The Silicon Valley canon and malformed publics

Greetings from Read Max HQ! This week’s newsletter is a podcast episode with

John Ganz

of

Unpopular Front

and

Henry Farrell

of

Programmable Mutter

. We talk about Henry’s recent Bloomberg article about “the tech industry’s reading list” and whether or not my four-year-old will ever encounter a Tootsie Roll pop advertisement, or indeed any advertising campaign at all.

One piece we discussed that I want to call Read Max readers’ special attention to is Henry’s Substack newsletter on the “malformed publics” of social media, in which he argues that the social media-borne “misinformation” we should be worried about is not so much “fake news” that might brainwash or mislead people, but the distorted conception, inculcated by social media, of who our peers and fellow citizens are:

Bringing this all together, the technologies through which we see the public shape how we understand it, making it more likely that we end up in the one situation rather than the other. As you have surely guessed by now, I believe Twitter/X, Facebook, and other social media services are just such technologies for shaping publics. Many of the problems that we are going to face over the next many years will stem from publics that have been deranged and distorted by social media in ways that lower the odds that democracy will be a problem solving system, and increase the likelihood that it will be a problem creating one. […]

The collective perspectives that emerge from social media - our understanding of what the public is and wants - are similarly shaped by algorithms that select on some aspects of the public, while sidelining others. And we tend to orient ourselves towards that understanding, through a mixture of reflective beliefs, conformity with shibboleths, and revised understandings of coalitional politics.

This isn’t brainwashing - people don’t have to internalize this or that aspect of what social media presents to them, radically changing their beliefs and their sense of who they are. That sometimes happens, but likely far more rarely than we think. The more important change is to our beliefs about what other people think, which we perpetually update based on social observation. When what we observe is filtered through social media, our understandings of the coalitions we belong to, and the coalitions we oppose, what we have in common, and what we disagree on, shift too.

One thing that I find particularly concerning (as I say on the podcast) is that I think this “algorithmic distortion,” so to speak, has a tendency to reproduce itself. Twitter in particular is a space for elite coordination; the users to whom it delivers a degraded understanding of “the public” are journalists and academics and political staffers who will then reinscribe those degraded understandings in their work of representing the world. At the same time, the other industries and institutions that shape publics--the entertainment industry probably chief among them--increasingly rely on the same market-like sorting algorithms as social media, algorithms that produce similarly distorted understandings of public preference and desire.

For more, listen above, or on the podcast platform of your choice.

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