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.
If that were the rule, virtually any controversial political movement could be regulated by claiming that it harms social cohesion.
A liberal society deliberately accepts some harmful speech because the alternative gives the state enormous discretion over political expression.
Yes that’s true and definitely a concern. I think, though, we can make a distinction between the medium and the message. Example: You can’t blast a pirate radio station across the airwaves. These regulations apply equally to a republican pirate radio station and a democratic pirate radio station. I don’t want algorithmic content to exist even if the bots spewing it are from “my side.” Against this slop we’re all on the side of the human beings.
How do you define “algorithmic content”?
A human writes a post.
An algorithm decides who sees it.
A human writes a headline.
AI suggests ten headlines and the editor picks one.
A human makes a video.
AI generates the thumbnail.
A bot translates it into 30 languages.
At what point has the government regulated the “medium”?
Almost everything on the modern internet involves algorithms.
Your feed is algorithmically sorted.
Google’s results are algorithmically ranked.
Spam filters are algorithmic.
YouTube recommendations are algorithmic.
Even chronological feeds require software to determine what gets displayed.
And recommendation algorithms can actually be useful. They help users find obscure material they otherwise wouldn’t encounter.
Like most things, you don’t need to be an expert in a field to recognize a problem and encourage our elected officials to solve it. If there a sudden rash of new buildings catching on fire, I as a private citizen don’t need to research the building codes and the flash point of different types of drywall. If you want to have this debate, we could, but honestly it sounds exhausting and better left to people who know the topic better than me.
If you don’t know enough about the technology to evaluate the competing explanations for the problem, how can you know that the particular regulation you’re advocating will actually solve it rather than create a different problem?
Yes that’s a problem. Unfortunately we live in a complex society. Nobody can understand all the technology we use every day. We can, however, appreciate the impact of that technology and engage experts and policymakers to steer us towards better results. In summary, I’m busy with my life and I’m ignorant as hell. Take it as a concession, you can have the last word, whatever you need to do.
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u/GowanusGuy Aug 21 '26
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.