On the Value of Restraint
It is restraint that is honorable to a person, not their liberty, wrote the Victorian polymath John Ruskin. This is a grave time, so a little forbearance is in order. Showing some restraint doesn’t necessarily make you honorable, but it is likely to make you less of an asshole.
Social media inverts Ruskin. We are at liberty to be insufferable, and holding back is for suckers. We long ago ditched the fantasy that virtual “town squares” would reinvigorate democracy. The list of things social media has made worse is impressively long. But let’s start with the fact that it fatally compromised our ability to think before we blurt.
Recent events illustrate, yet again, how being terminally online warped us. The horrors unleashed on Oct. 7 really ought to yank people out of a virtual swamp. Instead, they show how mired many of us are. As Elizabeth Spiers lays out in the New York Times, social media not only incentivizes lame tribal signaling from individuals and corporations, it exerts insidious forms of coercion on those who don’t join the cacophony. People will always sound off about what galls them, but the grace to process complex issues constricts by the day.
What this ecosystem provokes — among supposed leaders, among keyboard activists, among natterers of every stripe — is impulsive thoughtlessness. That’s lousy enough under ordinary circumstances, but when the topic is baby murder, we’ve managed a new low. Used as directed, these platforms inflame rage, supercharge lies, incite mob persecution, and morph rational adults into vengeful toddlers.
At consequential moments, our digital gimcrack sputters and fails. We have a decidedly analog president, addressing the nation in an old fashioned ways, likely the last with experience handling thorny problems spawned in the 20th century. Justifiable criticisms of this administration abound, but at least the Gerontocrat-in-Chief isn’t hooked up to a dopamine machine 24-7. The behavior of prominent people who have given themselves over to perverse algorithmic incentives — how could we begin to list them all — is both ineffectual and unhinged.
One of the weirdnesses of social media is how it Americanized the global information system— our identity obsessions, our habit of cramming complex issues into dumb binaries, our tendency to moral panic, our appalling narcissism — have become the funhouse mirror through which too many people view the world. Global problems cannot be coherently explained, let alone solved, by looking at your navel. The notion that the Israel-Gaza war is a reflection of puerile local beefs, that this, ultimately, comes down to our feelings, is an affront. What is happening in the Middle East, among other places, is deadly serious, and social media is a farce.
More than that, it is the worst sort of distraction, a noise machine that doesn’t improve understanding but effectively runs interference. It ego-boosts clowns, derides context, and has zero investment in allowing cooler heads to prevail. If the Arab Spring was its finest hour, events in Israel and Gaza underscore its obsolescence as an information tool. It has nothing more to offer us but trouble.
