Plugging back out

I (re-re-)started this newsletter/blog on November 11, 2024, a few days after Trump was elected for a second term, and a year to the day before my son was born, with a post examining how poorly leftist cultural practice performs in what I called the "metamodern miasma." Essentially, I argued that the way most people encounter information today lends itself best to a messaging style that matches the unpredictable, ephemeral, and simultaneously silly and serious nature of ascendant social media, group chat, and AI chat-bot mediums owned by increasingly right-wing oligarchs. In other words, almost the exact opposite of the ultra-targeted, focus group-tested messaging that Democratic political campaigns have long relied on.

One year, one fellowship, one baby, and two major versions of ChatGPT later, and I think the argument still holds up pretty well. You could summarize it as: the way most people form their identities and beliefs in today's digitally mediated information environment is, for lack of better terms, significantly weirder and more unpredictable than it has been for at least a century, and maybe longer.

As a result, paying to reach the right people with your message enough times that they can't ignore it is no longer enough to change hearts and minds (if it ever was to begin with). Instead, you need to be willing, as the New Yorker's Nathan Heller put it in his own version of this argument, also published just after the election, to seed "the ambience of information, throwing facts and fake facts (ed. note: except that part) alike into an environment of low attention, with the confidence that, like minnows released individually into a pond, they will eventually school and spawn."

If you accept Heller's theory, you can understand why not just campaigners and policymakers, but journalists, media scholars, political scientists, random bloggers (ahem), and really anyone with a stake in understanding how people make sense of the world are struggling to adapt to the modern information environment. The idea that we no longer have even a basic understanding of how information spreads and turns into belief and action is anathema to people whose careers, and often entire worldviews, depend on claiming some amount of control over that process.

Heller's idea adds to a growing canon in both professional and academic media circles that aims to radically rethink the core function of media to account for how individuals and groups form beliefs and identities today. I've enjoyed the "deep mediatization" framework proposed by media studies scholars Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp and the cross-disciplinary "collective behavior" framework, which I know are among countless others.

At their core, these frameworks are all grappling with the tension between viewing humans as the subject of ambient/deep/emergent media swirling around them and positioning them as the creators and mediators of the same media. At some level, media studies has been trying to resolve this tension since the field's founding. But it's far more pronounced today given the added layers of algorithms and bots, which shows in the amount of effort these thinkers put into analyzing the degree to which various human, computer, and in-between entities and groups are able to command agency to influence and form beliefs and identities in today's information environment.

It's in this question of agency where I think the essential weirdness of what we've constructed emerges. Over the last 30 or so years, the amount of effort required to answer nearly any question you can imagine has gone from potentially traveling several miles to a library and spending several hours asking a librarian for help finding the right book, checking it out, identifying the relevant passage, etc., to pulling out your phone and asking your favorite LLM. Finding thousands of people to discuss whatever you're looking for with has gone from nearly impossible to adding "reddit" to the end of any query. Viewed through this lens, individuals have unprecedented amounts of agency to explore almost anything.

At the same time, in the process of asking that LLM, visiting referenced links, and joining the right subreddit, you're constructing a digital profile that allows companies to tailor the results of your next query based on your previous ones for purposes relatively innocuous, like targeted advertising, and much more sinister, like influencing your political views. The more you seek out, the more targeted the responses become, which over time constricts the boundaries of what and who you can discover and makes you more of a target to those who seek to surveil and influence you. It's no wonder, then, that prolonged internet (and particularly social media) use causes us to be less trustful of people and ideas outside our preferred bubbles, leading to damaging social effects like loneliness, toxic individualism, filter bubbles, polarization, declines in conscientiousness, and politically driven geographic sorting.

In other words, we've created an information environment where the more agency you use, the less you actually have.

That isn't quite the paradox it might seem to be. Information technology has given us more individual agency than ever before. But we form our identities and beliefs socially, in close relationships with groups of people. So the more we turn to tools that make us feel individually powerful, but that constrict our relationships to loose digital ties with the likeminded, promote behaviors like cutting people out of our lives who disagree with or inconvenience us, and reinforce those behaviors by making the chaos of offline life feel unbearably inconvenient by comparison, the more power over our ability to form beliefs and identities we cede to those tools and their increasingly dangerous owners.

In my view, this ceding of power is the source of the "ambient" environment Heller identifies. We cannot be reached directly because no one is home to listen. As online individuals we are so ensconced in and enamored of our personalized feeds, groups, and bots that anything that penetrates from the outside automatically carries with it the suspicion of manipulation. As online groups we are largely too loosely connected for new ideas to properly bounce around and grow, and too segmented and polarized for the arguments that do manage to take hold to jump the boundaries from one community to the next. So, the best approach to messaging truly is to give up on the idea that you have any control and assume that, by communicating at once as broadly and specifically as possible, you will organically sow the seeds required for your ideas to take root in a million feeds, group chats, and forums, and that they will eventually grow until their tendrils become too big not to connect and form into a cohesive grand narrative, despite the odds.

As individuals, I believe the pathway out is a similar surrender to our essential powerlessness. I don’t think it’s productive or desirable to expect anyone to opt out of the digital information ecosystem. But perhaps we can acknowledge that the pervasive modern desire to feel powerful, to feel right, and to feel free of inconvenience and friction is often counterproductive. Perhaps we can commit ourselves to, hopefully with some regularity, plugging out of the tools that promise those benefits and plugging into tools, relationships, and communities that nourish us by challenging and inconveniencing us.