The Dictator observations thread.

[Low Down Low]

Thoughts?
https://wisdomofcrowds.live/your-twitte ... mbing-you/

I'm inclined to agree with much of that. I check twitter a few times a day and find it useful enough but there's so much I hate about it, not least the obsessive lust after likes and followers and how that validates people. "Twitter activism," if not exactly an oxymoron, doesn't sound to me like something to ever aspire to.

One of the many reasons why I've never gotten into social media is the, to me, unsettling combination of abstraction and status. That is, measuring significance by how many followers or friends you have or someone else has. With select exceptions, they aren't really your friend. They aren't likely to help you move a couch or meet you for drinks. I remember when Facebook broke out, a friend was telling me about all the famous Facebook friends she had, and looked at me like I kicked her dog when I said, "But you're not really friends with them." Which is to say, friends in a conventional, personal—properly human—way. The elevation of the abstract number—friends, followers, reposts, retweets, etc—over the real and human abuses the understanding and value of friendship. Measuring your sense of self in this way is, to me, kind of pitiable, not unlike comparing bank accounts. As a way of communicating, I'm mostly ambivalent, but its political and social effects seem pretty wretched to me.

Maybe you could argue there are some benign political or societal effects but do the negatives outweigh the positives? I wouldn't think so anyway. I remember the first time twitter entered my orbit, around the time the Arab Spring was being hailed as the "Twitter revolution" and those claims seem even more absurd to me now than they did then.

[Dr. Medulla]

Thoughts?
https://wisdomofcrowds.live/your-twitte ... mbing-you/

I'm inclined to agree with much of that. I check twitter a few times a day and find it useful enough but there's so much I hate about it, not least the obsessive lust after likes and followers and how that validates people. "Twitter activism," if not exactly an oxymoron, doesn't sound to me like something to ever aspire to.

One of the many reasons why I've never gotten into social media is the, to me, unsettling combination of abstraction and status. That is, measuring significance by how many followers or friends you have or someone else has. With select exceptions, they aren't really your friend. They aren't likely to help you move a couch or meet you for drinks. I remember when Facebook broke out, a friend was telling me about all the famous Facebook friends she had, and looked at me like I kicked her dog when I said, "But you're not really friends with them." Which is to say, friends in a conventional, personal—properly human—way. The elevation of the abstract number—friends, followers, reposts, retweets, etc—over the real and human abuses the understanding and value of friendship. Measuring your sense of self in this way is, to me, kind of pitiable, not unlike comparing bank accounts. As a way of communicating, I'm mostly ambivalent, but its political and social effects seem pretty wretched to me.

Maybe you could argue there are some benign political or societal effects but do the negatives outweigh the positives? I wouldn't think so anyway. I remember the first time twitter entered my orbit, around the time the Arab Spring was being hailed as the "Twitter revolution" and those claims seem even more absurd to me now than they did then.

Given the coarsening of politics and the pervasiveness of disinformation and ratcheting up of status seeking, I'm not sure how we can regard these platforms as a net benefit. They seem well-suited for magnifying our worst traits more than our better ones.

[Flex]

Thoughts?
https://wisdomofcrowds.live/your-twitte ... mbing-you/

As someone who is Extremely On Twitter I agree with the piece although I don't think they're describing the only way to use the platform. What keeps me coming back is the ability to shoot the shit with people I know in some fashion (many are folks who I met here who don't post regularly anymore). I wouldn't call everyone I follow or am mutuals with or whatever a "friend" but I think it's sort of a tell that this writer can't conceive of twitter as a place to, like, just talk about movies and music and stuff in a friendly way.

I do think "politics twitter" is hot fucking garbage. I probably have an arc like that person in that it used to be much more of a connective tissue for me, but now I try to avoid huge chunks of it. I mean, I still like to tell Matt Yglesias or Josh Barro or whoever to go fuck themselves from time to time, but I think there was this idea that online activism could be a pipeline to real world activism and seeing the abject failures of the Very Online Left for the last half decade plus really undercuts that theory of change. A lot of Big Name twitter people promised change but managed to just line their pockets while accomplishing precisely nothing. Same as it ever was, I suppose.

The platform encourages just rancid dishonesty too. You get your dopamine fix from spewing the hottest of hot takes at any given time, and the nature of these things is they're all rapid response so no one bothers to check if whatever they're boosting is like... accurate or true. I've had people actually straight up tell me as long as stuff is attacking the right people, it doesn't matter whether a given tweet or assertion is factually accurate or not.

I DO think all of this is a downstream result of how unresponsive our actual political institutions are. (Most) people go dutifully vote every 2 to 4 years but there's not really anything meaningful you can do to influence, say, gun policy. Yeah, tweeting about uvalde isn't going to change anything but there's literally no in real life action anyone can do to change gun policy, either. Our institutions are completely unresponsive and undemocratic so why not at least tweet a bit and maybe get someone online to respond to you? Because your government sure as shit doesn't give a fuck and there's nothing you can do - like, at all - to change that.

Edit: spelling

[Sparky]

Thoughts?
https://wisdomofcrowds.live/your-twitte ... mbing-you/

Not a fan of Twitter, I only go there if a link to an article takes me there. I have to agree, Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites are helping spread loads of disinformation about lots of stuff, tons of fake news.

[Dr. Medulla]

Thoughts?
https://wisdomofcrowds.live/your-twitte ... mbing-you/

As someone who is Extremely On Twitter I agree with the piece although I don't think they're describing the only way to use the platform. What keeps me coming back is the ability to shoot the shit with people I know in some fashion (many are folks who I met here who don't post regularly anymore). I wouldn't call everyone I follow or am mutuals with or whatever a "friend" but I think it's sort of a tell that this writer can't conceive of twitter as a place to, like, just talk about movies and music and stuff in a friendly way.

I do think "politics twitter" is hot fucking garbage. I probably have an arc like that person in that it used to be much more of a connective tissue for me, but now I try to avoid huge chunks of it. I mean, I still like to tell Matt Yglesias or Josh Barro or whoever to go fuck themselves from time to time, but I think there was this idea that online activism could be a pipeline to real world activism and seeing the abject failures of the Very Online Left for the last half decade plus really undercuts that theory of change. A lot of Big Name twitter people promised change but managed to just line their pockets while accomplishing precisely nothing. Same as it ever was, I suppose.

The platform encourages just rancid dishonesty too. You get your dopamine fix from spewing the hottest of hot takes at any given time, and the nature of these things is they're all rapid response so no one bothers to check if whatever they're boosting is like... accurate or true. I've had people actually straight up tell me as long as stuff is attacking the right people, it doesn't matter whether a given tweet or assertion is factually accurate or not.

I DO think all of this is a downstream result of how unresponsive our actual political institutions are. (Most) people go dutifully vote every 2 to 4 years but there's not really anything meaningful you can do to influence, say, gun policy. Yeah, tweeting about uvalde isn't going to change anything but there's literally no in real life action anyone can do to change gin policy, either. Our institutions are completely unresponsive and undemocratic so why not at least tweet a bit and maybe get someone online to respond to you? Because your government sure as shit doesn't give a fuck and there's nothing you can do - like, at all - to change that.

Your defense in the first paragraph is comparable to Kory's, in that you have to use it responsibly, as an amusement and distraction or a way of keeping up with friends. Which is a very liberal view of things—it's up to each individual. When I think about social media, tho, oddly enough I often go back to Fredric Wertham and his crusade against comics because that's how his opponents responded. It's up to each individual to read responsibly, to not act out torture scenes from Crime Does Not Pay, etc. Wertham said that a liberal interpretation of a social problem doesn't work. He likened the effect of crime and horror comics to an infectious disease sweeping a neighbourhood. If 80% of readers are unaffected, but 20% are harmed and that has far-reaching social implications—crime, loss of civic participation, those harmed by those 20%—then it's not worth the pleasure for the 80%. Now, of course Wertham had a jaundiced view of comics all around, but I think his perspective is worthwhile to consider. Even if we can regard our use as responsible and beneficial, does that justify its existence when, on a larger scale, the effects are harmful?

Much of my thinking/politics the last couple years is around the idea that, yeah, maybe conservative moral scolds back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s had a good point, that our embrace of hedonism as a social good is, in fact, a path to social destruction. I'm certainly not sitting comfortably with the loony evangelicals here, but the "if it feels good, do it" argument, while personally satisfying, should be pushed back against hard. And if we can't trust individuals to restrain themselves, then social action is required.

[Flex]

Yeah, but what if the problem isn't twitter, but a completely stagnant and unresponsive government?

Addendum: if twitter was banned tomorrow I'd be fine with it, but I don't think it would solve the problem of people engaging in ineffectual political action because I don't think there's such thing as effective political action anymore. We live in a largely and increasingly anti-democratic society and all that's left for people is individual social sanction or signalling as a replacement for political engagement.

[Dr. Medulla]

Yeah, but what if the problem isn't twitter, but a completely stagnant and unresponsive government?

Addendum: if twitter was banned tomorrow I'd be fine with it, but I don't think it would solve the problem of people engaging in ineffectual political action because I don't think there's such thing as effective political action anymore. We live in a largely and increasingly anti-democratic society and all that's left for people is individual social sanction or signalling as a replacement for political engagement.

No, of course, I'm not trying to pin all problems on one thing, and there are much more significant structural issues that are more malignant. *But* if a step in the direction of addressing those structural issues is improving civic mindedness/sociability—the fair exchange and debate of ideas and of recognizing each other as actual people with shared interests—then getting off or reconfiguring the narcissistic drug of social media is one of those key steps. Human beings are social creatures, so addressing that thing that perverts our social nature is vital before we can meaningfully attack bigger targets.

[Mimi]

The virtue signaling on all platforms, not just twitter, has brought me to the point that if I'm not still talking about an event days after it happened, I feel guilty. Twitter used to be fun. Now I just feel I'm being preached at or made to feel like a bad human for not showing how much I care if I don't say this in my bio, change my avatar in support of something or other, or tweet constantly about something. I left twitter a few years ago, on my personal account, because I saw that I got caught up in that thinking. It wore me down. After I left, my anxiety dropped. Reluctantly, I brushed off my old business account and came back. I've been very careful about who I follow and if someone gets too much for me, I mute them. Anyway... (I got distracted by a meowing cat and forgot where I was going with all this. Plus morning.)

There's a woman I've been sort of hate-following for a few years who is all about the virtue signaling. She has "follow science, not fear" in her bio but every. single. tweet. is fear-mongering. She makes Doc's post count on here look like small potatoes. She's on all the time, tweeting one rage-induced, doom-laden problem after another. And the preaching, god the preaching. And yet, reading between the lines, she doesn't leave her house much, so I know she ain't livin' what she's preachin'. That's when I realized, a good 90% (arbitrary number) of people on twitter on are only twitter activists. It's all lip service. They're all yellow-ribbons flapping in the breeze.

[Dr. Medulla]

The virtue signaling on all platforms, not just twitter, has brought me to the point that if I'm not still talking about an event days after it happened, I feel guilty. Twitter used to be fun. Now I just feel I'm being preached at or made to feel like a bad human for not showing how much I care if I don't say this in my bio, change my avatar in support of something or other, or tweet constantly about something. I left twitter a few years ago, on my personal account, because I saw that I got caught up in that thinking. It wore me down. After I left, my anxiety dropped. Reluctantly, I brushed off my old business account and came back. I've been very careful about who I follow and if someone gets too much for me, I mute them. Anyway... (I got distracted by a meowing cat and forgot where I was going with all this. Plus morning.)

A year or two ago, my sister read a piece about the problem of being "too aware," of reading too much news and analysis. The argument was that, yes, knowledge is power and all that, but at a certain point it becomes debilitating and compromises our ability to reason (i.e., we become more emotion-driven in our analysis). So tried an experiment of going nearly cold turkey for a couple weeks, and did find she felt better about herself and the world. Now, maybe that speaks to the nature of how news and analysis is presented to us or maybe there is a threshold where information becomes toxic, I dunno.

Similarly, in a really good book by Joseph Heath, Enlightenment 2.0, he also makes the case for disengaging and to take more time to being isolated and thinking. Thinking in ways that aren't just reactive, he argues, is really fucking hard and we impair that ability by always being connected, always thinking reactively.

There's a woman I've been sort of hate-following for a few years who is all about the virtue signaling. She has "follow science, not fear" in her bio but every. single. tweet. is fear-mongering. She makes Doc's post count on here look like small potatoes. She's on all the time, tweeting one rage-induced, doom-laden problem after another. And the preaching, god the preaching. And yet, reading between the lines, she doesn't leave her house much, so I know she ain't livin' what she's preachin'. That's when I realized, a good 90% (arbitrary number) of people on twitter on are only twitter activists. It's all lip service. They're all yellow-ribbons flapping in the breeze.

… …

[Mimi]

Hey, while we're here, guess who's on twitter? https://twitter.com/derekjeter

[Mimi]

The virtue signaling on all platforms, not just twitter, has brought me to the point that if I'm not still talking about an event days after it happened, I feel guilty. Twitter used to be fun. Now I just feel I'm being preached at or made to feel like a bad human for not showing how much I care if I don't say this in my bio, change my avatar in support of something or other, or tweet constantly about something. I left twitter a few years ago, on my personal account, because I saw that I got caught up in that thinking. It wore me down. After I left, my anxiety dropped. Reluctantly, I brushed off my old business account and came back. I've been very careful about who I follow and if someone gets too much for me, I mute them. Anyway... (I got distracted by a meowing cat and forgot where I was going with all this. Plus morning.)

A year or two ago, my sister read a piece about the problem of being "too aware," of reading too much news and analysis. The argument was that, yes, knowledge is power and all that, but at a certain point it becomes debilitating and compromises our ability to reason (i.e., we become more emotion-driven in our analysis). So tried an experiment of going nearly cold turkey for a couple weeks, and did find she felt better about herself and the world. Now, maybe that speaks to the nature of how news and analysis is presented to us or maybe there is a threshold where information becomes toxic, I dunno.

Similarly, in a really good book by Joseph Heath, Enlightenment 2.0, he also makes the case for disengaging and to take more time to being isolated and thinking. Thinking in ways that aren't just reactive, he argues, is really fucking hard and we impair that ability by always being connected, always thinking reactively.

There's a woman I've been sort of hate-following for a few years who is all about the virtue signaling. She has "follow science, not fear" in her bio but every. single. tweet. is fear-mongering. She makes Doc's post count on here look like small potatoes. She's on all the time, tweeting one rage-induced, doom-laden problem after another. And the preaching, god the preaching. And yet, reading between the lines, she doesn't leave her house much, so I know she ain't livin' what she's preachin'. That's when I realized, a good 90% (arbitrary number) of people on twitter on are only twitter activists. It's all lip service. They're all yellow-ribbons flapping in the breeze.

… …

When you take a step back and look at it, having a constant stream of things to think and care about can't be good. Not to say that thinking is bad, but brains need downtime to process. I know more people with anxiety now than I did 15 years or so ago and I wonder if it has a lot to do with the 24 hour news cycle and always being on social media. If you tweet/post something, you're going to go back and check to see if anyone has responded. You get sucked in. The next thing you know, it's been two hours and wtf? If you don't tweet/post you're just going to go and see what everyone is up to. Two hours later, wtf? If something happens, you go to commiserate or seek reassurance. I mean, it starts to act like a drug after a while, if you're not careful, and you need a constant hit. So, yeah, all that information becomes toxic.

[Low Down Low]

I wholeheartedly agree with the premise of only engaging with a small tight band of intimate acquaintances or trusted sources. People say, but that's just an echo chamber and that's precisely the point. As a means of engagement or debate, the surest consequence of twitter is enhanced blood pressure. I engage with no more than 8-10 accounts and I am aware it's doing little more than confirming existing biases and I'm quite alright with that.

[Mimi]

I wholeheartedly agree with the premise of only engaging with a small tight band of intimate acquaintances or trusted sources. People say, but that's just an echo chamber and that's precisely the point. As a means of engagement or debate, the surest consequence of twitter is enhanced blood pressure. I engage with no more than 8-10 accounts and I am aware it's doing little more than confirming existing biases and I'm quite alright with that.

I'm all right with it too.

[Dr. Medulla]

Hey, while we're here, guess who's on twitter? https://twitter.com/derekjeter

I take back everything I said about Twitter. Those tweets … so calming.

[Flex]

I have more thoughts that I'll put down later if I can, but the tight knit circle comments remind me of something degenerate conservative commentator Mickey Kaus whined about on a podcast I listened to (he cohosts one with Robert Wright, who is a foreign policy realist in the vein of mearsheimer who I make a point of listening to in order to listen to that analysis about Russia/Ukraine and china, particularly. Speaking of listening to voices outside your bubble).

Anyways, Mickey was elated about the musk buying twitter news because his thinking was musk would implement what is apparently the conservative definition of free speech, which is forcing other users to engage with conservatives and not be allowed to block/mute anyone. So just remember, as bad as twitter is it could always be even worse!