I have anon accounts at Twitter, Bluesky, Truth Social, reddit and I can't say that there is any serious discussion on any of the main channels or topics on any of the sites.
I look at the replies that Mark Cuban gets on Bluesky for trying to hold real conversations and its basically everyone just screaming into his face telling him he is the worst person ever for being a billionaire (regardless of topic posted)
Twitter is basically Elon's playground now for his "free speech" which restricts views that might be unfavorable to his brand, companies and politics.
Truth social is basically a cult member zone for everything MAGA related. Every reply and post that I have seen on the platform is basically propaganda for the administration.
Reddits main sub-reddits idea of "discussions" is to post favorable links for progressive websites (that nobody clicks on) and every comment is basically to call everyone who they disagree with a nazi or a facist.
For all the talk that people say they use social media for (expand their knowledge, connect with other people etc) it seems to just radicalize people based on whatever platform you use.
And the amount of bots and foreign agents trying to stir things up just makes most places awful to be in.
To be honest, the less time spent on social media, the better I feel. And I question every day why don't I just delete all social media and read news/blogs instead.
Youtube would probably the hardest to quit though.
I used to think of YouTube comments as the worst sort of hell but the comments on non-political content are actually weirdly charming and sweet. They're all mostly just encouragement to the content creator, or related anecdotes. "Really great video, friend! You know, my grand pappy used to have a yellow '67 GTO. I have a suspicion that's where my Pa was..."
YouTube comments used to be nasty, but they use AI to promote nice positive ones now.
It works a little too well. If you go into the comments on literally any song they're all like "this was my grandma's favorite music when she was dying of five different kinds of cancer and our dog had to be put down" and it just bums you out.
I think YouTube changed the comment algorithm to push positive comments to the top. It might not be strong enough for particularly controversial videos that touch a hot button issue, but most comments seem very supportive of the video creator
I think YT could kill the comments and survive. Maybe they lose some engagement and ad revenue.
The other sites? They’re all screwed if they had any kind of legislation policing commentary. Tbh…I’m not opposed, hypothetically. Social media is pretty cancerous. Longer form discussion is better, and even best is in-person :)
I love Youtube... I especially love the Youtube channels which provide first hand information...like travelers to far off places. As an example, there is a German guy biking (cycling) through Afghanistan right now..... provides great first person context. Of course, if I want to learn something, youtube is my first stop. Shamefully, if there is someone who has written a good book, I will tend to find a lecture/interview they have given on the book as a fast way to absorb their point-of-view. I tend to buy the book anyway... a bit of guilt and sometimes I even read it if I have time.
Yup... you got it... I find that all of these platforms are increasingly irrelevant. In terms of "progressives," whatever that means these days, a focus on real meat-and-potatoes issues would be wise. These issues remain remarkably consistent .. 1) health-care 2) education 3) national security 4) immigration 5) fiscal policy ...
They're not capable of this because one thing that defines progressives is they're "humanities" types (ie not nerds), which means they don't know or believe in any policies.
They're allowed to believe like two things, a) every single regulation is good and shouldn't be changed, b) every problem could be solved by throwing more money at it but the money was stolen by billionaires.
The problem with focusing on an issue is that a politician then is expected to deliver on it when elected. It's easy to purge a bunch of wokies from the government. It's hard to do anything to improve the issues you have listed.
Conservatives--instead of just talking trash at Liberals; i.e., registered Democrats--has gone incredibly further, firing tens of thousands of Democrat civil servants, firing FBI agents who fail loyalty tests, policing printed speech, deporting law-abiding legal residents, violating Posse Comitatus, declaring multiple "emergencies" to bypass Congressional authority, etc., etc.
And we are supposed to be lauding MAGA for "...talking about..." their perceived political/cultural enemies?
Seems to me that the Right looked at Cancel Culture and said, "Not only are we gonna take your microphone; but we're using the power of the government to cancel you even more."
It seems baked into the model. What kind of conversation is possible when limited to a few hundred characters?
On reddit if you go to the more niche subs at least it's possible to have real conversations and get value out of them, but the popular subs are a mess.
The issue I saw with reddit was that its way of segregating people by 1 affinity and then forbidding any other topic of discussion there, went against our natural way of coalescing a small community and then being able to discuss other topics within it. (Agreed that this "natural" mode would devolve unless carefully tended though.)
The gaming subreddits I use almost daily are 96% free of any political content. Or so it seems to me. But maybe that's my Liberal cognitive bias in action.
I have found Reddit useful for international travel planning. For example, thread topics like "visiting Buenos Aires" or "what places to visit and what places to avoid in Bogota Colombia." Sports team (e.g., your favorite NHL team) threads are usually safe without straying into Hitler-Nazi-Fascist derp. But, not always.
I think it's particularly baked into the quote-tweet. Being able to dunk on someone with a "hey look what this asshole said" and direct tons of fire their way just seems to be intoxicating. Bluesky really started to nosedive, IMO, when they introduced that and it became part of the culture.
YouTube PRO Tip: Disable your watch history, only subscribe to quality creators.
The horrible features disappear: No more recommended rabbit holes, no more shorts (other than from subscribed accounts). Analog YouTube is great. Quit the rest immediately, never post.
The shorts are very hit or miss. I think they are trying to be like TikTok but if you want that kind of Americas funniest home video content just go to TikTok itself 😎
Social media is a short form (and getting shorter) popularity contest, which is hardly conducive to proper argument, at least in the Greek sense. It's only a public forum if you attract enough public to your tweets or posts, and you can't do that by offering thoughtfull, sustained analyses or critique on any platform save possibly this one. Everything else is a short attention span theatre of memes gifs, snark, bots, bootlickers and bad actors, with a peanut gallery of angry trolls and purist on the hunt for heretics. There's no reasoning.
(wrote this seed of an idea and figured I’d share in case someone smarter wants to run with)
No single platform can accommodate people with vastly different viewpoints screaming at each other. There’s a dynamic of ascending nastiness, echoing, and isolation that pulls people into different closed communities, ending logically in special interest WhatsApp or Signal groups. After witnessing a few different platforms (not as many as this fellow above), I’ve come to the conclusion that this is fundamental to a “town square,” a metaphor that Elon used repeatedly. What happens in town squares in times of unrest? Guillotines, lynchings, massacres. He never talks about that.
The interesting part is the note at the end about the exception of YouTube. You wouldn’t as naturally group YouTube into this discussion, but it is a social platform: a place where people put content and thoughts and strangers can openly respond. Substack, too, is a place like this—although in Notes (their Twitter-like networking tool) I can sniff some subtle nastiness, snarkiness, and dismissiveness.
But on both platforms, the fact that people largely discover each other through long-form content that’s recommended to them by direct connections and algorithms seems like a defusing force.
I’ve thought about this listening to people like Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman debate whether they should read comments on their content. Joe—stubborn, confident, and self-driven—refuses to read comments, and as a result has descended into a pit of anti-woke BS. Lex—self-flagellating, diligent, and headstrong—makes a point of reading even the most vitriolic comments and trying to find the good in them, and as a result his podcast has continued to improve in quality. Not everyone can be like Lex here; but I’ve thought about LLMs being a great tool to filter, summarize, and “translate” hateful messages into more helpful tips to see what people are really thinking about you, so you can improve yourself and your creations without destroying your mental health.
I’ve used AI repeatedly—particularly Claude—to learn about the various viewpoints of thorny issues like the Israel/Palestine conflict, affirmative action/racial reparations, colonialism—and it’s been incredibly helpful to allow me to enter into thought spaces that I would otherwise avoid for purposes of self-preservation and sanity.
Is it possible to build something that uses this synthetic view as a primary tool of understanding, instead of a feed of shouting voices? Just a seed of an idea—synthesizing the output of different social media sites as they now exist and using that as a wedge to start a new platform where people can write thoughts and ideas that aren’t meant to be viewed directly. It wouldn’t have the same virality incentive, but that could be a good thing: filter for reasonable people who just want to understand and take notes on the world.
Some questions:
- Can people be actively motivated to contribute to an AI system in the way that they contribute to, for instance, Wikipedia? If so, how?
- Can a platform with AI-written content as a primary view be compelling?
- How can you best position AI synthesis and person-to-person discussion in a symbiotic relationship?
- Does AI present an opportunity to flip the dynamic of social media on its head—as a defusing force rather than a radicalizing force?
For what it’s worth, one can have perfectly sane conversations on Twitter. Just avoid the for you feed, choose who to follow carefully, and mute or block any assholes you come across.
I think Twitter is still OK you can ignore Elons nonsense or better yet laugh at it 😁 A lot of people are still posting there but I think it no longer has this cutting edge social media power to it especially for the left. This is my own very questionable view but I started on Twitter pretty early when Musk just posted mostly clever geeky stuff. And I see a lot of confirmation from other very online writers.
And don’t forget that Elon is a pretty good predictor or the next Republican outrage cycle, if you’re into that 😳
Personally glad I was behind the times - not deliberately but from being 'app primitive' and never joined Twitter
And for my only soc. media place, Facebook, experience got much better when I stopped usage other than purely keeping up-to-date with family, family photo sharing etc. (and silencing all political posts - family or otherwise, agreed with or otherwise). Much healthier.
Excellent piece, Noah. I think about this a lot. I don't participate in SM but I experienced similar firsthand as a professor. After teaching for a decade the same topics in the same way, I had a small group of students who registered formal complaints about me because "their voices weren't being heard" in my class discussions (this was around 2018). Fortunately, my level headed superiors didn't make anything of it but it was a wake-up call that I now had to walk on eggshells in my lectures. I teach decidedly non-political topics and rarely to never stray into them. This re-flared around the Hamas attack a few years back and that was complex where students wanted to stand up in front of my class to make statements (I teach in a business school). It was very difficult to navigate.
Like you, I despise that period mostly for its shutdown of any discourse around disagreements. The hard left were really the pioneers here as you note. I wish they had a tiny bit of self reflection now that we see how they enabled the right to do the same.
1. The Cancel Culture Era, Peak Woke Era, or whatever we want to call it, was the most unpleasant political era of my lifetime, and I say that as a lifelong Democrat voter. Yes, Bush did awful stuff and Trump is doing awful stuff right now, but I can't tell you how alienating it felt for the left-- my home -- to descend into its own form of Moral Majority-style bullying. It made me question everything about myself, whether I'm on "the wrong side of history," just becoming another dumb conservative as I age, etc.
You and other Substackers such as Jesse Singal, Freddie DeBoer, Jeff Maurer, Ross Barkan, Kat Rosenfield, and many more have helped a great deal with getting me through this. I've sought therapy for it too. I've also had countless private conversations with other disaffected liberals about this stuff. We really really hate it. Just as much as we hate Trump. It hit a nerve nothing else could.
2. By "late 2010s," shouldn't we also include 2020 and perhaps 2021? COVID was a boom time for these folks. Summer 2020 was the absolute peak of the madness, and 2021 saw the same cancellers frothing like mad at how anyone who refuses a COVID vaccine (or who is merely skeptical about vaccine mandates) should be fired and lose everything.
Yes I think 2020-2021 was indeed kind of a frothy crest.
Inside my company we had from some goddamn new hires fresh-out-of-college do a major kind of blow-up writing to Sr Mgmt (i.e. including me) about the horrors that HR notice (for global offices) referenced the genocide celebrating... Columbus Day. And my colleagues caved (my attitude was this is fucking ridiculous but there was this weird shut-down fear of online critics, anon glassdoor mobbing to make future hiring impossible to label us as "toxic workplace" etc. - so after this incident it became standard that all international offices wouldn't refer to US holidays by name at all).
I personally did not take it so hard. I never did Twitter, I work with a bunch of Trumpies so I mostly saw purity spirals on the left from afar, although I lost one friend. But I have another friend who was alienated in her circle and even now sees thought policing on the
left as the greater threat. It did the left serious damage. People in the left simply cannot see how grating constant position taking and virtue signaling are to unpolitical people.
I tend to ascribe to a different H (Horseshoe Theory), but I am just an average normie with similar positions to most Americans. I am a Reagan Republican, and depending on the subject,
I fall somewhere near the center of American attitudes. Occasionally, I may be further to the right on some things, yet rarely more to the left.
What we see with postliberalism from both the left and the right is a lot of performance with little substance. Mamdani and Bannon are the same people. You go further out, and you have Matthew Dowd and Tucker Carlson. Both loons. Whatever they are advocating has nothing to do with who we are as a country.
We practice liberal democratic capitalism here in America. It mostly works; sometimes it sucks.
Social Media is killing our culture.
We have seen every other form of government tried, and it has been found not to work. The old trope that Socialism can work, it’s just never been tried, is utter BS.
Mamdani’s ideas will lead us to France, which is in a dire state, and I believe it is a precursor to the problems we face. America is proof that every few decades or so, we need to relearn something. Trump will learn that tariffs are bad. Mamdani will learn that picking on a class of people to appeal to another class of people will fail. I mean, the Bill de Blasio disaster wasn’t that long ago.
Hang in there, pal, you have more friends than enemies.
Reminder : Mamdani is a candidate running to become the mayor of New York City. In what universe will a person running for a city election in a particularly unique city in America "lead us to France"? People, get a grip. If some regional politician has ideas that won't appeal to the masses living outside that region, they will never gain any national traction. I seem to remember there are some absolutely batshit crazy politicians in Congress on the MAGA side of the aisle. Why can't you feel able to say that their ideas will lead us to Russia or even North Korea?
I do say that often. You just don’t read it or perhaps listen. The problem in France is that they are broke and have huge deficits. As the government tries to rein in spending, the citizens who are used to the largess of government spending protest. The latest was a government shutdown protest.
Our political class of both parties is failing America. Progressives believe in spending other people's money, and there is no limit to how much they want to spend.
The post-liberal loons on the right are no better.
Currently, the GOP believes they have a good number of Hispanic voters and believes it will never lose an election. I believe they are wrong. Picking up grandma who has been here 30 years and deporting her isn’t going to make many friends. Democrats made a huge mistake thinking Hispanics are monolithic.
Noah makes a suggestion for Democrats to look normal, stop with defund the police. Mamdani wants to close jails and end policing as we know it.
You can defend that if you want, but it is insane. Just as insane as some postliberal MAGA types are insane.
I do agree with your outlook. I am not advocating for whatever Mamdani is saying in order to win the NYC mayorship. In fact, I could care less. That's my point - it's a REGIONAL issue, with no more relevance to those of us who have never been near New York City than the particular issues in an Iowan farm district would require a candidate there to advocate.
I’m my particular case I was pointing out that the exteems of each side are coming closer to together. Hence the Horseshoe theroy. Where the extreme are going so far they beging to look alike.
S&P 500 lowered French debt rating with this to say:
"We project France's general government interest payments will increase to 5.0% of general government revenue in 2027 from 3.3% in 2023."
France also spends more on the police than the US as a percent of GDP. US spends more on prisons instead. While spending similarly 1.2% of GDP combined, France spends on police to prison 6 to 1, while US spends 1.5 to 1, with the highest state Illinois spending 2.8 to 1.
The point I was making was that a government is trying to be financially responsible, and the public is not accepting it and shutting down the government. If and when we have a responsible government that does the same, I expect our divisions to end up in the streets. We no longer have a responsible body politic. IMHO
no longer? you mean compared to a few decades ago when the current pensioners voted to lower the age of retirement without funding the pension system ... or when was this golden era of governance excellence? :)
France is not that terrible although it's in crisis.
If Mamdani led the US to France, NY would have to be Paris ... not happening - but rather greater fear is the combination emerging in the US feels much more like a kind of Argentina-esque evolution. US becoming France not my taste but not complete fiasco.
Becoming Argentina, that's the disaster. And that's rather more the risk emering, Peronist-esque orientations on both right and left...
Deficits have led to tax increases and reductions in services.
As a result of those reductions in services, including getting rid of two national holidays, it's a reality that at some point you run out of Other People's Money. France has a wealth tax of up to 1.5%. Taxes on the wealthy are at 45%. Taxing the rich even more will have diminishing returns, and cheating, plus it likely won’t fill the hole.
Changing the retirement age to 64 from 62 caused riots. The government is trying to cut the deficit, should I say forced to?
Their economy does grow, but employment is tough to come by. The people want their generous benefits and expect someone else to pay.
America is running an unsustainable $2 trillion plus, to what Trump added. Meaning our debt will be over $50 trillion in 10 years. Debt payments are running higher, and the bond ghouls will make the US pay more for our profligate spending.
SS and Medicare will be insolvent soon. Even suggesting to increase retirement age by one more year gets people to scream: "women and children will die”. Defcon 1
If we do not fix SS there will be a “mandatory” reduction of 23% in benefits.
I am personally very familiar with France. Directly, personally and in biz, not just newspapers.
France is not a disaster, not fully to my taste, but not a disaster.
Being Argentina is. Not merely the deficits, but degrading institutional execution, deliberate moves to defaults, etc. (France whatever else one can write does have very good execution and gov institutions [maybe too much so but that's a choice])
US politically is feeling more in danger of Argentine developments like Peronism.
If the US were just on a French trajectory I would not be so worried. that it feels like evolution towards Argentina, that worries.
(really for a certain segment of French everything triggers what in the US we call a riot, it's not really the same overall meaning).
I was in the debt comparison. Peronism was bad, Trump likes, I think he is open to doing favors for the last person who buys his stupid meme coins.
But Trump isn’t Peron, yet. France nationalized industries, Trump is owning stock, again very different from either. France has a moribund economy. Now with big debt. So that is what I see.
Do I think Trump is building a Sovereign Wealth Fund, but he is doing it by threatening companies to give him stock. I can see raising the cost to take America's minerals, including oil. Threatening Universities to get some money for the Treasury is nuts. This is way different than the selective help of the government. It is not what Peron did. While Trump’s actions may have Peronist elements and the same with France, what Trump is doing is building a wealth fund as a personal slush fund. How will they invest the money? Who does it, can it benefit the President and his relatives if he chooses?
Yes - France nationalises industries. And has state ownership and has also an oddly robust capitalism (could be more robust w/o their dumb socialist angles but still generally robust).
The French economy is hardly "moribund" although if they liberalised more they'd do better - it's performing below it's ability but far from moribund (UK deserves that more thanks to idiocy of Brexit)
What it generally doeesn't have is highly personalised state action against actors, and generally does not do is cronyism etc
Trump & Co doesn't look like modern (Western) European - French or similar - statist but institutionalist economic or political action
What it does look like is various flavors of right-left populist Banana-Republicism like Peronism and similar flavors in 40-60s LatAm.
US is not en route to being France (if it were it would be not my cup of tea but as I have direct lived France-experience in biz and personal, it's just silly as a OMG statement and worse, it's wrong diagnostic.)
LatAm style highly personalised institution-degrading veering between right-and-left destructive populist policies in a kind of 21st century version of Peronism, that's a real path threat.
ETA it may be a quibble over analogy but I think it's rather importantly different.
The route of quasi-Peronism, is much more damaging economically, institutionally.
It’s ok we disagree but I still believe America will see protests and riots when Congress is force to make cuts and raise taxes. Perhaps I am wrong. The populists or political tribes will eviscerate whomever is in power at the time and trying to do the right thing. Just like France.
Bannon = Mamdani? Matthew Dowd and Tucker Carlson equally loony?
Bannon nihilistically favors taking a sledgehammer to most of government, Mamdani will pilot a few city-run grocery stores that will probably fail without doing much harm.
It used to be people like Bari Weiss decried cancel culture from a sort of free speech, "I don't agree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."
Unfortunately, most of those people have just turned into "Our turn now!" including Bari Weiss.
Yes. I looked today to see if The Free Press had anything about the USG threatening anyone who said anything bad about Charlie Kirk, but as usual when the Trump administration threatens people for speech, the FP is dead silent.
But Weiss is hardly an exemplary defender of free speech -- she calls anything even slightly critical of Israel anti-semitic.
What’s so frustrating about this is that it was so predictable. I warned my Twitter-brained lefty friends that, sooner or later, the right would co-opt this language and tactics and they wouldn’t like the result.
The reaction to Charlie Kirk has been absolutely unhinged. I have nothing against him, but flags at half staff for a random guy who went around arguing with college students for a living?
Trump is the most predictable creature on the planet. Of course he's going to glorify anybody who ever agreed with him or who has an audience of people who will vote for him.
Trump is using this to create and feed a narrative about left wing political violence and the need to quash any rhetoric that could be interpreted as inciting, meaning any rhetoric critical of him or his administration. He wants to use it to justify overt restrictions on political speech. It might not work, but he's trying, and if he can paint Kirk as a national treasure and symbol he can improve the odds of success.
Cancel culture is not a "right" or "left" thing. It is a mob thing. But certainly the folks calling for "cancellations and firings" of people expressing glee about Kirk's assignation were emboldened by having watched a dozen years of progressives calling for "cancellations and firings" for dumb-ass reasons like recognizing biological realty.
Matthew, would it be possible for you to flesh out this argument more? Is the right cancelling people who disagree with Kirk? (As opposed to saying bad, distasteful or hateful things about him).
Maybe I am just naive, but it seems it would have been acceptable to cancel someone like Demore if he had said he hoped women coders died. He was cancelled for saying men and women differ statistically in interests. Are you saying the right is canceling people who disagree with Kirk’s arguments?
I am saying that the Right is cancelling people who say that Charlie Kirk was a divisive figure or a bad person or that he pissed other people off or bringing up Kirk's comments a few months ago about gun deaths being an unfortunate but acceptable side effect of living with the 2nd Amendment. Or cancelling people who don't show "adequate sadness" over his death.
Matthew Dowd was fired from MSNBC for saying, "He’s been one of the most divisive, especially divisive, younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.”
“And I think that’s the environment we’re in. You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place. And that’s the unfortunate environment we are in.”
A Middle Tennessee State University Dean was fired for saying "Looks like Ol'Charlie spoke his fate into existence. Hate begets hate. Zero Sympathy."
A screencap was retweeted by sitting US Senator Marsha Blackburn and they were fired.
Seems to me people are distinguishing between cancelling for making light of or justifying a murder (bad taste and thus socially unacceptable) and cancelling for disagreeing with one’s political position. It is getting blurry though.
It's that the same people clutching pearls over Charlie Kirk were also gleeful about Paul Pelosi getting attacked with a hammer or when all those Democratic legislators in Wisconsin were shot. (Charlie Kirk himself among them).
I think they're mostly cancelling anyone who said anything that could be construed as celebratory of Kirk's death.
Somewhat related, my right wing family members are raging at Tim Walz for joking after Trump dropped out of sight that he kept checking to see if there would be something in the news, implying but not saying that he was hoping for a report that Trump had died. Actually, I don't think the family members who are raging have any idea what Walz said, they're raging about what they were told he said, which seems to be quite different from what he actually said.
"I don't think the family members who are raging have any idea what Walz said, they're raging about what they were told he said, which seems to be quite different from what he actually said."
That could be applied to Kirk and even Trump sometimes. It is just an extension of gossip and rumors running out of control to generate outrage.
Seriously... Florida is basically asking teachers there not to post or say critical things on their personal social media about Kirk or they can get reprimanded. Cancel culture has always existed, but progressive or liberal application of it has and will always be more limited in power over the long term than conservative use of it imo. I think we'll see something like Trump's first time, where by the end people are just exhausted. Fortunately he's speed running this term so maybe it'll happen sooner than later and we'll all show each other more grace afterwards and own that our online personas are not the best version of ourselves sometimes...
I have to admit I've been bewildered by the characterization of the bluesky by this article and Nate's article. I am on bluesky as a centrist, and I have found it to be a much more polite place than Twitter. If anything, it's too boring.
But I don't follow many political people on Bluesky. I mostly use it for data science and professional stuff.
Most of my professional peers are progressive, so when they moved to Bluesky. I followed. But I still just don't see any of the same call out culture found on Twitter.
Try this just for fun: create an anonymous account on BS. Find a semi-controversial post. In the comments post a slightly more moderate position than the OP has taken. See what fun ensues.
you should teach an "Introduction to Trolling" class. this would make a great homework assignment. Then, the class can share their results with each other. Maybe include an "Edgelord Certification" for the students who master it.
Nah. The point Noah is making, and that commenter Bill is having fun with, is that even a slightly more moderate point of view gets you piled on for being Nazi-Hitler-Bigot-Fascist who should have already killed himself. IOW, you can get rage (or at least condescending sneering) responses to milk toast statements. No need to go full-extreme. Example I am making up in my head:
Poster: "Transwomen are women!"
Troll: "I agree, but I do have some reservations about placing transwomen who are still anatomically male in women's prisons."
Poster + another 50 people: "Please kill yourself you bigoted monster"
Hah! I think my ability to troll would pale next to some of the trolls I've read - of course maybe that wouldn't disqualify me from teaching it. Sounds almost like a business plan. I fear we've been beaten to the market, though.
Don't sell yourself short, Bill. You can be a perfectly good troll with a little practice. Sure, some people are naturals, and others simply don't get it. But I think most of us can learn to play the game.
I’m a fan of you, and Matthew Yglesias, and Jamelle Bouie, AND Will Stancil.
I really don’t think you four disagree on much on principle at all, and you’re all excellent analysts in your respective fields.
To be frank, you guys should not be at each others’ throats like this, especially now. I do not see it helping anyone.
I get that Bouie and Stancil don’t like you, and the feeling’s mutual. Oh well. That’s life. You’re in the same tent, like it or not.
Confession: I will admit, I tend to side with Stancil on the general political advice Democrats should follow in the months ahead, 80% of the time at least. I think Schumer et al. should drop whatever they’re doing and try his approach for a spin.
Yglesias gives great policy advice, albeit subpar political advice. It’s my belief the Democrats generally try to do things his way, and he imagines otherwise. He has a lane he’s good at, and a lane he unwisely tries to merge into.
You, by and large, have the clearest view of the national economy and geopolitics. You’ve been a consistent cheerleader for Biden’s policies (at least, I, a Biden fan, perceive that), and rightly so. Would that more people followed your advice.
Bouie gives neither policy nor political advice that often, but he grasps the moment. Also he has excellent culinary and video game taste.
All four of you, like each other or not, have to figure out how to work together to stop the tide of tyranny. All this “Bluesky” invoking and infighting is going to be thought of as so much factional bullshit in months, let alone years. Most likely.
I would respectfully suggest that there is some uncharacteristic murkiness of thinking here, Noah.
What is it that these leftists should do? What do you (or I) want them to do?
Almost without exception, they are not suited for politics of persuasion. You take the online bullying a bit out of context. It's not JUST cancel culture; the same voices and their allies vehemently deny the need to alter message OR tone OR wording to try to win over voters who are not already persuaded. They believe in turnout, they believe in mobilization, they believe in maximizing attention of the evil of adversaries.
But persuasion is not their thing, for the simple reason that in order to persuade, the first thing you need to do is to understand where other people are really coming from (as opposed to your wartime caricature of them), and that is most decidedly not on their playlist.
This is not an accident, nor is it stupidity. The Left wants things that the public, outside of a few cosmopolitan pockets, would vote down decisively. Thus, waiting for these people to begin, as a group to speak in a manner designed to increase support for their causes by a few percentage points? We need to realize that this is just not going to happen.
Not so unlike the far Right, their best hope is to seize power due to chaos. Maybe if a Trump administration totally crashed and burned in such a painful way that the entire country was up in arms, while simultaneously the Left had grabbed control of the Democratic Party and nominated a president? A not-super-likely daily double, but way, way more likely than the public ever democratically choosing far Left policies.
When you see the Left attacking Abundance Democrats and other moderates so vehemently, people who could actually win majorities and then hope to make government work well enough to maintain majorities, you can see why this is not at all in the interests of the Left.
From this perspective, I do not see why we should mind if they take a large portion of their discussion off to a fairly private room and hold it there. Bluesky is not so much siphoning off useful liberal energy as it is diverting people who might (or might not) vote with us in general elections but are devoted to all manner of mischief the rest of the time. I'm not at all for canceling anyone, not even fascists, but if mischief makers choose to go into a room and talk to themselves, why should we complain?
While I kinda get why people were pissed off at Weiss's post (as an Asian American born here, the "where are you REALLY from" questions get old), the dogpiling (including on Weiss) is so utterly ridiculous that it's one the main reasons I left Twitter.
Unfortunately for a while that cancel culture nonsense infiltrated the work place too, and I recall younger employees getting flustered when people did not immediately do what they asked (older folks on social media were probably terrified of younger, more popular accounts and bent over backwards to follow the mob). People really did lose the art of persuasion, as being asked to put in the work of persuasion itself because a sign of oppression.
Advocacy groups followed similar lines of reasoning offline in local council meetings, government stakeholder engagement meetings, etc., such that "I as a (insert demographic group here) demand X" was supposed to be sufficient to change public policy. (Inevitably, someone from the same group would have an opposing opinion, but the advocacy group would either pretend they didn't speak or accuse them of being a shill for some dark, shadowy group.) I still see this kind of behavior from time to time, but it isn't as bad as it was under Trump 1 or early Biden admins.
“ Unfortunately for a while that cancel culture nonsense infiltrated the work place too, and I recall younger employees getting flustered when people did not immediately do what they asked.”
This is interesting. Can you give any examples? Like regular ones, not necessarily dramatic ones. What would a common instance of this look like?
I ask because I only got a glimmer of it in my office. The thing is that because of the nature of my job - in-house counsel for a giant corporation, where everyone in my department is a lawyer with 15 years experience in private practice - my exposure to the younger cohort is very low. That’s not to say that woke wasn’t a huge thing - it was, and it derailed my career - but it didn’t really come from young people. I feel like whatever “it” was in the last ten or fifteen years probably presented much different in the youth than the middle-aged.
I can think of one instance that really stayed with me: after Covid, when the company told everyone to head back to the office, the younger cohort JUST DIDN’T DO IT. They yelled and refused and demanded and threatened. I’m not being critical exactly - it was incredibly impressive, and they won. It’s years later and we’re still almost entirely remote. And we’re a gigantic multinational company.
I’m 55 and have worked in a lot of different places and I’ve never once even heard of employees pushing back like this. I still haven’t really figured out what I think about it.
My examples from the 2019-2021 period (in context of a company with multinational offices, US, non-US, etc) - in investment
1. Writing complaints to management if HR referenced US holidays like Columbus day by name (versus whatever the Lefty replacement name desired) other examples similar
2. Lots of strange expectations on issuing demands in a kind of college activist manner as far as I could tell, and expecting management like College admin to cave in and celebrate their insubordination, much around social engagement (and also oddball demands for taking positions on political things). Not per se utterly outré stuff but... in my decades of experience it was sustained weirdness in this period.
Most of it had to do with things like work-from-home, work assignments, or a particular policy decision a given worker didn't like. A lot of folks wanted to jump right into policy-setting rather than doing support work like research, writing memos, etc. I can't quite go into details given the nature of the discussions. They wanted to be invited to all the meetings where they felt they should tell others what they needed to do (based on little evidence or experience). While young people being ambitious is nothing new (and not a negative thing necessarily), there wasn't even an attempt at trying to make the case for their desired outcome. They just said they wanted X and therefore didn't need to provide any reasoning. Sometimes they'd try to get a petition going or something, which again was light on argumentation and heavy on language about rights.
I too saw this re "Unfortunately for a while that cancel culture nonsense infiltrated the work place too, and I recall younger employees getting flustered when people did not immediately do what they asked "
It was "toxic work culture" if the latest campus fad orientation wasn't on the agenda (calling Columbus day by its legal name e.g. rather than whatever was the Progressvie fad name [and fuck me I don't even think Columbus day should be a thing but whatever, it's the legal name).
The funniest responses suggested that Bari was technically accurate if she was congratulating Mirai's parents for having sex. But I am an aficionado of the "unhelpful defense" humor genre.
I wonder how much of 2010s social media tone was shaped by exposure to sitcoms. Everyone on Friends was nasty to each other and dismissive.
Edit to add: I think that people imbibed a mean, dismissive and clever way of speaking that’s hard to do in real time. But social media is asynchronous, so you can develop your zinger then deliver it. Meaning, maybe we wanted to talk this way before but weren’t able to until we had global quick-but-still-asynchronous communication.
Prewoke, beginning of tumblr era, the most common presentation of thought was via sarcasm. Everything was 'ironic'. Its an offshoot of sitcoms and later late night television and Whedon-ism. Sarcasm morphed into negativity via the 'But actually tho.' addendum. Sneer culture took over these spaces, which continues to today.
Is there a word for “doing something really interesting and novel artistically which unintentionally created a culture that perverts it into something foul?” I feel bad from Whedon. Buffy and that space cowboy show were awesome. Firefly. But the syntax and rhythms of language he created wrecked everything forever.
There must be a word for that. Probably something in German.
This may be true but it is a lazy post to write and feels like you are writing on the last war. If we take your argument - progressives got hooked on canceling, they all went to bluesky where no one cares what they say - then who is this piece for? Do you think it will persuade said progressives (presumably not if we follow your line- they won't read it and would cancel you anyway)? Is it just to make those who dont cancel feel better for having won? Is it to vent your own spleen at the poor and unreasonable treatment you received?
If progressive cancellers lost, what... exactly...have these champions for free speech won?
A right that feels no shame in calling for civil war against their enemies whom, you note, are powerless anyway? Is the world more free, more prosperous, more just?
Put another way, the problem with the piece is not so much that it is wrong (though I think the claims about bluesky are overwrought and likely self serving - you presumably get payouts from Musks X for driving engagement. No shame in that but let's call a spade a spade) is that it is dull and unimaginative. Surely you have more in the punditry tank Noah than slamming a platform you say doesn't matter?
Social Media has licensed a range of people with various disorders to become keyboard warriors from the safety and anonymity of their ‘bedrooms’. I worked with a guy that was one such ‘warrior’ who dished out all kinds of vitriol on-line. However, when forces to sit opposite me in my office he sat there with slumped shoulders with nothing much to say. He also couldn’t take on-line counter-attacks that brought him to task. My psychologist wife, on observing this guy in action, saw at least two disorders - narcissistic and borderline personality.
Here too things are complicated. But it's easier to show graphs! To your point -- when a certain very popular unpleasant Princeton history professor with a plagiarism problem decamped to Bluesky, it was clear what would happen in my academic circles. The small % of perpetrators cause 90% of the crime phenomenon operates on social media. If "particular" posters "snapped out of it," as you say, and dialed it down, we'd seen an extraordinary change. That's the task.
I have anon accounts at Twitter, Bluesky, Truth Social, reddit and I can't say that there is any serious discussion on any of the main channels or topics on any of the sites.
I look at the replies that Mark Cuban gets on Bluesky for trying to hold real conversations and its basically everyone just screaming into his face telling him he is the worst person ever for being a billionaire (regardless of topic posted)
Twitter is basically Elon's playground now for his "free speech" which restricts views that might be unfavorable to his brand, companies and politics.
Truth social is basically a cult member zone for everything MAGA related. Every reply and post that I have seen on the platform is basically propaganda for the administration.
Reddits main sub-reddits idea of "discussions" is to post favorable links for progressive websites (that nobody clicks on) and every comment is basically to call everyone who they disagree with a nazi or a facist.
For all the talk that people say they use social media for (expand their knowledge, connect with other people etc) it seems to just radicalize people based on whatever platform you use.
And the amount of bots and foreign agents trying to stir things up just makes most places awful to be in.
To be honest, the less time spent on social media, the better I feel. And I question every day why don't I just delete all social media and read news/blogs instead.
Youtube would probably the hardest to quit though.
No need to quit YouTube, just choose better content. I watch a lot of sailing and woodworking channels. It's nice.
I used to think of YouTube comments as the worst sort of hell but the comments on non-political content are actually weirdly charming and sweet. They're all mostly just encouragement to the content creator, or related anecdotes. "Really great video, friend! You know, my grand pappy used to have a yellow '67 GTO. I have a suspicion that's where my Pa was..."
YouTube comments used to be nasty, but they use AI to promote nice positive ones now.
It works a little too well. If you go into the comments on literally any song they're all like "this was my grandma's favorite music when she was dying of five different kinds of cancer and our dog had to be put down" and it just bums you out.
I've noticed that, too. I had not made the leap to AI, but that makes sense.
I think YouTube changed the comment algorithm to push positive comments to the top. It might not be strong enough for particularly controversial videos that touch a hot button issue, but most comments seem very supportive of the video creator
I think YT could kill the comments and survive. Maybe they lose some engagement and ad revenue.
The other sites? They’re all screwed if they had any kind of legislation policing commentary. Tbh…I’m not opposed, hypothetically. Social media is pretty cancerous. Longer form discussion is better, and even best is in-person :)
Yup - following broad science, technical channels zero politics and occasional goofball channel is perfectly scrumptious
I love Youtube... I especially love the Youtube channels which provide first hand information...like travelers to far off places. As an example, there is a German guy biking (cycling) through Afghanistan right now..... provides great first person context. Of course, if I want to learn something, youtube is my first stop. Shamefully, if there is someone who has written a good book, I will tend to find a lecture/interview they have given on the book as a fast way to absorb their point-of-view. I tend to buy the book anyway... a bit of guilt and sometimes I even read it if I have time.
Yup... you got it... I find that all of these platforms are increasingly irrelevant. In terms of "progressives," whatever that means these days, a focus on real meat-and-potatoes issues would be wise. These issues remain remarkably consistent .. 1) health-care 2) education 3) national security 4) immigration 5) fiscal policy ...
They're not capable of this because one thing that defines progressives is they're "humanities" types (ie not nerds), which means they don't know or believe in any policies.
They're allowed to believe like two things, a) every single regulation is good and shouldn't be changed, b) every problem could be solved by throwing more money at it but the money was stolen by billionaires.
The problem with focusing on an issue is that a politician then is expected to deliver on it when elected. It's easy to purge a bunch of wokies from the government. It's hard to do anything to improve the issues you have listed.
agree ... these are super hard problems. However, one of the ways that MAGA has gained traction is by actually talking about them.
Conservatives--instead of just talking trash at Liberals; i.e., registered Democrats--has gone incredibly further, firing tens of thousands of Democrat civil servants, firing FBI agents who fail loyalty tests, policing printed speech, deporting law-abiding legal residents, violating Posse Comitatus, declaring multiple "emergencies" to bypass Congressional authority, etc., etc.
And we are supposed to be lauding MAGA for "...talking about..." their perceived political/cultural enemies?
Seems to me that the Right looked at Cancel Culture and said, "Not only are we gonna take your microphone; but we're using the power of the government to cancel you even more."
It seems baked into the model. What kind of conversation is possible when limited to a few hundred characters?
On reddit if you go to the more niche subs at least it's possible to have real conversations and get value out of them, but the popular subs are a mess.
The issue I saw with reddit was that its way of segregating people by 1 affinity and then forbidding any other topic of discussion there, went against our natural way of coalescing a small community and then being able to discuss other topics within it. (Agreed that this "natural" mode would devolve unless carefully tended though.)
That's the downside, true, but the upside is that subs can moderate how they see fit rather than have one giant cesspool like the X-style platforms.
Perhaps Chris has spent time on the better subreddits. Somewhere.
The gaming subreddits I use almost daily are 96% free of any political content. Or so it seems to me. But maybe that's my Liberal cognitive bias in action.
I have found Reddit useful for international travel planning. For example, thread topics like "visiting Buenos Aires" or "what places to visit and what places to avoid in Bogota Colombia." Sports team (e.g., your favorite NHL team) threads are usually safe without straying into Hitler-Nazi-Fascist derp. But, not always.
I think it's particularly baked into the quote-tweet. Being able to dunk on someone with a "hey look what this asshole said" and direct tons of fire their way just seems to be intoxicating. Bluesky really started to nosedive, IMO, when they introduced that and it became part of the culture.
YouTube PRO Tip: Disable your watch history, only subscribe to quality creators.
The horrible features disappear: No more recommended rabbit holes, no more shorts (other than from subscribed accounts). Analog YouTube is great. Quit the rest immediately, never post.
But I just wanted to watch cooking videos...How did I become so politically radicalized?!? Is it so *wrong* to want Labubu's to rule the world?!
The shorts are very hit or miss. I think they are trying to be like TikTok but if you want that kind of Americas funniest home video content just go to TikTok itself 😎
Post if you have good content like music or tips to make or fix something. My bicycles ❤️YouTube!
Social media is a short form (and getting shorter) popularity contest, which is hardly conducive to proper argument, at least in the Greek sense. It's only a public forum if you attract enough public to your tweets or posts, and you can't do that by offering thoughtfull, sustained analyses or critique on any platform save possibly this one. Everything else is a short attention span theatre of memes gifs, snark, bots, bootlickers and bad actors, with a peanut gallery of angry trolls and purist on the hunt for heretics. There's no reasoning.
(wrote this seed of an idea and figured I’d share in case someone smarter wants to run with)
No single platform can accommodate people with vastly different viewpoints screaming at each other. There’s a dynamic of ascending nastiness, echoing, and isolation that pulls people into different closed communities, ending logically in special interest WhatsApp or Signal groups. After witnessing a few different platforms (not as many as this fellow above), I’ve come to the conclusion that this is fundamental to a “town square,” a metaphor that Elon used repeatedly. What happens in town squares in times of unrest? Guillotines, lynchings, massacres. He never talks about that.
The interesting part is the note at the end about the exception of YouTube. You wouldn’t as naturally group YouTube into this discussion, but it is a social platform: a place where people put content and thoughts and strangers can openly respond. Substack, too, is a place like this—although in Notes (their Twitter-like networking tool) I can sniff some subtle nastiness, snarkiness, and dismissiveness.
But on both platforms, the fact that people largely discover each other through long-form content that’s recommended to them by direct connections and algorithms seems like a defusing force.
I’ve thought about this listening to people like Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman debate whether they should read comments on their content. Joe—stubborn, confident, and self-driven—refuses to read comments, and as a result has descended into a pit of anti-woke BS. Lex—self-flagellating, diligent, and headstrong—makes a point of reading even the most vitriolic comments and trying to find the good in them, and as a result his podcast has continued to improve in quality. Not everyone can be like Lex here; but I’ve thought about LLMs being a great tool to filter, summarize, and “translate” hateful messages into more helpful tips to see what people are really thinking about you, so you can improve yourself and your creations without destroying your mental health.
I’ve used AI repeatedly—particularly Claude—to learn about the various viewpoints of thorny issues like the Israel/Palestine conflict, affirmative action/racial reparations, colonialism—and it’s been incredibly helpful to allow me to enter into thought spaces that I would otherwise avoid for purposes of self-preservation and sanity.
Is it possible to build something that uses this synthetic view as a primary tool of understanding, instead of a feed of shouting voices? Just a seed of an idea—synthesizing the output of different social media sites as they now exist and using that as a wedge to start a new platform where people can write thoughts and ideas that aren’t meant to be viewed directly. It wouldn’t have the same virality incentive, but that could be a good thing: filter for reasonable people who just want to understand and take notes on the world.
Some questions:
- Can people be actively motivated to contribute to an AI system in the way that they contribute to, for instance, Wikipedia? If so, how?
- Can a platform with AI-written content as a primary view be compelling?
- How can you best position AI synthesis and person-to-person discussion in a symbiotic relationship?
- Does AI present an opportunity to flip the dynamic of social media on its head—as a defusing force rather than a radicalizing force?
I see a risk of (AI) LLMs being politically biased :)
There’s bubbles on Twitter with serious, respectful discussion. Some even cross over with mainstream politics. Check out Jason Furman.
"Youtube would probably the hardest to quit though."
Coming soon to Amazon Prime "Brokeback Youtube"
For what it’s worth, one can have perfectly sane conversations on Twitter. Just avoid the for you feed, choose who to follow carefully, and mute or block any assholes you come across.
I think Twitter is still OK you can ignore Elons nonsense or better yet laugh at it 😁 A lot of people are still posting there but I think it no longer has this cutting edge social media power to it especially for the left. This is my own very questionable view but I started on Twitter pretty early when Musk just posted mostly clever geeky stuff. And I see a lot of confirmation from other very online writers.
And don’t forget that Elon is a pretty good predictor or the next Republican outrage cycle, if you’re into that 😳
Personally glad I was behind the times - not deliberately but from being 'app primitive' and never joined Twitter
And for my only soc. media place, Facebook, experience got much better when I stopped usage other than purely keeping up-to-date with family, family photo sharing etc. (and silencing all political posts - family or otherwise, agreed with or otherwise). Much healthier.
Excellent piece, Noah. I think about this a lot. I don't participate in SM but I experienced similar firsthand as a professor. After teaching for a decade the same topics in the same way, I had a small group of students who registered formal complaints about me because "their voices weren't being heard" in my class discussions (this was around 2018). Fortunately, my level headed superiors didn't make anything of it but it was a wake-up call that I now had to walk on eggshells in my lectures. I teach decidedly non-political topics and rarely to never stray into them. This re-flared around the Hamas attack a few years back and that was complex where students wanted to stand up in front of my class to make statements (I teach in a business school). It was very difficult to navigate.
Like you, I despise that period mostly for its shutdown of any discourse around disagreements. The hard left were really the pioneers here as you note. I wish they had a tiny bit of self reflection now that we see how they enabled the right to do the same.
Thank you again, Noah. Some thoughts:
1. The Cancel Culture Era, Peak Woke Era, or whatever we want to call it, was the most unpleasant political era of my lifetime, and I say that as a lifelong Democrat voter. Yes, Bush did awful stuff and Trump is doing awful stuff right now, but I can't tell you how alienating it felt for the left-- my home -- to descend into its own form of Moral Majority-style bullying. It made me question everything about myself, whether I'm on "the wrong side of history," just becoming another dumb conservative as I age, etc.
You and other Substackers such as Jesse Singal, Freddie DeBoer, Jeff Maurer, Ross Barkan, Kat Rosenfield, and many more have helped a great deal with getting me through this. I've sought therapy for it too. I've also had countless private conversations with other disaffected liberals about this stuff. We really really hate it. Just as much as we hate Trump. It hit a nerve nothing else could.
2. By "late 2010s," shouldn't we also include 2020 and perhaps 2021? COVID was a boom time for these folks. Summer 2020 was the absolute peak of the madness, and 2021 saw the same cancellers frothing like mad at how anyone who refuses a COVID vaccine (or who is merely skeptical about vaccine mandates) should be fired and lose everything.
Yes I think 2020-2021 was indeed kind of a frothy crest.
Inside my company we had from some goddamn new hires fresh-out-of-college do a major kind of blow-up writing to Sr Mgmt (i.e. including me) about the horrors that HR notice (for global offices) referenced the genocide celebrating... Columbus Day. And my colleagues caved (my attitude was this is fucking ridiculous but there was this weird shut-down fear of online critics, anon glassdoor mobbing to make future hiring impossible to label us as "toxic workplace" etc. - so after this incident it became standard that all international offices wouldn't refer to US holidays by name at all).
2020 was peak alright. Although some positions were the opposite of normal as well. On borders and Sweden. For instance.
I personally did not take it so hard. I never did Twitter, I work with a bunch of Trumpies so I mostly saw purity spirals on the left from afar, although I lost one friend. But I have another friend who was alienated in her circle and even now sees thought policing on the
left as the greater threat. It did the left serious damage. People in the left simply cannot see how grating constant position taking and virtue signaling are to unpolitical people.
Yeah. You just had to be there. You had to be in the room where it happened (Hamilton again 😎)
Noah
I tend to ascribe to a different H (Horseshoe Theory), but I am just an average normie with similar positions to most Americans. I am a Reagan Republican, and depending on the subject,
I fall somewhere near the center of American attitudes. Occasionally, I may be further to the right on some things, yet rarely more to the left.
What we see with postliberalism from both the left and the right is a lot of performance with little substance. Mamdani and Bannon are the same people. You go further out, and you have Matthew Dowd and Tucker Carlson. Both loons. Whatever they are advocating has nothing to do with who we are as a country.
We practice liberal democratic capitalism here in America. It mostly works; sometimes it sucks.
Social Media is killing our culture.
We have seen every other form of government tried, and it has been found not to work. The old trope that Socialism can work, it’s just never been tried, is utter BS.
Mamdani’s ideas will lead us to France, which is in a dire state, and I believe it is a precursor to the problems we face. America is proof that every few decades or so, we need to relearn something. Trump will learn that tariffs are bad. Mamdani will learn that picking on a class of people to appeal to another class of people will fail. I mean, the Bill de Blasio disaster wasn’t that long ago.
Hang in there, pal, you have more friends than enemies.
Reminder : Mamdani is a candidate running to become the mayor of New York City. In what universe will a person running for a city election in a particularly unique city in America "lead us to France"? People, get a grip. If some regional politician has ideas that won't appeal to the masses living outside that region, they will never gain any national traction. I seem to remember there are some absolutely batshit crazy politicians in Congress on the MAGA side of the aisle. Why can't you feel able to say that their ideas will lead us to Russia or even North Korea?
I do say that often. You just don’t read it or perhaps listen. The problem in France is that they are broke and have huge deficits. As the government tries to rein in spending, the citizens who are used to the largess of government spending protest. The latest was a government shutdown protest.
Our political class of both parties is failing America. Progressives believe in spending other people's money, and there is no limit to how much they want to spend.
The post-liberal loons on the right are no better.
Currently, the GOP believes they have a good number of Hispanic voters and believes it will never lose an election. I believe they are wrong. Picking up grandma who has been here 30 years and deporting her isn’t going to make many friends. Democrats made a huge mistake thinking Hispanics are monolithic.
Noah makes a suggestion for Democrats to look normal, stop with defund the police. Mamdani wants to close jails and end policing as we know it.
You can defend that if you want, but it is insane. Just as insane as some postliberal MAGA types are insane.
I do agree with your outlook. I am not advocating for whatever Mamdani is saying in order to win the NYC mayorship. In fact, I could care less. That's my point - it's a REGIONAL issue, with no more relevance to those of us who have never been near New York City than the particular issues in an Iowan farm district would require a candidate there to advocate.
I’m my particular case I was pointing out that the exteems of each side are coming closer to together. Hence the Horseshoe theroy. Where the extreme are going so far they beging to look alike.
Dowd and Mamdani are not angry. Carlson and Bannon are. It makes a difference.
From the data, France seems way more financially responsible than the US.
2023 Interest paid on public debt, percent of GDP (IMF)
US 3.86 vs France 1.87
https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/ie@FPP/ITA
2023 Interest payments (% of revenue) (IMF)
US 18 vs France 3.8
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GC.XPN.INTP.RV.ZS?end=2023&locations=FR-US&start=1972&view=chart
S&P 500 lowered French debt rating with this to say:
"We project France's general government interest payments will increase to 5.0% of general government revenue in 2027 from 3.3% in 2023."
France also spends more on the police than the US as a percent of GDP. US spends more on prisons instead. While spending similarly 1.2% of GDP combined, France spends on police to prison 6 to 1, while US spends 1.5 to 1, with the highest state Illinois spending 2.8 to 1.
https://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2019/01/09/charts-police-vs-prisons-in-the-us-and-europe/
The point I was making was that a government is trying to be financially responsible, and the public is not accepting it and shutting down the government. If and when we have a responsible government that does the same, I expect our divisions to end up in the streets. We no longer have a responsible body politic. IMHO
no longer? you mean compared to a few decades ago when the current pensioners voted to lower the age of retirement without funding the pension system ... or when was this golden era of governance excellence? :)
France is not that terrible although it's in crisis.
If Mamdani led the US to France, NY would have to be Paris ... not happening - but rather greater fear is the combination emerging in the US feels much more like a kind of Argentina-esque evolution. US becoming France not my taste but not complete fiasco.
Becoming Argentina, that's the disaster. And that's rather more the risk emering, Peronist-esque orientations on both right and left...
(Blasio disaster? Come on, Blasio bumbling....)
When I said France, here was my comparison.
Deficits have led to tax increases and reductions in services.
As a result of those reductions in services, including getting rid of two national holidays, it's a reality that at some point you run out of Other People's Money. France has a wealth tax of up to 1.5%. Taxes on the wealthy are at 45%. Taxing the rich even more will have diminishing returns, and cheating, plus it likely won’t fill the hole.
Changing the retirement age to 64 from 62 caused riots. The government is trying to cut the deficit, should I say forced to?
Their economy does grow, but employment is tough to come by. The people want their generous benefits and expect someone else to pay.
America is running an unsustainable $2 trillion plus, to what Trump added. Meaning our debt will be over $50 trillion in 10 years. Debt payments are running higher, and the bond ghouls will make the US pay more for our profligate spending.
SS and Medicare will be insolvent soon. Even suggesting to increase retirement age by one more year gets people to scream: "women and children will die”. Defcon 1
If we do not fix SS there will be a “mandatory” reduction of 23% in benefits.
Will we see marches if that happens?
I am personally very familiar with France. Directly, personally and in biz, not just newspapers.
France is not a disaster, not fully to my taste, but not a disaster.
Being Argentina is. Not merely the deficits, but degrading institutional execution, deliberate moves to defaults, etc. (France whatever else one can write does have very good execution and gov institutions [maybe too much so but that's a choice])
US politically is feeling more in danger of Argentine developments like Peronism.
If the US were just on a French trajectory I would not be so worried. that it feels like evolution towards Argentina, that worries.
(really for a certain segment of French everything triggers what in the US we call a riot, it's not really the same overall meaning).
Well said. Peronism is much more of a threat than frenchification. France is a wealthy dynamic stable powerhouse compared to Argentina.
I was in the debt comparison. Peronism was bad, Trump likes, I think he is open to doing favors for the last person who buys his stupid meme coins.
But Trump isn’t Peron, yet. France nationalized industries, Trump is owning stock, again very different from either. France has a moribund economy. Now with big debt. So that is what I see.
Do I think Trump is building a Sovereign Wealth Fund, but he is doing it by threatening companies to give him stock. I can see raising the cost to take America's minerals, including oil. Threatening Universities to get some money for the Treasury is nuts. This is way different than the selective help of the government. It is not what Peron did. While Trump’s actions may have Peronist elements and the same with France, what Trump is doing is building a wealth fund as a personal slush fund. How will they invest the money? Who does it, can it benefit the President and his relatives if he chooses?
Yes - France nationalises industries. And has state ownership and has also an oddly robust capitalism (could be more robust w/o their dumb socialist angles but still generally robust).
The French economy is hardly "moribund" although if they liberalised more they'd do better - it's performing below it's ability but far from moribund (UK deserves that more thanks to idiocy of Brexit)
What it generally doeesn't have is highly personalised state action against actors, and generally does not do is cronyism etc
Trump & Co doesn't look like modern (Western) European - French or similar - statist but institutionalist economic or political action
What it does look like is various flavors of right-left populist Banana-Republicism like Peronism and similar flavors in 40-60s LatAm.
US is not en route to being France (if it were it would be not my cup of tea but as I have direct lived France-experience in biz and personal, it's just silly as a OMG statement and worse, it's wrong diagnostic.)
LatAm style highly personalised institution-degrading veering between right-and-left destructive populist policies in a kind of 21st century version of Peronism, that's a real path threat.
ETA it may be a quibble over analogy but I think it's rather importantly different.
The route of quasi-Peronism, is much more damaging economically, institutionally.
It’s ok we disagree but I still believe America will see protests and riots when Congress is force to make cuts and raise taxes. Perhaps I am wrong. The populists or political tribes will eviscerate whomever is in power at the time and trying to do the right thing. Just like France.
Trump is consolidating a dictatorship and we are supposed to behold French tax rates and recoil in horror?
Bannon = Mamdani? Matthew Dowd and Tucker Carlson equally loony?
Bannon nihilistically favors taking a sledgehammer to most of government, Mamdani will pilot a few city-run grocery stores that will probably fail without doing much harm.
So no mention of the massive wave of right wing cancellations and firings related to people who said "bad" things about Charlie Kirk?
It doesn't seem like the HBomb was defused as much as handed over to the MAGA state.
Conservative cancel culture is only growing in power.
It used to be people like Bari Weiss decried cancel culture from a sort of free speech, "I don't agree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."
Unfortunately, most of those people have just turned into "Our turn now!" including Bari Weiss.
Yes. I looked today to see if The Free Press had anything about the USG threatening anyone who said anything bad about Charlie Kirk, but as usual when the Trump administration threatens people for speech, the FP is dead silent.
But Weiss is hardly an exemplary defender of free speech -- she calls anything even slightly critical of Israel anti-semitic.
She has gotta close her big sale so I can see why she keeps her mouth shut.
Very principled of her.
Which would seem to suggest this is about the underlying dynamics of society and our communication media… not a left or right issue or problem.
What’s so frustrating about this is that it was so predictable. I warned my Twitter-brained lefty friends that, sooner or later, the right would co-opt this language and tactics and they wouldn’t like the result.
The reaction to Charlie Kirk has been absolutely unhinged. I have nothing against him, but flags at half staff for a random guy who went around arguing with college students for a living?
Trump is the most predictable creature on the planet. Of course he's going to glorify anybody who ever agreed with him or who has an audience of people who will vote for him.
Trump is using this to create and feed a narrative about left wing political violence and the need to quash any rhetoric that could be interpreted as inciting, meaning any rhetoric critical of him or his administration. He wants to use it to justify overt restrictions on political speech. It might not work, but he's trying, and if he can paint Kirk as a national treasure and symbol he can improve the odds of success.
Cancel culture is not a "right" or "left" thing. It is a mob thing. But certainly the folks calling for "cancellations and firings" of people expressing glee about Kirk's assignation were emboldened by having watched a dozen years of progressives calling for "cancellations and firings" for dumb-ass reasons like recognizing biological realty.
Matthew, would it be possible for you to flesh out this argument more? Is the right cancelling people who disagree with Kirk? (As opposed to saying bad, distasteful or hateful things about him).
Maybe I am just naive, but it seems it would have been acceptable to cancel someone like Demore if he had said he hoped women coders died. He was cancelled for saying men and women differ statistically in interests. Are you saying the right is canceling people who disagree with Kirk’s arguments?
I am saying that the Right is cancelling people who say that Charlie Kirk was a divisive figure or a bad person or that he pissed other people off or bringing up Kirk's comments a few months ago about gun deaths being an unfortunate but acceptable side effect of living with the 2nd Amendment. Or cancelling people who don't show "adequate sadness" over his death.
Matthew Dowd was fired from MSNBC for saying, "He’s been one of the most divisive, especially divisive, younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.”
“And I think that’s the environment we’re in. You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place. And that’s the unfortunate environment we are in.”
A Middle Tennessee State University Dean was fired for saying "Looks like Ol'Charlie spoke his fate into existence. Hate begets hate. Zero Sympathy."
A screencap was retweeted by sitting US Senator Marsha Blackburn and they were fired.
Nice article about it here. https://apnews.com/article/dowd-msnbc-kirk-comments-e08f349022c9d69171cd575664141075
Thank you very much for elaborating.
Seems to me people are distinguishing between cancelling for making light of or justifying a murder (bad taste and thus socially unacceptable) and cancelling for disagreeing with one’s political position. It is getting blurry though.
It's that the same people clutching pearls over Charlie Kirk were also gleeful about Paul Pelosi getting attacked with a hammer or when all those Democratic legislators in Wisconsin were shot. (Charlie Kirk himself among them).
Minnesota, not Wisconsin?
I did not know any of that. Any suggestions on where I can find the distasteful glee from Kirk after the Wisconsin legislator shooting?
I think they're mostly cancelling anyone who said anything that could be construed as celebratory of Kirk's death.
Somewhat related, my right wing family members are raging at Tim Walz for joking after Trump dropped out of sight that he kept checking to see if there would be something in the news, implying but not saying that he was hoping for a report that Trump had died. Actually, I don't think the family members who are raging have any idea what Walz said, they're raging about what they were told he said, which seems to be quite different from what he actually said.
"I don't think the family members who are raging have any idea what Walz said, they're raging about what they were told he said, which seems to be quite different from what he actually said."
That could be applied to Kirk and even Trump sometimes. It is just an extension of gossip and rumors running out of control to generate outrage.
Seriously... Florida is basically asking teachers there not to post or say critical things on their personal social media about Kirk or they can get reprimanded. Cancel culture has always existed, but progressive or liberal application of it has and will always be more limited in power over the long term than conservative use of it imo. I think we'll see something like Trump's first time, where by the end people are just exhausted. Fortunately he's speed running this term so maybe it'll happen sooner than later and we'll all show each other more grace afterwards and own that our online personas are not the best version of ourselves sometimes...
That "bad" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Celebrating an assassination is a lot different than a quote from Hamilton.
Good piece but so much American commentary is just talking about talking on Twitter, or talking about the talking about the talking on Twitter.
Politicians should get off it so they have an easier time moving to the center. Writers should get off it so they have an easier time reading books.
There was an old Dilbert comic strip making fun of Trump, with one panel having 3 Trump-looking dudes shouting "You're fired!" to one another.
Would do just as well for making fun of cancel culturists if it said "You're cancelled!"
“Compromise” is the third rail of the progressive left. Great piece, Noah.
I have to admit I've been bewildered by the characterization of the bluesky by this article and Nate's article. I am on bluesky as a centrist, and I have found it to be a much more polite place than Twitter. If anything, it's too boring.
But I don't follow many political people on Bluesky. I mostly use it for data science and professional stuff.
Most of my professional peers are progressive, so when they moved to Bluesky. I followed. But I still just don't see any of the same call out culture found on Twitter.
Try this just for fun: create an anonymous account on BS. Find a semi-controversial post. In the comments post a slightly more moderate position than the OP has taken. See what fun ensues.
you should teach an "Introduction to Trolling" class. this would make a great homework assignment. Then, the class can share their results with each other. Maybe include an "Edgelord Certification" for the students who master it.
Classic trolling would be posting a more extreme position to get rage. Posting a more moderate position is something like anti trolling?
Nah. The point Noah is making, and that commenter Bill is having fun with, is that even a slightly more moderate point of view gets you piled on for being Nazi-Hitler-Bigot-Fascist who should have already killed himself. IOW, you can get rage (or at least condescending sneering) responses to milk toast statements. No need to go full-extreme. Example I am making up in my head:
Poster: "Transwomen are women!"
Troll: "I agree, but I do have some reservations about placing transwomen who are still anatomically male in women's prisons."
Poster + another 50 people: "Please kill yourself you bigoted monster"
Hah! I think my ability to troll would pale next to some of the trolls I've read - of course maybe that wouldn't disqualify me from teaching it. Sounds almost like a business plan. I fear we've been beaten to the market, though.
Don't sell yourself short, Bill. You can be a perfectly good troll with a little practice. Sure, some people are naturals, and others simply don't get it. But I think most of us can learn to play the game.
Have you done that? Can you show me screenshots of the result?
Real talk:
I’m a fan of you, and Matthew Yglesias, and Jamelle Bouie, AND Will Stancil.
I really don’t think you four disagree on much on principle at all, and you’re all excellent analysts in your respective fields.
To be frank, you guys should not be at each others’ throats like this, especially now. I do not see it helping anyone.
I get that Bouie and Stancil don’t like you, and the feeling’s mutual. Oh well. That’s life. You’re in the same tent, like it or not.
Confession: I will admit, I tend to side with Stancil on the general political advice Democrats should follow in the months ahead, 80% of the time at least. I think Schumer et al. should drop whatever they’re doing and try his approach for a spin.
Yglesias gives great policy advice, albeit subpar political advice. It’s my belief the Democrats generally try to do things his way, and he imagines otherwise. He has a lane he’s good at, and a lane he unwisely tries to merge into.
You, by and large, have the clearest view of the national economy and geopolitics. You’ve been a consistent cheerleader for Biden’s policies (at least, I, a Biden fan, perceive that), and rightly so. Would that more people followed your advice.
Bouie gives neither policy nor political advice that often, but he grasps the moment. Also he has excellent culinary and video game taste.
All four of you, like each other or not, have to figure out how to work together to stop the tide of tyranny. All this “Bluesky” invoking and infighting is going to be thought of as so much factional bullshit in months, let alone years. Most likely.
It is what it is.
Pundit beer summit!
damn fuckin’ straight 🍺
“This tweet may have gotten 4500 likes, but it poses no threat to my reputation or career…”
From the screenshot, it looks like Noah is the one who got 4500 likes. If so, it shows how far this dispute falls into talking past each other
I would respectfully suggest that there is some uncharacteristic murkiness of thinking here, Noah.
What is it that these leftists should do? What do you (or I) want them to do?
Almost without exception, they are not suited for politics of persuasion. You take the online bullying a bit out of context. It's not JUST cancel culture; the same voices and their allies vehemently deny the need to alter message OR tone OR wording to try to win over voters who are not already persuaded. They believe in turnout, they believe in mobilization, they believe in maximizing attention of the evil of adversaries.
But persuasion is not their thing, for the simple reason that in order to persuade, the first thing you need to do is to understand where other people are really coming from (as opposed to your wartime caricature of them), and that is most decidedly not on their playlist.
This is not an accident, nor is it stupidity. The Left wants things that the public, outside of a few cosmopolitan pockets, would vote down decisively. Thus, waiting for these people to begin, as a group to speak in a manner designed to increase support for their causes by a few percentage points? We need to realize that this is just not going to happen.
Not so unlike the far Right, their best hope is to seize power due to chaos. Maybe if a Trump administration totally crashed and burned in such a painful way that the entire country was up in arms, while simultaneously the Left had grabbed control of the Democratic Party and nominated a president? A not-super-likely daily double, but way, way more likely than the public ever democratically choosing far Left policies.
When you see the Left attacking Abundance Democrats and other moderates so vehemently, people who could actually win majorities and then hope to make government work well enough to maintain majorities, you can see why this is not at all in the interests of the Left.
From this perspective, I do not see why we should mind if they take a large portion of their discussion off to a fairly private room and hold it there. Bluesky is not so much siphoning off useful liberal energy as it is diverting people who might (or might not) vote with us in general elections but are devoted to all manner of mischief the rest of the time. I'm not at all for canceling anyone, not even fascists, but if mischief makers choose to go into a room and talk to themselves, why should we complain?
While I kinda get why people were pissed off at Weiss's post (as an Asian American born here, the "where are you REALLY from" questions get old), the dogpiling (including on Weiss) is so utterly ridiculous that it's one the main reasons I left Twitter.
Unfortunately for a while that cancel culture nonsense infiltrated the work place too, and I recall younger employees getting flustered when people did not immediately do what they asked (older folks on social media were probably terrified of younger, more popular accounts and bent over backwards to follow the mob). People really did lose the art of persuasion, as being asked to put in the work of persuasion itself because a sign of oppression.
Advocacy groups followed similar lines of reasoning offline in local council meetings, government stakeholder engagement meetings, etc., such that "I as a (insert demographic group here) demand X" was supposed to be sufficient to change public policy. (Inevitably, someone from the same group would have an opposing opinion, but the advocacy group would either pretend they didn't speak or accuse them of being a shill for some dark, shadowy group.) I still see this kind of behavior from time to time, but it isn't as bad as it was under Trump 1 or early Biden admins.
“ Unfortunately for a while that cancel culture nonsense infiltrated the work place too, and I recall younger employees getting flustered when people did not immediately do what they asked.”
This is interesting. Can you give any examples? Like regular ones, not necessarily dramatic ones. What would a common instance of this look like?
I ask because I only got a glimmer of it in my office. The thing is that because of the nature of my job - in-house counsel for a giant corporation, where everyone in my department is a lawyer with 15 years experience in private practice - my exposure to the younger cohort is very low. That’s not to say that woke wasn’t a huge thing - it was, and it derailed my career - but it didn’t really come from young people. I feel like whatever “it” was in the last ten or fifteen years probably presented much different in the youth than the middle-aged.
I can think of one instance that really stayed with me: after Covid, when the company told everyone to head back to the office, the younger cohort JUST DIDN’T DO IT. They yelled and refused and demanded and threatened. I’m not being critical exactly - it was incredibly impressive, and they won. It’s years later and we’re still almost entirely remote. And we’re a gigantic multinational company.
I’m 55 and have worked in a lot of different places and I’ve never once even heard of employees pushing back like this. I still haven’t really figured out what I think about it.
My examples from the 2019-2021 period (in context of a company with multinational offices, US, non-US, etc) - in investment
1. Writing complaints to management if HR referenced US holidays like Columbus day by name (versus whatever the Lefty replacement name desired) other examples similar
2. Lots of strange expectations on issuing demands in a kind of college activist manner as far as I could tell, and expecting management like College admin to cave in and celebrate their insubordination, much around social engagement (and also oddball demands for taking positions on political things). Not per se utterly outré stuff but... in my decades of experience it was sustained weirdness in this period.
Most of it had to do with things like work-from-home, work assignments, or a particular policy decision a given worker didn't like. A lot of folks wanted to jump right into policy-setting rather than doing support work like research, writing memos, etc. I can't quite go into details given the nature of the discussions. They wanted to be invited to all the meetings where they felt they should tell others what they needed to do (based on little evidence or experience). While young people being ambitious is nothing new (and not a negative thing necessarily), there wasn't even an attempt at trying to make the case for their desired outcome. They just said they wanted X and therefore didn't need to provide any reasoning. Sometimes they'd try to get a petition going or something, which again was light on argumentation and heavy on language about rights.
I too saw this re "Unfortunately for a while that cancel culture nonsense infiltrated the work place too, and I recall younger employees getting flustered when people did not immediately do what they asked "
It was "toxic work culture" if the latest campus fad orientation wasn't on the agenda (calling Columbus day by its legal name e.g. rather than whatever was the Progressvie fad name [and fuck me I don't even think Columbus day should be a thing but whatever, it's the legal name).
The funniest responses suggested that Bari was technically accurate if she was congratulating Mirai's parents for having sex. But I am an aficionado of the "unhelpful defense" humor genre.
I wonder how much of 2010s social media tone was shaped by exposure to sitcoms. Everyone on Friends was nasty to each other and dismissive.
Edit to add: I think that people imbibed a mean, dismissive and clever way of speaking that’s hard to do in real time. But social media is asynchronous, so you can develop your zinger then deliver it. Meaning, maybe we wanted to talk this way before but weren’t able to until we had global quick-but-still-asynchronous communication.
Prewoke, beginning of tumblr era, the most common presentation of thought was via sarcasm. Everything was 'ironic'. Its an offshoot of sitcoms and later late night television and Whedon-ism. Sarcasm morphed into negativity via the 'But actually tho.' addendum. Sneer culture took over these spaces, which continues to today.
Is there a word for “doing something really interesting and novel artistically which unintentionally created a culture that perverts it into something foul?” I feel bad from Whedon. Buffy and that space cowboy show were awesome. Firefly. But the syntax and rhythms of language he created wrecked everything forever.
There must be a word for that. Probably something in German.
Precisely. Snarky Whedon-ism has had a profoundly bad impact on dialogue, both in entertainment and occasionally in real life. Kill it with fire.
Ah, “sneer culture”. Love the term.
I never heard the term sneer culture but it's so appropriate
Friends ended before 2010. Maybe it had a second period of life on streamers but it doesn’t seem to have any real form of cancel culture.
This may be true but it is a lazy post to write and feels like you are writing on the last war. If we take your argument - progressives got hooked on canceling, they all went to bluesky where no one cares what they say - then who is this piece for? Do you think it will persuade said progressives (presumably not if we follow your line- they won't read it and would cancel you anyway)? Is it just to make those who dont cancel feel better for having won? Is it to vent your own spleen at the poor and unreasonable treatment you received?
If progressive cancellers lost, what... exactly...have these champions for free speech won?
A right that feels no shame in calling for civil war against their enemies whom, you note, are powerless anyway? Is the world more free, more prosperous, more just?
Put another way, the problem with the piece is not so much that it is wrong (though I think the claims about bluesky are overwrought and likely self serving - you presumably get payouts from Musks X for driving engagement. No shame in that but let's call a spade a spade) is that it is dull and unimaginative. Surely you have more in the punditry tank Noah than slamming a platform you say doesn't matter?
Social Media has licensed a range of people with various disorders to become keyboard warriors from the safety and anonymity of their ‘bedrooms’. I worked with a guy that was one such ‘warrior’ who dished out all kinds of vitriol on-line. However, when forces to sit opposite me in my office he sat there with slumped shoulders with nothing much to say. He also couldn’t take on-line counter-attacks that brought him to task. My psychologist wife, on observing this guy in action, saw at least two disorders - narcissistic and borderline personality.
Here too things are complicated. But it's easier to show graphs! To your point -- when a certain very popular unpleasant Princeton history professor with a plagiarism problem decamped to Bluesky, it was clear what would happen in my academic circles. The small % of perpetrators cause 90% of the crime phenomenon operates on social media. If "particular" posters "snapped out of it," as you say, and dialed it down, we'd seen an extraordinary change. That's the task.