Hyperpartisanship is a phenomenon we can see in societies far predating the invention of movable type, and it has had a class trigger (the Gracchi revolts in Rome), a religious trigger (Arian/Orthodox in late antiquity -Iconoclasm/Iconophile in Byzantium), a sports trigger (the Blue/Green civil riots in Constantinople) or traditionally an intra-elite trigger (Guelf/Ghibbeline or White/Black Guelf in medieval italy.) Niall Ferguson is not a rigorous historian and, like Malcolm Gladwell, should be considered an entertainer not a thinker.
Communication friction, price and latency, has always shaped the structure and reach of our communities. Historically, friction that meant most people primarily interacted with "nearby" humans with differing perspectives... moderating new ideas through socialization.
What's changed is that social media, and the internet at large, has finally brought the cost of global peer-to-peer communication to (effectively) zero. That's huge! Our tribal boundaries are now fully decoupled from distance. We can define our community with complete freedom and precision while our phones grant near ubiquitous access to those we have selected.
On one hand, I know this revolution helped some LGBT friends find themselves and stay strong growing up in "traditional" communities... but the same tools also enable bigotry and conspiracies to fester in our backyards.
Hyperpartisanship is not new, but the degree of tribalization enabled by the internet feels new. Differences are being reinforced along every axis of opinion, with a much weaker socialization factor. It's not just team A vs B... the various groups of A are fighting themselves, all the variations of B through Z, and hordes of bots. It's an unending unwavering battle royale.
How do we compromise or reach consensus in a system like that? How can we turn this diverse melting pot into progress, mass adoption and acceptance of new ideas? And how, if at all, can we self-regulate things like bigotry without oppressing progress?
Niall wanted some way to cash out on his vast knowledge about history, and decided to go after the current hype, facebook. He's not actually worried, he's just following the current public anxiety, and gets to promote his book in the process (nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it's not real fear, and it creates a fear bubble). I'm just making this up, but that's what it feels like based on listening to his interviews (and by reading his most recent book, which feels super rushed and/or like not a lot of love went into it).
That’s exactly how I felt about a previous book of his, The Ascent of Money, which was released at the height of the financial crisis in 2008 and then rushed into production as a TV documentary. One review accurately called it “rushed and uneven”. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ascent_of_Money)
We talk about "internet witch hunts", but I hadn't really considered that it might be useful to compare the situation with actual historical witch trials:
Ferguson said that the phenomenon of polarization was predictable, when one considers similar historical events.
To understand our time, he said, you must go back 500 years to the early 16th century, when the printing press became widely available. It allowed a greater volume of content to be produced and disseminated with a lower cost of communication.
The Mark Zuckerberg figure of that time was Martin Luther, the leader of the Reformation. Luther’s axiom, he said, was that if you could read the Bible and have a direct relationship with God, everything would be awesome. But what ensued was 130 years of conflict due to polarization. Half of the population wanted to reform the church, the other half didn’t, he said.
The most insidious manifestation of this polarization was in the persecution of those considered to be witches. The “witchcraft mania,” Ferguson said, was not just in Salem, Massachusetts; it swept across Europe.
Today we see a similar manifestation in the context of fake news that spreads faster than true news, which undermines our confidence in the media.
As an aside, in the unlikely event that you are passing through the small Arctic town of Vardø, Norway, there's a stunningly understated monument to the "witches" killed there in the 17th century. The main museum is a long raised hallway, with dangling light bulbs illuminating excerpts from the court records of each person that was executed. It's in historical order, so one reads of one person who accuses another of witchcraft leading to their execution, who then in turn is denounced and executed, who then in turn is denounced and executed, layer after layer after layer. It's really quite a chilling museum, and a testament to a legal process gone awry: https://www.iconeye.com/architecture/features/item/9674-pete...
Today we see a similar manifestation in the context of fake news that spreads faster than true news, which undermines our confidence in the media.
Has it really? I would think the editorial quality of any publication has not noticeably diminished over the last three years.
Has most of the "undermining of confidence in the media" been really been a manifestation to dislike publications that one already despised, such that there is now just more people openly stating it and that now more people are agreeing with it?
At the same time, I am interested if there have been any studies performed that compared the populations perceptions of particular publication's accuracy / quality over time compared to an unbiased organization independently (if one such exists) assessing the quality of the reporting over time.
Worth noting the book “The Great Illusion” by Norman Angell published in 1909 in the years before WWI. The book is considered probably the best example of Europe’s delusions regarding the nature of peace and war before 1914.
One of Angell’s main ideas was that trade between countries rendered them so close, increasing familiarity and contact, that war would be extremely unlikely because of decreased nationalist sentiment. He believed that contact and connection reduces disagreement.
His book did not really account for the fact that increased connection and encounters simply give you many more things with which to disagree and possibly go to war over.
Charles Lindbergh years later took up this idea again, believing the airplane to be a utopian machine of unity between peoples and countries. He believed it so much he was helping the Nazis and the Luftwaffe well into 1938 without issue.
Finally I want to note I see a concerning amount of similarity between the utopianist rhetoric that came from physicists and aircraft engineers in the 1920’s and those of software engineers today, and I think this is worth considering. Those inventions, while incredible, played a key role in one of the most brutal wars of all time.
It's refreshing to see social networks put into a historical context of human behavior. Sites that I otherwise respect routinely run columns on social media where I can't tell if the author is completely ignorant of history or if they're blithely ignoring it.
> Luther’s axiom, he said, was that if you could read the Bible and have a direct relationship with God, everything would be awesome. But what ensued was 130 years of conflict due to polarization. Half of the population wanted to reform the church, the other half didn’t, he said.
It's hard to say that this is bad. Before Luther, there was one system, like it or not. With/after Luther, some people undertook to reform the system. You can argue one side was better than the other but the fact is that under the first system one set of power brokers ran everything. After, there was at least some diversity.
