Robert Wright's Nonzero (private feed for eveningglass@gmail.com)
Society & Culture:Philosophy
The relationship between bitter ideological adversaries is often highly non-zero-sum; their mutual contempt is win-win.
Jordan Peterson may snidely dismiss woke thought leaders, but where would he be without them? And vice versa? Both woke and anti-woke social media stars can only be such stars because they have each other to performatively dismiss. Nobody ever paid to see a professional wrestling match that featured only one wrestler.
I was reminded of this dynamic recently during a conversation with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat—not because he and I are bitter ideological adversaries, but because we were addressing the much discussed question of why political discourse now is so mean and polarizing. And something he said triggered a modest insight: One thing that distinguishes times of relatively productive and honest discourse from times of more polarizing and less honest discourse is the nature of the non-zero-sum relationship between ideological adversaries: What specific forms of contentious engagement between them are the most rewarding?
The conversation with Ross will go public in a couple of weeks, but it’s available to paid newsletter subscribers now, via video (below) or audio (above, and also in the NZN feed that’s available in podcast apps to paid subscribers). And below is a (cleaned up) transcript of the part of the conversation that triggered my modest epiphany.
The context of our conversation is the rebranding of the Bloggingheads YouTube channel as the Nonzero channel (and, correspondingly, of the Wright Show podcast feed as Robert Wright’s Nonzero podcast feed). I co-founded Bloggingheads.tv in late 2005 with Mickey Kaus and Greg Dingle, and Ross was one of our earliest guests, making his debut in the spring of 2006.
My rebranding festivities involve having a series of podcast conversations with early BhTV regulars (such as, so far, Matt Yglesias and David Corn), and these conversations naturally turn to differences between then and now. Then, as the name Bloggingheads suggests, was the golden age of blogging—or, at least, the age of blogging, which some of us remember as (relatively) golden.
It turns out that Ross, like me, does remember the age of blogging as relatively golden. I’ll pick up our conversation at the point where he discusses that:
Ross: I would say that Bloggingheads was sort of an extension of a media atmosphere that was much more, in a certain way, much more argumentative than the media atmosphere we’ve had for the last five years or so.
Bob: In the good sense of argument?
Ross: Mostly… I mean, some people would say in the bad. I would say in the good sense, because I like to argue… What that era had, I think, was a lot of contexts where people were sort of engaging at length with ideas that they really, really strongly disagreed with. And that was what blogging itself sort of lent itself to.
Like, to the extent there was an economics of blogging, it was driven by sort of attacking someone at length--quoting them at length and then attacking them at length--and getting them to attack you back, but sort of creating this cycle of argumentation that in theory drove your audience…
And certainly I think the dynamics of social media radically. changed that and created an environment where the incentives were for sort of clusters of agreement rather than—
Bob: And disagreement with what is often a caricature.
Ross: Oh yeah… on social media, you need the bad tweet, right?…
Bob: Like, the worst tweet of all the tweets generated by the other side.
Ross: Right. But, yeah, [in the heyday of blogging] there was a premium on, you know, giving the impression that you were taking the other person’s argument seriously. [But thereafter] that sort of diminished.
And [now] you have these zones outside of social media--both podcasting and to some extent, Substack--that in certain ways recreate some of the virtues of that world, right?
Like, podcasting is much more respectful than social media. Interestingly--this is something my colleague, Michelle Goldberg pointed out when we were podcasting together--you’re much less likely to get sort of canceled off something you say on a podcast… than something you say on Twitter, right?…
And then Substack is obviously a literal refuge for the canceled.
But neither of them—you know, the most successful podcasts are not argumentative; I think they’re sort of zones of mild disagreement…
….
Substack is like the blogosphere, but the financials of it mean that you are trying to build a community of the like-minded who will pay. So even there, there’s less premium on sort of sustained long form disagreement. I mean, it does exist, but it’s not like the blogosphere, where you are trying to draw traffic from your, you know, your enemies and critics basically. That’s not the Substack model.
Bob: No, and there are a lot of preaching to the choir podcasts. I mean, when you think of the most monetarily successful [podcasts]… you get like Chapo Trap House, you know, real preaching to the choir podcasts that don’t involve a lot of serious argument.
But it’s interesting--I don’t think we’re idealizing the golden age of blogging. There really was a moment there where there were ecosystems that were kind of trans-ideological, where people would routinely link to people of different persuasions.
You were part of—Actually, was your first blog at the Atlantic?—because that was a very systematized version of this.
[Long tangent on Ross’s early days as a blogger at the Atlantic, along with people like Matt Yglesias, Andrew Sullivan, Megan McArdle, and Ta-Nehisi Coates.]
Bob: In terms of golden ages of things, if I look back further, pre-internet, like late eighties, early nineties at The New Republic [where I was a staffer then] I would say the same thing: We had serious arguments. We seriously engaged arguments.
Mike [Kinsley, the editor of TNR] was particularly good about insisting that you confront the best version of their argument. And that was the culture of the small, kind of, intellectual magazines. And you and I agree that the situation is somewhat different now.
Look, there’s a lot of good stuff and serious engagement out there, but our consciousness seems so dominated by Twitter that we also see just a lot of, not just kind of garbage, but garbage rewarded. If your goal is to amass followers, and hence influence, the incentive structure seems to encourage something other than rigorous intellectual honesty and accurate characterization of alternative arguments and so on.
…
But this is all a runup to asking you: If I’m right, that you kind of agree with that assessment—and correct me if you don’t—are you optimistic about this just being kind of a pendulum swing and things maybe—once we adjust to the sheer technological change—things getting better along that dimension?
Ross: I think there is some self correction that happens. There is some pendulum swinging… And… you also have to deal with exogenous factors, right? Like, you know, the world gets calmer at some moments and crazier at others. And the crazier the world, the harder it is to stay sane in argument.
With that being said, had you had Twitter during the Iraq War—which is the backdrop to this golden age of blogging that we’re discussing—things would’ve been truly, truly crazy. I think that’s clear—So I, I don’t think you can say, “Oh, you know, Trump made things crazy now, it’s not the tech…”
I mean… that’s part of it. But yeah… I think there’s some correction, right? So you go too far with social media and then people say, “Oh wait, maybe people would actually like to read longer form takes and actually they’ll pay for them.” And so you get the Substack economy and that didn’t exist five years ago. And that’s probably an improvement on social media without Substack.
I’m a little bit pessimistic though, about sort of an escape, a true escape, from social media dynamics. Just because I see it in my own media consumption. I consume the news through Twitter, for better or worse…. I don’t see a sign at the kind of mass level, or even in this sort of narrowcasted frame that people are going to leave social media unless you have a sort of—well, I’ll put it this way:
In the blogging days, blogging was the primary place, for a little while, for intellectual engagement. In the late 1990s, it [had been] long essays in the New Republic and short rebuttal pieces in National Review—that was sort of the primary mode. And then, when I was in my early twenties, that world still existed, but then the place where people met to argue with each other became the blogosphere. And now even in the age of Substack… that place is social media; if you’re looking to find the place where people are clashing, it is happening primarily in our profession on Twitter.
And that, you know, that creates dynamics that are hostile to sustained, serious argument. And I don’t know how, I don’t know exactly how that goes away. It can improve if you have other alternatives. But you’re still—in 2022 as in 2020—if you’re taking your ideas to sort of find an argument, I think it’s social media first and primarily.
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