F**king Mondays: Social Media Rot

How audience capture, algorithms, and profit destroy public discourse.

Welcome to the latest edition of “F**king Mondays”! In the roundup this week:

Alt Left delusions

This interaction between Sam Harris and Russell Brand on the issue of Donald Trump and the Russia/Ukraine war is extremely illuminating:

The key part of the conversation is this extraordinary monologue from Brand:

Now Biden is in office and this inequality is continuing and this polarization is continuing, and we are not seeing anyone say “look we got carried away with Russiagate and that's probably really damaged your trust, and over the course of the pandemic, we've seen a lot of shifting narratives, and we have not been as transparent as we ought to have been.”

…… I recognize now that this ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine is hemorrhaging popularity, and many of you query, is this the humanitarian war that many claim in order to stop the criminal Putin? Or is this like so many other American wars, like the one in Iraq, like the one in Afghanistan, like the one in Korea, like all American wars up till now, actually motivated by a unipolar objectives, a globalist corporate agenda, the advancing of the interest of the military-industrial complex, and an explicit plan for BlackRock to rebuild Ukraine post-war, and your tax dollars are paying for it?

And the only person that, and be empty oratory and yet more lies, you know, I recognize what you're saying about Trump, and I'm certainly not going to try and change your perspective on anything like that, because for me, none of these figures are the answer — radical systemic change has to be immediately discussed, and we have to acknowledge that what's happening in media has to be replicated with what's happening with politically - immediately, we have to find ways of altering our systems of governance and having the maximum amount of them democracy and access to power for ordinary people, rather than this continual mudslinging. I would say that the only person or one of the few people who's willing to say this war must end is Donald Trump.

If I was to extract the name and the face Donald Trump from his rhetoric around the war and how he would bring about a diplomatic solution, I would say this is the only person who's talking sensibly. And I just cannot extract everything I know about what happened in 2014 in that coup, about what Putin has publicly said about if, if, if there's any infringement on Crimea, about the complex expertise about ethnicity within Ukrainian territory, all of that, and with great respect and love and solidarity and support for those suffering in Ukraine and for the half a million that have died in that conflict so far, for me, dancing closer and closer to the apocalypse with dubious motivation, claiming once again that it's a humanitarian endeavor seems outrageous to me. And the fact that this is the alternative is a much bigger problem than anything Trump has done or said because I do see him as an outlier, as an extraordinary public figure. But I see him primarily and above all else as a response to institutional corruption entropy within our institutions. But like when Biden is able to meet with his donors and say “nothing will fundamentally change” when he succeeds Trump, and as he does succeed Trump, you know, for all of your concerns about other being the lack of a peaceful transition, I would say that is the problem.

There’s a lot to unpack here, but this is a perfect example of the sloppy thinking that goes on in Alt political circles. Brand’s sesquipedalian prose is really a ruse to disguise the fact that he is an A-grade bullshit artist. He does not deal with facts or evidence to construct his arguments and instead relies on stitching together multiple conspiracy theories to “counter mainstream narratives.”

The narrative Brand is trying to promote is worth delving into. Rather than existing outside of the neoliberal/military industrial/corporate paradigm he purports to hate, Brand occupies a highly lucrative niche built on algorithmically popular contrarianism. And it isn’t based in reality. It is based in a fictional world where the Trump campaign team didn’t meet with Russian spies, where the Covid vaccines didn’t save tens of millions of lives, and where a brutal dictatorship helmed by a psychopath didn’t illegally invade its democratic neighbor. It’s also a world where Donald Trump’s attempts to end democracy in America aren’t a big deal because he’s sympathetic to Vladimir Putin. In this alternate reality, America’s involvement in the Russia/Ukraine conflict is also no different to its invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan two decades ago, even though America didn’t invade anyone.

As Harris dryly responded to Brand’s argument: “my concern is that the starting point for addressing any of those problems is a fact based discussion about what the problems themselves are.”

Unfortunately fact based discussions don’t generally generate into Youtube clicks, so don’t expect Brand to ever agree on them.

Social media rots even the greatest minds

One of the fascinating aspects of social media has been the unfiltered access it gives us into the minds of respected authors and intellectuals. You can follow the likes of Richard Dawkins, Naomi Klein, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Joyce Carol Oates for realtime insights into their thinking. Sadly, it has also allowed us to watch the realtime implosion of some of these public figures who appear to have been destroyed by the insidious combination of algorithms, attention economics, and audience capture. Witness the deranged rantings of once respected author and feminist Naomi Wolf:

How does one go from being an Oxford Rhode Scholar, respected political consultant, and having a book described by The New York Times as being "one of the seventy most influential books of the twentieth century" to this?

Perhaps Wolf was always prone to conspiratorial thinking, but there can be no doubt that profit driven, unregulated social media platforms have helped create a monster. Wolf’s timeline is filled with anti-mask, anti-vaxx lunacy revealing a disturbing level of obsessive fixation. Her mind appears to have been entirely destroyed by a social media driven conspiracy theory, proving that even the brightest minds are extraordinarily vulnerable to our algorithmic overlords.

Ukraine Russia reality check

The brilliant Timothy Synder provides a sober reality check on the Russia/Ukraine war, and why it is so important we have a reality based President heading into 2024:

The Ukrainians are defending the legal order established after the Second World War.  They have performed the entire NATO mission of absorbing and reversing an attack by Russia with a tiny percentage of NATO military budgets and zero losses from NATO members. Ukrainians are making a war in the Pacific much less likely by demonstrating to China that offensive operations are harder than they seem.  They have made nuclear war less likely by demonstrating that nuclear blackmail need not work.  Ukraine is also fighting to restore its grain exports to Africa and Asia, where millions of people have been put at risk by Russia’s attack on the Ukrainian economy.  Last but not least, Ukrainians are demonstrating that a democracy can defend itself.

Ukrainians are delivering to us kinds of security that we could not attain on our own.  I fear that we are taking these security gains for granted.  (In my more cynical moments, I fear that some of us, perhaps even some presidential candidates, resent the Ukrainians precisely for helping us so much.) 

This war will not end because of one sudden event, but nor will it go on indefinitely.  When and how it ends depends largely on us, on what we do, on how much we help.

President Biden has forcefully backed Ukraine, recognizing the extreme threat Russia presents to global stability. Donald Trump wants to give into Putin’s nuclear threats by handing him the territory he stole. We’ve seen what happens when the world backs down from power hungry fascists. So let’s act and vote accordingly.

See you next week!

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