Determining America's enemy within

Economist and commentator Noah Smith writes: "Being the technological determinist that I am, I think we should regard our enemies first and foremost as technological. Our country’s most potent and terrible enemy is in our own pockets. And having located that enemy, I believe that we can pretty quickly see how to strike it where it lives, and take our country back."

A noble objective, for sure. But is its premise correct? That first and foremost, our worst enemy is technological? — "that America [has] been uniquely hurt by the changes that social media unleashed," they being "the elevation of toxic personalities to positions of influence and popularity." This is undergirded by a preceding premise of Smith's:

"[We once used] geographic diversity to temper the stresses and strains created by our ideological diversity." But given "Twitter and Facebook and TikTok, it immediately stopped mattering as much who [our] physical neighbors were," he continued. Soon "we were thrown into a small room [where people] disagreed about everything. This created instant anger and friction throughout society."

Yet in that passage there lies the unconcealed societal friction of stress, strain, and anger — the foundational premise, and it dwarfs the others cited by Smith: "ideological diversity." Here's an überpolite way of describing the manifestation of what America "should regard" as its "first and foremost" enemy, its "most potent and terrible enemy" — and at root, it ain't technological. It is, rather, a breed of ideological diversity that has been with us ages before Jack Dorsey's team, Mark Zuckerberg and Zhang Yiming had their butts slapped by an obstetrician.

It's authoritarianism, fascism, absolute monarchism — generic, historical terms for today's ideologically diverse tangle of Trumpism; indeed a veritable kingly authoritarianism of fascistic design in its racial animus and blood-and-soil hypernationalism swimming in cesspools of conspiracy theories, demagogic ravings, mass ignorance, the Leader principle (Führerprinzip), and messianic delusions.

Oxford Reference defines Smith's technological determinism as "the stance that new technologies are the primary cause of major social and historical changes at the macrosocial level of social structure and processes" (italics original). Thus, though I do not presume to speak for Smith, it does seem that those of his technological determinist bent would see Gutenberg's invention of moveable type and the screw press as the Reformation and Counter-Reformation's ignition key.

Others, like me, see Gutenberg's invention as an unintended exploitation of preexistent human passions and witless zealotry. The fundamental "tool" of change, the real driver of change, was humanity's irrationality. Its byproduct was reciprocal slaughter, Catholics and Protestants.

In historical change we can also see sociologist William Ogburn's 1922 concept of "cultural lag," the unfolding of society's maladjustment-to-adjustment stages of technological development. Still, of far greater significance were the sprawling, unfolding realities of his era's inventions, such as travel by automobile and flight.

In some instances, however, fixed maladjustment is society's wiser course. The prime example would be The Bomb's development and international spread, which brought about Americans' mammoth, emotional disconnect from technology: mass anxiety: a deep and rational fear of humanity's extermination; acutely, a heightened fear of enemies, the "Reds" of Russia, China's "Yellow Peril"; and soon the dreadful backwash of nuclear proliferation beyond the Great Powers.

The fear, smartly, is still with us, less cultural lag than lingering cultural angst. Again, I gather that technological determinists would see The Bomb's invention as the spark. And again, we others would see humanity's dark ingenuity as the primordial mover of potential self-destruction. We'd be in good company, too, from Robert Oppenheimer, who understood what genius had done, to Thomas Kuhn, who departed the discipline of physics for the history of science field, having witnessed with horror his fellow physicists' scientific "accomplishments" of 1945.

To keep this post manageable, space-wise, let us move on to Smith's vision of striking back, "If we want our country back":

"Social media platforms are our true enemy, and so we must use the real world as a platform for our counterattack. The first and most obvious policy is to ban phones in schools [bold, original] ...  reduc[ing] bored teenagers’ own influence over online discourse and status, while also reducing their exposure to extremist ideas....

"The second thing to do is to change the character of social media itself, by restricting the spread of extremist content.... The people who run social media platforms ... can implement algorithmic tweaks that will direct people toward more moderate, reasonable content and away from extremist, incendiary content."

There Smith stops his assault, adding that "The devastation of the America I grew up in is reversible; the spread of social media technology is not. The key is to use technological solutions to solve the technological problem that we’ve inadvertently created."

I'm a bit blown away by this, not so much by its meagerness of teenage phone bans and "algorithmic tweaks" — which the world's Zuckerbergs have no financial incentive whatsoever to "implement" — but by its concluding force gale of incomprehensible peculiarity.

There was no inadvertence in the creation of online media platforms as a "technological problem" for American society. It was as deliberate as the Final Solution, in which insecticidal Zyklon A's technological development into humanly lethal Zyklon B was, as well, not at all a prime mover.

The problem — our deepest, entrenched, most virulent problem — is us. It's human. It's Trumpism. Even if iPhones were lifted and algorithms tweaked, that wouldn't stop Trump's cascading bullshit on scores of other outlets, it wouldn't deter MAGA and associated rubes from buying Trump's bullshit, and it wouldn't reverse America's near-completed slide into Trump's shithole of a country.

Epidemic apathy and Americans' withdrawal from civic republicanism caused the "problem." And only activated mass resistance to, and formidable pushbacks against, Trumpist authoritarianism can kill it.

***This piece is cross-posted at my Substack page, which has the spiffy new title, PUBLICK OCCURRENCES both FORREIGN and DOMESTICK est. 1690. That'll make little sense, until you see yesterday's explanation.