This is an annotated Twitter thread I had posted a little while ago, itself prompted by an excellent thread by Erik Torenberg.
This is my thread, with the same text and commentary right below:
1/ In his thread Erik says (among other things) that multiple parallel hyper-realistic online worlds made possible by Twitter gives demagogues attention leverage never possible in the 20th c. They can perpetuate their existence creating online simulacra of majority-oppression without having to deliver on chaos. But…
Small decentralised foreign teams can manipulate opinion en masse, as the 2016 American national election proved. We’d have imagined this would be done through damage to communications infrastructure, but these teams sabotaged, not wrecked, the tools people use everyday. Or more traditionally, certain events would have been made to happen, benefiting one or the other political side. Instead, these teams constantly magnified and spun multiple small events to create an alternative reality. It make it easy for those who wanted to believe to believe. Taking to its extreme, many people online now perennially consume outrage porn. Warfare has changed and we don’t know it yet.
2/ … I think the ability to create an alternative reality and subculture is also freeing, empowering in a way. Any shared national narrative of the past was foisted upon people by whatever small set controlled TV and print media.
I remember reading a couple of years an article on how decadal cultures like “the 80s” and “the 90s” don’t exist for the 2000s and 2010s as each of us has plugged into our own online cultures. Since online cultures evolve faster than mass media ones, generations form faster too. Consider the Xennials, a ‘micro-generation’ that I fall squarely in the middle of, who identify with neither of the successive generations labelled GenX and Millennial.
(Part 2)