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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32037 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 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.**

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.

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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