Incompetence

 

When my son was a baby, maybe 2 years old, I distinctly remember an episode on a playground where he and a number of other similarly aged children were playing in a sandbox.  They were all friendly, or at least indifferent towards each other and readily shared the toys that were randomly cast about in the sand.  Except for one child.  He would scream bloody murder anytime another child put a finger on a toy he was even mildly interested in. Regardless of the toy, he'd throw a fit if another kid so much as looked at it. I always paid special attention to situations like this.  Some children would get upset.  Some children would quizzically observe.  And yes, a select few children would act with aggression.   I watched the episode through to its logical conclusion.  A parent on their phone, not paying attention to the present, looking  up in horror as her child smacks another kid in the face with a sand shovel, picks up the toy that wasn't his to begin with and willfully moves to an isolated corner of the sandbox.  Real life Lord of the Flies shit.  It's probably wrong of me as a parent to look at the kid and think, Jesus, he's going to be dangerous when he grows up, but I'd be lying if I said the thought didn't cross my mind.

Today my wife, who still submits herself to the drudgery of paying attention to what others are up to on Facebook (I deleted my account almost 2 years ago), told me that a number of conservative  minded people she's friends with are fed up with the "liberal bias" of Facebook and heading to an app called Parler which, predictably, was created because of the perceived liberal bias of platforms like Facebook and Twitter under the transparently predictable guise of the 1st Amendment.  

Given that the toxicity of these platforms was bad enough for me to bail almost two years ago, I can only imagine what they are like now.  Of course, I don't have to imagine.  There are numerous studies that show what a megaphone these platforms are for, ahem, "alternative facts". The krux of the matter is when these reality deniers get challenged with inconvenient truths, they do what the two year old did.  They smack the other person in the face with a shovel and leave town.  As an aside, I also distinctly remember conservative talk of "safe spaces" and "snowflakes" after the 2016 election.  The projection is strong with these ones. 

I think there are a lot of people who view Donald Trump's defeat in the 2020 Presidential Election as a turning point.  I couldn't disagree more.  Trump is little more than a symptom.  A propaganda network that Joseph Goebbels couldn't have imagined in his wildest dreams is a reality.  The people that are susceptible to this kind of bullshit aren't what I would call extremely self-aware (to put it kindly).  They are spoon fed hate, and hate is what they do.  They would deny it but . . . well, read the sentence before last. Here's the thing with hate, it is ALWAYS self-destructive.  That is why these people have to be presented with an enemy.  First it was the terrorists.  That faded (although they still do hate brown people) so for the last 12 years it's been the liberals.  They HATE liberals.   Once the liberals are annihilated, then it will be on to the next group to hate.  Once all out groups have been eradicated, these poor bastards will turn on themselves and self-destruct.  They will splinter into sects and hate each other based on purity.  I'd say that it's so assured that it's a law of the universe except, thank heavens, humans aren't significant enough to be an inkling of an itch on the rectum of universal time and space.  One of the few things that keeps me sleeping peacefully at night.

This brings us to this supposed turning point.  Social media platforms are built to herd like-minded people into pens.  This builds self-assuring echo chambers where people can feel safe and, sigh, emboldened.  This also builds predictable cohorts of people that can be more precisely targeted for marketing dollars (what the founders intended) and propaganda (what states and bad actors have figured out).  That this isn't blatantly obvious to all is troubling.  The eventual outcome of this tragedy seems obvious to me.  A large portion of the population rejects reality, and is given a haven; no, is ENCOURAGED to go to safe spaces.  Once that safe space gets invaded by reality, they will simply flee to the other corner of the sandbox where they will be safe again.  With each move their construction becomes more homogenized.  With each move they will fall further into the abyss of propaganda and hatred and inversely, become more and more detached from reality and congruently more dangerous to a healthy society.  Facebook and Twitter are not the culmination of our hyper-polarization.  They are the opening salvo.   

Groupthink is baked into the DNA of social media.  To further the analogy, one cannot alter DNA without irreparable change to the whole organism.  You can't fundamentally change a trillion-dollar industry in a capitalistic economy, so it will have to be transformed by the users.  How do you transform a hundred million people?  How do you get these self-indulgent, reality denying organisms of hate to change their DNA?  You'd be shocked by how many of these outwardly sane people think that the liberal elite exist only to sodomize and then eat innocent children.  That's not a joke.  There's a terrifyingly large group of these morons that actually believe this!  How the fuck do you reach people like that? All of these people, this includes the founders and enablers of these platforms, are fundamentally unsound and unless we figure out a way to make them empathize and care about a diverse society, we're all fucking screwed.     

Quite frankly, I think they are completely devoid of the tools that would allow them to do so. How do you get an unruly mob of people that have shown a complete lack of critical thinking skills and empathy to empathize and  think critically?  Unless we figure this little conondrum out, and fast, I don't know how things don't continue to go downhill.  We'll nostalgically look back at Tea Party obstructionism, Benghazi witch hunts and baseless Birtherism as quaint and innocent as our own neighbors and loved ones will be looking at us with dreams of our heads in their crosshairs.  

The underlying lesson that seems to be unlearnable is that we are fundamentally incapable of harnessing the very  technologies that we are capable of creating.  From gunpowder to the industrial revolution to internal combustion to the information age.  All of these things have done much good, and  also so very much harm.   I don't mean to get into the whole Jungian duality thing, but I guess it does make sense that the things we create would, indeed, be a reflection of ourselves and in analyzing them, I can't help but think what an intensly odd and profoundly incapable species we are.