nobody learns anything

From a terrific column by Megan McArdle:

Twitter never had that many users, compared with Instagram or Facebook. But it had a big group of influential users — politicians, policymakers, journalists and academics, all of whom were engaged in a 24/7 conversation about politics and current events.

That was a boon to progressives, who wielded outsize influence on the platform because they were early adopters who outnumbered the conservatives. They were also better organized and better networked, and had the sympathy of Twitter’s professional-class employees, who proved increasingly susceptible to liberals’ demands for tighter moderation policies on things such as using male pronouns to refer to a transgender woman.

Moderation suppressed conservative users and stories that hurt the left — most notoriously, the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which Twitter throttled as “disinformation” in the run-up to the 2020 election. Of course, progressive Twitter mobs also policed the discourse themselves, securing high-profile firings that made many people afraid to cross them.

Thus, that national conversation ended up skewed toward liberal views, creating the illusion that their ideas were more popular than they actually were. That’s a major reason that institutions went all-in on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, and why the 2020 Democratic primary field moved so far to the left that Kamala Harris was still struggling to backtrack four years later. All that changed when Musk bought Twitter.

There’s a touching moment in Middlemarch (the first chapter of Book V) when our heroine Dorothea Casaubon pays a visit to a local doctor, Mr. Lydgate, with whom she hopes to do some charitable work. Mr. Lydgate, it turns out, is not home, but his young and beautiful wife Rosamond is there — along with someone Dorothea knows well: Will Ladislaw, a handsome young man with whom Rosamond is playing music.

Now, Dorothea — a married woman who wants to be faithful to her husband, as unhappy as their marriage is — has not yet acknowledged to herself just how attracted she is to Will; but Will, while keeping generally within the bounds of propriety, has made it unmistakably clear that he is deeply attached to Dorothea. So Dorothea is rather discomfited to see Will there with Rosamond in circumstances that look rather … romantic.

As she sets off in search of Mr. Lydgate, she has time to reflect:

Now that she was alone in her drive, she heard the notes of the man’s voice and the accompanying piano, which she had not noted much at the time, returning on her inward sense; and she found herself thinking with some wonder that Will Ladislaw was passing his time with Mrs. Lydgate in her husband’s absence. And then she could not help remembering that he had passed some time with her under like circumstances, so why should there be any unfitness in the fact? But Will was Mr. Casaubon’s relative, and one towards whom she was bound to show kindness. Still there had been signs which perhaps she ought to have understood as implying that Mr. Casaubon did not like his cousin’s visits during his own absence. “Perhaps I have been mistaken in many things,” said poor Dorothea to herself, while the tears came rolling and she had to dry them quickly.

The slow pace of the horse-drawn carriage gives Dorothea time both to cry and to dry her tears; and the solitude gives her time to think. There may be a general lesson here.

Back in the day, if something happened in politics or culture that made you unhappy, you might or might not have had anyone to talk with about it. Maybe a spouse, or a few friends, or a co-worker or two. After a while, sitting and brooding about the dark turn things have taken, you might eventually have worked your way around to the thought that maybe, just maybe, you had gotten some things wrong. You had trusted those you should not have trusted, believed accounts you should not have believed, wrongly assessed the rules of the game or the way of the world. One of the primary purposes of short-form social media, it seems to me, is to prevent us from getting to that point of self-understanding. Bluesky means never having to say you’re sorry.

I have a Bluesky account, and I’ve posted a few things there, in a desultory fashion. Some people insist that Bluesky is dramatically healthier than Twitter, less corrosive and rage-filled, but … well, to me it seems virtually identical, which would make sense, per Megan’s column: the dominant voices on Bluesky are people who really liked Twitter and want to reconstitute what they think was the best form of it.

Me, I hated, or came to hate, Twitter, and it seems to me that whether on Twitter or Bluesky, there are five major varieties of short-form social-media post:

“Here is some information”

“Look at how funny I am”

“Look at how stupid my enemies are”

“Look at how smart my allies are for pointing out how stupid my enemies are”

“Hello total stranger! You’re an idiot”

Obviously, posts in the first category are useful; posts in the second can be enjoyable when the poster actually is funny; and the remaining three are poisonous.

And one of the poisons readily injected there is the poison of smugness — because you can always find among your allies reassurance that We did everything We could for the righteous cause, that whatever went wrong is not Our fault, that Our enemies were probably even worse than We suspected, and generally speaking everything that has happened just proves that We were right all along. Group solidarity is powerful dope, even when it’s just solidarity among shitposters, and if you get it quickly enough you’ll never have the opportunity to sit and think and realize that perhaps you’ve been mistaken about many things.