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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31393 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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My headcanon has always been that he's destroying Twitter on purpose as a favor to humanity. So far everything tracks. Shine on you crazy diamond.

I wouldn't mind that. Even with (slightly improved) freedom of speech Twitter looks like a net negative.

I dearly hope you're right. Twitter has been the worst thing that's happened to the political discourse in Finland by a large margin. I've said for years that politicians and journalists should have been forbidden from writing, reading or discussing anything on Twitter or seen there with the threat of a heavy fine or jail sentence.

Facebook is equally bad or worse, and it has been (sensibly) argued that any publicly accessible or accountable forum as such is a detriment to politics.

[before replying, please read the linked post , the excerpt does not explain the reasoning sufficiently well.]

Excerpts:

The other significant effect of the loss of secrecy is a catastrophic decline in dishonesty in politics.* It’s no longer possible to pretend to adopt a political position but to secretly work against it.* It’s not possible to express a claim confidently as a bargaining position, and yet negotiate to minimise the risks.** If you have publicly expressed confidence, you have to publicly act in line with that expressed confidence**. And you can only act publicly.4

When politics was carried out within powerful institutions with social and organisational coherence, political factions could keep secrets. They could plan to carry out actions, and to present arguments, without publicly announcing what they were going to do. Today that is not the case.** Because political factions are open and meritocratic, collective decisions can only be reached in public.**

The effects go further: because all communication within a faction is essentially public, the only way to advance within the faction is through public statements. If you can plan privately and then act, you can be responsible for the consequences of your actions. If you can only contribute to a public debate, then you are responsible for nothing but your public statements.** The loss of institutional power has led, through the loss of secrecy, to a loss of responsibility.**

Facebook is equally bad or worse

Facebook has effectively zero effect on the political discourse in Finland now that Covid is just another flu (it had a very small effect as a breeding ground for fringe groups but their actual effect was minimal). As for what effect Facebook has on that side of the pond, I simply don't care.

Facebook has effectively zero effect on the political discourse in Finland

I don't believe that. Do the major political figures not use Facebook, or are their Facebook pages dead with little interaction ?

Politicians' FB pages are used more or less exclusively for preaching to the choir - that is, people who would vote for them anyway. Almost nothing on them enters the wider discourse in any meaningful way. Meanwhile most journalists and far too many politicians are constantly importing stupid ideas from US Twitter or reporting what this or that person posted on Twitter (to the extent that US domestic politics are given more space in papers than the rest of EU combined).

The excerpt contained faulty reasoning which immediately jumped out at me but when I actually read the article it became clear that the author didn't understand what happened in the first example that got brought up.

The failed coup against Trump is a good example of the phenomenon: If there was an actual conspiracy it was tiny, and most of the work of making the Russia frame stick on Trump was done by people who genuinely believed it was real, and therefore adopted the wrong tactics. At a stretch, it’s possible there was no real conspiracy at all: Hillary and her team were making up excuses for their failure, and some intel people were just nuts (an occupational hazard) or were showing off to their friends. It’s important to understand that the publicly claimed positions get internalised. Even if they start as cynical lies, in the absence of private meetings where everyone agrees, “yes we said that, but it’s not really true”, people end up really believing what they pretend to believe.

There was an actual conspiracy, it wasn't tiny, most of the people involved genuinely and definitively knew that it was garbage and they adopted the best tactics they could in order to make the false claims stick and hamstring Trump's presidency without putting themselves in too much risk. You can just go back and read the text messages that got leaked - so let's just do that (time read what were formerly private communications!) and compare them to what this author said.

“You and I both know the odds are nothing. If I thought it was likely, I’d be there no question. I hesitate in part because of my gut sense and concern there’s no big there there.”

Here we have one of the FBI agents who was involved with both the illegitimate surveillance of the Trump campaign and the Mueller investigation that followed - and he's directly, flat out contradicting the author of this piece. The publicly claimed positions were not internalised and the nature of the scheme meant that this couldn't happen. The intel people were not nuts and the Clinton team knew what they were doing and started the Steele dossier nonsense before they even lost. I'm sure that the people buying Mueller votive candles earnestly believed those public statements, but those people just aren't relevant to the decision-making process here. I disagree with the main thrust of the piece as well for the record, but I don't think I even need to get into that when his first example was so blatantly wrong.

Political factions keeping secrets can let them negotiate in private and prevent them from being second-guessed by ignorant members of the public. But that's not the only effect of political factions keeping secrets. Whether they know more than the public may be less important than whether they have the same interests as the public, and keeping secrets makes it easy to get motivated reasoning and principal/agent problems, or even just plain old corruption.

Principal/agent problems are inherent to a republican government, and public debate doesn't solve them one bit.

Consider for example the housing issue - where people prevent the new construction to conserve value of their own, or the pensions issue, where they're getting nice pensions paid for by money taken from wages of people who are never going to get anything once they're old.

But how does keeping secrets solve either of those issues?

You could probably be more likely to pass a reform of construction if you are able to lie about it. Developers paying off a party, even though it's going to suffer a short-term electoral setback is possible, because they know in the long term it's needed and they'll get something out of it.

Under public conditions, it's impossible, no? They'd get destroyed and coordinating a vote out in the open would be extremely hard.

You can probably be more likely to pass something to benefit yourself and your cronies and hurt the people if you are able to lie about it too, which seems like it would be a bigger effect.

So far politics have gotten far worse than they were before social media. E.g. do you really think the Democratic Party in the US would be championing Drag Queen Story Hour without social media campaigns and activist pressure ? Traditional media could gatekeep the freaks out, or at least it tried.

We'll see in a decade where we are, I guess.

Well, as the blog observed, politics has gone more, not less insane with the rise of social media, so.. I guess we'll wait and see.

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