Remember that old origin myth about the Tower of Babel?
In biblical literature, there was this structure built in the land of Shinar (Babylonia)
some time after the deluge. The story of its construction, given in Genesis 11:1–9, appears to be an attempt to explain the existence of diverse human languages. So the Babylonians wanted to make a name for themselves by building a mighty city and a tower “with its top in the heavens.”
Well, God was offended by the hubris of humanity and said: Look, they are one people, and they have one language; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.
The text does not say that God destroyed the tower, but you know in most popular renderings of the story, he does.
Picture the folks wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate, condemned to mutual incomprehension.
Mythology is very good at teaching us important things through metaphors.
Look at the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went horridly awry.
We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth.
We are cut off from one another and isolated from the past.
The lessons of history, even recent history; are forgotten.
It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different nations claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within our institutions, universities, companies, and even families.
Babel is also a metaphor for what social media has done to nearly all groups and institutions.
If there is a direction to history, and there is; it is toward cooperation at larger scales.
It is observable in biological evolution, in the series of “major transitions” through which multicellular organisms first appeared and then developed new symbiotic relationships.
We can see it in cultural evolution too.
In the book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Robert Wright documents that history involves a series of transitions, driven by population density and new technologies (writing, roads, the printing press) that created new possibilities for mutually beneficial trade and learning.
Zero-sum conflicts—such as the wars of religion that arose as the printing press spread heretical ideas across Europe—were better thought of as temporary setbacks, and sometimes even integral to progress. (Those wars of religion, he argued, made possible the transition to modern nation-states with better-informed citizens.) It's an interesting read with an optimistic portrayal of a more cooperative future for mankind thanks to continued technological advance.
We might see the early internet of the 1990s, with its chat rooms, message boards, and email, exemplified the Nonzero thesis, as did the first wave of social-media platforms, which launched around 2003. Myspace, Friendster, and Facebook made it easy to connect with friends and strangers to talk about common interests, for free, and at a scale never before imaginable. By 2008, Facebook had emerged as the dominant platform, with more than 100 million monthly users, on its way to roughly 3 billion today. In the first decade of the new century, social media was widely believed to be a boon to democracy. After all, what dictator could impose his will on such an interconnected citizenry?
What regime could build a wall to keep out the internet?
The high point of this techno-democratic optimism was 2011, a year that began with the Arab Spring and ended with the global Occupy movement.
That is also when Google Translate became available on virtually all smartphones, so you could say that 2011 was the year that humanity rebuilt the Tower of Babel.
We were closer than we had ever been to being “one people,”
and we had effectively overcome the division by language.
If you were optimistic, you might have thought humanity's future
would not be a dystopian nightmare.
In biblical literature, there was this structure built in the land of Shinar (Babylonia)
some time after the deluge. The story of its construction, given in Genesis 11:1–9, appears to be an attempt to explain the existence of diverse human languages. So the Babylonians wanted to make a name for themselves by building a mighty city and a tower “with its top in the heavens.”
Well, God was offended by the hubris of humanity and said: Look, they are one people, and they have one language; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.
The text does not say that God destroyed the tower, but you know in most popular renderings of the story, he does.
Picture the folks wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate, condemned to mutual incomprehension.
Mythology is very good at teaching us important things through metaphors.
Look at the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went horridly awry.
We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth.
We are cut off from one another and isolated from the past.
The lessons of history, even recent history; are forgotten.
It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different nations claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within our institutions, universities, companies, and even families.
Babel is also a metaphor for what social media has done to nearly all groups and institutions.
Raising The Modern Tower
If there is a direction to history, and there is; it is toward cooperation at larger scales.
It is observable in biological evolution, in the series of “major transitions” through which multicellular organisms first appeared and then developed new symbiotic relationships.
We can see it in cultural evolution too.
In the book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Robert Wright documents that history involves a series of transitions, driven by population density and new technologies (writing, roads, the printing press) that created new possibilities for mutually beneficial trade and learning.
Zero-sum conflicts—such as the wars of religion that arose as the printing press spread heretical ideas across Europe—were better thought of as temporary setbacks, and sometimes even integral to progress. (Those wars of religion, he argued, made possible the transition to modern nation-states with better-informed citizens.) It's an interesting read with an optimistic portrayal of a more cooperative future for mankind thanks to continued technological advance.
We might see the early internet of the 1990s, with its chat rooms, message boards, and email, exemplified the Nonzero thesis, as did the first wave of social-media platforms, which launched around 2003. Myspace, Friendster, and Facebook made it easy to connect with friends and strangers to talk about common interests, for free, and at a scale never before imaginable. By 2008, Facebook had emerged as the dominant platform, with more than 100 million monthly users, on its way to roughly 3 billion today. In the first decade of the new century, social media was widely believed to be a boon to democracy. After all, what dictator could impose his will on such an interconnected citizenry?
What regime could build a wall to keep out the internet?
The high point of this techno-democratic optimism was 2011, a year that began with the Arab Spring and ended with the global Occupy movement.
That is also when Google Translate became available on virtually all smartphones, so you could say that 2011 was the year that humanity rebuilt the Tower of Babel.
We were closer than we had ever been to being “one people,”
and we had effectively overcome the division by language.
If you were optimistic, you might have thought humanity's future
would not be a dystopian nightmare.
In February 2012, Mark Zuckerberg was preparing to take FB public.
He told investors “Today, our society has reached another tipping point,”
He said FB planned “to rewire the way people spread and consume information.”
It would "transform many of our core institutions and industries.”
In the 10 years since then, Zuckerberg did exactly what he said he would do.
He did rewire the way we spread and consume information;
he did transform our institutions, and he pushed us past the tipping point.
It has not worked out.
In the past, civilizations have relied on shared blood, gods, and enemies
to counteract the tendency to split apart as they grow.
But what is it that holds together large and diverse secular democracies such as the United States
India, or modern Britain and France?
Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust),
strong institutions, and shared stories.
Social media has weakened all three. To see how, we must understand how social media changed over time—and especially in the several years following 2009.
In their early incarnations, platforms such as Myspace and Facebook were relatively harmless.
They allowed users to create pages on which to post photos, family updates, and links to the mostly static pages of their friends and favorite bands.
In this way, early social media can be seen as just another step in the long progression of technological improvements—from the Postal Service through the telephone to email and texting—that helped people achieve the eternal goal of maintaining their social ties.
But gradually, social-media users became more comfortable sharing intimate details of their lives with strangers and corporations. They became more adept at putting on performances and managing their personal brand—activities that might impress others but that do not deepen friendships in the way that a private phone conversation will.
Once social-media platforms had trained users to spend more time performing and less time connecting, the stage was set for the major transformation which began in 2009: It was the intensification of viral dynamics.
Before 2009, Facebook had given users a simple timeline––a never-ending stream of content generated by their friends and connections, with the newest posts at the top and the oldest ones at the bottom.
This was often overwhelming in its volume, but it was an accurate reflection of what others were posting. That began to change in 2009, when Facebook offered users a way to publicly “like” posts with the click of a button. That same year, Twitter introduced something even more powerful: the “Retweet” button, which allowed users to publicly endorse a post while also sharing it with all of their followers. Facebook soon copied that innovation with its own “Share” button, which became available to smartphone users in 2012. “Like” and “Share” buttons quickly became standard features of most other platforms.
Shortly after its “Like” button began to produce data about what best “engaged” its users, Facebook developed algorithms to show each user the content most likely to generate a “like” or “share”.
Later research showed that posts that trigger emotions––especially anger at out-groups––are the most likely to be shared.
By 2013, social media had become a new game, with dynamics unlike those in 2008. If you were skillful or lucky, you might create a post that would “go viral” and make you “internet famous” for a few days. If you blundered, you could find yourself buried in hateful comments. Your posts rode to fame or ignominy based on the clicks of thousands of strangers, and you in turn contributed thousands of clicks to the game.
This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment, and their prediction of how others would react. One of the engineers at Twitter who had worked on the “Retweet” button later revealed that he regretted his contribution because it had made Twitter a nastier place.
As he watched Twitter mobs forming through the use of the new tool,
he thought to himself, “We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.”
The newly tweaked platforms were perfectly designed to bring out
our most moralistic and least reflective selves.
The volume of outrage was shocking.
our most moralistic and least reflective selves.
The volume of outrage was shocking.
It was just this kind of twitchy and explosive spread of anger
that James Madison had tried to protect us from as he was drafting the U.S. Constitution.
The Framers of the Constitution were excellent social psychologists. They knew that democracy had an Achilles’ heel because it depended on the collective judgment of the people, and democratic communities are subject to “the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions.”
The key to designing a sustainable republic, therefore, was to build in mechanisms to slow things down, cool passions, require compromise, and give leaders some insulation from the mania of the moment while still holding them accountable to the people periodically, on Election Day.
The tech companies that enhanced virality brought us deep into Madison’s nightmare.
Many authors quote his comments in “Federalist No. 10” on the innate human proclivity toward “faction,” by which he meant our tendency to divide ourselves into teams or parties that are so inflamed with “mutual animosity” that they are “much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.”
But that essay continues on to a less quoted yet equally important insight, about democracy’s vulnerability to triviality. Madison said that people are so prone to factionalism that “where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.”
Social media has magnified and weaponized the frivolous.
Is our democracy any healthier now that we’ve had Twitter brawls over Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s tax the rich dress at the annual Met Gala, and Melania Trump’s dress at a 9/11 memorial event, which had stitching that kind of looked like a skyscraper?
How about Senator Ted Cruz’s tweet criticizing Big Bird?
It’s not just the waste of time and scarce attention that matters;
it’s the continual chipping-away of trust.
An autocracy can deploy propaganda or use fear to motivate the behaviors it desires (and social media can be utilized far more effectively for spreading that sort of rubbish than previous media technology), but a democracy depends on widely internalized acceptance of the legitimacy of rules, norms, and institutions.
Blind and irrevocable trust in any particular individual or organization
is never warranted under any circumstances,
but if citizens lose trust in elected leaders, health authorities, the courts,
the police, universities, and the integrity of elections,
then every decision becomes a life-and-death struggle.
social media amplifies political polarization; foments populism, especially right-wing populism;
and is associated with the spread of misinformation.
It's bad for civilization.
In the pre-digital era we were a single “mass audience,” all consuming the same content,
We were all looking into the same gigantic mirror at the reflection of our own society.
The digital revolution has shattered that mirror,
and now the public inhabits those broken shards of glass.
So the public isn’t in any sense one thing
with a shared experience of a concrete reality anymore.
It’s highly fragmented, and it’s mutually hostile.
It’s mostly people yelling at each other and living in bubbles of one sort or another.
Outrage is the key to virality, stage performance crushes competence,
Twitter can overpower all the newspapers in the country, and stories cannot be shared
(or at least trusted) across more than a few adjacent fragments—
so truth cannot achieve widespread adherence.
When our public square is governed by mob dynamics
unrestrained by any sort of due process, we don’t get justice and inclusion;
we get a society that ignores context, proportionality, mercy, and truth.
In the 20th century, we built the most capable knowledge-producing institutions in human history.
In the past decade, they got stupid en masse.
To remain viable in this post-Babel era, we must harden democratic institutions so that they can withstand chronic anger and mistrust, reform social media so that it becomes less socially corrosive, and better prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship.
