In what way can a dominant narrative be both accurate and unintentionally misleading?
The conventional wisdom is that we live in a time of political polarization. However, it turns out that few people are actually polarized. How many of us actually know of anyone who has become polarized? Perhaps a friend of a friend has gotten swept up in conspiracy theories. But ordinary life just keeps chugging along for 85% of Americans. And the 15% who are polarized were always polarized. Moreover, this disaffection might only be political in a superficial way. Perhaps a parallel might be found in academia, where most professors are not political, and those who are political are mostly political in a “fantasy football” kind of way. In fact, it seems like the alienated people who get into conspiracy theories are the same kind of people who would have joined religious cults in the 1970s. The conspiracy theories today have a political varnish, but the essence of the conspiracy subculture is to pull away from the real world and political engagement into collective fantasy.
We blame social media for polarization. Indeed, social media deliberately amplifies engagement by feeding people news and information that triggers their anger. But it’s not certain that social media is the primary issue in the polarization of the electorate (or, at least, the polarization of a small segment of it). Blaming social media might be equivalent to the way that comic books were blamed for the crime wave of the 1950s (which still remains a mystery). Social media might have become a scapegoat the way outsiders are demonized in a small town, with a sense that “Everything was so beautiful and perfect until they moved in.” In reality, things were never so great and there have been ongoing changes throughout society that might have triggered polarization more than social media has (for example, the abandonment of the working class by both political parties).
First, if social media did not deliberately engage people politically, people might still use social media in such a way that this would happen anyway. For example, Twitter does not require people to identify themselves and this seems to promote hostility; on Facebook people do generally identify themselves and there is possibly more hostility.
Second, one must also look at the creeping changes in mainstream media. When Ted Turner first launched CNN, it was quite different from today’s CNN. CNN back then was truly international and cosmopolitan and professional, with international reporters like Peter Arnett reporting live from war zones. Today, CNN feels both domesticated and slick, like watching Good Morning America, and newscasters on CNN seem just as openly biased as Fox News. In fact, to what extent is the rise of Fox News a reaction to the changes at CNN?
Third, there was always polarization. The kind of older and rural men who watch Fox News always existed — but they used to listen to AM radio. The young people who used to listen to FM radio now watch late night talk shows (which back in Johnny Carson’s day was the domain of old men with insomnia). So, again, only the medium has changed. Moreover, unlike AM radio, everyone encounters Fox News and CNN — and so we are actually less stuck in isolated siloes. But this new visibility of political extremes in itself does not reflect an increase in polarization among most people. The mainstream media once had a formal, objective, and cold feel, but today the vibe is different. One could once see this kind of evolution in TV shows like “LA Law”. After years of popularity and critical recognition, they would chase their fading popularity by shedding the realism that once made them respectable in favor of outrageous stunts. Perhaps a CNN that once felt so bracing for viewers in the 1980s came to feel boring and so they jumped the shark.
The choice was made to not regulate the “new media” the way that the “old media” such as newspapers is regulated. The negative legacy of this might not be political polarization, but rather the cryptocurrency bubble. That is, the techno-utopianism that underpinned an unregulated social media merged with the speculative instincts that seemed to have been unleashed in the 1980s and the offspring of this joining was cryptocurrency. If the financial sector had gotten in on the crypto boom the way they had wanted to, the economy might be worse now than in 2009.
The lasting lesson of all of this might be the legitimacy and relevance of TRADITION. The centuries of legal tradition that had evolved around regulating public speech in the English-speaking world was therefore largely ignored with the rise of social media. There never was a “new media” that had a radically different nature from newspapers and radio and television. Moreover, perhaps the same is true of the “new economy”. Like the deinstitutionalization of mentally ill people onto the streets in the 1970s, the 1990s attitudes towards new technology were a reaction to repression in communist states. It was left-wing techno-utopian anarchists (some of them teenagers) who urged that the “new media” should be a realm of pure, unrestricted freedom because, they felt, “all information must be liberated”. That assault on privacy and liberty was quickly adopted by the new mega-corporations whose core business became trading in everyone’s personal information.
In sum, much has been written about how social media has intensified a toxic political culture — but upon reflection there is rarely any empirical proof provided in relevant discussions of social media. There seem to be polarizing influences in the mainstream media that did not exist before that few have noticed. Social media might be a target of criticism because of its relative newness, the way that Walmart and MicroSoft were once lamented as “monopolies” that dominated our lives because they were new and suddenly ubiquitous. Nevertheless, the criticism that popular romanticism blinded policy on public speech in the early days of social media is valid but its malignant influence lies in areas outside of politics.
An analogy to the decontextualized criticism of social media might be found in the debate on gun control. The connection between gun violence and the availability of guns is unmistakable.
.https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/2/16399418/america-mass-shooting-gun-violence-statistics-charts
Another issue is the types of guns that Americans are drawn to. In Europe, police officers can be seen carrying relatively small .32 revolvers, and the breach-loading shotgun is the typical rifle owned by civilians. In the USA, Americans buy the guns that cops use — and the American police use military-grade weapons, in particular, the NATO standard 9 mm semi-automatic pistol and the AR-15 rifle. But the guns that Americans buy keep getting more powerful because the narcotics that Americans get high on keep getting more powerful — and small calibers will simply not have enough stopping power. When police encountered enough violent people high on PCP (angle dust), there was a shift to using mace or putting suspects in choke holds; but people who have been hit with chemicals or choked out are put in a sitting position (in a police car) with their hands behind their backs (handcuffed), it turns out that they can go into cardiac arrest. There was then another policy shift toward using solid steel batons to subdue people who don’t listen or seem irrational and who might be on drugs — although this also describes many mentally ills people. (Also, there are now more women police officers, and they are not going to choke or beat anyone because they are too small, so there is more emphasis on using guns.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_It_Fall:_Los_Angeles_1982%E2%80%931992
Europeans like the French are old-fashioned alcoholics, and Americans are drug addicts. In the future, there will be narcotics more powerful than anything anyone can conceive, and American police and civilians will respond rationally with greater firepower — with harsh side-effects on American society.
(“Dr. No”, 1962, James Bond reluctantly upgrades from a .25 to a .32)
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(“The Irishman”, 2019, The cops call a .32 a woman’s gun)
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(“Traffik”, 1989, speech about new drugs in penultimate scene)
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(“Let It Fall”, 2017, trailer)
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Just as we need to contextualize the way that social media stimulates political polarization, we need to contextualize fraud in the tech industry.
Recently, there seems to have been a sudden reversal in the public perception of tech leaders who have been found to be engaged in fraud.
They were once perceived as visionaries but now they are seen as sociopaths.
The argument here is that they might be better understood as overconfident, over-educated fools who are engaged in the same kind of speculation that has seized the entire culture.
A contrast might be made with the financier Bernie Madoff, who turned his firm into a total pyramid scheme.
Investment firms invest in each other — but none of them invested in Madoff because the growth of his profits was too impressive and divorced from the fluctuations of the stock market.
They knew that something was wrong, but they could not conceive that Madoff was engaged in an outright Ponzi scheme.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Madoff
In 1999, financial analyst Harry Markopolos had informed the SEC that he believed it was legally and mathematically impossible to achieve the gains Madoff claimed to deliver. According to Markopolos, it took him four minutes to conclude that Madoff’s numbers did not add up, and another minute to suspect they were fraudulent.[86]
After four hours of failed attempts to replicate Madoff’s numbers, Markopolos believed he had mathematically proven Madoff was a fraud.[87] He was ignored by the SEC’s Boston office in 2000 and 2001, as well as by Meaghan Cheung at the SEC’s New York office in 2005 and 2007 when he presented further evidence. He has since co-authored a book with Gaytri D. Kachroo, the leader of his legal team, titled No One Would Listen. The book details the frustrating efforts he and his legal team made over a ten-year period to alert the government, the industry, and the press about Madoff’s fraud.[86]
Although Madoff’s wealth management business ultimately grew into a multibillion-dollar operation, none of the major derivatives firms traded with him because they did not believe his numbers were real. None of the major Wall Street firms invested with him, and several high-ranking executives at those firms suspected his operations and claims were not legitimate.[87] Others contended it was inconceivable that the growing volume of Madoff’s accounts could be competently and legitimately serviced by his documented accounting/auditing firm, a three-person firm with only one active accountant.
When Madoff was finally arrested, he just laughed and asked “What took you so long?”
Madoff’s flippancy at being caught was interpreted as proof of his sociopathy.
Yet as former chairman of NASDAQ, Madoff was always highly respected within financial circles, and there is no classic pattern of sociopathic behavior in his early life.
In fact, when Madoff was initially investigated five years prior to his eventual arrest, he was dismayed that the most basic review of his finances was never made.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Madoff
I was astonished. They never even looked at my stock records. If investigators had checked with The Depository Trust Company, a central securities depository, it would’ve been easy for them to see. If you’re looking at a Ponzi scheme, it’s the first thing you do.
It was the high regard in which he was held that enabled him to scam so many smart people.
Madoff was held in high esteem because so much of his earlier career had been scrupulous.
Madoff targeted wealthy American Jewish communities, using his in-group status to obtain investments from Jewish individuals and institutions. Affected Jewish charitable organizations considered victims of this affinity fraud include Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, the Elie Wiesel Foundation and Steven Spielberg‘s Wunderkinder Foundation. Jewish federations and hospitals lost millions of dollars, forcing some organizations to close. The Lappin Foundation, for instance, was forced to close temporarily because it had invested its funds with Madoff.
Madoff got his start in penny stocks, and there is the possibility that he engaged in fraud in order to survive and then found that this made him extremely successful.
Of course, he would have know that he would have eventually been caught, but turning himself in would have been suicidal in his mind.
The cases of traders who lost billions of dollars and covered it up and destroyed their firms is instructive.
After making one bad bet, they tried to cover their losses by hiding it and making bigger and more reckless bets which simply snowballed their losses.
In later interviews, they described getting caught as a huge relief after all their lies and hiding and anxiety.
Madoff might have been different in that he owned the firm and everybody admired him — and so the scam just kept on rolling along.
Of course he would have laughed at getting caught because he had expected to get caught decades ago.
The difference between Madoff and would-be tech leaders who go to prison for fraud is that they don’t perceive their fraud as fraud.
The business culture that they are immersed in involves a “fake it ’til you make it” mentality.
That is, certain tech leaders have a business plan that they see as visionary but they know does not yet function — but they feel that it will in the future.
For example, after getting fired from Apple in the 1980s, Steve Jobs went into building a $10,000 computer for the educational market; when that failed, he focused on developing the software of that computer as a product that Apple would buy — and which would serve as a Trojan horse for him to get back into the leadership at Apple.
It might be tempting for young tech entrepreneurs to extrapolate from such a lesson and feel that although they have a product that turns out to be bogus, something great will come of it.
That might be the kind of thinking that Elon Musk is engaged in after his impulsive purchase of Twitter.
Musk seems to have brainstormed that Twitter could be turned into a payment app — and then might have pivoted again to the idea of using Twitter to build a conservative media empire (which steals the spotlight from both Fox News and Donald Trump).
This mentality of being able to radically change plans is said to characterize the software industry from which Musk originates.
This is the source of much humor in HBO’s “Silicon Valley”, in which a company building a product (like a compression program) suddenly switches to developing a totally different product (like a server).
But this mix of superficial public image, inner emptiness, and exuberant confidence in a glorious future seems to pervade American culture in general.
Once upon a time, students went to college and majored in accounting and pharmacy in order to make a life for themselves in their trade.
Today, high school students spend their free time building their own personal brand — although they have no real product to sell.
This is because they assume that in the future they will have something worth selling.
That there are graduates of Stanford and MIT engaging in outrageous fraud doesn’t mean they know that they are doing so because that’s become central to the culture.
Just as we need to contextualize the way that social media stimulates political polarization, we need to contextualize fraud in the tech industry.
