In Praise of the Ratio

I'm not particularly interested in the specifics of the grime artist Wiley's antisemitic remarks, though I would note that it appears to have arisen out of a beef with his Jewish manager, so the best background reading might be James Baldwin's 1967 essay, 'Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White', which explains the material factors at work, rather than anything printed of late in The Voice or The Jewish Chronicle. What stood out was the way that a viral online campaign, #NoSafeSpaceForJewHate, saw people who have whined about "cancel culture" in the past clamouring for Wiley's cancellation by Twitter. As the hashtag indicates, this is not simply about "Jew hate" but more significantly the refusal of a "safe space". That was evident by the number of career cyberbullies, mostly emanating from the political right and centre, who loudly participated in a 48-hour boycott of the platform. While many of their erstwhile targets (i.e. the left) celebrated the sudden arrival of peace and tranquility in their timelines (it didn't make that much difference, if we're honest), some felt obliged to join the boycott.

The point here is not the routine hypocrisy or the willingness of some on the left to fall in line with the civility police to demand better gatekeeping, but the obsession with Twitter. The microblogging site is not big in social media terms, with around 330 million users compared to Facebook's 2.5 billion and Instagram's 1 billion, but it enjoys a disproportionately high profile in public discourse. This is both because it is popular with people who work in both old and new media and, not unrelatedly, because its ability to generate controversial content makes it a prime source for recycling by that old media. Facebook may be regarded as more sinister in its manipulative ambitions to know everything about you, but Twitter is a more reliable target for scorn because it is seen to encourage incivility through anonymity. The latter is offensive to media gatekeepers not so much because of their over-developed respect for bylines but because they fear that ordinary users are "getting away with it" - i.e. not facing the consequences in terms of public opprobrium and shame by which those gatekeepers normally manage the discourse.

Twitter's USP is the Speakers' Corner principle: that any idiot can stand on a box and harangue the crowd but also that any number of idiots can answer back. It doesn't have the gated communities of Facebook or the competitive rating of Reddit, though those facilities do exist. Its attraction is precisely that it most closely matches the public square: a free-for-all in which originality and wit are rewarded by dissemination but where most of the activity is criticism. That might seem over-generous for what is often just tutting, abuse or incoherent ranting, but this is to misunderstand the value of raillery and loud dissent. What I'm thinking of here is not the formal public sphere (Öffentlichkeit) of Jurgen Habermas, though I do think his analysis of its history, and specifically the way that it has been eroded by commercial mass media and representative democracy is relevant, but the more informal public sphere: the pub and the football terrace more than the coffeehouse and the debating society.

We are all familiar with the ways that access to public speech is controlled, with the consequence that we all have a strong sense of "their" discourse and its instrumental rationality, as distinct from the practical rationality of everyday discourse, or the "lifeworld" as Habermas would put it. Central to this control is the expectations of class and social capital, but we also know how fluid these are in reality: how one can impersonate (or be mistaken for) another "type" through language and cultural reference. This isn't misrepresentation but evidence of the inadequacy of the narrow definitions and stereotypes manipulated by the dominant discourse: the reactionary Muslim, the resentful ex-miner, the woke millenial etc. The nature of Twitter, and in particular its anonymity, is ideally suited to this chameleon-ism. Blue-ticks rigorously staying on-brand is a marginal pursuit. The great bulk of activity on the platform is ordinary people being both ordinary and extraordinary, as the whim takes them.

But if this were merely people showing off, or curating fictitious characters, they wouldn't be on Twitter. They'd be on Instagram or LinkedIn (and to be fair, many of them are, but that just means they're compartmentalising). What they are doing on Twitter isn't broadcasting or even narrowcasting (again, the Direct Message facility is marginal), but acting as that Speakers' Corner crowd: laughing at the pretensions of the high-and-mighty, calling-out hypocrisy (as they see it), showing support for the favoured, ridiculing the disfavoured. Where Twitter was once praised as the medium of democratic revolution, the "voice of the square" in authoritarian regimes like Egypt, it is now more likely to be associated with the word "mob". This shift has been given some academic respectability by concerns over the mechanics of social media, though a lot of this later critique is of the pop-sociology type promoted by the liberal media that conveniently dovetails with its meta-narrative about populism.

For example, Will Davies has written in the London Review of Books on the Schmittian roots of the 'like' button: "In place of elections, representatives and parliaments, all talk and gutless indecision, Schmitt appealed to the one kind of expression that people can make for themselves: acclamation. The public should not be expected to deliberate or exercise power in the manner that liberals hoped. But they can nevertheless be consulted, as long as the options are limited to ‘yea’ or ‘nay’". Davies is a more subtle thinker than this might imply, and his ultimate argument is against binary simplicity rather than social media per se, but there is a danger in promulgating this view that we lose sight of the sheer amount of critique that swamps the momentary acclamations of social media. What winds up the persistent critics of Twitter isn't the likes but the ratio: the hostile replies to nonsense and pretension. Speaking back isn't really what Carl Schmitt had in mind. 

Social media has refined and intensified the idea that we should pass binary judgements, but this isn't a novelty, as the history of plebiscites and the desire for a pure expression of popular will shows. Schmitt was criticising liberal democracy, both in its favouring deliberation over peremptory action and in its claim that the people can be effectively represented through debate and the search for consensus. The attraction of the plebiscite was not merely that it did away with all the "talk", but that it allowed a direct connection between the people and whoever can exercise power: the monarch, the dictator etc. As such, it is anti-democratic, rather than just anti-talk or anti-representation, as it presumes a political centre that is unconstrained by anything except the negative acclamation of the people, which is the historical reality of the pre-democratic era in which the people had only the one recourse in the face of an unreasonable government: revolt.

If the "mob" is one caricature of Twitter, the "wisdom of the crowd" is another, though in practice this dubious dynamic is limited to the crude signal of trending topics (and, as usual, the algorithms are obscure enough that we don't know how truly representative it is). Henry Farrell has a more positive view of social media in general and argumentation in particular that could be said to provide a rational basis for that wisdom: "We have a strong tendency to believe our own bullshit. The upside is that if we are far better at detecting bullshit in others than in ourselves, and if we have some minimal good faith commitment to making good criticisms, and entertaining good criticisms when we get them, we can harness our individual cognitive biases through appropriate group processes to produce socially beneficial ends. Our ability to see the motes in others’ eyes while ignoring the beams in our own can be put to good work, when we criticize others and force them to improve their arguments. There are strong benefits to collective institutions that underpin a cognitive division of labor".

In other words, you are making a useful contribution in the social media salt-mine simply by telling others that they have failed to consider different perspectives, even if that's not true or your own perspective is demonstrably wrong: "Your most truthful contributions to collective reasoning are unlikely to be your own individual arguments, but your useful criticisms of others’ rationales. Even more pungently, you are on average best able to contribute to collective understanding through your criticisms of those whose perspectives are most different to your own, and hence very likely those you most strongly disagree with. The very best thing that you may do in your life is create a speck of intense irritation for someone whose views you vigorously dispute, around which a pearl of new intelligence may then accrete." What this highlights is the importance of cognitive diversity, i.e. the breadth of the public sphere: "diversity of perspective is typically correlated with diversity of goals – someone who disagrees with how you see the world is also likely to want different things from it". This is a useful perspective for considering the certainty of various blue-ticks, for whom diverse opinion appears to be nothing short of an existential threat.

The critics of "cancel culture", like those of "safe spaces" a few years ago (often the same people, natch), claim that it threatens cognitive diversity, but it is clear that they are operating with a very narrow definition of "diverse" and similarly regard free speech as the right for those who have speech-power to be free of consequences, rather than as a moral imperative to equalise that speech-power and give voice to the marginalised. In practice, the war on the woke is a strawman that serves to further the marginalisation of the left. This endeavour has adopted the terminology and principles that the left have historically employed, from free speech to anti-racism, not simply as an adroit tactic but as a necessity. As Aaron Bastani fairly notes, "the compulsive vendetta being pursued against the left serv[es] a secondary purpose of not having to confront the fact that – for the first time in a century – the political forces of the status quo have no solutions to society’s intensifying crises". The danger is that Twitter, arguably the one social media platform that has played a positive role in expanding dialogic democracy and therefore helping address those crises, will become collateral damage of the establishment's intolerance of dissent.