Thread by @normative

In virtually every claim like this, you could replace “Facebook” with “connecting people.” Not that FB doesn’t deserve the crap they get, but the intensity of it feels a little like a form of denial—if not for the wicked algorithms, we would’t be doing this.

It is admittedly depressing to think a descent into psychotic and violent conspiracy theories is just a concomitant of widespread, low-friction connectivity, but… it probably is. This stuff spreads on all sorts of platforms, even without algorithmic boosting.

The underlying problem is *this is the type of content that increases engagement*. That means, sort of tautologically, that it’s what people are going to engage with absent aggressive intervention to prevent that from happening.

In Ye Olden Dayes, the “intervention” was the (in this one respect) benign paternalism of media gatekeepers. That’s not really a tenable strategy anymore, AND we’ve got at least one legacy gatekeeper that’s decided it’s more profitable to act as a gateway to the hard stuff.

On social media, the “intervention” is moderation, and by all means, the platform should do more of it, especially for non-English content, where they’re much laxer. But *lots of human communication is unmoderated*, and nobody really thinks that shouldn’t be the case.

Thought experiment: Say we have a bunch of fully decentralized social networking apps built on open protocols, with a wide array of content discovery algorithms and content filters that users themselves can choose between. No evil corporation is manipulating us. What happens?

Tautologically, the people who choose the algorithms that yield the highest engagement are the most engaged, sharing the most content, etc. What yields the highest engagement? Right. Back where we started.

To the extent that it still makes sense economically & technologically to have these functions centralized, the platforms provide a chokepoint that can slow this dynamic down, and they can vary in their willingness & competence to do so. But the tautology wins in the long run.

That is: the networking mechanism (whether it’s one of many platforms or a decentralized protocol) that yields the highest engagement will be the one people are most engaged with.

Moderation that conflicts with user desires will survive only so long as barriers to entry limit the number of viable platforms, and the economics of decentralized alternatives don’t work as well as models with a chokepoint.

Tangent: There’s a shoddy (but in some academic circles popular) book called “Caliban and the Witch” about the Early Modern witch craze. The thesis of this book is that the witch panic was a kind of proto-capitalist plot to wipe out resistance to the nascent economic system.

Now, a very little research makes it obvious this thesis is nonsense. The “argument,” such as it is, proceeds by cherry-picking and misrepresenting sources, then vaulting the logic gaps that remain with brazen non-sequiturs.

What’s going on in the book is that the author has a vehement, theological precommitment to Capitalism Bad, and relatedly, is offended by the idea that (at least in some places) ordinary peasants might have driven the phenomenon without being tricked by authorities.

The picture that emerges if you read more serious historians of the Witch Craze is a lot more interesting. In some times and places, it is indeed spearheaded by local elites for their own reasons (though “eliminating resistance to capitalism” has very little to do with it).

In other times and places—though you don’t get serious body counts unless local authorities are at least somewhat complicit—it’s much more a genuinely bottom-up phenomeon. The common thread is a viral combination of *ideas* about witches…

The mash-up concept of the witch takes the old idea of a person who can do malign magic—make you impotent, ruin crops, make women miscarry—and then adds elements from stereotypes about other contemporary out-groups (heretics, lepers, Jews).

Critically, it adds the idea that they’re not merely solitary—they meet in groups. Then it adds the folkloric idea of the “nocturnal flight”: They can fly! You might not see them travel to these meetings!

Finally you get the idea of the “inquisitorial process” borrowed from the Church (which was, for various reasons, actually relatively good about stamping out which panics in regions where it had strong authority). You don’t just do an ordeal and execute the witch…

Rather, you’re supposed to torture them and extract a confession. And because you’ve added “they meet in groups” and “nocturnal flight” to the mash-up concept, you get them to confess the other witches they know, who (because they fly at night) could be anyone!

The combination of these four key elements—malign magic, covens, nocturnal flights, inquisitorial process—constitute a viral concept that rationalize self-perpetuating violence, because once you find one witch you get a list of new victims, who name more new victims, etc…

And the spectacle of multiple executions, of course, causes the stories to spread all the faster. “Wow, these witches must be a big problem!”

So why does this happen when & where it does? (Spoiler: It isn’t correlated in any interesting way with emerging capitalism. If anything, it’s the reverse.) Partly it’s the currency of the ideas that make up the mash-up concept of the witch, waiting to be recombined.

Partly, it’s the end of the medieval warm period—climate change. The first Witch Panics happen around the Pyrenese alps, where the effects are first felt. Extreme weather events. Crop failures. Sudden migration of people & animals. (Where’d all these wolves come from?)

But a really big factor is the printing press. A defrocked priest named Heinrich Kramer writes down the mash-up concept of the witch in a book called the Malleus Maleficarum, or “hammer of witches.”

The book is promptly condemned by the respectable ecclesiastical and academic authorities. The Malleus nevertheless becomes an international runaway bestseller, along with numerous pamphlets and knock-off books that follow.

The literate segments of the population across Europe are exposed to the viral concept of the witch, and spread it by word of mouth to the rest. Parts of the process are centralized…

The university at Ingolstadt becomes a major “platform” for anti-witch discourse, and rulers and clergy educated there are a major vector for the spread of witch ideology. Prince-bishops in the Holy Roman Empire drive persecutions for their own political reasons.

But THE PROCESS AS A WHOLE—spanning several centuries and many different regions of Europe—is not centralized. No puppet-master (capitalist or otherwise) is making all these disparate people go crazy and murder, all told, tens of thousands of women (and a few men).

If you had to give a crude, one-sentence answer to what happened that caused all this conspiracy-theory-fueled violence, you’d probably have to say: “The printing press happened.”

You can look at a time slice in a region and say: “Well, this greedy publisher shouldn’t have printed that book/pamphlet just because it was popular and would make money.” And fair enough, as far as it goes.

If specific publishers, or the administrators at Ingolstadt, had made different choices, maybe some local panics could have been avoided. But it’s also missing the forest for the trees to think primarily in those terms.