The Internet Has Turned Us Into the ChatGPT of "Takes"

Let's talk about the human machine learning of political discussion points and the damage this does to the Left today.

Recently, I was asked, and through that have asked myself the question: why is political discussion, especially on the Internet, such a pain of being stuck in the middle of a massive circlejerk as pre-recorded slogans rain down on us from all sides? Why does it seem to be that nobody can coherently explain what precisely they stand for, what they want to achieve, and most importantly: why, as they wildly fling their predictable, well-known, but ultimately shallow buzz-phrases around? Why are so many popular takes these days so internally inconsistent and contradictory? Where’s the solid theoretical basis that helps us come to clear and concise conclusions that fit into a greater conception of the world and its systems, and how and when did it disappear?

There are no greater narratives or complex concepts, there are only individual takes floating in space that often do not entirely seem to be compatible if one were to try to piece them together. This lack of true political understanding isn’t usually questioned, because having one is not of our concern these days. The common terms of political engagement and exchange have changed. Unfortunately, this means that next to no significant theoretical progress is made to help us understand the past, present, and future, at least not in the way one might expect if we consider that we have more avenues and platforms for people to engage in debate than ever before in history. We could be developing and solidifying great ideas at an impressive pace since information came to be able to spread globally within fragments of milliseconds, but let’s face it – that simply isn’t happening.

Instead, politically flavoured exchange has become a low-effort pastime that requires no mental engagement at all, to the point where an inflammatory tweet on the Current Thing can be easily composed on the side while watching Love Island. A hobby in which we advocate for our sides like sports fans talk about their favourite teams. It’s for fun (yes, even getting angry at The Rightoids and The Libs or whomstever can be fun), it’s for community, it’s for identity building, it’s a subculture not much unlike being a goth or a weeb. Similar to being into sports, it promotes in-group loyalty and out-group hostility instead of encouraging real intellectual development and collaboration in forming ideas. Get online and vent with like-minded people, collect some dopamine in the form of likes to feel a little less doom for the moment. Nothing more than briefly, semi-consciously memorized slogans are necessary to participate in this. But should that really be the purpose? Can we really say that we live in a post-political world in which we can accept politics being a simple spectacle to bring a little pseudo-argumentative entertainment into our depressing lives? I think we can all agree with the answer to these questions being a solid no. Political engagement, real political engagement, is extremely important, and yet it is dying. So, what has happened to it?

“Is this just the consequence of the public's (political class and the base) attention being fractured in a million different ways as a result of the new media landscape, thus not allowing for vast groups of people, activists, etc. to draw upon a set of intellectual traditions that stood the test of time to help advance their political cause? Or are they just not doing a great job of carrying the left's intellectual tradition from one generation to the next? Is this the reason that today's young political class has absolutely no hope of getting anything accomplished? Because they're operating, intellectually, from a tetherless place without a solid foundational understanding of political (but honestly, even non-political: such as aesthetic, historical, moral, literary, philosophical) philosophies and intellectual traditions of both the left, but also of the right (in order to better refute). I'm not arguing for people to be scholars or anything, but it seems that students in colleges along with the political-activist-class in the past at least used to have a cursory understanding of well-known philosophers, historical figures, political movements and ideas, etc. from the past, whereas today there is absolutely zero indication of that whatsoever in the greater political discourse.” — A smart person on Reddit asking the right questions

After some thought, I have come to the idea that Twitter is to blame for this. When I say “Twitter”, I’m really referring to short-form communication combined with self-branding and profiling of users as online “activists” that operate within common interest circles (or “bubbles”) that we have become used to in the time of social media, for which Twitter is the perfect example, as well as being the most political, and the most politically relevant, of the platforms that we currently use.

A full “debate” can be written down in four or less short lines for each side. An opinion is either cringe (-), or it is based (+), and people intuitively have a sense of what would fit into each category based on their experience in the bubble. The goal of debate is to be recognized as based, and acquire a status as Chad. Only the Chad argument is defended, while Soyjak is assumed to be wrong by default without further consideration. Good feedback, bad feedback based on superficial traits such as group identity. A Soyjak cannot be right. This is obviously just a meme, but it does describe online discourse quite well.

So, what has Twitter done to us? Where we once needed to make full use of our human brains to form and spread our opinions by putting pieces together on our own, mostly engaging with longer-form media and facing others in real-life situations in which responses have to be provided in more substantial forms than pointing a thumb up or down, over the course of tweeting and liking and sharing on sites that operate on content promotion algorithms, we have evolved into bots that adopt their positions and adapt their communication through machine learning algorithms.

We have ourselves turned into machines that learn based on feedback. The incoherence of people’s political beliefs comes from an amalgamation of many individual snippets of ideas, hints of ideas, potential ideas, convincing sounding BS, anecdotes and observations, statements that came to people in a dream, out of context movie quotes and Marx quotes.. all thrown into one place and each being either affirmed or rejected by the amount of likes and shares and the comments they receive. Positive feedback affirms that yes, this is something that is part of the Prevailing Correct Opinion. Negative or no feedback serves as the political interaction equivalent of clicking “Show me less like this” on a Facebook ad. 

The Prevailing Correct Opinion is whatever it may be that conforms to a certain political camp that people come to find affiliation in through identity and gut feeling more than anything else. Trump fans have their Prevailing Correct Opinion, woke people have one, liberal feminists have one, radical feminists have one, communists, Nazis, libertarians, you name it. There is a vague general sense of what is an acceptable or commendable thing to say in one’s bubble based on observing other contributors’ feedback over time. People make use of this sense and distribute loose bits of suitable ideas as a means to gain acceptance, solidify their place in the community, and learn which types of statements have the right “vibe” to help them keep the momentum up. We’re all part of the hive mind, and the hive mind works more or less the same way as the TikTok algorithm: 

• Statement A - good feedback. 

• Related Statement B - bad feedback. 

• Say more things like Statement A! - sure thing, will do. 

• Statement C - banger response.

Statement C in many ways runs counter to Statement A. In the world of isolated hot takes that are judged completely individually, this is not something that would be considered a problem or even noticed. It’s been weeks since anyone has briefly glanced at Statement A for a split second to leave it a quick like, anyway – nobody would think of connecting the two now, the hot take trend cycle has moved on. As long as a take on the current trendy issue hits the right emotional spot and fits the vibe that gets the hive mind going, it gets a like from other subculture members/bubble-contributors. If our takes are formed, shared and engaged with like tweets, it does not matter if after some further analysis, inconsistencies between A and C can be found that on second look would mean that no person with a firm concept of what it is that statement C is talking about would hold these two opinions at once. We are not in any way required or incentivized to critically examine and develop the opinions we spread every day, which keeps what we say and think incredibly shallow.

Kevin Munger explains this machinic, almost unconscious and unthinking nature of The Discourse quite well in his post titled "The Discourse" is the Cybernetic Event Horizon of Human Freedom, and I suggest you all read it once you finish here to gain an additional perspective based on Vilem Flusser’s theory of discourse vs. dialogue:

Any Twitter addict will see my larger point: "The Discourse" is the universally acknowledged term for what we log on dozens of times a day to receive. People talk of "The Discourse" in fully ironic terms, accepting that the text of the tweets they encounter will be “machinically” produced -- and that their role to machinically reproduce what they encounter. Note that I'm saying "machinically" and not "mechanically" -- the distinction comes from Lewis Mumford, the early 20th-century critic of technology. “Mechanical” (rote, repetitive) use of human bodies peaked under industrialism; in post-industrial capitalism, we behave “machinically” insofar as our actions are subsumed within the functioning of a societal “megamachine” that produces something other than human freedom.

Am I really saying that most people engaging in The Discourse have not really thought about why they promote the takes they do? Kind of. This may seem a little insulting, but in fact, I simply think of all of them as intelligent enough to notice their contradictions and complete their incomplete thoughts if they really paid attention instead of machinically reproducing discourse. I have absolute faith that most people are capable of forming coherent thoughts and theories. We’re just not in any way incentivized to have them, which is unfortunate. Why we as people who want serious political change should care about this is quite simple.

First of all, if political discussion turns into an algorithmic game of collecting and responding to feedback, it inevitably turns into a clout game the more we get used to discussing in this way. In the world of clout games, takes are disseminated only for the purpose of receiving as much attention as possible. The ideal situation, of course, is to collect a ton of likes and become the Chad of your bubble by taking on the positions of the other Chads you follow, but for that, you first need exposure. At this point, most of us understand how to set off the engagement machine: by providing emotional reaction potential. A post needs to be recognised by the engagement machine as one that can set people off, it needs to promote outrage so that comments can generate more comments. All attention is good attention. This affects the nature and quality of discussion as well as the topics being discussed.

In order to reach the highest amount of people possible with the greatest possible trigger potential, one needs to engage in the absolute lowest common denominator discourse in the simplest of ways (so that literally anyone no matter the amount of knowledge on the topic can contribute in 200 characters or less) and choose just the right topics to do it. It's important that whatever contribution is made to the bubble is “triggering” enough, which makes topics such as workers' rights and related economic theories, which 99% of people could relate to and use to sincerely connect in solidarity entirely uninteresting to talk about. What you need to be a perfect cog in the like-machine is to be a front-line fighter in the culture war and actively promote needless infighting, which by its division of the proletariat and the preoccupation of people who could otherwise make themselves useful is hilariously counterproductive for an "activist" to do. The four day work week for example could change people's material conditions, help the working class gain confidence and strength by providing a success, and even possibly move us forward in the fight for socialism. But for The Discourse, something as uncontroversial as improving working conditions is unattractive compared to a topic that baits outrage, such as debating whether or not trans people are real or whether using the word "dumb" makes someone literally fascist scum (takes provided by people who have no coherent definition of what constitutes fascism, for example – they've just learned that using that word works really well in the engagement machine, since inflammatory wordings are an important part of the Twitterised discussion culture). The culture war, especially when it comes to fighting among people who materially should be entirely on the same side, will get us absolutely nowhere.

Secondly, and more importantly, fragmented, incoherent positions without a strong basis are inherently volatile, which makes them nothing to build a solid movement around. Despite contributing to the same hive mind, without a theoretical framework that we share, we each remain our own little sub-machines that run on their own separate algorithms. This means that despite our vague sense of what vibes with the Prevailing Correct Opinion of our given bubble (which could be something such as “capitalism bad” or “socialism good”), we all have our own ideas when it comes to the specifics of the take in question and what the solution to a given problem might be. Instead of having more or less built a basis of unity by the time we actually sit down in a room and work together, if this ever happens at all, we are and will continue to be distracted by endless infighting as we figure out even the basics of what we should do. There cannot be a new Left that is capable of gaining actual influence in the world if theory is replaced with every “activist” having their own baseless, untethered hyper-individualized micro-opinions. The only thing The Discourse ultimately furthers is doomerism (because we continue to be unsuccessful), capitalist realism (continuing to be unsuccessful supports the belief that there is no alternative), and more directionless action such as the Occupy protests, or no action at all. It slows us down like nothing else. 

So here we are. The Discourse is making humans more like machines and GPT is making machines more like humans. Flusser warns that the time for action is short: that we must reprogram the “telematic apparatus” to enable truly dialogic communication, and soon, before the ultimate triumph of The Discourse. (x)

Do I have solutions? Not really. So I’ll simply end this post with a general call to balance The Discourse with true dialogue – like Flusser says, “Dialogue nourishes discourse, and discourse provokes dialogue”. Maybe pick up a book once in a while. Join a discussion group. Have a beer with a friend and go absolutely ham in an endless drunk debate. All of this is probably better than composing more tweets while doing nothing else in terms of political education and exchange.

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