Fighting Against the Rip Tidal Pull of Digitized Conformity

Matt Taibbi, in his latest, "Maintain Your Brain," at Racket News:

I started to worry over what looked like the removal of multiple lanes from the Information Superhighway. Wikipedia rules tightened. Google search results seemed like the digital equivalent of a magician forcing cards on consumers. In my case, content would often not even reach people who’d registered as social media followers just to receive those alerts.

I was convinced the issue was political. There was clear evidence of damage to the left and right independents from companies like NewsGuard, or the ideologically-driven algorithms behind Google or Amazon ad programs, to deduce the game was rigged to give unearned market advantages to corporate players. The story I couldn’t shake involved video shooter Jon Farina, whose footage was on seemingly every cable channel after J6, but which he himself was barred from monetizing...

We’re entering a stage of history where, like the underground resistance in Bradbury’s book, we’ll have to build some consciousness as a movement to save the human mind. Because thinking for oneself has already been denounced as a forbidden or transgressive activity in so many different places (from campuses to newsrooms and beyond), it’s probably already true that membership in certain heterodox online communities is enough to put a person on lists of undesirables.

Twenty-five years ago, most of us thought it would be a great idea to digitize everything and connect it to everything else. It was a great idea. My most recent moment of demoralization: now that everything is digitized and connected, it gives too much power to anyone who can manage to control it all. To open the gates to some and close them to others. It wasn't so terrible when their were hundreds of media outlets, but that's not the case any more. Worse yet, a lot of the censoring is being don surreptitiously (e.g., shadow-banning, stealth editing and outright censoring). Increasing numbers of us are getting the sense that we are yelling into the void. I just don't know the extent of it. I don't know who is in charge. I don't know where this is leading, but if they can do this to Matt Taibbi, they can easily do it to small fish like me.

Matt urges: "We’ll eventually want to get to know each other a little more, be a little more interactive." I think that is the right approach, living and interacting significantly more locally, which will make it more difficult for power-hungry others, especially when well-intentioned (Mike Benz calls it "The Blob"; Brett Weinstein refers to this somewhat coordinated effort as "Goliath"), to intervene, to pit us against each other, to make us disappear, to generate yet another false consensus . . . .

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Christmas Eve Battle of the Bulge Truce

Amazing story. Here's an excerpt:

Unarmed, the Germans entered the cabin – only to see the Americans reach for their own guns. The Germans couldn’t have helped but think they were set-up. Fritz’s mother defused the situation and placed her hands on the Americans’ guns. Tensions remained, however, with a young family caught in the middle of sworn enemies only feet from the other. Things calmed down after one of the German soldiers asked, in English, about the injuries to the American. It was a deep cut that caused severe loss of blood but he would recover.

Dinner was ready to be served. They all held hands – the Americans, the Germans, the German civilians – and Fritz’s mother offered a prayer, asking for “an end to this terrible war, so that we can all go home where we belong. Amen.”

The entire story is worth a read. For those of you have have doubts that this event occurred, watch this video. You won't be disappointed:

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The Problem with Many DEI Trainings

Jesse Singal raises many red flags regarding DEI trainings in his article, "What if Diversity Trainings Are Doing More Harm Than Good?" I agree with many of his concerns, but I don't think it took any research to be wary of these trainings. In fact, the default should have been to not hold any such "trainings" until they could be shown to be effective in encouraging human flourishing. That was not done, of course, so now we have a multi-billion dollar industry that is self-interested in promoting these struggle sessions in order to maintain continued employment, often at absurd levels of compensation.

D.E.I. trainings are designed to help organizations become more welcoming to members of traditionally marginalized groups. Advocates make bold promises: Diversity workshops can foster better intergroup relations, improve the retention of minority employees, close recruitment gaps and so on. The only problem? There’s little evidence that many of these initiatives work. And the specific type of diversity training that is currently in vogue — mandatory trainings that blame dominant groups for D.E.I. problems — may well have a net-negative effect on the outcomes managers claim to care about." ....

Many popular contemporary D.E.I. approaches meet these criteria. They often seem geared more toward sparking a revolutionary re-understanding of race relations than solving organizations’ specific problems. And they often blame white people — or their culture — for harming people of color. For example, the activist Tema Okun’s work cites concepts like “objectivity” and “worship of the written word” as characteristics of “white supremacy culture.” Robin DiAngelo’s “white fragility” trainings are intentionally designed to make white participants uncomfortable. And microaggression trainings are based on an area of academic literature that claims, without quality evidence, that common utterances like “America is a melting pot” harm the mental health of people of color. Many of these trainings run counter to the views of most Americans — of any color — on race and equality. And they’re generating exactly the sort of backlash that research predicts.

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Greg Lukianoff Recommends Martin Gurri’s “The Revolt of the Masses”

I just spotted this review of The Revolt of the Masses by Greg Lukianoff." Greg's review has convinced me to order my own copy of The Revolt of the Masses.

Excerpts:

“The Revolt of the Public” explains that the shifts in media technologies that we believe accelerated American political polarization and played havoc with young people’s mental health were actually part of a much larger global transformation that Gurri calls “The Fifth Wave.” Essentially, the empowerment of vast multitudes of people to communicate directly with the world and with each other has genuinely transformed society. Unfortunately, in its current state, this media revolution has only been able to tear things down; institutions, ideas, and yes, even people (a.k.a. cancel culture). This idea is what Gurri calls “negation.”

. . . . Gurri shows how this manifested in the 2011 Arab Spring and how it has had ripple effects in Spain, Israel, and the American Occupy Wall Street movement. Gurri also argues that these movements generally were rich with targets: people, institutions, and ideas that needed to be torn down, but those same movements were often very hesitant to offer constructive solutions or realistic reforms. This hopeless point of view amounted to a kind of nihilism, according to Gurri—usually not the kind of nihilism of the philosophers, but a de facto nihilism in which nothing constructive is proposed to replace what needs to be torn down.

You can see this in American society in everything from “End the Fed,” to “abolish the police,” to cancel culture on both the right and the left, and to the absolute negation of all assumptions represented by the QAnon conspiracy.

One thing that must be said about the “crisis of authority” we find ourselves in due to the overwhelming power of negation is that very often what critics have discovered is that our existing “knowledge” was truly based on some pretty thin evidence, bad assumptions, and sometimes not much more than the pieties of some elites. Understanding the crisis of authority as only being wrongfully destructive of expertise is to miss that, frankly, we are often asking far too much of expertise and experts, and oversight itself has not been all that rigorous. Negation is indeed tearing things down that needed to be torn down; unfortunately, it seems to be taking everything else with it.

Continue ReadingGreg Lukianoff Recommends Martin Gurri’s “The Revolt of the Masses”