Thread by @bernybelvedere

Now that I've written this piece, which includes a rousing call for those of us #onhere to be far more measured in the way we substantively criticize, I want to show the other side of the coin. The side that suggests we won't actually be able to do this.

arcdigital.media/san-franciscos…

One of my greatest concerns, for the ongoing viability of social media to function as a genuine platform for discussion, is that it may be too late to turn away from discourse catastrophism. Sometimes I fear there may be no remedy for it.

It's of course possible that I'm being too pessimistic. Couldn't we just learn to be more careful about the way we frame things? Couldn't we enter into a mutual pact of cross-partisan charitable engagement?

I just don't see this as a live possibility.

It would be bad enough if this problem were merely psychological, merely a problem of us lacking the intellectual willpower to be more consistently fair and judicious.

But our problem is also structural.

The incentives baked into our various discourse arenas are by now so well-entrenched, so inextricably woven into our very understanding of what it means to discuss something online, that they may be impossible to dislodge.

Our discussion forum architecture is intrinsically designed to incentivize point-scoring. Jack or whoever could tinker around at the edges, shaving off a few instances of bad-faith chuddery here and there, but the system itself would remain optimized for cynical exploitation.

This is not a problem of language.

There's no magic linguistic fix, such as abandoning words like "they" or "them" in our posts (e.g., *they* are trying to ruin America). This is not a matter of finding the right term that will just solve everything.

You can remove words entirely and we'll still find a way to build unsupported characterizations of each other that go platinum viral. Emojis by themselves can signal, "This is what the left wants to do to America."

You don't even need words to signal something like that.

My latest piece articulates my commitment to anticatastrophism, i.e., guarding against taking statistically infrequent instances of bad behavior and constructing macronarratives about how This Is How America Dies.

arcdigital.media/san-franciscos…

But the structural incentives within partisan media, and within social media more broadly, disincline their participants from producing, and rewarding, anything rhetorically short of that.

The folks willing to engage in this behavior will be rewarded, their voices amplified, their platforms ensured.

The masses flock to these accounts, and none of us with our quaint little notions of evidentiary adequacy and interpretive charity will be able to do a thing about it.

In a different piece, one from a couple years back, I was more optimistic.

We can do this, guys! We just need to be better!

But I'm afraid this isn't a fallacy that we can easily correct.

It certainly is a fallacy—this one's a species of hasty generalization and slippery slope—but it's more pernicious than that.

It's more rigidly sewn into the very fabric of social engagement now.

And I am worried.