Thread by @asymmetricinfo

"Twitter, with its 280-character limit, is most effective at signaling the things you can’t say ... handing over the reins of power to the Twittersphere ... means offering control to those who are especially adept at not making arguments."

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/…

I could have written yet another ode to free speech. But we've had those arguments before. I believe 'am all, but no one's mind gets changed.

So instead I wrote about Twitter: why it's very good at making coalitions to pressure institutions, and very bad at making institutions.

A lot of Twitter dynamics are toxic to any kind of institution--most notably, bringing public pressure to bear to win any dispute in which one party feels they can assemble a large enough coalition to turn the tide.

The first thing worth pointing out is that this is an effective tactic, which is why people use it.

It's effective largely because of an evolutionary error. It hijacks social circuits that are built for small groups of 150 or fewer.

When the social cognition functions of our brain recognize a huge number of people being angry, they figure something serious is going on. And indeed, if thousands of people were screaming at you and wishing death upon you IRL, something very serious would be happening.

But that sort of thing has costs IRL--it's hard to assemble thousands of people who wish death on anyone, and our brains have moderating instincts too, that kick in when we're face to face.

Retweets are costless, & online, moderation doesn't kick in. So companies infer that a large mob means everyone will hate them if they don't DO SOMETHING RIGHT NOW! FIRE AWAY! In fact nothing will happen. It will all blow over in a few days. But their brains are screaming FIRE!!!

Which is one--though not the only--reason that things like that mask video can get people fired even though presumably that dude's bosses already knew whether he was a basically decent fellow who had a really bad day, or just bad news who should already have been fired.

I've written about this before, and also the problem of scale--that social media has turned behaviors which were harmless-to-healthy into things that are genuinely socially costly.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

But from the point of view of institutions, Twitter also exacerbates a tendency that Yuval Levin has identified in American elites--the tendency to act as if you're somehow outside the institutions you belong to, which are at most a platform and at worst a target of your ire.

Institutions where everyone behaves this way won't be institutions for very long. All institutions need to handle some things internally, to have some level of deference to colleagues, some base level of fellow-feeling. Without that, they're on the road to failure.

I don't want to oversell this argument; it's not as if nstitutions that experience a few Twitter dust-ups with members of the community are doomed. It's that you're always playing with fire.

And when you're trying to gain control of the institution, presumably that's because you think the institution is valuable, and could be doing important work. So you want to be careful not to burn it down.

To me, it looks as if a lot of the cancellation artists are taking the institutions as constant, and imagining that they can vary only some of the institutional norms. That's not how institutions work.

It's not much of an exaggeration to say that an institution is its norms; if you change them, you change everything: what the institution is capable of doing, how it does that work, how that work is received. Maybe for the better! But different.

But Twitter norms are optimized for doing something that looks very, very little like any sort of institution that the cancellation artists are trying to capture--not the media, not academia, not the arts, not publishing.

And having those fights very publicly and acrimoniously is an especially dangerous way to go about trying to impose those norms on the old institutions.

That's all I've got, folks, don't forget to tip your waiter and read the column: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/…