Lost Social Connections

Fair is fair. The authors have a point. In an Atlantic essay last year Peter Pomerantsev and Anne Applebaum bemoaned the fact that Americans no longer seem to want to associate with each other. They no longer want to work together. They no longer trust each other. They no longer much care about what happens to each other. 

They no longer want to practice the habits that make democracy work. 

It is a fair point. But then, the authors go off the rails. They blame it on Donald Trump and on the tech titans who control the internet. For all their caviling about how Trump supporters imbibed large quantities of disinformation, to the point where they refused to accept the result of the 2020 election, they offer not a word about the Democratic lawmakers and thought leaders who ranted about the illegitimacy of the 2016 election. And who did everything in their power to destroy Trump, to destroy anyone who was associated with Trump, to make it impossible for Trump to govern.

The authors live within their own thought bubble, so they do not see both sides of the issue. That, after all, is the problem. 

While we are perfectly happy to note the malignant influence of the tech titans who exercise monopoly control over the marketplace of ideas, who shut down Trump supporters and who even censored The New York Post during the last election campaign, we must add that the authors have mistaken a symptom for a cause.

We cannot blame the internet for America’s current disaggregation. It's too easy. And it leads the authors to propose a more democratic internet-- thereby missing the point.

Anyway, the authors begin strongly. They begin with Tocqueville’s analysis of why democracy works in America. You will note that it has nothing to do with winning elections or imposing your will on the nation. It is not even about ideals:

Tocqueville reckoned that the true success of democracy in America rested not on the grand ideals expressed on public monuments or even in the language of the Constitution, but in these habits and practices. In France, philosophes in grand salons discussed abstract principles of democracy, yet ordinary Frenchmen had no special links to one another. By contrast, Americans worked together: “As soon as several of the inhabitants of the United States have conceived a sentiment or an idea that they want to produce in the world, they seek each other out; and when they have found each other, they unite.”

So, we have lost the habit of voluntary association, of living together in community. This was obviously aggravated by the lockdowns and social distancing imposed on the country during the Covid pandemic.

The authors explain:

Most Americans no longer have much experience of “township” democracy. Some no longer have much experience of associations, in the Tocquevillian sense, either. Twenty-five years ago, the political scientist Robert Putnam was already describing the decline of what he called “social capital” in the U.S.: the disappearance of clubs and committees, community and solidarity. As internet platforms allow Americans to experience the world through a lonely, personalized lens, this problem has morphed into something altogether different.

Now, Americans socialize online. Unfortunately, such socializing is more simulation than reality. No one really connects online. People join mobs anonymously and, from behind their masks, allow their worst tendencies to prevail:

Many modern Americans now seek camaraderie online, in a world defined not by friendship but by anomie and alienation. Instead of participating in civic organizations that give them a sense of community as well as practical experience in tolerance and consensus-building, Americans join internet mobs, in which they are submerged in the logic of the crowd, clicking Like or Share and then moving on. Instead of entering a real-life public square, they drift anonymously into digital spaces where they rarely meet opponents; when they do, it is only to vilify them.

Person to person conversation has gone out of style. People do not do it, and people no longer really know how to do it:

Conversation in this new American public sphere is governed not by established customs and traditions in service of democracy but by rules set by a few for-profit companies in service of their needs and revenues. Instead of the procedural regulations that guide a real-life town meeting, conversation is ruled by algorithms that are designed to capture attention, harvest data, and sell advertising. The voices of the angriest, most emotional, most divisive—and often the most duplicitous—participants are amplified. Reasonable, rational, and nuanced voices are much harder to hear; radicalization spreads quickly. Americans feel powerless because they are.

They continue:

We can’t compromise. We can’t make collective decisions—we can’t even agree on what we’re deciding. No wonder millions of Americans refuse to accept the results of the most recent presidential election, despite the verdicts of state electoral committees, elected Republican officials, courts, and Congress. 

As noted above, the authors fail miserably by not remarking that the tech titans who run the social media platforms invariably slant them toward the Democratic position. What was new in 2020 was the extent of the brazen effort of the directors of social media platforms to slant the presentation of information:

We don’t have an internet based on our democratic values of openness, accountability, and respect for human rights. An online system controlled by a tiny number of secretive companies in Silicon Valley is not democratic but rather oligopolistic, even oligarchic.

We are always happy to condemn the titans of Silicon Valley:

In this sense, the internet has taken us back to the 1890s: Once again, we have a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful people whose obligations are to themselves, and perhaps to their shareholders, but not to the greater good. But Americans didn’t accept this reality in the 1890s, and we don’t need to accept it now. We are a democracy; we can change the rules again. This is not just a matter of taking down content or even of removing a president’s Twitter account—decisions that should be determined by a public process, not a lone company’s discretion. We must alter the design and structure of online spaces so that citizens, businesses, and political actors have better incentives, more choices, and more rights.

One appreciates the virtue involved in their call for a more democratic internet. And yet, when it comes to the larger question, of why we have gotten to this point, they fail.

Why does it happen that people no longer know how to socialize and to connect? We we want a hint we should examine Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam’s study of diverse neighborhoods, called E Pluribus Unum.

The cause for America’s disaggregation, according to Putnam, lies in our diversity. When you engineer communities and schools and businesses to look more diverse and inclusive, people react by avoiding social contact, by doing what Putnam calls-- hunkering down. In truth, the more we launch cultural revolutions against bigotry, the more likely are people to avoid each other. Once you make certain groups radioactive, people will avoid them. 

Now, the next step is obvious. The people who are hunkering down go online and join mobs in order to express their rage at no longer being allowed to socialize. In short, diversity and inclusion forces censorship and repression. From there flows a multitude of ills.