Thread by @SethAbramson

(🔒) NEW at RETRO Digital Culture (see the tweet following this for a discount link): "The Response to the Rittenhouse Verdict on Social Media Reveals the Rot in the American Experiment"

I think this is the talk we need to have. I hope you'll share this. retrostack.substack.com/p/the-response…

(DISCOUNT LINK) Click the link below to get 30% off an annual RETRO subscription (i.e., less than $3/month for a full year if you subscribe through November 30): retrostack.substack.com/p/the-first-ev…

(PS) After I posted my RETRO article about how far-right demagogues use anecdotes to poison reasoned criminal justice system discourse, Tim Pool began to trend on Twitter for claiming that the political left is represented by a madman who wrote that he wanted to harm Rittenhouse.

(PS2) The ease of Tim Pool’s grift is almost breathtaking. He doesn’t need to have any expertise, pedigree, training, experience, hard data, network of sources, or journalistic ethos—he just has to find an outlandish, one-off *anecdote* and say it’s a sign of impending civil war.

(PS3) In the main, response to the Rittenhouse verdict—in major media *and* on social media—was that it was not surprising; pointed to a need for reform in the criminal justice system; may have been in line with Wisconsin law; and shouldn’t have led to Rittenhouse being lionized.

(PS4) The reason grifters like Tim Pool and Andy Ngo are winning the information war is that they’ve learned that half the country is just looking for one anecdote to confirm what they already believe. And as a rule of thumb, at least one anecdote always exists to prove anything.

(PS5) As I wrote at RETRO, it’s true that hard data can also be misleadingly framed. But it’s far harder to do this than to find a single outlier anecdote—and the moment you concede hard data is infinitely preferable to anecdote, you shift the battlefield to more reasoned debate.

(PS6) It’s via a liberal arts education that one learns to reason with data and expertise rather than anecdote—anecdote is a medieval, pre-Enlightenment mode of reasoning—which is why the far right desperately wants to destroy colleges/universities. They make people less pliable.

(PS7) It’s precisely *because* the post-Enlightenment reasoning skills one learns via a liberal arts education make one less pliable—and less susceptible to grifters like Pool—that a major thrust of their information war is to falsely claim higher ed makes people *more* pliable.

(PS8) A conventional civil war isn’t likely coming—and certainly not of the armed-camp 19th-century sort—but one could credibly argue that we’re in an “information civil war” right now, one fought not with violence but rhetorical schema. Pool and Ngo are dangerous actors in this.

(PS9) Given how big and anonymous the internet is, Pool would’ve needed *hundreds* of *confirmed* leftists calling for harm to Rittenhouse to make any coherent point. Instead one local Dem social media director called Waukesha “karma” and was instantly fired. That’s all Pool had.

(PS10) Fortunately for Pool, his audience is so uneducated that all they needed was *one tweet*—anonymous or not, provably leftist or not (hell, authored by Pool or one of his associates or not)—to declare that “they” (the left) isn’t just “bad” but violent, evil, geared for war.

(PS11) The scary part is that on these terms, the information war is unwinnable. Because the fact is, many on the left *also* weaponize anecdotes regularly—so much so that it’s reached the point we *all* do it occasionally.

Which means we’re already fighting on impossible terms.

(PS12) Maybe once we could’ve leaned on institutions to re-orient the culture, but corporate media makes more money off anecdotes than hard data and politicians now hunt for anecdotes to win arguments just like Pool does. We’re on a downward spiral I don’t believe we can get off.

(PS13) I sometimes wonder if *anyone* is strong enough to push back on the degradation of our rhetorical schema. Just when I think I’m doing OK, I find myself clapping back at (say) Candace Owens—a person who exists *only* to entice the left into lapsing into anecdotal reasoning.

(PS14) The goal—which I now think is unattainable—is finding a common language for reality that over 75% of us are willing to speak. Hard data is one option; curatorial journalism, another; think-tanks staffed by unimpeachable experts another. All face mountainous obstacles, now.

(P15) I’m a curatorial journalist; I often use hard data to answer questions (I do a lot of this at RETRO via the “Definitive Top 100” methodology I’m developing there); and I’ve tried to develop several areas of expertise via my terminal degrees. But I still lapse into anecdote.

(CONCLUSION) I guess I’m just adding to the chorus of voices saying that—when something is trending in media—ask yourself, “Does it really *mean* anything outside the situation in which it arose? Does it really *prove* anything? What else is needed for it to establish a *trend*?”