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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The Overwhelming Power of Negation

Greg Lukianoff discusses Martin Gurri's Revolt of the Public. He focuses in on negation. As Greg discusses, It's easy to tear things down and it can be contagious as it becomes a badge of tribal membership to tear more and more things down. A big problem, however, is the concomitant violation of Chestson's Fence: Do tear something down until and unless you first know why it was there in the first place. What happens next is described by the law of unintended consequences. To me, these three principles seem to define the present age. Here's an excerpt from Lukinanoff's article, the byline of which is "Our media revolution has only been able to tear things down. We need to learn how to build."

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.” Here’s Gurri explaining further:

“Negation” comes from Hegel’s dialectical logic ...  In my terms, it’s the complete repudiation of the system by the public, usually expressed through some aborted form of protest.
. . . Gurri shows how this phenomenon manifested itself in the 2011 Arab Spring, and how it has had ripple effects in Spain, Israel, and the American Occupy Wall Street movement. ... According to Gurri, this hopeless point of view amounted to a kind of nihilism in which nothing is proposed to replace what needs to be torn down:

If you push the negation of the system far enough without any interest in providing an alternative, you arrive at the proposition that destruction by itself is a form of progress. ... You can see this nihilism 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 QAnon and other conspiracy theories.

One thing must be said about the “crisis of authority” we find ourselves in due to the overwhelming power of negation: Very often, what critics have discovered is that our existing “knowledge” was 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 the fact 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 really needed to be torn down. The problem is that it seems to be taking everything else with it.

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Apple Censors Jon Stewart and Lina Khan

And this is how the world goes around. Apple has been publicly exposed as a censor in a big way. Stewart, no longer working for Apple, is now free to talk about the problem. Matt Stoller reports:

During the interview with [FTC Chair Lina Khan], [Jon Stewart] said that Apple had blocked him from interviewing her while he was at Apple. "They literally said, please don't talk to her,” he offered.... It’s a wide-ranging interview, in which Khan and Stewart discuss everything from inhalers to antitrust to big tech. And it’s worth watching. But the key moment was when Stewart asked Khan why Apple would do something like that. And she responded, “I think it just shows one of the dangers of what happens when you concentrate so much power and so much decision-making in a small number of companies.”

That is the right analysis. It’s well-known that Apple bars TV producers on its streaming service from commenting on China. When I was in Hollywood last year, censorship on behalf of China by all the streamers, especially Apple, was a constant complaint. There are obvious reasons, as Apple is de facto controlled by the Chinese government.

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