People so ardently wish to feel what is pleasant, to undergo something stimulating, something that stirs them from their habitual torpor. Certain substances... like, alcohol, nicotine, cannabis, kratom, laughing gas, oxycodone, hydrocodone, codeine, morphine, amphetamine, methamphetamine, ketamine, heroin, GHB, fentanyl, LSD, psilocybin, etc. etc., therefore exert a powerful allure. Yet the emotion-provoking fare dispensed by the communal networks serves the same function. It ensnares just as firmly. It leads, with equal certainty, to thinking confined to the immediate moment. It narrows attention, contracts awareness, and renders the spirit incurious. In this manner, amid incessant excitation, indifference takes root and quietly prospers.
I’m reminded by this notion often. Today, the article below triggered this thought.
How media incentives stoked the culture war
...the kind of content that viscerally engages and activates people is maybe not the kind of content that’s actually good for them if they stepped back and made a more reflective decision about it. Another is that there might be externalities where everybody might individually love to listen to content about the culture war, but if all of politics becomes about this, the broader functionality of politics breaks down the ability to make effective policy to craft bipartisan legislation and so on breaks down.
And so even if everybody’s individually optimizing, this can lead to failures at a collective level. And then more specifically on the question of mobilization, an interesting fact is that this period in which the news seems to have leaned much more into mobilization has actually coincided with declining political participation, declining political knowledge, and just absolutely shocking increases in cynicism and disaffection. If you look at Gallup polls about how much people trust Congress or how much they trust institutions, things are really, really bad. And one potential explanation for that is that a kind of short-term policy of firing people up, inflaming them in order to mobilize them into engaging with the news in the short run is really good for engagement, but in the long run exhausts people, causes them to become alienated from and suspicious of politics. And so there’s this collective action problem where it’s best for each news network to try to maximize its own engagement by doing this super inflammatory stuff, but it’s bad for the whole ecosystem in the long run because it causes people to just burn out.