannered liberal and lefty professionals. It's only when I log onto social media that I encounter people who believe in QAnon, think vaccines contain microchips, or view George Soros as a gay Jewish space vampire."
I am fortunate that I straddle both worlds in my offline life. I have relatives who are lefty academics along with some friends who believe that latest right-wing conspiracy theories. All my highly educated family and friends tend to be believe (and talk about) the same things. It's seems like a very sophisticated orthodoxy. My right-wing friends tend have wide variety of anti-establishment beliefs, but no real worldview that binds them together.
The liberal orthodoxy, while very well thought out, fails when it encounters something it can't explain and thus ignores it. A perfect example would be the grooming gangs scandal - NONE of my educated friends had even heard of it before. Or the race and IQ debate. Or crime statistics. I bring up any of these things and suddenly the educated become neophytes.
This orthodoxy, which seems to have come about after the second world war, is in serious need of reform, which is why I think we are in epistemic crisis. Smart people on the right are shooting holes in the belief system and its founding myths. The only defense on the left seems to be calls for censorship.
One of the largest problems created by algorithmic feeds on social media is societal atomization. If everyone has a tailored stream of information, we increasingly lack a common ground of truths and convictions as a country. This in turn is a real danger to the survival of democracy in my opinion, because democracy depends on a strong backbone of civil society standing up for it, if it ever was challenged. I don't see this happening in a fractured individualistic society.
There's some risk of this, but it's overstated. The real threat to the "common ground of truths and convictions" is the fact that those in power and those who want power recklessly lie, and while this has always been the case to some extent, they're motivated to do so now more than ever because our societies are unsustainable and our resources thinning. Averting/ameliorating the mounting crises would require totally rethinking the flow of power and wealth, and so we get a constant stream of desperate bullshit pumped into our media to force us to think otherwise, or to direct our frustrations at each other.
Well timed article, @conspicuouscognition, given Mark Zuckerberg's announcement of a return to free speech.
Why is it that everyone else are "evidence foragers" while the authors of 'The Internet Is Worse Than a Brainwashing Machine' Charlie Warzel and Mike Caulfield can create their own original thought?
People can make up their own minds. Social media is a democratising revolution. We do have free will. If they couldn't, and it wasn't, and we didn't, Kamala Harris would have won a 90%+ landslide.
I’m just listening to the Derek Thompson story on our growing isolation…
https://x.com/DKThomp/status/1876995470808973344
Perhaps the impact of screens more broadly and the Internet on trust and status anxiety (by facilitating more alone time and unrealistic social comparison) is part of the deeper dynamic at play.
Great aggregate piece as well as a persuasive critique of the Atlantic article in a fair and argued manner. Also like the reference to Mercier’s book. Thank you.
Thanks!