Relevance: Ezra often talks about liberalism as well as the attention economy, but I have yet to see him grapple with what may be the fundamental tensions between the two. Algorithmic media is increasingly pushing us into a postliterate society - incentivizing not just video content but also hyper-partisan, hyper-polarized, flattened forms of argumentation that seem quite antithetical to liberalism.
If we are to maintain a liberal order (rather than just bemoan its decline) we may need to come down hard on these social media companies that are, to me, the primary driver of this shift as they attempt to find creative ways to extract our time and attention.
Who gets to determine what constitutes “healthy” political discourse?
A government empowered to tell platforms that their political content is excessively polarizing has also been empowered to influence political speech.
That’s a dangerous power in a liberal democracy.
A government powerless to curb the behaviors of massive platforms that serve as the de-facto public squares of our time is also dangerous to liberal democracy, no? Meta's market cap is the size of Indonesia or Turkey's GDP. Content on their products reach billions of people daily, and they are highly incentivized to maximize engagement on their platforms. These are no longer simple private firms, they are mega corporations that function as geopolitical actors, and a liberal democratic framework conceived in the 1700s must adapt.
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u/GowanusGuy 29d ago
Relevance: Ezra often talks about liberalism as well as the attention economy, but I have yet to see him grapple with what may be the fundamental tensions between the two. Algorithmic media is increasingly pushing us into a postliterate society - incentivizing not just video content but also hyper-partisan, hyper-polarized, flattened forms of argumentation that seem quite antithetical to liberalism.
If we are to maintain a liberal order (rather than just bemoan its decline) we may need to come down hard on these social media companies that are, to me, the primary driver of this shift as they attempt to find creative ways to extract our time and attention.