A few weeks ago, I managed to step on a Twitter landmine—not an uncommon experience for anyone mad enough to brave the dense and unpredictable minefields of X’s cyberscape, but this landmine was harder to anticipate than most (for me at any rate). As Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election became clear and undeniable, I was puzzled to find so many commentators reaching for the work “landslide”—a term that, as a student of history, I had been taught to associate with such events as Richard Nixon’s 1972 shellacking of George McGovern (+23% popular vote, +503 electoral vote), or Reagan’s 1984 trouncing of Walter Mondale (+18% popular vote, +512 electoral vote)—or perhaps, at the outside margins, Obama’s 2008 victory over McCain (+7.2% popular vote, +192 electoral vote).
Trump’s margin, in contrast, was a paltry 86 electoral votes and just 1.6% in the popular vote—an impressive comeback from 2020, no doubt, and indeed the best performance by a Republican in two decades, but still historically speaking a very close election, not a “landslide.” For Republicans to think of it as a landslide, I feared, would quickly become self-defeating: a general who marches to battle thinking he enjoys a massive superiority in numbers, when in fact he has a razor-thin advantage, is liable to march straight into disaster. Just so with electoral mandates, which are fragile under the best of circumstances.
To point out this fact was perhaps unduly professorial—in fact, it was to commit exactly the error that I had warned “autistic elites like me” against just 8 days earlier. So I offer no defense of the tweet. The reaction, however, illuminates something striking about the contours of digital discourse, something that dovetails with my ongoing reflections on Anton Barba-Kay’s contention that we are increasingly remaking ourselves in the image of our digital technologies.
My tweet (as well as my unrelated essay on “The Boethius Option”), I was told by many, was guilty of “countersignaling,” that is, of registering hostility to Trump or dissatisfaction with his victory; indeed, I was inundated with response tweets that were some variation of “cry harder, lib.” My views on Trump are, I think, no secret—as neither a Trumper nor a NeverTrumper, I am at once appreciative of many of the short-term wins his movement might bring to conservative causes and wary of the long-term harms. But to the extent the tweet expressed any partisan intention at all, it was an exhortation to Republicans on how to steward their majority wisely and effectively. Within the increasingly binary discourse of social media, however, no such nuance exists; a tweet is only ever a signal or a countersignal. Whatever the ostensible referents of the words and grammar it contains, it conveys no substantive rational content, only an inarticulate :thumbs up: or :thumbs down: . It is as if a carefully thought-through message were translated into Morse code for the purposes of transmission, but, on the other end, no decoder were present, and the hearers could register the message only as short and long taps.
Of course, perhaps this should not surprise us if indeed we are trapped within a totalizing culture war. The very idea of “signaling,” after all, is drawn from warfare. When is it that we must abandon the ordinary forms of communication, with carefully curated words conveying the right shades of meaning, and tones of voice or body language that add additional layers of context, and resort instead to crude, simplified forms of coded communication that will quickly alert others to a threat and tell them whether it is time for fight or flight? Well, in wartime, of course. In war, and especially on its frontlines, we leave off the rational speech of peacetime and accept a profoundly impoverished vocabulary ordered toward the narrow functional purposes of reassuring friends and vanquishing foes. If we are trapped within a culture war, it should hardly surprise us that words no longer have their ordinary meanings, but must instead be reduced to blunt instruments for signaling and countersignaling: Trump=good/Trump=bad; taking a W/taking an L.
Such an observation is not particularly original, of course; many have lamented the impoverishment of speech in our increasingly hyper-tribalized politics. But it is worth considering the role of digital media in this dehumanization of our discourse. Barba-Kay, as always, got there before me: “The binary and encoded character of the medium means that our mode of encountering its content is also fundamentally either/or: on/off, like/dislike, accept/reject, agree/disagree, swipe right/left, thumbs up/down, positive/negative feedback. Input is meant to be univocal” (41).
Increasingly, although promising us endless new vistas for human creativity and self-expression, the landscape of digital media seems to be reducing all of our discourse to pixelated monochrome, contracting the range of thoughts that we are capable of expressing to one another (or hearing from one another) to mere grunts of friendship or snarls of hostility. According to Barba-Kay, this should not surprise us, for we become like what we make, and the logic of computing is fundamentally binary and quantitative, not nuanced and qualitative. It is the task of computers to aggregate 0s and 1s, Nos and Yeses, heart emojis and retweets, not to convey meaning as such. We began, several decades ago, by distilling a crude approximation of human thought and speech in order that can be mimicked by a computer, and then, admiring the image we have produced, we have now sought to reduce ourselves to conform to it, as I described in a previous Substack post. We dumb ourselves down in order to better match ourselves to our machines. (Ironically, we seemed to have reached the point where we are actually dumber than our machines; even as LLMs allow AI to demonstrate great nuance and creativity of thought, we find our own speech becoming as bland, contentless, and repetitive as that of a 1990s chatbot.)
If “the medium is the message,” it is hard not to suspect a kind of feedback-loop relation between the so-called “culture war” and the digital medium that has served as its main theater of conflict. The move away from longform print to digital communication encouraged an adaptation of our modes of thought and language toward the computer’s byte-sized binaries: contextless “facts” or “alternative facts,” or inarticulate gestures of rage or elation, each calculated for maximum virality value. Needless to say, such illiterate forms of communication were poorly suited for fostering mutual understanding or sustaining a culture of persuasion; they encouraged, instead, a breakdown of civic friendship and a discourse of mutual incomprehension—a culture war, in short. Once engaged, the war, like any war, needed effective means of mobilizing combatants, sustaining their morale, and directing them toward their targets. For this, the crude “signaling” of online discourse, especially in its algorithmically-fueled social media environments, was admirably suited.
The more high-stakes the war has seemed, the more we have felt the need to abandon the slow and cumbersome tools of persuasion and to take up the crude but effective tools of signaling—which are designed to achieve the secret of success in any war: “get there first with the most men.” While digital technology may technically reproduce the forms of print media—the ebook, the longform essay, the op-ed—the reality is that, to the extent that these seek to perpetuate peacetime ends of persuasion, they are crowded out by media pursuing wartime ends of mobilization. Indeed, if they are to survive at all, they must reduce themselves into gestures of binary signaling and countersignaling, knowing that, if they do not do so, their hearers or readers will so reduce them anyway.
Newly Published
“Regulating Pornography” (WORLD Opinions): With the Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton case now in the critical homestretch between amicus filing and oral arguments, I was asked to write a quick primer on the case for WORLD Opinions. “Like the tobacco industry sixty years ago,” I write, “pornographers know their product is poison; their only hope lies in keeping us so hooked we don’t stop to ask questions.” But “if the Supreme Court bucks precedent and upholds HB 1181, it has the potential to revolutionize not merely the legal status of the porn industry, but how we think about the internet more generally.”
“Taking the Easy Way Out?” (WORLD Opinions): Last Friday, the UK voted to join the ranks of the euthanizers, despite the doleful results of the experiment in other countries that have legalized physician-assisted suicide. As support for euthanasia continues to grow in our own society, we must reckon with the root causes. As with most issues on which social conservatives keep losing, it cannot be treated in isolation from broader cultural and yes, technological (sorry to be a broken record!) trends. In a society in which technology has conditioned us to look for the easy way out of any uncomfortable situation, we simply no longer have the cultural resources that enable us to make sense of prolonged suffering, or to support others through it.
“The Rise of Assisted Suicide” (The World and Everything in It): The radio segment version of the above.
Coming down the Pipe
“Porn and the Parens Patriae” (First Things): Following from our amicus brief on the ineffectiveness of parental controls, Clare Morell and I wrote a more popular level article exploring the broader themes of our argument against leaving porn filters to parents. The porn industry has cleverly deployed the rhetoric of “parental rights” that is so often used by conservatives, insisting that it shouldn’t be the government’s job to decide what content is censored and what content is given to kids; parents should be able to make up their own minds. This argument trades on a characteristic modern detachment of “rights” from the right, a completely unrealistic concept of the challenges of parenting in a technological age, and on an evasion of the collective harms that come from poor individual choices. This issue, we argue, provides an excellent case study for conservatives to think about the proper relationship between the authority of parents and the authority of law.
On the Bookshelf
William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1961): Everyone is talking about Hitler these days, it seems. The Left for years has been convinced that Trump is “literally Hitler” (unlikely), and that his supporters are Nazi-wannabes, and more recently some on the Christian Right have done their very best to prove these wild rantings true, by posting Nazi memes, speculating loudly about the international conspiracy of Jews, and suggesting that the so-called Holocaust was just a big mistake of labor camps gone awry. And for all the absurdity of this discourse, there’s no denying that late stage liberalism can bear an uncanny resemblance to the senescence of the Weimar Republic. All that to say, I’ve become convinced that if I am to be an intelligent observer of our own times, I should know a thing or two about Nazi Germany. This book, it seems, is the gold standard.
John Keegan, The First World War (2000): Finished this one a few days ago. Dang. What a journey—although I confess I’d been hoping for more. Really, a 20-hr. audiobook for all of World War One is fairly concise and cursory. In particular, Keegan is very much a military historian, in a detached, almost clinical mode. For those who enjoy troop movements and numbers of divisions and artillery barrages and such, it’s a very fine overview—and don’t get me wrong, I love that stuff. But I would have appreciated a bit more from below (the human element of the men in the trenches) and from above (the grand strategy—or lack thereof—of statesmen). That might’ve required a 40-hr. audiobook, but I’d have eaten up every minute.
From the conclusion:“The chronicle of its battles provides the dreariest literature in military history. No brave trumpets sound for the drab millions who plodded to ruin on the featureless plains of Picardy and Poland. No litanies are sung for the leaders who coaxed them to slaughter. The legacy of the war’s political outcome scarcely bears contemplation: Europe ruined as a center for world civilization; Christian kingdoms transformed through defeat into godless tyrannies, Bolshevik or Nazi, the superficial difference between their ideologies counting not at all in their cruelty to common and decent folk. All that was worst in the century which the First World War had opened, the deliberate starvation of peasant enemies of the people by provinces, the extermination of racial outcasts, the persecution of ideology’s intellectual and cultural hate objects, the massacre of ethnic minorities, the extinction of small national sovereignties, the destruction of parliaments, and the elevation of commissars and warlords to power over voiceless millions, had its origins in the chaos it left behind.”
A.G. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods: I was planning to read this over Thanksgiving break, but then I got sick, and then the book got mysteriously misplaced for a couple of days, so I’m only partway through. But it is delightful—and of course, convicting in this age of action and distraction. Here is one of many fine passages:
“When the world does not like you it takes its revenge on you; if it happens to like you, it takes its revenge still by corrupting you. Your only resource is to work far from the world, as indifferent to its judgments as you are ready to serve it. It is perhaps best if it rejects you and thus obliges you to fall back on yourself, to grow interiorly, to watch yourself, to deepen yourself.”
Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1993): “Wait—you haven’t read Technopoly yet?” I’m working on it, OK?! As of a week from now, I will be able to join the ranks of those answering, “Duh, of course I’ve read Technopoly. Why haven’t you?” And indeed, I ask, “Why haven’t you?” It’s amazing. Also, for what it’s worth, far less cranky than it has a reputation for. At least, so it seems to me, though that may just say something about how cranky I am.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace: Yes, I am reading this again, after long stagnation. And yes, of course it’s still fantastic. And yes…I’m still aspiring to finish by Christmas—or at least the twelfth day thereof.
Recommended Reads
“Resist the Enclosure of the Human Psyche” (L.M. Sacasas, The Convivial Society): L.M. Sacasas doesn’t write on his Substack often…but when he does, it’s well worth your time. This piece is no exception, even if it is a bit meandering and inconclusive, in my judgment. I like the fact that Sacasas explores pre-modern property relations (in which dominion and use were non-exclusive) as an analogy for the digital domain (see my “We Peasants of the Metaverse”), and that he quotes near the end from Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, surely one of the five greatest books of the last century. So, yes, well worth your time.
Truth be told, that’s the only recommended read this week. I’ve been enjoying my books and audiobooks so much, I haven’t spared much thought or attention for the ephemera of web articles. Maybe more next week.
Help Me Do More
It’s that time of year again—when families gather around laden tables with steaming aromas, when the holiday music starts blaring through every speaker, and when anyone and everyone with any affiliation to a non-profit starts asking for money.
In all seriousness, though, everything I do here at EPPC is donor-supported, as is the work of our few dozen scholars, who continue to have an impact on renewing culture and shaping public policy far out of proportion to the size of our institution. If you’ve appreciated what you’ve seen from me on this Substack and elsewhere this year, I’d like to invite and encourage you to consider supporting my work going forward, so I can continue to build my scholarship, writing, and policy work, as well as developing programs to magnify these efforts. If you’d like to talk more about financial support, just shoot me an email (w.b.littlejohn@gmail.com), or if you’d like to go ahead and make a gift, click the button below and put my name in the Comments field!