Antidoters Assemble! Pt 3: Five Easy Solutions to Negativity & Polarisation*
“It wasn’t me” Shaggy
(I might have overdone the wisdom quotes in my last post. Shaggy will remain our one and only philosopher for this post).
We all prefer to point the finger for societal problems, so I was looking forward to this post. Who’s coming to save us?? Where are you?? What are tjhe government, business, tech and educators doing to take more responsibility and counter the trends towards negativity and polarisation that are making us all so anxious?
Inevitably, as before - after a month of intensive reading and rabbit-hole tumbling - my optimism started to wane, particularly when I stumbled across an article where two astute polarisation experts managed to both diagnose me and expose my naivety with a simple paragraph. Damn it.
“Typically a well meaning engineer or academic gets in touch to declare, breathless with excitement, that they ‘have the solution to polarization.’ They are often certain that it will be scaled up to a large group of users. The expectant, supportive pauses we leave in the conversation are then filled with a proposal to develop…a bot, a news aggregation site with a special algorithm, or a platform to randomly match different people to chat online. The problem is, whilst these solutions are well intentioned, they don’t work. In fact, they can make things worse” Alice Thwaite, Alison Goldworthy
Sigh. In my funk, I kept returning to my metaphor of us all treading water in a choppy sea of depressing content. We hold our noses and deep-dive occasionally but if we’re honest, we haven’t the time or lung-capacity to go too deep on very much at all. When it all gets too depressing, we just lie on the top of the water, glaze over and stare up at the clouds - (aka a ‘Bridgerton’ binge).
Suffused by my own naivety (8 episodes in) and on the verge of deleting my draft, I remembered the point I raised in Part 1 of this series on the Power of Bad. I recalled how good we have become as a society at recognising and diagnosing problems and yet how oblivious to incremental progress we’ve become. Because, of course there are glimmers of hope. They may be small - a life vest here or there - but together they might make a raft. So herewith, 5 themes of ‘solutions’ from our potential lifeguards:
The Better Content Creators
The alternative media market has changed dramatically over the last few years and is rapidly reaching a new maturity, with professional podcasters and long-form online publications increasingly harnessing the talents of experienced, principled journalists (amidst the noise of every man and his dog now self-publishing. Self-aware woof). Their success is perhaps the surest sign of a disillusionment with old media journalism and of a yearning for nuance.
Millions of us now invest up to 3 hours listening to experts grilled deeply, often irreverently on the ideas and knowledge they’ve invested a lifetime in. New intellectual celebrities have come to public consciousness as a result. Related, there are lots of ex-mainstream journalists now investing in slick, well-produced online video channels e.g. Rebel Wisdom - integrating video with live webinars, community and more to explore systems-change ideas through philosophy, psychology, political theory and more.
‘Slow news’ innovators such as Tortoise or ‘The Know’ resist the tendency to jump on an outrage-inducing story and step back into macro trends, exploring the broader context (remember that?). Tortoise’s recent podcast series ‘Pariah’ on Harvey Proctor and his treatment by Operation Midland was one of the most astonishing, empathetic examples of journalism I’ve enjoyed in the last few years. Empathy. Not a word you hear much to describe journalism.
The are good news sources such as ‘Future Crunch’ providing intelligent optimism on scientific breakthroughs and positive progress; ‘All sides’ news showcasing stories from both sides of the political reporting divide; LetterWiki inviting opposing experts to converse politely and constructively across ideological divides; and countless new online publications - from Unherd or Quilette - to blogging platforms like Medium and Substack which enable the length of articles required to do complex topics more justice.
A simple scour of the best-sellers list reveals a large number of counter-culture books further illustrating the frustration many now feel with a Cathy-Newman-style gotcha interview (in no small part responsible for Jordan Peterson’s meteoric rise). Commentators that succeed - such as Joe Rogan- seek to get smarter than they were at the start of the conversation, are happy to share their own ignorance and (dangerously, these days…) to think out loud. Their content lives in perpetuity for consumption at convenient times - a jog, a car journey, a commute (remember that?). Nuance rules the alternative media waves and advertisers and publishers are flocking to the crowds.
All Hail the Entrepreneurs:
The optimists. The inventors. Those that think around corners. Just as they’re quietly building us a more sustainable world, they’re doing the same in the content-sphere.
For those willing to explore their own biases, there are numerous technologies and platforms emerging: Fullfact, Snopes, Politifact, Brainytab or blindspotter which analyses how balanced your twitter is. Most encouragingly, some like Fullfact are working directly with big-tech and government to share their huge data insights and inform initiatives like Offcom’s media literacy strategy.
Artificial intelligence provides hope too with a host of new businesses rising to the challenge e.g ‘Factmata’ using AI to detect fake or misleading news or discern rumour and hoax from truth and Spirit AI and Unitary for community management and moderation. New forms of crypto-social media via decentralised ‘unowned’ blockchain (e.g Bitclout) are another solution being touted by many, removing the power from any single corporate or government entity, rewarding creators directly and enabling self-moderation (although the jury’s still out).
Tech product designers are also on the case, increasingly disillusioned with the direction of travel (as profiled in ‘The Social Dilemma’ Netflix smash). This growing movement has found one home in the ‘Center for Humane Tech’ a thriving community of ethical techies working on products that are less manipulative, negative or addictive. And other organisations such as The Center for Countering Digital Hate and the Online Safety Tech Industry Association have recently launched to bring-together like-minded initiatives.
Regulation of Big Tech: The gloves are off
And what of big tech and their accountability for trust and truth? Seemingly, it’s freedom of reach in the red corner vs freedom of speech in the blue. Are they merely the utilities enabling the public debate (do we blame the phone line provider for what’s said on a call?) or are they publishers with the responsibility that entails (particularly when c. 50% of people get their news via them)? How can we regulate ‘hate’ or ‘misinformation’ across 100bn messages a day (Facebook alone) let alone the fact that ‘hate’ is subjective and ‘misinformation’ on a spectrum, open to interpretation? How can we hope that politicians with only a basic knowledge of algorithms and the attention economy (and their own biases) can legislate for what we’re seeing now, let alone what’s coming down the pipe?
What is evident is that whether through accepting their own moral responsibility or simply knowing regulation is on the horizon (or - if you’re cynical- as a result of making a flashy government PR hire in Nick Clegg), big tech is now taking more responsibility- employing armies of fact-checkers, setting up ‘news literacy campaigns’, ‘civic engagement’ teams, and removing millions of fake accounts on a daily basis. Watch this space.
Teaching Resilience & Better Critical Thinking
There are a number of fantastic initiatives empowering the young and working to instil both information discernment skills and resilience around having difficult conversations. The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff is a wonderful primer on many of the significant challenges here created by the seemingly benign, but practically damaging desire to create ‘safe spaces’ for young people. Resilience is in tatters, rates of poor mental health going through the roof. A number of organisations are stepping up to support, from ‘Debating Matters’ or the English Speaking Union school competitions to the DfE now promoting lesson plans for identifying misinformation online. We need many more of these initiatives mandated in the education system (with perhaps fewer teachers thrown under the bus for seeking to highlight controversial issues as part of this effort?). And maybe such techniques could be incorporated into the world of work to avoid the increasing unpleasantness and inefficiency of polarisation in the workplace (the Basecamp story, a cautionary tale)?
The Big Ideas vs. Doomsaying
And then there are the big thinkers… and so we return to Tierney and Baumeister, authors of ‘The Power of Bad’ which I profiled in Part 1 of this series. Some of their solutions include:
‘Put your money where your doom is’: getting experts to put their own cash and reputations on the line when they make doom-laden predictions, particularly where such prophesies may be costing the public millions in avoidance or mitigation strategies. eg Warren Buffet bet hedge fund managers that an ordinary index fund of S&P 500 stocks would outperform the hedge funds over 10 years. He won $2.2M and gave it to charity. A website called ‘Long Bets: ‘The Arena for Accountable Predictions’ was set up in 2003, backed by Bezos - (although currently utilised more by the optimists than the pessimists with this notable exception about the extinction of the apostrophe by 2030).
Calling ‘Time Out’ on knee-jerk lawmaking: Such lawmaking is often witnessed as a political point-scorer after high profile personal tragedies that consume our news cycle (e.g. Megan's Law in the UK, Sarah’s law in the UK or Baroness Jones’ call for a 6pm male curfew in the wake of the Sarah Everard tragedy). Such laws are rushed, ill considered and frequently exploited (e.g. used vs immigrants, paediatricians, teenagers having sex with those two years younger etc). Instead, Teirney and Aumeister advocate for cross-partisan Blue & Red ribbon Panel commissions set up to take a medium-to-long term view of the challenges and prevent bad ideas being rushed into law until after the media clamour has subsided.
Stop memorialising terrorism. Whilst honouring the dead is important, the authors question whether we should be treating the victims of terorism as a ‘special class’ of victim - as this arguably serves to create more victims in the future. Vigils and monuments are well intentioned, but they inadvertently glorify terrorism, stoking fears and encouraging future attackers. Victims' families deserve sympathy of course, but so do those of accident victims or tragedies who don’t get monuments built for them. Maybe we need to stop giving terrorists and their ideas the notoriety they crave and ‘no-name’ them? Find them, punish them and forget about them, so as not to spur on others.
So there is a case for optimism then. Rest assured that smart brains are well and truly engaged.
Nuance, positive incremental change, and progress isn’t ‘romantic’. It’s not as adventurous, loud or shocking as outrage or activism and so it has a fundamental problem with story-telling. We need more stories of positive progress. We need stories about Antidoters working on solutions that work, around whom we can rally to build upon their progress. They’re there if you look: on climate change, socio-economic inequality, diversity and here, tackling negativity and polarisation. They’re notable in that they don’t seek to scare you, they’re simply too busy creating.
For my part, with increased awareness of what’s going on, I may continue to roll my eyes frequently but I feel a new sense of calm around provocations that might previously have raised my blood pressure. And this is a much better mindset from which to create. Exhale.
And so ends the ‘Antidoter’ series, if not the research and insight… I’ve got the bit between my teeth. From now on, I’ll be going shorter and pithier on issues within the issues. Some big, many small and merely observational. Mission? Simply to make you go ‘Huh.. I never looked at it that way before’.
Like the idea? Please sign up, share and debate (linkedin/ twitter/ by reply to this), thank you thank you, thank you.