when I saw the potential of the Internet, I thought it would be solved. The web would allow us to come together, not just across the world, but across the park, across racial lines, across our many divides... everything turned upside down. The open communication network we thought we were building turned into a hunting ground for trolls and spamme…

Shitposters, who are bound by nothing, set a rhetorical trap for their enemies, who tend to be bound by having an actual point. Attempts to analyze what shitposters are doing... reinforces their project by amplifying their signal... hitposters resemble the disengaged ironists ... Søren Kierkegaard discussed ... Stories ... are not descriptive of …

A work in progress from an upcoming eponymous post. Another experiment with the enewsletter format: some initial thoughts on this seemingly intractable problem, with some of the source materials I’m studying.

Echo chambers aren’t just a product of the internet and social media, however, but of how those things interact with fundamental features of human nature... Understand these features of human nature and maybe we can think creatively about ways to escape them... our tendency to associate with people like us. Sociologists call this homophily.... t…

the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end... many good effects... But the fixation on diversity ... produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life.

How to make sense of Donald Trump’s election? Here are some articles which helped me. Maybe they’ll help you.

voters feel let down by the BBC’s coverage being hampered by impartiality rules... we are entering, as the Americans seem to have entered, an era of identity politics where the politicians, the campaigners, are seeking by a process of nods and winks to let you know: ‘Hey, this is where you belong. Your people are here.’”

To approach someone else convincingly you must do so with open arms and head held high, and your arms can’t be open unless your head is high... the mastery of such intelligent, kind-hearted, and considered disagreement emerges as a supreme art of living And yet there are instances in which it is unsound to engage with another whose values are so …

a lot of media sources you don’t recognize ... a new and distinctive sort of operation ... political news and advocacy pages made specifically for Facebook... engineered to reach audiences exclusively in the news feed... Occupy Democrats; The Angry Patriot; US Chronicle... together make up 2016’s most disruptive, and least understood, force in med…

a research paper ... found depressing proof that the web is fuelling segregation.... matched the attitudes of those who did and did not have broadband with data on partisan hostility... Greater use of the web ensured that an admirer of Jon Stewart would think that conservatives were not just mistaken but stupid, or a viewer of Fox News would wor…

Brexit, as experienced by a British-Australian comms guy in Brussels.

it's fair to question whether the average Brexit supporter is grounded in reality.... This mass separation from reality also represents a parallel to what is going on with our strange, sad election in the United States... Trump... has ridden a wave of distaste for the more buttoned-up masters of the universe... the leave campaign has painted the…

The job of politics... finding common cause with people who aren’t like you. But current incentives seem to point in the opposite direction... I blame the internet ... You can’t take on inequality and injustice with a coalition of people who use the same slang, listen to the same music, and post the same emojis that you do.You have to be willing t…

In which I studiously avoid curating anything about 2016 or David Bowie.

what many of these movements’ followers share is the desire not just to disagree with their opponents, but to delegitimize, dehumanize, and ostracize those with whom they disagree... It is not their policies that these new populists share, but their emphasis on a new kind of identity politics... What would previously have been isolated cases o…