Social instability and destructive media

Ezra Klein’s Feb. 25  New York Times interview with Martin Gurri is a fascinating and troubling hour-long ramble through the wreckage of McLuhanism and aging concepts about chaotic information systems.

The highlight is a temporal excursion into the Thirty Years War and the role of the printing press. The low point is a defense of right-wing free speech absolutism that should have been better informed.

Gurri’s book,  “The Revolt of the Public,” argues that the new abundance of unfiltered, non-hierarchical information creates a fractured media system that is fundamentally unstable.  “It knows how to destroy but not how to build,” as Klein says.

This is not a new idea. Jay Bolter’s 2018 book,  The Digital Plenitude, made the same argument about the instability inherent in the erosion of authoritative information. So did Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s, although McLuhan approached it from the other side, more or less cheering the erosion of straight-jacketed cultural institutions.

What’s different about Gurri’s book is that he connects this information instability to the rise of authoritarianism in the US with the re-election of Donald Trump.  And he has this to say about the role of revolutionary media using a time machine metaphor : 

Suppose you take a time machine and go to the Thirty Years’ War (which, in terms of) percentage of the population,  (was) the bloodiest war that was ever fought in Europe. People were being slaughtered. And suppose you went there and you asked the man on the street, “What do you think of the printing press?” And the man on the street would say, “It’s the most horrific conflict-inducing thing that has ever been invented. Look, over there, there’s this little church, and over there, there’s another little church. And they’re coming out with their printed books, and the printed books have almost exactly the same words. But, like, eight words are different. And they have to kill each other over that. If we didn’t have a printing press, we’d be safe, right?” Well, today we know that the printing press was the most liberating invention that ever happened in the human race. We had to get past that. And let’s be thankful — building on the metaphor — we’re not at a Thirty Years’ War level here. We’re not anywhere near that.  So I think we will get past that.   

Gurri credits Antonio Garcia Martinez, author of Chaos Monkeys, for the Thirty Years War metaphor.  And he has faith that society will mature, which is the Arthur Koestler argument about technologies setting back social maturity until they adjust.

Then, the unexpected hard right turn. Liberals, Gurri says, are the censors. Never mind that Elon Musk has tagged “cis” or “cisgender” on X as hate speech, or that Trump administration is placing heavy controls over what agencies can say.  Biden’s clumsy attempts to influence public health information is the real culprit. Ezra Klein responds: Isn’t this just a matter of being in power? Why would liberals be the censors?

Because, Gurri says, they have adopted the European model of censorship, while  Trump gets it. “This is what we fought for in the ’60s, was to be able to say whatever we wanted to and to expand that to whatever the limit is that doesn’t break down social peace. So that was my No. 1 thing.”

The main problem with this idea — and there are quite a few — is that the freedom to amplify hate for profit is the freedom that leads to social chaos and, potentially, genocide.  This kind of freedom  is rather like the drunk uncle whose free speech absolutism lets him tell everyone “the truth” about their pathetic lives over Christmas dinner. Perhaps that is too charitable.  More to the point: Hate for profit can become the bunker fuel of genocide.

One haunting observation from a survivor of the Rwanda massacres, Henriette Mutegwaraba,  helps put these new media forces in focus. In 2023, a United Nations interviewer asked: If the digital age existed in 1994 in Rwanda, would the genocide have been worse? She said:

If there was Facebook, Tik Tok, and Instagram, it would have been much worse. The bad people always go to youth, whose minds are easy to corrupt. Who is on social media now? Most of the time, young people. During the [Rwanda] genocide, a lot of young people joined the militia and participated, with a passion. They sang those anti-Tutsi songs, went into homes, and took what we had … A message that used to take years to spread can now be put out there, and in one second, everybody in the world can see it. I hope this will never happen again to anybody in the world. I hope the UN can come up with a way to respond quickly to atrocities.

But what is the alternative to the American model of the marketplace of ideas and the First Amendment?  In the absence of authoritative media filters, and  now also with the abdication of any social media fact-checking or moderation by Meta and Twitter/X , where do we find a moral compass?

Part of the answer involves human dignity and justice ethics.  Harrison Rosenthal of the University of Kansas notes:

“An ideological chasm is emerging between new First Amendment theorists and their scholarly forbearers on the philosophical justifications for hate speech protection. The new guard … is balancing the equities of First Amendment  libertarianism against Fourteenth Amendment equal protection—or what the international community calls human dignity. For socio-historical reasons rooted in armed conflict, Americans tend to embrace individualism, while Europeans tend to embrace collectivism.

The problem is not simply a modern abundance of cheap communication. In the past,  anyone with a mimeograph could take a message to the streets, as the Prague communists found to their chagrin in 1989.

The problem is the way cheap communication undermines authority or, to look at the flip side, increases social immaturity to the point that it is easy to believe absurdities and, as a consequence, commit atrocities.

When kindergarteners go bowling, the guardrails go up on the sides of the lane – Otherwise the ball always ends up in the gutter. Similarly, when an immature society grapples with a new media technology, guardrails may be needed.

You may claim that Europe is engaged in censorship, but if human dignity law can minimize social hatred between ethnic groups and does not stop political criticism of the governments, it’s clearly a far cry from the situation in Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia today.  And it beats a repeat of the Thirty Years War.