Reflecting on Ultra-Polarization and Personal Limits

Several months and blog posts ago, I said that I wanted to avoid most of the partisan discussions here in favor of moving on with what I actually want to talk about.

That was my best-effort attempt at the time to articulate the amount of overwhelm I was feeling about the United States’ current events, specifically the impact of intense, algorithm-driven polarization on our ability to have effective and constructive conversations about what types of societies and social mores lead to the best human thriving. We have received warnings about social media’s massive negative societal effects since the mid-2010s — to draw from my own content bubble, most notably in Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (which I’ll link to this summary of) and in the discussions with experts on the podcast Your Undivided Attention.

I was also mentally sifting through a lot of if/then and what-if scenarios related to my autism diagnosis, especially after my surgery when I was well enough to start compiling information for the assessment appointment. I had spent some of my 20s reading extensively in sociology about friendship and interpersonal dynamics to see what takeaways I could glean from it. (“Sharing things about your personal life creates relatability,” those articles said. “Text your partner at least 20 times per day for communication efficacy,” another study said. “Do not confront people publicly and bring up grievances in private so they process what you say instead of feeling like they have to be standoffish to preserve their reputation and face,” another one said. “Do not use -ism names to someone’s face because it’s confrontational,” from yet another.) But not everyone on social media seemed to be working off of those rules and conventions — human interaction is more than what gets through an IRB — and in the end a lot of stuff was just … chaos, especially the part where people get dragged down radicalization rabbit-holes and you can’t press pause on them while you’re processing and working through what they’d previously been saying. The intense reflective period clarified why the formal presentation of my thoughts in longer works such as The Soul’s Inner Statues or poetry projects like Acts of Speech or in that Platonic study primer I put up on this blog had been so much more effective than my attempts on social media to communicate with other people. There are some people, of whatever neurotype, who are just much better at creative ideation and synthesis.

The Palinode of the Phaedrus and What Souls Saw

Above all, though, I want to just pose something about what these algorithms have done in the spirit of our collective reflection. Olympiodorus relates that Proclus would say that if we truly didn’t like someone and resented them, we would let them carry on with their behavior without intervention in this life and let the person face the penalty in the afterlife and their next incarnation. If we do care about someone, we need to figure out how to give the difficult feedback. As I have noted before, there is a tendency for people to assume that these critiques on social media radicalization do not apply to them, but to those other people — and I encourage you to avoid that fallacy because we’re all on the Internet to some degree or other, and the algos are inescapable.

A lot of individual human beings have tendencies. One could say, in a Platonizing fashion, that the tendencies in a person relate to what they saw before they came down in embodiment — the specific Forms they viewed, the God they followed, &c. And what is noteworthy here is that each of us did not see something complete. Once we have an incarnation or several and its echoes accreted on to us, we have our initial conditions, the shells and layers and garments that we’ve picked up from life to life, and whatever happened to us during our formative years in this life. This is a befuddling situation, especially since Platonism teaches that souls are going to try to do good things. What if we are (and we are) confused about what even is the best thing to do?

• There is someone who is secretly in awe of the Gods giving libations and honors to one another without envy, unflinchingly.
• There is someone who sees the might of Zeus or Hera or some other kingly deity and who falls in love with power, dazzled by might.
• There is someone who sees the all-in-each of the Gods and equality and who becomes enamored of the idea of everyone having freedom and agency without hierarchy.
• There is someone who grasps at the hierarchy of the emanations from the One downward and who falls in love with hierarchy.
• &c.
• &c.

And so many combinations of these things and other things that I have not named.

Algorithmic Radicalization

We can all hopefully see how these tendencies, if carried to the maximum, could really drive people to do bad things, not because they’re bad people, but because they do not have all of the information and do not realize that the only way to do the right thing is to come together and harmonize it (my bias lol). And we, as a species, tend to be awful at moderation — we keep overdoing things in one direction or another.

Algorithmic social media and advertising feeds are designed to figure out what you care about and exploit you based on those hooks.

It used to be, before social media, that people were mostly able to figure things out. They could come together, and they could be convinced to put a stove in the one-room schoolhouse so children could eat hot food in winter (yes, there’s a preserved black-and-white (silent?) film of that — it was created to teach the democratic process to kids). We have a hollowing out of the center now, and we have a possessed rage that has been carried down to us by the firenado of these excesses.

So. I could, based on what I’ve learned about human beings, take someone with some slightly questionable takes aside and give them some information to think about on their own. But … what about people who are so railroaded by their predispositions down a radicalized algorithmic path to a destructive, widely harmful political -ism? It seems that the only way to properly intervene in someone’s life at this technology moment is to (somehow) insulate them from the algorithms and also to reach them when they are in middle school.

Many Formers have created or volunteered for organizations focused on deradicalization. Some mention, in their decision to leave, that they had a major life event that propelled them out. Others say that their life circumstances forced them into contact with people very unlike themselves, often the very people that they had been taught to hate. The latter option seems farther and farther from achievable given what is happening with siloing and polarization. In both cases, it’s recommended that those on the outside keep communication channels open because those in extremist movements are more likely to leave extremism if they feel like they have a future and a life outside of it. But how does one even do that now, with everything being as it is?

Choosing My Strengths

Having several conflicting sociology literature reviews all in my head at the same time is what is overwhelming me about everything right now. In addition, as someone who does speculative, hieropoeic worldbuilding as one of her main passion interests, it’s frustrating and anger-inducing to see a wrecking ball destroy so much. I would rather focus on what I think I can do effectively, keep away from spiraling public rumination and echo-chamber rambles, and trust that the people doing the work to organize around things I care deeply about — the divine gift of vaccines, religious freedom for non-Christians, federal funding for science and medicine, trains and mass transit, climate change, Strong Towns-style human-centered city and town redesigns, libraries and literacy, holding social media orgs accountable — will effectively communicate out to 5 Calls and engaged citizenry about how best to support their advocacy.

More recently, I’ve been thinking about the small pop-up exhibit of Syd Mead’s work in New York City that I went to see with a friend who is interested in the artist’s style and technique. Most of the technically brilliant art was not to my taste subject-wise — it was about people enjoying themselves at parties or with futuristic vehicles that were probably really loud, and I was still thinking about the exhibit’s intro text about Syd Mead’s liberated hedonistic utopian vision, but I stopped to stand in front of an imaginative watercolor of a rotating space station’s agricultural fields. It looked peaceful and organized and calm. Quiet.

I think there’s something to be said for laying out possible futures as an echo of the choice of lives, or perhaps an echo of the paradigm, or perhaps an echo of the way that the ancient oracles presented cryptic visions that could prepare people to make the best decisions if interpreted correctly. Perhaps the obsessions of the current technocrats in Silicon Valley with unbridled algorithmic social engineering and (having not learned their lesson) user-siloed AI are “if King Croesus crosses the Halys River, a great empire will be destroyed” — why would you continue doing something that you thought was so dangerous that you’d need a civilizational collapse panic bunker? — but there are other oracles and auspicious words and auspices, and there are other patterns to see within the webbing, pebble-churned water. There’s the set of songs that Davi Kopenawa discusses in The Falling Sky, or the quiet, brilliant hum of deep theurgic moments when everything is all dazzle and the everything inside feels like it could burst forth with luminous life. And we really should decouple ourselves from people who cannot understand oracles well and who are going to, like Damascius’ appetitive-life person who ultimately behaves like a “body dumped in a corner, lying enervated and incapable of movement,” keep at the addiction-to-money-and-power problem they have without their better judgment coming in to tell them when to stop and do something else.

There’s something about being able to do something at depth that really makes me confident. Social media requires a lot of energy-intense reconciliation of my inner lit reviews, and the thing about that is that it’s most successful when the other people involved are known and predictable and you’re both referring back to the same references. I am feeling zero FOMO about Mastodon or BlueSky. Nope, nope, nope.

People seem to more easily understand what I’m saying when I write poems, or when I write long treatises like The Soul’s Inner Statues, or when I’m working through ideas in fiction where I can test them with imaginary people in settings very different from our own. I can say that A Matter of Oracles and The Village of Strong Branches are a portrait of reincarnations and choices of lives, that in-progress Ossia is about speculative mythologies and Apollon and the ways that a life could follow one’s God in an occulted fractal design, that the unpublished-but-done The Raised Seal is about the ways that prophecies can take on a life of their own and explode lives in unpredictable and horrible and long-term-traumatic ways, that the in-progress To Light Candles in the Forest is at once a nymph haunting story and a lesbian courtship-to-marriage novel and a reaction to everything I’ve read about the social environments of the philosophical intelligentsia in Late Antiquity. And, of course, all of this is grounded in very different social structures than ours, in societies with vibrant cultus for the Gods.

Everyone need things to grab hold of, and they need ideas to inform how they choose what kind of lives will be sown for us in the future. There’s a lot of conversation now about how reactive partisan politics is, and some people keep calling for a reawakening of a positive vision to counter the destructive and brutal things being done, but that’s a bit difficult when there is so much noise that the public can’t make out the possibilities. What is possible needs to be much louder and visible to the average person. (Also, as a note: I think this is also where the opportunity to talk about polytheistic piety and virtue can contribute to future-making and taming the dangerous, out-of-balance/control/sense mess around us.)

Some Final Thoughts

Overall, I hope that this provides some clarity about where I am coming from. This just covered a lot of ground — from some thoughts I’ve had about the Phaedrus (both alone and in conversation with friends) and its impacts on us, to discussing algorithmic radicalization, to talking about where I think my strengths are and why I’m going to focus on those. People who are divided and fragmented from themselves are not as effective as people who are coming at challenges from a place of unity and self-understanding. There will definitely be times when I’m writing something that is using examples and (partly) reacting to current events, but those will, I hope, always focus on the broader, long-term picture.

Hopefully, sharing this will encourage others to think about their own engagement online and to think about where they do best. I really do wish that we lived in a world where we could all recognize what our tendencies are and learn how to deal with them in a healthy way. Nothing about what is currently going on in American society is healthy.

I would like to close by offering up something that I have listened to on repeat for a few weeks. I have a lot of thoughts about this piece, but I wanted to share it here because it has a vibe that reminds me a bit of the Phaedrus.