Your Own Damn Fault

There’s a lot of to-do about radical-ization online right now, about the online right. Many people complain about things like Youtube “algorithms” “feeding” viewers “radicalizing” “content” from “gateway” sources, (can you sense my “contempt” for this “shit” yet) and wireheads share stories about their best buds who used to be great progressive guys, but watched one too many Ben Shapiro videos and mutated into horrible slavering werewolves, with s0nnenrad tattoos and jean vests.

The outrage over this issue is simultaneously under- and over-blown. Let’s start with the surface level first: there is no algorithm designed to move you from Ben Shapiro to Varg. Youtube’s recommendation algorithms are a reflection of associations users draw between videos, not the other way around. If the algorithm were genuinely responsible for radicalizing someone, it would only be a reflection of the fact that many many people are radicalizing. Maybe the algorithm is an aggravating factor, but it’s not the root cause. Most of these “gateway” sources are just mundane neoconservatism, which wasn’t a threat to decent society a decade ago. Their content hasn’t changed — the attitude of the audience has.

This is a good lead-in to my greater point, which is that the audience has to be responsible for how they engage with content. If a person listens to radical propaganda and thinks “hmm yes he’s got a point” then that person is either gullible or uneducated. Unfortunately, we live in a culture that selects for precisely those traits —our education system rewards children for uncritically accepting whatever information is thrown at them by aggrandized teachers with too much confidence in the correctness of their beliefs, and too little in the intelligence of their students. For twelve years (sometimes more) American children are trained not only to take their instructors’ word for everything they know, but also to tear down old ways of knowing taught to them by the same instructors, and replace them with new, “more sophisticated” beliefs, with no more justification than the first, and with no reason except “this is beyond the scope of this course”! Education is not the only place in which this happens but it is the most egregious example. It’s hardly surprising that people are vulnerable to radicalization when they are so incapable of thinking critically. The friend you “lost” to radicalization was never sane to begin with — he was always that unhinged, you just didn’t notice it because he was attached to beliefs that aligned with yours. He went through his entire life believing nothing but the propaganda that was fed to him. He was a useful idiot back when he was a mild-mannered proponent of TPTB, and he’s a useful idiot now that he’s attending those rallies.

Americans live in a society which expects us to behave as adults, but doesn’t equip us to do so. Implicit in the concept of “democracy” is the idea that every enfranchised person is capable of making an informed decision about the political issues of the day. If anyone weren’t, they would make bad political decisions, and there would be no justification for allowing them to vote. At the same time, we have a pundit class full of nervous mother hens, constantly fretting that this or that bad influence will subvert the minds of millions of people as if by magic, preventing them from making the Correct choice at the voting booth. They do this because Americans have proven time and time again that they have no self-control when it comes to what they will believe, because they have been taught to be open and trusting. Americans are not suspicious enough to be left unattended. They need a baby-sitter in the voting booth, in their Youtube feed, in their social networks, in their television shows.

You think the American people are unfit for democratic government for precisely this reason. You may disagree — but if you do, please understand that you are placing your faith in the people around you to read books, watch videos and listen to speakers without an adult in the room. You are telling them that you trust them — handing them the keys to the car. If you genuinely believe that people are helplessly radicalized by Youtube algorithms, you believe that they are mentally incapable of participating in democracy.