We have an information ecosystem increasingly centered on platforms that are maximally advantageous to Gish Gallop/One-Way Hash arguments, and I have no idea how we go about reversing this trend, because evidently people like these formats a lot.
Noam Chomsky used to argue that television was inherently (small-c) conservative because if a TV hit gives you 5 minutes of total speaking time, you can’t really articulate a view very far outside the mainstream consensus without sounding crazy…
But it seems like something like the opposite is true when you toss the gatekeepers and shorten the average time even more. You can make a crazy view sound plausible if people are thinking in 30 second increments.
I’m having a minor moment of old-person panic thinking about the effects of transitioning, at the population level, from “reading books” to “consuming 30 second videos” as a primary formative media experience.
About a decade ago, at an Internet Governance Forum in Istanbul, I met a young media theory prof & asked what he was teaching, mentioning a couple books or papers I figured might be on the syllabus. “Oh no, he said,” I can’t assign texts…
“They never read them. I assign talks on YouTube.” I thought he had to be joking or exaggerating, but he was pretty earnest. Maybe he was just ahead of the curve.

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More from @normative

11 Sep
I guess this is a fairly common view, but this sort of biological fetishism just seems absolutely bizarre to me—like a cargo cult imitation of an intelligible moral system. nytimes.com/2021/09/09/opi…
It’s like hearing someone claim the fundamental source of moral value is Duluth, Minnesota. It’s not just that it’s wrong; it makes you wonder whether they actually have the concept of “morality” at all.
Ah. Yeah, I think this is it. Someone wants to make a respectably “scientific” argument for a position held as a matter of religious doctrine… but they end up seizing on a biological property that couldn’t possibly be morally significant in itself.
Read 4 tweets
10 Sep
So… as a practical matter how enforceable are these mandates really? The record of immunization most folks have is a tiny square of cardboard that’s equally easily lost, destroyed, or forged.
Obviously the most visible “vaccine hesitant” are the ones who are loudly declaring their opposition, but… I sort of assume there are lots more who’ll just say “sure, I got vaccinated, if that’s what I have to say to not get fired.”
Obviously there are ways to check, in principle, via insurance or the direct providers, but that sounds like it would require significant infrastructure if suddenly you’ve got a massive number of employers needing to check vax status for 80 million workers...
Read 4 tweets
7 Sep
The extreme form of this is the sort of comical U.S.-centric narcissism you find on conspiracy boards, where EVERY significant event anywhere on Earth is parsed as the latest “distraction” from… some trivial domestic political story, like PillowGuy’s circus symposium.
You might THINK the Taliban taking Kabul is about the complex interal dynamics of another country with its own factions, ideologies, and soccial structures… but no, it’s actually about getting the Arizona audit out of the headlines.
Because QAnon nuts are the protagonists of world history, and so all events anywhere are fundamentally about them: Either elaborately coded communications from the White Hats or cabal efforts to disrupt their vital research. And by “research” I mean “watching videos on Rumble.”
Read 5 tweets
2 Sep
This Texas ruling is disturbing for reasons that don’t even relate to reproductive choice. SCOTUS is effectively saying “if you build a Rube Goldberg enforcement mechanism for the express purpose of evading review of a facially unconstitutional law… very clever, that’ll work!"
Somehow I doubt the Court would have displayed comparable procedural restraint if Massachusetts had allowed private citizens to sue their neighbors for owning a firearm or practicing Christianity.
This doesn’t preclude the court striking it down later, but that still entails a period of cruel uncertainty and onerous burdens on people seeking to terminate pregnancies in Texas. And it’s a roadmap to securing a grace period for unconstitutional legislation.
Read 4 tweets
29 Aug
A hypothesis: I bet “online misinformation” does the most harm offline. That is: The people who are consuming this stuff on social media are mostly either seeking it out or predisposed to it. The effect on them is probably marginal. But it gives them ammo for IRL indoctrination.
Crank boards are full of people telling stories about how “my co-worker / friend / cousin was gonna get the jab until I redpilled them with the latest inaccurate summary of research I didn’t understand…"
The direct, online consumers were already cranks or crank-adjacent, but what they find online gives them a superficial aura of credibility with not-so-online acquaintances who would have otherwise (correctly) dismissed them out of hand.
Read 4 tweets
25 Aug
This is a weird argument. If you accept the premise behind the analogy—that the territory of the country as a whole is effectively collective property—you are already pretty straightforwardly not proceeding from any recognizably libertarian principle.
I’d hope this would be obvious, but nothing about this form of argument limits it to immigration restrictions; you can use it to license ANY majoritarian policy. “I can forbid marijuana in my home, therefore the government can forbid marijuana smoking within its borders…”
Reading “freedom of association” to mean “the government can make any rule within its territory that a homeowner could enforce on their property” just yields straight-up authoritarianism if you take it seriously.
Read 4 tweets

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