you can’t win arguments made in bad faith, because they’re don’t care about being right or wrong — they only care about you losing. by no-platforming i always thought: starve their propaganda of attention, focus on your own positive arguments cc @interfluidity.com
i guess the claim, which i think is mostly accurate, is that no one has any capability of starving others' arguments of attention — or if anyone does, it's the fascists now. 1/
there's still the asymmetry that their claims are purely instrumental, they face no truth constraints, seek only propaganda effectiveness, will happily flood the zone with shit. it's still true that debating with a Gish Gallop is mostly counterproductive. 2/
but gatekeeping won't work, and they no longer require "us" to help bring their propaganda attention. the President of the United States is megaphone enough. 3/
it's not a happy story. it's a story of we'd-better-figure-something-out, because right now the so-called marketplace of ideas is about as competitive as, say, the search market. civilized ideas are basically duck-duck-go. /fin
to circle back and chew thru this, eh idk. i feel like on a micro level daily i bear witness to scores of people wasting time engaging with what are clearly specious arguments, a pantomime of bullshit, time that would be better spent advancing better ideas
no argument that lots of time is wasted on social media, including arguing or "debating" assholes who cannot be persuade and communicate in bad faith!
no platforming is very effective but it’s only ever applied to ideas that threaten the status quo. dunno what’s actionable in there beyond “most punditry & policy debate is bullshit”
to the degree it is effective, yes, the people who own the platforms will be most effective at it. which gets us back to @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com's original point, some progressive version of "we" imagined that we governed, controlled in some sense, the platforms so it could work… 1/
but it turns out that fascist plutocrats do, and the old "free speech" story that people at the bottom of social hierarchies are most vulnerable to gatekeeping do hold some water after all. /fin
i suppose the fantasy was that ppl who spent a lot of time defending liberal ideology would not immediately crumple the second their self interests were threatened even a little
right. there was this neoliberal intuition that corporations could be forces for good. they are managed and dominated by educated professionals! Marx i think has been vindicated a bit. as power shifted, the same corporations that boycotted North Carolina now build their new data centers in Texas. 1/
recently i was worried i was going to appear on a panel with some transphobes, and a friend cautioned me against it because "i shouldn't give those ideas legitimacy". i should just resign my slot instead. but the thing is i don't think they need me to give them legitimacy at this point!
like they are *out there* already, filling the airwaves, selling their ideas to whoever will listen. not showing up, on my part, wouldn't be denying them airtime--it would be denying *myself* airtime. this is what i mean about how we do in fact have to slug it out in the court of public opinon
i'm also frustrated with the tactic of "it's not my job to explain that to you." sure, sealioning is annoying... but if i am out here supporting X, arguing for X, then yes it very much is my job to explain X to you. not least because if i don't, the reactionaries are *eager* to explain Y instead!
The status quo can't be deplatformed because being the status quo is the biggest platform there is. Like, deplatform heterosexual marriage. Debating them is a dishonest waste of time but we have to engage with what's happening.
in the abstract, but what do we think about Fox News in airports? (and I’m thinking as much about the stories they suppress as the content they air)