We all live in history. A lot of the problems that face us, and the opportunities that present themselves, are defined not by our own choices or even the specific place or government we’re living under, but by the particular epoch of human events that our lives happen to coincide with.
The Industrial Revolution, for example, presented opportunities for certain kinds of business success – it made some people very rich while others were exploited. If you’d known that was the name of your era, it would have given you a clue about what kinds of events to prepare for. So I’m suggesting a name for the era we’re living through: the Information Crisis.
It’s not a single moment; it’s an epoch – we’re in the middle of it already and it is going to continue for the rest of our lives. And I’d argue that this is the third great information crisis human beings have gone through: following the invention of writing and the Gutenberg printing press, we are now witnessing a crisis caused by digital communications technology. These prolonged crises aren’t just neutral technological improvements; they change us psychologically and socially in profound ways that cannot be reversed.
I mean the point when the desire to just win an argument turns you into someone who goes against all your other values.
Ok, why does this article act like internet discussion is uniquely vulnerable to this?
Here’s a rule I have developed for myself: never talk about a culture-war topic with anyone who only wants to talk to you about that topic. These conversations can only be helpful if they happen as part of a relationship. If you’re going in cold on a very hard topic, you will not be able to experience each other as people, only as opinions or symbols.
-_-
So never talk about difficult things with strangers in the context of debate?
There are good parts to this article, but it about sums it up to me that this person talks about Bluesky and never, ever asks if there is an inherent problem here with the capitalist architecture of social media contributing to the problem or mentions the Fediverse/Mastodon.
I think the following is incontestable: the only way to get rid of all opinions that are different from yours is by carrying out unthinkable human rights atrocities. (And this doesn’t actually work: there are still, in fact, both Catholics and Protestants.)
We can already see how this type of thing becomes more common during an information crisis because we’re now in another one. We’re overloaded and overwhelmed by information. We don’t have the social and informational structures in place yet to manage it. My suggestion is that this enormous information wave makes us anxious and angry.
Is it really the new information age that drove the Palestinian Genocide or is the Palestinian Genocide happening despite the information age trying desperately to stop it?
The article begins with a history of communication and condemnation over differing values, so the author definitely doesn’t say this only applies to the internet. The article just happens to be about the internet.
She doesn’t say to never debate with strangers, either. That whole section was the bookend to her starting primer on violence over ideological differences, the point was that people are more than just a single comment on the internet.
She only mentions bluesky once. The article brings up, multiple times, the underlying motivators keeping people angry and engaged.
One example:
So, which institutions are we being tempted to condemn root-and-branch because of some mistakes and abuses? What large, trying-to-be-helpful-but-sometimes-failing associations would various rulers like to break up and destroy because they represent alternative sources of authority to their own narrative, and also there’s money to be made?
I don’t even know where to start with the Palestinian genocide thing. Where did that come from? This is more about individual experience with the internet.