Acculturation, Radicalization, and Political Violence
An Excerpt (Part 2 of 2) from My Term Paper
Greetings, dear readers! In this edition of the newsletter, I am providing the follow-up excerpt from my term paper which explores issues of public opinion, online interaction, and political violence. While this is a standalone piece, I do encourage you to read Part 1 first as it provides some helpful context.
Before I jump in, I did want to note something. I did the heavy lifting for this new Brookings report entitled The true costs of the Tulsa race massacre, 100 years later. Here’s a quote from the beginning:
In this analysis, we look at the estimated dollar amounts of lost wealth from the 1921 massacre, and consider what that collective wealth might be able to accomplish in contemporary Tulsa were that money still in circulation. Specifically, we look at what that collective wealth could accomplish in terms of financing college education, buying homes, and starting businesses.
Our goal is to provide a concrete way of understanding just how catastrophic the economic losses were for Black residents of Tulsa. This exercise reveals the devastating economic impact of racism on communities, and it also provides important justification for concrete reparations as a response to undeniable economic injustices.
Please do give it a look. It includes some really cool graphics too including a spatial analysis of where financial hubs exist in Tulsa in relation to Black neighborhoods.
Oh, and one other thing: let us all attend to the wisdom of the Holy Father:
The Internet and The Insurrection
On January 6th, 2021, something happened at the nation’s capitol. That something happened is a point upon which there is likely universal agreement. But the specific ways that we identify and speak about the peculiar events of January 6th depends largely on the social webs that we inhabit that supply us with our interpretive language and frameworks. Notice the degree of ambiguity in even adequately naming (that is, conceptualizing, categorizing) the event, whether “riot,” “protest,” “demonstration,” or “insurrection” - each term with its specific contextually-bound connotations.
I particularly appreciate the way that [theorist] L.M. Sarcasas writes about it in his essay on the event: “the failed coup or insurrection or seditious mob, or whatever else one may call it, which stormed the Capitol to interrupt the certification of the electoral college votes and, as far as some participants were apparently concerned, hang the Vice President of the United States.” Interpretive hedges intended to convey measured nuance abound in his description, and aptly so given the layers and complexities in making sense of such bizarre events.
But what does seem clear enough to me - and this will form an assumption moving forward - is that at least a small handful of individuals who breached the capitol did so with the intent to commit political violence. Likewise, it seems convincing to me (again given all appropriate caveats and disclaimers), that a much larger number (perhaps even a plurality) of individuals were expressly intending to disrupt the political process to try and prevent the certification of an election outcome they deemed to be fraudulent.
In evaluating the causes of January 6th retroactively, many were quick to blame the former President. Even Senator Mitch McConell said (from the senate floor) that “the mob was fed lies” and was “provoked by the president and other powerful people.” Nevertheless, even if we concede that this attribution is fair (and I think it is), we are still in a position much akin to evaluating the extent of Iago’s blameworthy for Desdemona’s murder by Othello. While it is certainly the case that the former President (along with Senators such as Hawley and Cruz) repeatedly called the results of the election into question, and while it is also true that this played out largely on social media (and especially Facebook, Twitter, and Parlor), the locus of culpability and the degrees of that culpability are not at all straightforward.
In the remainder of this section, I want to provide more conceptual tools from Sacasas’ theory of digitization to better understand these events via the lens of inquiry established in this paper so far. Sacasas observes that technological innovation often facilitates profound structural shifts. He thus observes that, “when digital media restructures human communication in roughly 25 years time (dating roughly from the early years of the commercial internet), we should expect significant social and political change.” And he adds that “the challenge is to make sense of it midstream, as we still are.”
To help us understand January 6th, et. all, Sacasas offers a number of insights that are relevant to the broader scope of this paper. First, he notes that despite our various metaphors and habits of speaking, “online” is best understood as a “set of distinct social relations” rather than a spatial designation. In fact, he argues that “speaking of the digital sphere as a place or even a space is part of the problem” because “digital tools do not generate places in the ordinary sense of the word” but rather that they ”mediate relationships” and they do so “in part precisely by disassociating the self from place.”
We are tempted to say that the “Stop the Steal” conspiracy theories spilled out from “online” into “offline” - where online and offline are conceived of as distinct and contrasting places or spaces. Instead we should say something like: the distinct sets of social relations that are emergent with, embedded in, and mediated by a consolidation of physical and digital technologies known colloquially as “social media” were made manifest in localized physical action, including specific acts of (at least attempted) political violence. Here the various descriptors I used - 1): emergent with; 2): embedded in; and 3): mediated by - each delineate specific dimensions of how technologies and social conditions interact leading to specific kinds of behavior. To fully understand individual behavior, we must therefore be appropriately attentive to all three dimensions considered both separately and in conjunction.
Another crucial insight from Sacasas’ account is that these digitally mediated relations constitute thick (or strong) forms of culture, meaning that users (as participants) are acculturated in ways that can lead to radicalization. Sacasas explains that “ if we think of a culture as a materially and symbolically mediated set of human relations with a distinct, relatively coherent set of beliefs and values, then it is perfectly legitimate to speak of the proliferation of cultures resulting from the digital mediation of human relations.” Sacasas points out that in the earliest days of the Internet, these digital cultures were weak in the sense of being chiefly organized around fandoms or other overlaps in shared consumer behavior. MySpace is a particularly interesting example here: while it contained many of the features associated with social media platforms today, MySpace was principally used to express identities built around shared tastes in music. And even Facebook in its earliest public days was mostly a place for cat videos and the like. Today, these cultures are less attached to either weird niches or mass produced consumerism and instead often offer “divergent and often competing orientations toward the world” that generate “distinctive perspectives on truth, morals, and norms.”
The idea of shared cultures rooted in distorted images of reality is notably present at least as far back as Plato’s allegory of the cave. And theorists like Boorstin and McLuhan have considered this problem afresh in their treatment of 20th century technologies. Thus much of what we might say about the Internet here is applicable to technologies like the radio. I’m thinking about factors like the lowered cost and technological barrier to content production, the lack of institutional gatekeeping power (which can be good as well as bad, just as with the printing press), and the speed of delivery. Yet the sociality built into the Internet as a medium transcends those earlier technologies: every Internet user can participate directly and instantaneously in the creation, reformulation, and dissemination of the information, moral claims, and other social currency specific to the subculture of which they are a part, even as they are themselves acted upon in real-time by other users acting in this same shared capacity.
To put this in the language of Plato’s allegory, I can be puppet-master, puppet, and audience consuming the puppet show all at the same time. And further, I can inhabit these roles in ways that are ambiguous and unclear to me and to the other users with whom I am interacting, who likewise inhabit these three roles simultaneously and in equally ambiguous ways. And to extend this even further, the particular information flows (and specific content in those information flows) are subject to these same social ambiguities pertaining to identity, intent, and the like, creating a condition of increased vulnerability and risk for any given user to manipulation and deception, as well as plain misunderstanding and misinformation.
The proliferation of distinct cultures can thus amplify the knowledge problem and complicate the health of democracy in two ways. The first way is the accelerated loss of a shared common culture or commonly shared orientation toward public events, public deliberations, and public processes (including explicitly political ones). Theorists like Alasdair MacIntyre explore this very issue and the subsequent incommensurability in moral reasoning and justice claims that result in increasing political friction, as well as heightened partisanship and polarization.
The second way it causes harm to democracy is much more specific to this inquiry. These cultures can be rooted in and expressive of both misinformation and disinformation. In the worst such instances, these cultures can constitute a “web of lies” functioning as a continuous exercise in epistemic injustice and leading to a variety of subsequent harm to the body politic. And while literal violence is not a guaranteed outcome in even the most radicalized cultures, it is likely much more latent in a much broader range of Internet cultures than has previously been acknowledged by tech enthusiasts.
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(The remainder of the paper is focused on some recommendations for addressing this problem. Those recommendations are tentative, and much less rigorous than the proceeding analysis which is why I’ve opted not to excerpt that here.)
What I Am Reading Elsewhere:
Purdue President Mitch Daniels gave an incredible commencement speech:"The very essence of your coming leadership roles will lie in making hard choices. After weighing all the options, the competing priorities and the uncertainties that even the biggest databases cannot totally eliminate, others will look to you to choose."
Writing for Governing, Scott Beyer (Market Urbanism Report) provides a really good overview of how Texas is using MUDs (municipal utility districts) to spur development and drive down costs of affordable housing, while internalizing cost of sprawl/infrastructure maintenance.
In The Philadelphia Inquirer: Philly Shipyard brings in a new generation of apprentices: “The apprentices are paid employees from the first day, with retirement benefits and time off."
In Bloomberg, The Bottom 90% of Americans Are Borrowing From the Top 1%
Annie Lowrey argues in The Atlantic that: “the job of the government is not to ensure a supply of workers at whatever wage rates businesses set. And workers’ having the power to say no is not a policy problem that the government needs to solve.”
For Brookings, an article on Helping residents ‘buy back the block’ with American Rescue Plan funds: “The process of organizing small-dollar resident investors or owners, on the other hand, must be advanced patiently through community-based organizations that have earned local trust and have the capacity to organize, educate, and mobilize."