The Great Twitter Emigration
Telegram and substack are great, but they’re ultimately (mostly) asocial. They’re a whole bunch of folks, each in his or her own separate building, preaching. Isolated fiefdoms aren’t what move us together toward societal progress.
Societies need social networks.
No, societies are social networks.
The way society — and science — moves forward toward the truth is via social networks. We’re designed for them. Our very emotional expressions are our evolved language for them (the topic of my pre-orderable book, EXPRESSLY HUMAN).
It’s through the use of these expressions within a functioning social network that reputations rise and fall, and the people who are high reputation are trusted.
Now, we’re designed for real social networks with real people in real life, not today’s social media. Social media today is in many ways trying to fill that evolutionary role, and even has, like in FB, emotional expressions you can apply to peoples posts.
But existing social media is “sick,” and I believe one reason mass hysteria swept through so badly in March 2020 was because our social media are badly designed, something we study at the FreeX Institute.
At any rate, as badly designed as today’s social media may be, we need it.
What we need is a new Twitter.
Whether GETTR is the right place is unclear. Might they simply get bought by Google or Twitter?
In the short term it doesn’t matter, because it has long been impossible to stay at Twitter, but we just… wouldn’t… leave.
Why?
For the same reason I bang on about concerning mass movements: Because it’s not possible cause mass movements intentionally. You simply can’t just make everyone move to another social media site.
I’m not going to go unless all you go. And we’re all thinking that. And so we all sit and breathe in the toxic Twitter fumes rather than moving.
Gab and Parler have been around for a few years now, with no mass movement to it.
Because you can’t force it. If it happens, it will happen via forces out of our control.
But this week there was a real mass movement to GETTR — Twitter’s suspension of Robert Malone seems to have been the trigger. And if a mass emigration movement happens out of Twitter, you just go with it.
GETTR may someday be poisoned, but Twitter is killing us now.
That’s where many of us now are. Find me at @markchangizi
And don’t forget to pre-order my upcoming book. Let my publisher know they need to print a lot FFS.
I wonder if a true meaningful deliberation is possible between strangers on a widespread scale with social media, period. We can sometimes manage it between smaller groups of people with some degree of shared norms, at least epistemic norms and some minimum baseline of social norms and some degree of competence at disagreeing constructively. But it is unfortunately very clear that those conditions are not present in current digital spaces, regardless of whether those seem "tyrannical" or not to people who have had bad experiences with them.
Those conditions may well also not have been possible face to face, especially once we grew larger than the ancient Polis, and even that seems like a borderline case. We just didn't realize how far we were from the deliberative ideal until we started looking closely at what was really happening because the "polarization" and so on became so dramatic.
Reputation is not to me a solution to the problem of social media not being social in the more fully human sense because reputation is so easily manipulated and we have no solution to that problem other than some sort of agreed upon reliable certification process or some sort of agreed upon fair deliberative process. And we are lacking either of those, at least in any broadly agreed on form.
Best to you Mark.