Tweeting Ourselves to Death

What the preferred medium for mainlining modern media says about us as a culture...

Joel Bowman, reckoning this Sunday from Buenos Aires, Argentina...

So, Musk bought Twitter. Let the crying games begin... 

Why the crocodile tears, you ask? Weren’t these the very same memeple (meme people) who conscripted the “if you don’t like our platform, get your own!” argument just last month, when the deplorable basket of unwoke, unwashed, unvaxxed dared to complain about the unequal partisan illiberal “selective” application of Little Blue Bird’s “content moderation policy.” 

Now equity experts, diversity consultants and the media’s entire cottage industry of finger-wagging inclusivity hall monitors have their collective, unisex panties in a bunch after Mr. Musk did exactly what they suggested and, for want of a better phrase, got his own. No sooner had the ink dried on the corporate purchase agreement this past Monday when the whole drum circle of jilted offendennials began burning their faux-libertarian flags and trading in their shiny new “Don’t Tread on Me” lapel pins (they never did quite fit) for the comfortably familiar BLM fist badges, Che Guevara hoodies and NCAA-approved mankinis. 

But perhaps you’re a little confused, rational reader. Don’t be. It is classic Rules for Thee, Not for Me. You see, when members of the anointed elite own something, it’s called “private property.” But when anyone else owns it, particularly if that person happens to be a private citizen with whom said gatekeepers righteously disagree, it’s a “public space.”

Think of it a bit like bodily autonomy. When it comes to a subject as intricate and complex as abortion, one’s body is strictly a “pro-choice” jurisdiction... as in “their body, their choice.” (“They” being the corporal rentier, mind... not the “inconvenient interloper.”) But when it comes to, oh... say, vaccines mandates, it’s really more about “your body... also their choice.” 

See? What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is... also mine. Easy!

No doubt there will be plenty of virtual ink spilled regarding who gets to say what and where over the coming weeks. (Expect your rabid, free speech absolutist editor to chuck his own Akubra into the proverbial ring in a future Sunday Sesh.) Meanwhile, stepping back from the chatter, we can’t help notice the conversation that isn’t happening. Forget, for a moment, the information (or misinformation, if you prefer) that Twitter is pumping into sweaty teen palms and fintwit craniums around the globe and consider, instead, the nature of the medium itself.

What does the Little Blue Bird, as a unique, 21st Century communications conduit, say about the way we gather, distribute and process information, about the way we understand the world around us, as well as our place within it? What does it mean to have transitioned from Typography Man to Television Man to, with increasing ubiquity, Internet Man? How does Twitter, as a medium, reflect on the way we build cohesive communities, that is, real life social networks out there in the physical realm, where we interact with flesh and blood human beings, people who watch our kids, drive our taxis, cut our hair, invest our money and legislate our societies? What “problem” does Twitter seek to solve? And to whose ultimate benefit?

Satisfying as it is witnessing a whole cohort of irony-immune bedwetters enter core meltdown mode, the Musk-Twitter mega deal offers us a valuable opportunity to examine some critical points concerning the dilapidated state of public discourse. Which brings us to this week’s essay...

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Tweeting Ourselves to Death

By Joel Bowman

Know thyself
Nothing in excess
Certainty brings insanity 

~ Delphic Maxims, as inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi

Many and varied are the ways man attempts to make sense of the world around him. From time immemorial has he searched, interpreting shadows on cave walls and following blistering lodestars, scorching their paths across the heavens above, hoping to divine meaning and purpose in an otherwise chaotic and often frightening reality. In constant communication with his fellow nomads, through the ineluctable modalities of the visual, aural, spatial, gestural and linguistic, has he sought to share and decipher these strange mysteries presented him by the cold, apathetic universe. Now, after hundreds of millennia wandering mostly in savage ignorance, having painstakingly clawed his way from smoke signals to Shakespeare, totems to Tolstoy, hieroglyphics to Homer to Heisenberg to Handel, he has finally arrived at the apogee of modern, civilized, sophisticated communication mediums...

...Twitter.

We jest, of course. But the overwrought slab of syntax rendered above – in which your card-carrying Joycehead of an editor managed to smuggle in an allusion to his favorite modernist artist-as-a-young-man – is not without a purpose of its own, a teleology, to borrow again from the Greeks. The point, casually strewn across 894 unhurried characters, no less, is to draw sharp distinction between what passes for communication in the post-postmodern Digital Age versus that which cradled one’s precious attention in the good ol’, not-so-distant past. (On this, the centennial anniversary of the publication of Ulysses, scholars are still peeling back Joyce’s onion.)

Indeed, if you have arrived at this point in the essay at all – whether through accident, an act of stubbornness, a sense of pity or even genuine interest – you may count yourself in the fast-vanishing minority capable of resisting the unceasing allure of omnipresent cat memes and those flashing Amazon banner ads, showcasing a dozen different models of that blender you were researching just last week. Point being, our mediums of communication come to define us as a culture as much as we make ourselves through their lenses. And when you have a culture that views itself through the prism of an infinite scroll, comprised of discrete, clickable, 140-character data snippets, what else would you expect but Dory-like attention spans and ever tightening, shiny-new-thing-centric gratification cycles? As for anything approaching Capital “T” Truth, where might one even begin the search amidst the swirling abyss of decontextualized data and digital detritus masquerading as wisdom, prophecy and intelligent life? And yet, this foray into the bottomless scroll, something akin to tipping over the event horizon of a black hole, is only the latest iteration of a still deeper communications conundrum.

In a long procession of gifted noticers, it was Neil Postman who, seemingly alone, stepped back from the television screen long enough to pen his seminal, 1985 work: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. In it, Postman lamented that we were rushing headlong into a dangerous Faustian Pact, in which we were lulled by the promise of a cornucopia of “knowledge,” as televised by the mutant offspring born of the intercourse between typography and photography: the idiot box. All we had to offer in exchange for this bountiful infoglut were our attention spans, our social decorum, our ability to form meaningful “co-presence” relationships (in the “real world”), our critical thinking capacity, our ability to solve complex, multivariate equations, to discern valuable insights from calorie free “advertainment.” 

Early in the book, though still further along than the 140 character mark, he writes:

As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it. Every philosophy is the philosophy of a stage of life, Nietzsche remarked. To which we might add that every epistemology is the epistemology of a stage of media development. Truth, like time itself, is a product of a conversation man has with himself about and through the techniques of communication he has invented. 

Wait... Nietzsche? Epistemology? Time itself?

Consider, before we even begin to unpack the meaning in Postman’s message, the fact that he dared marshal together a philologist, a notoriously dense branch of philosophy and the very nature of time as a handy metaphor in a book addressed to a general reading public, many members of which are alive today. Now consider that his book was a national best-seller! How do you suppose such a work would fare in the Age of Twitter, 2022, assuming it made it past the desk of the twenty-something, gender fluid literary agent/social media manager splitting zir time between “non-fiction: culture” and zir preferred genre of “underrepresented first nations voices in young adult, non-binary fantasy/cosplay?”

Complex subjects, of the sort that are routinely wrapped in pithy headlines and hogtied by tl;dr (too long; didn’t read) summaries, demand deep reading and sharp, focused thinking. Such matters require meditation, rigorous analysis and sometimes even heavy drinking. (The ancient Persians, according to Herodotus, used to weigh an issue by debating it... then getting plastered and chewing it over... then addressing it again the following day, through their post-booze haze. If they came to the same conclusion before, during and after wanton inebriation, it was considered a good sign. The Greeks, too, began their famous Symposium, on the nature of love and virtue, with the kind of hangover that would make Mel Gibson blush...)

Now consider Twitter as the preferred mechanism for mainlining information in the modern age. What does the medium itself tell us about the general public’s appetite for careful, considered, contemplative reading? Moreover, what does it tell us about that which we think we know? 

Few subjects have been covered/smothered more comprehensively than the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020. One might assume, given the superabundance of data freely available on the aptly-named information superhighway, the general level of knowledge regarding the subject would be something approaching basic proficiency. And yet, take a look around you. Do you see anything remotely resembling a sound, sane, rational response to the pandemic, either from individuals... communities... school boards... elected officials? 

Or take the conflict on the Eurasian Steppe, plenty in the public’s newsfeeds of late. How many upright citizens of Twitlandia do you suppose know who drew the Russian/Ukrainian border, as it stood before this latest incursion? How many Twitter news feeders, many of whom promptly, bravely declared their allegiance by including either a Ukrainian or Russian flag emoji in their bio, know the name of the Ukrainian Minister of Defense? Or his Russian counterpart? Or even, for that matter, the US Secretary of State? 

Speaking of Antony J Blinken, what do we know about the goings on at WestExec Advisors, the political strategy advisory firm he co-founded in 2017 which, according to Beltway operative and Clinton-Obama acolyte, Michele Flournoy, “facilitates relationships between Silicon Valley firms and the Department of Defense”? Or how about the advisory’s strategic partner, the private equity firm Pine Island Capital Partners? During the final stretch of Biden’s presidential run, Pine Island raised $218 million for a “blank check company” (SPAC) to invest broadly in the “defense, government service and aerospace industries.” Do most people know Blinken was a partner in that firm, too? According to the company’s website, Pine Island’s D.C. partners boast a who’s-who of government spooks, operatives and slippery grifters, including “former prominent members of Congress, ambassadors, and military and defense leaders who also have significant private sector experience.” Might the revolving door between the Pentagon and the insanely lucrative private military contractor space be relevant when considering one’s impulse to wage war or make peace?

The point here is not to impugn one or another politico’s motives, nor to take sides in a complex geopolitical event happening half a world away, in a region most Twittarians have never seen, will never visit and probably couldn’t find on a map anyway. Rather, we mean only to demonstrate that when it comes to even the most extensively covered events in our world today – be they plague, war or good ol’ fashioned politicking – the bite-sized media nuggets fed to a somnambulant public hardly suffice to convey the gravity and complexity of the situation at hand. To be uninformed on a given subject is certainly no shame. After all, there are not enough hours in the day to become an expert in every field known to man. The problem, argued Postman, comes when we mistake shallow, vague familiarity with a subject with actual knowledge.

“Ignorance is always correctable,” he observed, “But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?”

Which brings us to the poverty of our modern communication mediums, in Postman’s case the television; in ours, social media platforms like Twitter. In Amusing, Postman worried that the daily news, itself a “construct of our technological imagination,” was by its very nature incapable of affording a given subject (indeed, any given subject), the requisite time for proper reflection. Forty-five seconds is hardly sufficient to deal with a local gas station hold-up or a little league game, much less the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or a catastrophic tsunami in Southeast Asia. Moreover, the discrete packaging of individual segments rendered them entirely decontextualized from one and other, leading viewers to adopt a kind of schizophrenic’s apathy toward the barrage of disconnected information and to draw false equivalencies regarding the import of one “piece” of news to the next. 

“There is no murder so brutal,” observed Postman, “no earthquake so devastating, no political blunder so costly – for that matter, no ball score so tantalizing or weather report so threatening – that it cannot be erased from our minds by a newscaster saying, ‘Now...this.’”

All this is not to say these mediums – from television to Twitter – cannot be entertaining, only that we commit an error when we suppose ourselves informed for having subjected ourselves to the nightly news or half an hour of mindless “newsfeeding.”

This becomes a particular problem when considering, as Postman does later in the book, that “television is our culture’s principal mode of knowing about itself.”

Fast forward the tape (remember those?) to our present day and one wonders what may be said about a culture that’s primary mode of self discovery involves narcissistic palm gazing through an infinite scroll of calorie-free clickbait, where serious stories cascade over the falls alongside celebrity gossip, cat videos and soft-focus photos of your friend’s avocado toast #HealthyEating. 

“It has been demonstrated many times that a culture can survive misinformation and false opinion,” wrote Postman. “It has not yet been demonstrated whether a culture can survive if it takes the measure of the world in twenty-two minutes. Or if the value of its news is determined by the number of laughs it provides.”

In contemplating the mediums through which we view our world, Postman poses a series of interesting framing questions. For instance, he invites us to consider what problem this technology is solving by drowning us in wave after wave of non-cohesive, emotionally detaching, context-free information? Do we have less crime now that we have collectively swan dived into the interface of our smartphones? Do we have less wealth inequality? Is there less environmental damage being done, less bombs dropped, less homeless encampments in San Francisco, the Big Tech capital of the world? Moreover, who benefits from the inescapable ubiquity of this technology? Is it us, as individuals, as conscientious family members, as participants in our local communities, our society, our species? 

If the goal of the individual is to “know thyself,” to better equip himself to handle his natural environment, his reality, then it is a dubious proposition at best that the preferred path to enlightenment is strewn with “like” buttons, shares and followers. Rather, one would expect deep reading on a select few and useful subjects, the kind that will aid him in the marketplace, in his family, his immediate community. But the “goal” of social media algorithms has almost nothing in common with that of the “target user.” In point of fact, it may well be diametrically opposed to our own objectives. 

Consider that the lifeblood of social media platforms is user engagement (or better yet, enragement). Indeed, just as “entertainment is the supra-ideology of all discourse on television,” according to Postman’s diagnosis, enragement has become the supra-ideology of all discourse on Twitter. 

That’s because platforms like Twitter depend on the interconnectivity of the network, the constant flow of information between participants. Far better, from the point of view of a social media algorithm, for users to flit rapidly from one baited headline to the next, firing off angry (often anonymous) comments and pithy retorts along the way, than to spend an hour, or even a minute, delving into one or another story. When the currency is page impressions, deep reading becomes a deep cost. All the while, our platforms are learning our behavior, both on an individual level and in terms of harvesting our personal information and responding to us collectively, as so-called “metadata.” It is not we who are learning from the machines, in other words, as much as the machines are learning from us. And they are building a world which rewards division, thrives on polarization, which feeds on a mis-, dis- or un-informed population slinging insults at one and other from one impermeable echo chamber to another. As long as we are glued to our phones and clicking “purchase,” the algorithms are content. 

In future times, when intrasolar archeologists blast back from Musk’s Mars to uncover the cultural remnants of Old Earth, what Maxims will they find inscribed in the pronaos of the Temple of Twitter? A guess...

Know everyone else
Everything in excess
Insanity is the only certainty

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And now for a even more Fatal Conceits…

This week we catch up with the investment director for Fortune and Freedom, a UK-based financial research service.

Rob is a former investment banker and also a long-term expatriate, having relocated with his family to Argentina over a decade ago. With “official” inflation figures running at over 50% here, Rob offers his perspective on the “ghost of America’s inflationary future.”

Rob Marstrand on Inflation and Capital Controls

And that’s all from us for another Sunday Sesh. We’re off to local favorite parrilla, Sucre, for a late brunch and a few mojitos. Today’s missive was a bit longer than usual but don’t let that stop you from sharing it with anyone you know who boasts an attention span above the 140 character baseline.

Don’t forget to tune in again tomorrow, when Bill returns with his regular missives. Until next week…

Cheers,

Joel Bowman

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