More on Attention, Policy, and Problem-Solving
Daniel Estrada has a response to my missive on Facebook and slacktivism. While Estrada certainly raises several pertinent points of interest, he does not address critical components of my argument. His own argument also rests on a series of contentions that I hope to convince you are wrong at worst or dubious at best. I shall respond by first analyzing what Estrada has misdiagnosed about my analysis, and then move on to tensions and problems in his own argument.
I have written this at length simply because I feel that this conversation raises a lot of profound problems in how we talk about a host of things related to policy, public opinion, and the explanation of social movement structures. I do not expect all of my readers to come along for the ride, but for those that do, they can pull up a chair and get a cold beer. This will take a while.
In the first part, I describe what I believe Estrada has misdiagnosed about my argument and areas in which he has not properly addressed arguments that I have made. In the second part, I evaluate what I view as problematic about Estrada’s own arguments, building from what I view as the most ancillary to the most central of his points.
What Estrada Gets Wrong About My Argument: Part I
Estrada roughly characterizes my argument as follows:
For these reasons, Elkus argues against what he calls “tragedy hipsterism”: the “endless castigation of the West for sins and imperfections” without offering any real constructive benefits. He says, “Awareness-raising is only useful if it is somehow necessary for the instrumental process of achieving the desired aim.In many cases, it is not and is in fact an obstacle to that aim”
However, Estrada misses the point where I have elaborated on exceptions and conditions to my argument. I wrote the following paragraph specifically because it would be patently absurd to deny that there was any benefit from mass public participation or argue that there are no downsides whatsoever to attention asymmetries. Technology is at the end of the day, a tool. So are tactical and instrumental means of getting any large-scale social endeavor accomplished.
Indeed, as I note below:
Sometimes attention and mass public participation is necessary to fixing a problem. The #BlackLivesMatter movement has been succesful due to the organizational acumen of its leaders in focusing public attention on a narrow problem — police violence — and getting themselves a seat at the table. Likewise, public embarrassment of the US at a time when it badly needed to show the Third World that it was progressive to compete with the Soviets played a strong role in helping the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. And, as Joshua Foust has argued in the case of Syria and Russia, attention asymmetries also can have very real consequences when the bodies that are diverting their gaze have real decision-making power or influence. But all of this has to be demonstrated rather than merely asserted. Awareness-raising is only useful if it is somehow necessary for the instrumental process of achieving the desired aim. In many cases, it is not and is in fact an obstacle to that aim. And when the purpose is, as a more perceptive tweeter than I noted, tragedy hipsterism, it is really useful to no one.
Obviously, what level of public participation and what kinds of social movement tactics are necessary is a matter left to the eye of the beholder. There are plenty of people who disagree with me about the instrumental effectiveness of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, but to them I point out that they have now forced establishment figures such as Democrat frontrunner Hillary Clinton to meet with them. But I don’t really think this point is truly that controversial. Karl Marx famously made it when evaluating the failure of latter-day revolutionaries in the famous analysis in which he said that men make their own fate but not under circumstances of their own choosing. I will expand on this later, but suffice to say this is merely a foreshadowing of a later argument that instrumental processes and strategy are not to be curtly dismissed.
Second, I am still not very sure what exactly Estrada has found so objectionable about my paragraph here: “[a]wareness-raising is only useful if it is somehow necessary for the instrumental process of achieving the desired aim.” Estrada goes on to argue that people need not have any real awareness of the problem at hand to voice concern over it. In the opening of Estrada’s piece, he compares the anguish of the slacktivist to that of a crying baby, certainly a very….well….infantilizing metaphor that I even I would not use to describe them! More on that later (a lot more!). But let us move on to the actual quote:
Of course, this argument is ridiculous. Crying isn’t meant to solve problems directly. In fact, crying is usually issued from a place of helplessness: the inability to realize one’s aims is precisely why crying is needed. Furthermore, crying doesn’t imply any deep understanding of the problem or the conditions required to satisfy it. The crying baby might not even know it is hungry; all it knows is that something is wrong.
Estrada hurries to follow this evocative scene up with an assertion that the baby’s tears “act as a beacon for an ongoing problem…..The goal of crying is to generate a widespread recognition that there is a problem in need of solving.” But this is not exactly incompatible with the argument that “[a]wareness-raising is only useful if it is somehow necessary for the instrumental process of achieving the desired aim.” Estrada seems to argue that the baby cries, people want to relieve the baby’s suffering, ergo good things happen. That is an argument, exactly, that the baby’s crying serves the instrumental purpose of achieving the desired aim. So at least on the baby-crying example, I am not sure exactly how we are in disagreement.
Where we are in disagreement, however, is that this analogy is useful. The analogy is absurd. What Estrada and I are debating is not the sating of an perturbed infant, but actions involving many thousands of people and social structures and organizations. Which is, perhaps, why Estrada does not bother to address any of the links I have offered to political scientists looking at why the thoughtless, emotionally driven actions of large masses of people crying out for something, anything to be done, goddamit, have resulted in simply more human suffering. Estrada simply handwaves this entire paragraph away:
As Laura Seay has noted, Western advocacy has frequently had catastrophic unintended consequences in everything from “conflict diamonds” to the abortive “Stop Kony” movement. I would also observe more broadly that since the 1970s, every US president has invested substantial political capital in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and the conflict receives an absurdly disproportionate amount of attention from the global media and NGOs. What has the result been? Oh…..wait. And the last time that the international community, spurred by highly publicized atrocities and led by the United States, intervened in Lebanon 200 Marines died from one well-placed bomb. Sometimes, as Ed Luttwak said, international attention to a crisis can be worse than neglect.
Estrada is unwilling to seriously deal with the possibility that sometimes, neglect may be better than action. Or at the very minimum, muddling through may be better than action. I note that I have been willing to consider conditions under which my objection does not obtain. But Estrada apparently does not. Estrada writes the following:
Not to solve the problem directly, but to create social conditions for recognition of a problem, so that others will feel the pressure to generate solutions, both for their own sake and also to stop the annoyance and danger the crying itself generates. Because yes, beacons can be dangerous; that is partly why it moves others to act.
This “starting a conversation” dodge is a time-worn rhetorical cliche and neatly abstains from any ethical responsibility for the results of the conversation started. Supporters of police bodycams, for example, pressured others to develop solutions. And this may, in fact, yield a reduction in lethal police encounters. But this may come at the cost of basic civil liberties and a rise in arrests that come from the police’s enhanced power to arrest the most vulnerable for minor infractions. And these are people that have simply a modicum of understanding about the costs and benefits. What about, say, anti-GMO supporters that hurt farmers and harm people that might be fed by genetically modified crops out of a vague sensation of impurity? People concerned about crime whose “tough on crime” opinions led to the rise of the modern prison state and its gross racial and economic inequalities (as well as basic perversions of justice)? Knee-jerk opponents of US foreign policy who end up creating the conditions for despots to murder far more abroad? Knee-jerk supporters of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) who say that “something must be done” and end up creating a bigger mess by ineptly using US military power abroad? We all cannot predict the outcomes of what we advocate for, but responsibility suggests that at a minimum we make the attempt.
And on the topic of police violence, there is also the small matter of how the mere act of calling for a law — which can in theory be enforced using lethal violence by the state — makes us complicit in unnecessary lethal incidents with law enforcement. There is a reason why academics are often cautious about popular movements that take up contentious policy problems. As Laura Seay has said, they do not simply just create the conditions for a solution by forcing recognition of a problem. They also shape how that problem is perceived and the form of the policy solutions that arise. Framing the problem of terrorism as one of a fight against hostile enemies vs. framing it as a war on Islam matters a great deal for how policymakers are going to likely address the problem! There is an enormous debate over the myth of the rational voter and other related problems that Estrada simply sidesteps. There is an enormous debate over the consequences of polarization that Estrada simply sidesteps. But you get the picture. Estrada simply sidesteps.
By this logic, Donald Trump is “starting a conversation” about Muslims and immigration. After all, aren’t he and his followers just crying out for something to be done? Don’t they care with all their hearts about the issue? Aren’t they crying out for justice as they see fit? Are we somehow obligated to “generate a solution” to make them shut up? Perhaps it might be reasonable to see if there is something we can do to see if we can peel off some of the Trump supporters; perhaps there are mistakes we are making that are swelling their ranks. But we can try this basic scenario with other examples as well. Is, say, Estrada willing to grant that GamerGate supporters are “creating the social conditions for recognition of a problem?” Would he say this of ISIS’ supporters’ online? Fervent supporters of Kahane that believe that the “problem” to be recognized are Palestinians and other Arabs?
What Estrada Gets Wrong About My Argument: Part II
But this is far from the only questionable inference (or lack thereof) that Estrada has made about my argument:
In explaining his view, Elkus draws an analogy to cars: no one really cares about the accidents they cause; nevertheless, a small group of people can solve the problem (with self-driving cars), despite the fact that no one is raising a fuss. But Elkus’ analogy is mistaken; people have been fussing about car accidents for decades. Such fussing is most effective when it is specific: for seat belts and air bags, or against drunk driving. But this is all fussing about the same problem. It is the constant and consistent squeakiness of this wheel (and the vast number of people effected) that have kept the pressure on for a solution to be found. We have pushed for a solution to this problem because we care, not despite it. If we weren’t raising a stink about this issue, then it simply wouldn’t get the attention it deserves. If we weren’t raising a stink, the people in power would deduce (correctly) that we really didn’t care.
I was arguing that cars have existed for a long time, have caused a substantial amount of death, and their existence has been tolerated:
What I am trying to argue, however, goes well beyond the issue of international political violence. There is no inherent requirement that a large amount of people need to care about something for meaningful work to be done on it. Very few people care about stopping one of the biggest killers in America — car accidents. Yet a small group of technical experts may render human driving irrelevant and substantially lower the death toll by working on self-driving cars.
This is a useful example because it is often argued that people, say, are aware of X bad thing happening in the world but do not care that much or attach that much urgency to solving it. Indeed, Estrada makes this point directly:
To see why, we must first understand how opinion dynamics work. In debates that use terms like “tragedy hipsterism”, the focus is almost always at the extremes: the extremely violent, the extremely annoying, the extremely powerful. But a discussion centered on extremism tends to mask the tedious and boring realities of everyday human life. The truth is that human beings are constitutionally moderate. Our opinions, on everything from politics to food, from the important to the mundane, tends towards the average. We like to find a happy middle ground.
It has been a “boring and tedious reality” that cars, beginning in the early 20th century, have killed thousands and thousands of people. Who they have not killed, they have injured and burdened with suffering and financial liabilities that will hold them down for the foreseeable future, if not forever. Yet we nonetheless have tolerated this. And not in the recent past. Car accidents are as old as the car itself. The public has been willing to implement specific fixes that have saved lives, but the public has evidently been willing to trade their own convenience and the economic benefits and personal freedom the car provides for personal security. Despite the existence of widely available alternatives such as public transit, we have tolerated what amounts to mass murder every single year out of a desire to retain cars. Estrada would like to spin this as somehow a victory for public activism and fussing, but it is nothing of the sort. It amounts to the toleration of mass murder, year after year, due to public neglect and the collective action problems of policymakers as well as regulatory capture from the automobile industry.
So, yes, Estrada. The people in power don’t think you care, and they are right. Estrada’s valorization of incremental fixes, in this case, fits with the general tendency that Evgeny Morozov described in his article on the “taming of tech criticism.” If only we had a few more UX/UI fixes, everything would be OK! Never mind the politics or economic and social aspects. Estrada may counter that this is putting the perfect before the possible, but I counter-counter that in making this counter he would not be addressing my original argument. I said that the problem of the car — not the steering wheel, seatbelts, or drunk drivers — as a systematic destroyer of human life is a problem that we have tolerated as long as cars have existed. Regardless of whatever improvements we have been able to get out of the magnitude of the toll, the car is a systematic, man-made destroyer of human life that has been kept in service despite the existence of alternatives. And it looks like a small group of people might just help banish the scourge of the car for good!
Of course, Estrada argues that all of the various activist campaigns concerning automobiles may be viewed as somehow the product of the same overriding idea or urge. This is….questionable, given that it supposes that a citizen advocacy campaign against drunk driving and underage drinking is somehow equivalent to Ralph Nader’s consumer safety effort (which was a consumer rights movement). Both have different images of the problem and how it could be solved, organizational dynamics, strategies, and difficulties. Without further clarification, it is simply strange to see the two juxtaposed on the same time line as somehow close equivalents or the continuation of a long-run process. Of course, let’s assume for the sake of argument that they are both products of the same march of history towards Progress.
Estrada suggests that some kind of low-level ambient pressure has been responsible for the invention of the autonomous car. But this is far from the case. I missed the “we want a self-driving automobile” hashtags, Facebook posts, and Upworthy videos. Google and others’ motivation to automate driving is likely some kind of complex system of profit opportunity, world-historical enthusiasm for being a part of something big, and fear of competitors upstaging them, or a desire to boldly disrupt a market. When proponents of self-driving cars have mentioned car accidents, they have done so to defend their systems from criticism and justify their operation.
Moreover, Estrada raises another inconvenient point. The technology to automate much of driving has existed for a while. Why now, in 2015, if there has been such a consistent drumbeat of concern or horror at the car’s toll? Why not 10 years ago? The 1990s? Or, as I have kept incessantly mentioning, why did we build up a system of transport that privileges fast-rolling murder machines in the first place? Viewed from a different perspective, Estrada’s supposed successes are actually failures, evidence of the system’s ability to co-opt and manage dissent and channel it into discrete, episodic adjustments to what amounts to the toleration of fast-rolling murder machines. Estrada would like to argue that raising a stink got the car the attention it deserved, but he really does not supply convincing evidence for this contention.
Now, granted, pragmatism might dictate that we tolerate the car despite its horror because we value other things. But to Estrada, these value tradeoffs are invisible. Instead, there is a constant sense of disquiet and distaste about the car that results in incremental improvements, without the acknowledgement that this disquiet and distaste may have been tempered by policy tradeoffs. Perhaps, instead of a crying baby, people that believe that there is just something wrong might also be capable of tempering their opposition as they realize that they face harsh tradeoffs when The Man asks them for their list of demands. It is, as I will later note, precisely this kind of maturity and strategic acumen that Estrada downgrades in his valorization of slacktivism.
Why I Am Still Not Convinced About The Virtues of Slacktivism Part I: The Problems of Belief-Concurrence
The core of one part of Estrada’s critique lies in this argument:
Elkus’ criticism targets those who complain about the distribution of attention, but in this case the goal again is normalization of an otherwise extreme view. The normal view is that journalism in the west operates justly, and the criticism is meant to reinforce the narrative that, in fact, it does not. Beating this drum over and over will not itself directly change the direction of journalism. But indirectly, it’s the only tool we have to put pressure on those who can.
But what if there is not, in fact, an imbalance in coverage? The specific genesis for the outrage — the belief that there was somehow an imbalance in coverage — was completely wrong. As countless pieces noted, Beirut and other incidents were in fact covered by the press. To be fair, if Estrada is wrong in supposing they did not, I join him in his analytical mistake. I too, believed, that an imbalance in coverage existed but was happily corrected by those more knowledgeable than I. But perhaps it would have been better if both Estrada and I were correct that the media ignored the bombings.
So if the media did, in fact, cover the bombings, what was all of the outrage about? If the public did not pay attention enough to know that the news media was covering it, why on Earth would they be motivated to voice any kind of complaint about a supposed lack of coverage? The far more bitter truth is that the public simply did not pay attention, except for the purpose of scolding people that they believed lacked the requisite public display of virtue. This is an argument that I do not expect Estrada to accept but which I will revisit from my earlier piece:
I do not feel that argument 1 is, frankly, that useful. It is a product of a desire to endlessly castigate the West for its sins and imperfections, real or imagined, that exists among a certain set of commentators. That desire becomes tyrannical and pseudo-religious when it reaches down to the level of trying to manipulate and control individual behavior to produce an elaborate display of having purged oneself of unclean thoughts and emotions. The person who will not be happy until you have shown that you have read an article about all of the other bad and monstrous things happening in the world outside of Paris and made an appropriate display of your outrage and concern will also demand that you do many other things to signal that you concur with their belief system. Xavier Marquez has written much about these elaborate displays of belief-concurrence in authoritarian societies and political propaganda, and I do not feel that I can add much to anything that he has already said.
Accepting Estrada’s argument requires a kind of belief in the benovelence of crowds that I am simply unwilling to grant. Estrada has a curiously bloodless, almost physics-like view of how social change and communication works. A group of people have different beliefs, they are exposed to different ones, they converge to a new one, etc. Agents have preferences beyond the very simple ones that he assumes in his explanations. And one of them is a basic psychological sense of self-justification and validity that, in common with the Internet, has made digital life somewhat rocky.
I am sure that Estrada would concur that signaling is simply basic to human life and organized human life especially. Much as we might dislike the ways in which social presentation may be manipulative or deceptive in nature, it is a basic aspect of who we are. We present ourselves to many different audiences, to achieve varying aims. Where I draw the line is at the point where the purpose of the signaling is to coerce other people to make elaborate displays of belief-concurrence for one’s own personal gratification.
What this demand for belief-concurrence has in common with is the ritualistic demand after every terrorist attack for Muslims to collectively denounce terrorism. The public, due to availability bias, do not see Muslims visibly denouncing terrorism despite the empirical fact that community leaders to average Joes and Janes have made public displays of denouncing religious terrorism. But, of course, what does this actually do to stop terrorism? A religion of one billion people cannot reasonably be expected to cohere together to stop a violent minority. Is there much evidence that these public displays have deterred ISIS butchers from butchering, as opposed to more direct measures such as killing ISIS butchers and reducing their “state” to a bunch of bloody stains on the desert floor? And given the lack of payoff from forcing people who have no responsibility at all for the murderous actions of others to make public, humiliating, denunications of said murderous actions, why should we force them to do it?
The purpose of forcing belief-concurrence is to gain some satisfaction that others have as pure of a heart as you do, or in some circumstances (such as the Muslim example) to impose unreasonable and humiliating demands on others. Estrada, as I will detail in the next section, goes on to wax poetic about the virtues of opinion dynamics as they converge toward new points in the state space. But that alone, as I have noted in the previous section, is no virtue. While Estrada presents this process in positive terms, it may also kill the patient before it cures him.
It is possible to Overton Window oneself and one’s friends over a cliff, as Julian Sanchez noted in his analysis of “epistemic closure” among political elites. The same was recently observed in article surveying the way in which Occupy Wall Street fostered a cult-like atmosphere so thoroughly disconnected from reality that it harmed the ability of the movement to achieve its goals. The same could be observed in Greece, where a social-media backed demagogue drove his country into financial ruin to the roars of approval of a frothing mob that had long since taken leave of its senses. Jeremy Corbyn, similarly propelled by the fervor of the masses, will likely devastate Labour. Donald Trump, if nominated, would virtually hand the US presidential election to Hillary Clinton.
At the heart of the belief-concurrence problem, however, is what Sanchez has identified as the “care bear” theory of politics:
Claims that we know perfectly well how to solve problem X, if only we cared enough or had the political will to address it. A common variant holds that some vital function can’t be left to the market, since only government can guarantee the right result, presumably by putting the word “guarantee” somewhere in the relevant legislation. Feel free to use the photo above to tag instances of Care Bear Stare from either side.
In short, if only people cared and made a visible display of their caring, we could fix the problem. But is people caring an unmitigated benefit? Unfortunately, politics isn’t about policy. People often — but not completely or deterministically — congregate online in filter bubbles comprised of people like them. On the Internet, they can identify other people like them when those people make a signal of belief-concurrence. But what this measures is less the convergence toward a social optimum and more the ability to pose as if you have changed your beliefs. This leads, unfortunately, to the phenomena of Internet liberals that jump all over themselves to praise Ta-Nehishi Coates but likely would call the police on Mr. Coates if they spotted him in an dark alleyway wearing a hoodie. As I am also a fan of Mr. Coates’ writings (dear reader, you can judge for yourself whether I am signaling by saying this, but I assure you that I am not), I suspect that Coates would be far happier if his “fans” did not call law enforcement on him even if they did not care for his writings.
Now, let us return to the argument I made at the beginning of my piece:
There are two primary reasons to be outraged by what are inevitable asymmetries in attention in policy matters (which arise from bias, the availability heuristic, and many other psychological and social distortions in the distribution of eyeballs).
Differences in attention are bad because they suggest an invalid moral hierarchy of suffering.
Differences in attention are bad because they are a barrier to a solution.
Item 1 is related to item 2.
Beyond the baleful influence of self-reinforcing groups and the question of how we might really understand whether belief change has happened, there is another problem with satisfying conditions 1–2. First, it would be bad if an attempt to right an invalid hierarchy of suffering, real or imagined, led to the construction of another invalid hierarchy of suffering. As David Auerbach observed, this in fact occurred when a mob of online critics decided that justifying or at the minimum soft-balling and victim-blaming the murder of French journalists was an effective way to help stop the persecution and abuse of Muslims and immigrants from Muslim states. Surely this would not be regarded as an useful solution to the problem? Second, as Horst Rittel observed a long time ago, it is not clear that lack of attention is a barrier to the solution in the first place! Problems may have multiple overlapping constraints, ill-defined structure, conflicting stakeholders, issues of collective action and coordination, and other things that might not just solely stem from the divided attention of policymakers and the public. One does not have to resort to Rittel’s work on planning theory to make this conclusion, it is evident simply from the economic approach to policymaking. Tradeoffs exist. Caring intensely about a problem isn’t going to make them go away.
Lastly, I find Estrada’s evidently favorable citation of this literature somewhat amusing if the goal is social justice:
Humans are hypersensitive to fairness. More than any other creature, we pay attention to the distribution of resources, and we cry foul when they are not distributed evenly. And this works not necessarily to reclaim resources, but rather to turn the social sentiment against the unjust. We cry foul because we assume we’re playing tit-for-tat, and getting everyone on your side to punish defectors is how the game works. Crying foul was never supposed to be an instrument for directly realizing social aims. Like a baby’s cry, crying foul on social injustices is always issued from a position of helplessness, meant to highlight the problem in the hopes that others recognize the need for a solution as well.
Estrada might want to be very careful about what he wishes for. In Robert Axelrod’s original piece on the evolution of norms, one of the examples utilized is Axelrod’s explanation of that peculiar Southern institution, the lynching (and in the particular anecdote, murder via arson) of helpless African-Americans by mobs of murderous racists. Axelrod notes that the first person to express even the most mild form of discontent was immediately hit in the face. But the marvelous power of human hypersensitivity to fairness though! Estrada, as I have consistently noted throughout this response, seems indifferent to the idea that such a hypersensitivity is not a neutral abstract mechanism but socially and politically situated. It can be a good or a bad thing.
It is undeniable that humans are biologically and socially evolved to be sensitive to perceived violations of fairness. It is also undeniable that people frequently resort to violence due to a perceived violation of fairness or norms of conduct, whether the violated norm is one of not stepping on an angry thug’s designer sneakers or failure to share the belief that the burning of an human being alive by an murderous mob of racists is a valid endeavor. The end result is the same: violence is sanctioned. Estrada, following Peter Singer (the philosopher, not the think-tanker), wants the powerful effect of the primordial drive to rectify perceived unfairness and enforce group order without the violence, oppression, generalized nastiness, coerced conformity, and irrationality that often accompanies it.
Why I Am Still Not Convinced About The Virtues of Slacktivism Part II: That’s Just Your Opinion, Man!
All of this, however, does not really address or satisfy the most powerful critique that Estrada makes — his argument from opinion dynamics. Certainly it has chipped away at pieces of the whole, but in the segmented and fragmented style of Internet argumentation. Until I address Estrada’s core claim here:
Beating this drum over and over will not itself directly change the direction of journalism. But indirectly, it’s the only tool we have to put pressure on those who can
….Estrada will justifiably note that I have assaulted him with a farrago of objections that are ultimately subsidiary to his strongest argument. Yes, mass public outrage mobilization and outrage is messy, imperfect, often highly haphazard, crude, and often does not lead to policy solutions. Estrada might even accept all of my arguments about the substantial problems, risks, and downsides in detail. Nonetheless, he can counter with the simple and effective point that it is the only tool that can put pressure on policymakers. He justifies this via an analysis of opinion dynamics. Because I want my readers to be sure that I am going to fairly argue against what comes next, I quote it at length:
Put simply, castigation for social injustices is meant to operate on popular opinion, not policy. It is not an objection to the technique that it is an ineffective political instrument; this is simply a misunderstanding of its political aims to begin with. Elkus thinks crying foul is meant to result in constructive changes in policy and finds it lacking, when in fact it is meant to sway hearts and minds. From this perspective, Elkus is exactly wrong to dismiss “tragedy hipsterism” is ineffective. Our capacity to sway the dynamics of popular opinion through internet “slacktivist” crying has never been greater. And, if I might say so, it is glorious.
To see why, we must first understand how opinion dynamics work. In debates that use terms like “tragedy hipsterism”, the focus is almost always at the extremes: the extremely violent, the extremely annoying, the extremely powerful. But a discussion centered on extremism tends to mask the tedious and boring realities of everyday human life. The truth is that human beings are constitutionally moderate. Our opinions, on everything from politics to food, from the important to the mundane, tends towards the average. We like to find a happy middle ground.
There’s a good reason for this: extremism is expensive. When you adopt an extreme view you also carry the burden of justifying and maintaining that view in the face of popular opposition, since by its very nature most people will reject the extreme view. Extremism takes work, and it isolates you from the crowd. Extremists tend to seek each other out partly because it is easier to hold extremist views in populations where such views are typical. Moderate views are more widely held, and so distribute the work to maintain them among a wider population. Holding moderate views will rarely put you in a position of social opposition. Moderation is the path of least resistance.
So, in other words, extremes, by shifting perceptions of what it means to be moderate, gradually help make the extreme moderate:
Okay, assume the above story is more or less how we develop all our beliefs. We just want to average out the beliefs of everyone around us. Our interests and a general desire to distinguish ourselves might drive us to seek out niche communities and beliefs, but within these communities we’re generally attracted to the moderate views. Call it the murmuration theory of opinion dynamics. On this view, we’re not looking for convincing arguments or evidence, and we’re really not driven by understanding or deeper purpose. We just want moderation relative to our neighbors.
In a sea of moderates, how do you generate social change? The best arguments and evidence can be swept aside in a popular debate by ad hominems and red herrings, so building a convincing political case won’t do much good. Since you’re also in an oligarchy your effective options for direct political action are minimal. In this environment, your best option is to move the extremes. If you want the flock to bank right, then you need to bank right, hard, and hope that enough follow you to make a difference. If everyone is seeking moderation, then wide exposure to new extremes will indirectly shift the general sense of “the middle”, and thus the popular sentiment creeps towards your ideal. So, for example, we tell the public that 99% of scientists agree on climate change not because it is independently convincing (though it should be), but instead to inform them on where the average view lies. The argument relies on the moderation of the general public, not on their support of science.
In general, we expect others to have moderate opinions; it’s the rule we’re all following. So when another person expresses moral outrage, it is possible that this is an expression of a moderate position, that anyone would be outraged if they paid attention. It is also possible that the person is expressing an extremist position, in which case I might not be outraged. But the only way to be sure is to look, and any looking accomplishes the extremist’s goal, which is simply to expose you to new extremes. It probably won’t convince you directly, but it indirectly influences you to accept the new extreme as the limit of the view, and to re-evaluate your own sense of where the happy middle lies. Enough such re-evaluation will nudge the center slightly in the extremist’s direction.
First, let’s note that repeatedly informing people about the climate consensus has done…..exactly what for climate change efforts? *crickets*. Climate change is politically dead. Why? There are a lot of reasons, but let’s take a bit of a closer look at this specific contention:
In this environment, your best option is to move the extremes. If you want the flock to bank right, then you need to bank right, hard, and hope that enough follow you to make a difference. If everyone is seeking moderation, then wide exposure to new extremes will indirectly shift the general sense of “the middle”, and thus the popular sentiment creeps towards your ideal. So, for example, we tell the public that 99% of scientists agree on climate change not because it is independently convincing (though it should be), but instead to inform them on where the average view lies. The argument relies on the moderation of the general public, not on their support of science.
As it turned out, informing the public about the climate consensus didn’t work. Why? Someone actually did some research on this, and the results do not suggest much confidence for Estrada’s argument.
Why do members of the public disagree — sharply and persistently — about facts on which expert scientists largely agree? We designed a study to test a distinctive explanation: the cultural cognition of scientific consensus. The “cultural cognition of risk” refers to the tendency of individuals to form risk perceptions that are congenial to their values. The study, published in the Journal of Risk Research, presents both correlational and experimental evidence confirming that cultural cognition shapes individuals’ beliefs about the existence of scientific consensus, and the process by which they form such beliefs, relating to climate change, the disposal of nuclear wastes, and the effect of permitting concealed possession of handguns. The implications of this dynamic for science communication and public policy-making are discussed.
Estrada would believe that people are unthinking automata like the kind that he utilizes in his agent-based models, converging to various macro-outcomes based on simple decision rules. Unfortunately for climate change advocates, that was decidedly not the case empirically! This is not the only part of the justification for his causal sequence that is thin in justification. When I clocked Estrada’s reference to “murmuration theory,” I was somehow expecting, say, a peer-reviewed publication in the social sciences that supported his claim or a link to an prominent expert or episode that suggested that his causal mechanism was correct. Instead, I got a piece about a bunch of flocks of starlings. No, I’m not kidding you. Flocks of starlings.
The “take a model from outside the social sciences and infer that it explains human social behavior” argument depends on the audience believing that the dynamics of starlings somehow constitute an equivalence class of human social behavior. Why not argue, then, that this survey of social rivalry among wild baboons transitively suggests that “testicular function, social rank, and personality” in said baboons (much closer to us than starlings) has something to tell us about social cooperation and conflict?
Estrada surely knows that models like this and arguments like this are a dime-a-dozen in the computational social sciences. Everyone that has taken the intro course and made those NetLogo turtles run around has seen all of the toy models that constitute generative proofs of some abstract hypothesis. Heck, I ended up once trying to make a case that simulated annealing explained offshore balancing simply because I thought that simulated annealing looked cool!
The problem, as chemist Cheryl Rofer often repeats on Twitter, is that without an idea of how these nice-looking models and simulations relate to observed social reality, it’s just “complexity woo-woo.” But I would be doing Estrada a profound disservice if I did not acknowledge that he has offered other evidence for the claim. There is…..another simple complexity model. However, I have some complex systems models of my own that I can show to readers, culled from the 910 citations on the simple model used to provide evidence for the claim. Such as the comment on the simple model that pointed out a mathematical error. Or a note that observes that the model does not consider the structure of the agent society. There are others that challenge, extend, modify, or shift the emphasis of the original model used. But to go further would be pedantry. Estrada has already acknowledged that it is a simple model and that a more advanced simulation has more representational power and complexity. I pointed out these two sources because it illustrates two significant problems in Estrada’s argument.
First, Estrada is making an argument from opinion dynamics that agents are capable of self-organizing to what he would consider a normatively desired state. Yet the evidence for this is very thin, consisting of a reference to research on the dynamics of starlings and a one-off take on the results of a simple agent-based model (there are enormous amounts of agent-based models, all of which have problems with verification and validation). Noticeably absent from Estrada’s analysis is reference to any empirical literature in American political science, which might have something to say about the dynamics of political opinion. This is problematic, because the model he cites as part of his argument has not been empirically validated.
Certainly it demonstrates an existence proof and was an important advance in the study of opinion dynamics. But little else within the context of our argument beyond the fact that his argument at a minimum has plausibility. And, as I noted above about the climate change empirical mismatch, idealized models can mislead. It may be useful to consider a society of agents a series of automata with little detailed cognitive mechanisms, self-awareness, or perceptions of ritual or values, but it is also imprudent under certain circumstances. Such as, for example, explaining the genesis of complex public policy shifts.
This lack of citation to political science and disciplines beyond opinion dynamics and the flocking of starlings is unfortunate, because there is something very much missing from Estrada’s analysis — the process of how, exactly, opinion leads to outcomes. Estrada seems to subscribe to a naive variant on the Overton Window (which, I should add, is far more beloved by journalists and pundits than among political scientists).
In a sea of moderates, how do you generate social change? The best arguments and evidence can be swept aside in a popular debate by ad hominems and red herrings, so building a convincing political case won’t do much good. Since you’re also in an oligarchy your effective options for direct political action are minimal. In this environment, your best option is to move the extremes. If you want the flock to bank right, then you need to bank right, hard, and hope that enough follow you to make a difference. If everyone is seeking moderation, then wide exposure to new extremes will indirectly shift the general sense of “the middle”, and thus the popular sentiment creeps towards your ideal.
As it turns out, the idea that there is a “sea of moderates” waiting to be captured goes against much of what we know about political opinion, which tends to hinge around issues of everything from party sorting to biological dispositions for political beliefs. Pundits have dreamed again and again for some kind of third party composed of a mythical set of independents to somehow lead us to salvation, and time and time again they’ve found that independents are actually partisans. We have also seen, more broadly, that moderates could very well be on the path to becoming an endangered species in our political system.
The absence of such details is not surprising given that simple opinion dynamics model is not really designed to test “how to generate social change.” It shows how opinions change. Which may or may not result in social change. As we are not starlings, the nature of how our opinions change, how we mobilize, and the relation between activists, policy entrepreneurs, “veto players,” policymakers, and other creatures of the American political zoo are not a subject of analysis. But they are all elements of social change.
In general, Estrada’s idea of why I am wrong is rooted in this causal chain:
- Lots of people have the same opinions due to a mainstreaming process due to exposure to extremes.
- Social recognition of a problem
- Pressure builds
- Something happens
It’s a nice idea, but it runs into a problem: lots of people wanting things doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll get it. Why? Lots of reasons. It would take an entire dissertation to provide even a simple literature review. Collective action power and social capital are commonly observed structural explanations for why certain movements succeed or fail. If you are a discourse theorist or a political psychologist, you might look at the impact of frames and discursive strategies. It also pays very little tension to the organizational repetoire and operations of the movements themselves, a topic discussed by the most famous and influential book in the study of protest and social movement politics. This is all relevant because Estrada’s view of social movements only operates at the level of opinions themselves, not their strength, nature, or ability to coerce policymakers. Might there be some work on this? Yes, there is!
Whether or not those opinions lead to pressure or desired outcomes is the topic of a lot of interesting research in political science. The conclusions often are that policy outcomes are determined by savvy insiders, not bottom-up public opinion. One systematic review of the literature found that
“Compared to economic elites, average voters have a low to nonexistent influence on public policies. …..Not only do ordinary citizens not have uniquely substantial power over policy decisions, they have little or no independent influence on policy at all,” the authors conclude. In cases where citizens obtained their desired policy outcome, it was in fact due to the influence of elites rather than the citizens themselves: “Ordinary citizens might often be observed to ‘win’ (that is, to get their preferred policy outcomes) even if they had no independent effect whatsoever on policy making, if elites (with whom they often agree) actually prevail.”
It is due to the fact that opinion does not, in fact, always prevail that the strategies, motivations, and tactics behind social movement campaigns matter. They are not an afterthought to be treated, as Estrada does, as the demand of a grouch wanting the people waving the signs around to have a bullet pointed ten-point plan. Many of the most successful leaders and strategists of social movements have had a keen and richly developed sense of what they want to achieve, why, how, and why other people should care. They also understand, contra Estrada, that mere grievance is not enough to cause purposeful social change. It is a cliche to cite how the Civil Rights movement waited for just the right opportunity to launch its busing campaign (as well as how close they came to disaster in that campaign and others). But it’s also a cliche for a reason. Ditto to the pragmatic cooperation of movement leadership with high-level federal authorities, and the way they played them off against local political elites.
A tragic thing about many social movements as well is the way in which mistakes — especially in the public eye — can have catastrophic impacts. Diluting the focus of a social movement, as many protestors since the 1990s have discovered, merely lessens the impact and turns the public presentation into one of a freak show. In contrast, the #BlackLivesMatter movement kept the focus squarely on the problem of police brutality and created pathways for activists to be involved and feel like a part of the movement besides dancing around a campfire and talking about people they read in graduate school. Occupy has since split into a series of sub-movements, some of which are likely attaining more success than their parent organization in whatever endeavors they are trying to achieve.
And the consequences of success sometimes can be undesirable as well. Electing President Obama, for example, felt good. But it drained progressive activists of the campaign war chests that they had so painstakingly built up and allowed Obama to co-opt various forms of progressive infrastructure that would be needed later on to fight ideological opponents. Perhaps no one thought about that while the endorphins flowed and Obama made a soaring speech. But it had an operational impact nonetheless, and it stung even further because the President (surprise!) did not live up to the hopes of many of his most fervent admirerers.
And when one looks at the mixed record of various celebrity-driven movements for relief in the Third World, Estrada should not be so dismissive of genuine concerns over the sincerity and above all else instrumental effect of public sentiment. I have plenty of friends who are veterans of various peaceful efforts to do genuine good in the world and their opinions of these kinds of campaigns is grudgingly accepting at best and scathingly dismissive at worst.
Why I Am Still Not Convinced About The Virtues of Slacktivism Part III: The Instrumental Imperative
To this, Estrada may throw one last counter: how else do we turn public opinion against the unjust? How else can we make The Man hear us? This is, on its face, a strong argument. All I have done is poked holes in the belief that a bunch of people on Facebook can lead to generalized social change.
Well, he might begin by picking up a book by Saul Alinsky or many of the thousands of other people who have either practiced or studied the art of social movements, protests, and persuasion. None of them believed that they had the answer, but many of them would have been shocked or even offended by Estrada’s baby analogy. Instead of babies mewling for an adult to come and feed them, many of these organizers — from various political, economic, and ethnic backgrounds — sought to unite their followers by appealing to their common dignity, courage, and determination. They created a shared narrative of taking back what was lost, and righting a common wrong. The act of participation in the movement was both a means to a desired and clearly specified instrumental end but was also an end in and of itself in that it gave powerless people power and a sense of pride and hope.
They were, of course, willing to tolerate mainstream unpopularity and were willing to tolerate arrest and the risk that a public spectacle. And of course they also made plenty of mistakes, some of them game-ending. But they also were not stupid. They asked their followers to do a lot to, to endure a lot, and in return there was some expectation of a definition, however crude, of what it would lead to. This leads me to my final criticism of Estrada’s response. Estrada’s vision of social action is completely bereft of any way that makes the people in question agents of their own fate. He justifies this with the following analysis:
Of course, this argument is ridiculous. Crying isn’t meant to solve problems directly. In fact, crying is usually issued from a place of helplessness: the inability to realize one’s aims is precisely why crying is needed. Furthermore, crying doesn’t imply any deep understanding of the problem or the conditions required to satisfy it. The crying baby might not even know it is hungry; all it knows is that something is wrong.
And this is the point of crying: to act as a beacon for an ongoing problem. The goal of crying is to generate a widespread recognition that there is a problem in need of solving, lest anyone forget; a failed solution is all the more reason to cry. Not to solve the problem directly, but to create social conditions for recognition of a problem, so that others will feel the pressure to generate solutions, both for their own sake and also to stop the annoyance and danger the crying itself generates. Because yes, beacons can be dangerous; that is partly why it moves others to act. The parents of the crying child on a plane want to alleviate their own shame as much as their child’s suffering.
Does Estrada really think so little of the people that he is writing about that he analogize them to…..babies? It appears so. His conception of social action is one rooted in the incessant plea for an authority figure to do something to help. This is not a coincidence. As T. Greer has noted, this defines the landscape of how we as Americans — of all political stripes, not just the oft-criticized campus leftists — see politics:
Campbell and Manning hint at a more important factor when they highlight the growing power of university administration and the weakening of social ties among students. Here the college campus is a microcosm of social changes happening at every level of American society. Not every American must deal with an ever distant university administration, but all are further and further removed from the levers of power. This story is a well known one: over the last five decades American social capital has fallen apart. Americans are less likely to volunteer, participate in local political parties or caucuses, join civic, religious, or self improvement associations, attend church, have group hobbies, vote, read local newspapers, organize neighborhood gatherings, play cards, spend time on social visits, or have as many friends now as they did in 1960.
At the same time many organizations which once gave average men and women the chance to work together or serve in local leadership roles disappeared — or have been consolidated to heights far beyond the reach of the average citizen. There are fewer school boards and municipal governments now than there in the 1950s, despite the doubling of America’s population since then. National charities are more likely to ask their members for money than time; lobbying has replaced supporting local chapters as the main activity of most national activists. The federal government assumes powers traditionally reserved to local and state governments. Local businesses have been pushed out of existence by international conglomerates. [11] The businesses, associations, congregations, and clubs that once made up American society are gone. America has been atomized; her citizens live alone, connected but weakly one to another. Arrayed against each is a set of vast, impersonal bureaucracies that cannot be controlled, only appealed to.
A “Culture of Victimhood” is a perfectly natural response to this shift in the distribution of power. Remember that the central purpose of moral cultures is to help resolve or deter disputes. Dignity cultures provide a moral code to regulate disputes among equals from the same community. They also help individuals in a community — citizens — organize to protect their joint interests. 21st century America has lost this ability to organize and solve problems at the local level. The most effective way to resolve disputes is appeal to the powerful third parties: corporations, the federal government, or the great mass of people weakly connected by social media. The easiest way to earn the sympathy of these powers is to be the unambiguous victim in the dispute.
This, quite literally, is how Estrada envisions the process of slacktivism. A group of people, whom he (I repeat) analogizes to infants, cry out about a problem they don’t understand or have little bearing on because something must be done, and an authority figure must do it. The authority figure, annoyed and distrubted by the crying and bleating of the people upset about X or Y, finally has to do something. It doesn’t matter what they do, whether or not what they will do is in everyone’s well-being (remember, parents can respond to crying children by punishing them in various ways or revoking privileges), they just need to feel a pressure for generating a solution.
Conclusion
I started out writing this essay believing that I was going to be arguing against a Goldilocks conception of society in which people cry out for someone to do something and it “creates the conditions” for something to be done. However, the baby passage was utterly shocking to me. I looked at my screen several times just to see if I was correctly understanding what was being written. Someone was arguing that the bleating of a baby, someone with no legal agency of their own, for the attention of a parent and the resulting social pressure on the parent to do something, anything to get the baby to shut up, is a useful or even ennobling view of social activism. This is a view that seems ripped out of a Breitbart.com column scolding “kids these days.”
For what it is worth, I have a far more measured and positive view of slacktivism than Estrada does! The Internet can be a effective mobilization tool; #BlackLivesMatter has proved that. And there are other campaigns that have harnessed slacktivism to help shift the correlation of forces, such as the successful effort to mobilize latent political opposition to tear down the Confederate flag. And if I wanted this piece to be any longer than it already is (ugh!) I could run down the list of academic publications that I know offhand or could quickly find that show how internet-mobilized social movements could have powerful operational impacts without demanding much of the participants.
At heart, as I have repeated several times in the piece, I am not inherently opposed to the idea that the Internet can be a positive force for social change. What I want is some indication that there is something in it beyond the vanity or signaling of the participants, and if there must be vanity and signlaing it is channeled toward a useful end. In the context of a perceived misallocation of attention over Beirut and other locales, perhaps people might investigate whether or not there is, in fact, a lack of coverage and go from there?
Even if there was, the point remains that covering foreign news is very hard and there are substantial disincentives for often poorly paid and ignored foreign reporters or their bosses to assume that the public cares. Given that few seem to read their stories or care about them when there is no signaling to be done, I would think that these fellows are justified in their belief that there isn’t any point. Just crying out “something needs to be done” isn’t going to help, unless there’s some posited causal mechanism for how it is going to somehow reverse those incentives. Estrada has none. He simply says “people are upset, there will be pressure, someone will do something about it” and then leaves the what will be done about it blank. That is unfortunate, as perhaps being able to shape the “what” might actually be useful!
Regardless, no matter how low my opinion of slacktivists, I would never in a million years write a paragraph analogizing them to babies crying out for mother in a crowded restaurant. First, I do not believe that such a negative generalization is warranted absent even a minimal explanation of context (and even that would not be enough). And even if I did, I would be eviscerated if I dared to write something like that. If social change has Estrada as a friend, I shudder to think about who stands to be counted in the legion of its enemies.