the critical discussion in the Democratic Party is around "deliverism" and the alternate ideas that it has to get some successes and get things right to build legitimacy vs the view that things just happen to us and we can't count on things going right so why try?
alwa · 7h ago
A gap in my education that I look forward to filling, thank you! I’m curious about a specifically-online dynamic that the Persuasion author highlights: that is, it used to be the family and community could keep a lid on the crank flat-earther uncle, now he’s in algorithmically-catalyzed community and cohesion with 5,000,000 other crank uncles.
It feels like there must be a lot of good thought about that new mode of bottom-up legitimacy-building (and of impugning fustier real-world institutions)—would you happen to have any reading suggestions off the top of your head?
FrankWilhoit · 5h ago
What he is, and we are, seeing is devolution. The things he thinks are causes are effects, and vice versa.
alwa · 8h ago
A former senior Bush administration official (writing under a pseudonym) attempts to survey the social and political side-effects of algorithmic polarization and the tech business cycle.
Arrives at a similar call for deliberate moderation and communities of human-scale judgment as have familiar observers like Jon Haidt, Arthur C Brooks, and the “small web” crowd. Probably nothing new to most of the folks here, but I appreciated the broad view of the trenches we labor in from the perspective of a political person.
> Every platform eventually follows the same arc: nobility gives way to monetization, and monetization gives way to enshittification. But the true cost of enshittification isn’t just a worse internet experience. It’s a worse society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legitimation_crisis
He looked for solutions in his later
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Communicative_Ac...
which seem dangerously naive in the current day of online platforms. See also the concepts of "input legitimacy" vs "output legitimacy"
https://macleans.ca/general/two-concepts-of-legitimacy/
the critical discussion in the Democratic Party is around "deliverism" and the alternate ideas that it has to get some successes and get things right to build legitimacy vs the view that things just happen to us and we can't count on things going right so why try?
It feels like there must be a lot of good thought about that new mode of bottom-up legitimacy-building (and of impugning fustier real-world institutions)—would you happen to have any reading suggestions off the top of your head?
Arrives at a similar call for deliberate moderation and communities of human-scale judgment as have familiar observers like Jon Haidt, Arthur C Brooks, and the “small web” crowd. Probably nothing new to most of the folks here, but I appreciated the broad view of the trenches we labor in from the perspective of a political person.
> Every platform eventually follows the same arc: nobility gives way to monetization, and monetization gives way to enshittification. But the true cost of enshittification isn’t just a worse internet experience. It’s a worse society.