the second techlash
the first was about collapsing consensus reality, the second will be about collapsing morality
For quite a while, I’ve thought that there might be a second techlash brewing. Primarily because Silicon Valley really has no idea how much many people hate them. To be clear, this isn’t a left vs. right problem. It’s a social capital problem.
Tech disrupted our sensemaking organs—the mainstream media—and replaced them with a more competitive marketplace for ideas. In theory, this should appeal to freedom-loving people like Americans.
But it turned out, most people do not like arguing 'what is real' from first principles every time they have a discussion.
We disliked mainstream media bias, but to some extent, people had been pricing in media bias for some time. For millennials like myself, at least since the Iraq War.
The problem with the social media platforms is not bias though. Its aggregates of sentiment are partially synthetic. We are better at discerning bot from individual than we were ten years ago. But not that much better.
Post-pandemic, social media has been winning the battle against mainstream media. Both compete to frame our reality and it is true that more eyeballs are on X than CNN.
But, social media did not win the war via trust. It won the war via the wholesale disintegration of trust.
There are no more journalists, only personalities.
There is no more news, only gossip.
Tech failed to be institutions, it only built platforms.