Attention Epilepsy and Freedom of Speech on the Internet

Freedom of Speech versus Freedom of Reach, Listening through the Surface of Complaints, and Maybe just Maybe Republic style Democracy is a Good Thing?

His Purple Mountain Majesty, the Trunk which Upholds the Three Branches of Government, the Granter of Innate of Human Rights, Supreme Compeller of Freedom, Presumer of Innocence, Blinder of Justice, Father of the Founding Fathers, Son of the Statue of Liberty, Two-Armed Bearer of Arms, Shield of Speech, Amberer of the Waves of Grain, All-Powerful Separater of Powers, the King of the United States of America

When we were all hunter-gatherers chasing after antelope on the African savannah I bet people would sit around the campfire at night and tell some pretty wild stories. Creation myths, weird psychotropic visions, and just outright lies. Did you see Ugalug kill an antelope with a single hand? Well, Ugalug will tell you all about it. Ugalug would hold up a single hand and tell an imaginative story about his divine strength. And if that hand was holding a spear in reality, next to several other men with spears, maybe everyone would let it slide based on the tribal knowledge “That’s just how Ugalug is. Ugalug likes to exaggerate. That’s okay because Gragna is the one calling all the shots and everyone knows not to take Ugalug too seriously.”

This kind of speech paradigm works when everyone knows everybody else and people prone to wild exaggerations can only talk to people with whom they have long-standing relationships. When you have a history with everyone and you’re able to filter any new thing they say through the lens of that history. Sure. Whatever. That’s not the same as knowing objective truth, but I think we can all admit we do this simply as a way to save disc-space in our brains. You can’t attend to whatever crazy fabrication Ugalug or George Santos is coming up with every time like it’s the first time he’s ever told you anything. You just biologically can’t do that.

Now give Ugalug a magical golden horn. When he speaks into this horn, his voice will instantly appear among other tribes he has never met. He tells them about the time he killed an antelope with a single hand. And now everyone thinks “Praise the stars, a hero has chosen to speak to us from on high!” All manner of unrest follows as all of these other tribes have to figure out what to do with the thoughts of Ugalug, who they have never and will never meet in person.

This is analogous to the situation we find ourselves in with the internet. Except everyone gets the magical horn. It’s not one Ugalug speaking into the middle of your tribe, it’s all the Ugalugs. Millions of Ugalugs all competing for a moment of your attention. They’re happy to pretend to have done all sorts of things. And worse, there’s all kinds of real and true stuff out there as well that you hardly even know what to do with. All of it, all at once, all the time. Freedom of Reach has never been so intoxicatingly powerful.

You’ll scroll through your X feed and you’ll watch a video of Sir Nicholas Winston saving children during the Holocaust, then not even a full second later watch some random video of someone getting killed in the middle of the street, and finally this comedy video of Norm MacDonald from almost thirty years ago savaging a movie made by Carrot Top. All of this in one second. One second to go to the heights of human heroism, to the depths of depravity, and land on the heights of comedy. Your brain was not intended to operate in this kind of environment.

I call this Attention Epilepsy. There is nothing there to order the appropriateness of whatever “content” comes into your feed. There is nothing there to give you a sense of history with the account that posted the content. Nothing to pick up your focus and channel it into a useful thought or to take that useful thought and turn it into some real practical action. It’s an endless and ever-changing sea of people you will never see again posting or re-posting and your ability to meaningfully understand any of it is impossibly small. Until Community Notes there wasn’t even anything there to give you a sense of what the broader group happened to know about that content. What are you supposed to meaningfully focus on? If you find some person posting some content is a convicted sex offender how do you warn other people about that and make it stick? Or what if someone with six followers is actually a professor with proven research in a given subject trying to make his opinion known? It’s all just kind of… there.

I think in their best natures, even if they don’t know it and would disagree with the immediate idea, the kind of people who flip out about Nazis posting on substack aren’t really so much upset by the idea of Nazis making a few dozen dollars every month —seriously, they don’t make that much money and Substack certainly isn’t making a killing off those accounts— as they are about unmitigated Attention Epilepsy. Racist content is arresting. It makes you immediately stop and pay attention. If that winds up in your feed you’ll take notice. Even if only to dislike its presence. Even the possibility of a guy appearing in front of your eyes who might post the N-word at any moment is a bit like going to a public swimming pool and finding yourself floating alongside a turd. The tolerance for that kind of circumstance is very low.

In the most borderline instance, take Richard Hanania. When people are talking about Nazis on substack they are mostly talking about or around him because otherwise the reality is as written in the previous paragraph, a few guys making at most a couple dozen dollars per month. To be clear, Richard Hanania is not a Nazi. He doesn’t even describe himself as a white-supremacist. He’s a bit of a smug but aren’t we all at times? However, Hanania also appears to have been bitten by the bug of “post wild shit online” and had a much more severe case when he was younger when he did post some genuinely out and out racist stuff. That might not be a turd floating by you in the public swimming pool but it it might feel like the kid who hasn’t showered in the last month suddenly doing a cannon ball by you and your family.

Social media wants to find a way to reconcile itself between the untamed chaos of a public pool with thousands of strangers and the intimate order of a small community pub where you have the same interests and history as the other twenty people there.

I don’t really have to try to empathize very hard to imagine someone in a minority group wanting to know the history of Richard Hanania when coming across his writing. I would want to know Richard Hanania’s history before reading his opinion on affirmative action or whatever. I also don’t have to try very hard to imagine someone just not wanting to see it. I can even see someone insisting that other people know it when coming across that content.

It’s important to listen through someone’s complaints. People usually are right that they’re upset. Being upset is an almost comically difficult thing for people to be wrong about. But they’re usually not correct about what they want to have fixed or how, until you ask deeper and more probing questions.

If I sat down with people who are upset about these kinds of things and we talked it out for a very long time, my guess is that they’re mostly upset about Attention Epilepsy. Not only that they can’t seem to live in a world they want to inhabit but that there’s no order to any of it, no consequences, and no context, for anyone about anything.

Okay, but We still can’t just have Mobs — Or, Don’t Pretend You Weren’t There When the Deep Magic was Written

The Substackers Against Nazis movement frustrates me a lot. The primary reason is because I feel like the community on substack as a whole is extremely middle-aged and very, very online. So when people pretend not to understand where their opponents are coming from it’s like watching a painfully acted high school musical. Everyone is putting on a show. Everyone knows everyone is putting on a show. And everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone is putting on a show. And we’ve all seen this play performed approximately ten million times.

Firstly, do you know how fucking weird you have to be to have signed up for an email newsletter company? If you have a normal group of friends, you are the weirdest one. Do you know how much of an outlier you have to be to publish an online newsletter? Don’t pretend this is your first argument about Free Speech on the internet or that you’re so morally pure that you literally can’t even imagine what the other side is saying. You’re forty. Even if you’re thirty-eight, as I am, you’re forty. Forty. In fact, in internet time, you’re sixty-three. If you’re sixty-three on the internet you basically served in Korea on two dozen combat missions, so stop acting like you have the limited agency of a one-eyed orphan kid selling chiclets on the side of the road in a developing country.

We’ve all been online since the early days of the internet when you had to go upstairs and have a conversation with your entire family that you needed no one to pick up the phone for the next two hours because you were about to go fight an entire fandom on some message board because no one else there believed in your fan theory. When we watch this video of the “Master Debater” guy… we all have to accept that we are him a little bit on the inside. Click on that link. That’s you. He lives in you. You’ve danced this dance before.

So when John Hodgman —a comedy hero of mine— reposts very simple arguments, that acknowledge no nuances or possible problems with mob justice, advocating for Substack to just immediately and arbitrarily delete anyone that an angry group of people decides is a Nazi… dude, don’t pretend you weren’t there when the Deep Magic was written. I know everyone on each side of this is too damn smart to not see what the other side means even if the other side isn’t using the exact right words to advance their argument. No, it’s not your responsibility to make their argument for them but maybe since we’ve all been doing this for basically a hundred years, out of sheer frustration, maybe you would find some way to find common ground?

We all need to sit down and have a breather and look each other in the face and say: “Kevin, you’re fifty-one years old now. You eat dinner at 4pm. Stop trying to start a Civil War on the internet.”

For anyone who is so deep into method acting that literally cannot even imagine why someone would be concerned about deleting Nazi friendly substacks, here’s why:

1. I have a problem in general with people being punished because a large group of people assembled, became aggressive, and just demanded that they be punished. That’s not due process. When this stuff happens it’s not in the form of a “please quietly and discretely review this in a fair and impartial manner and give the accused the right to make their own defense or to have another speak in their defense with no coercion” it comes in the form of a list of demands backed by various threats. The people at the center of the controversy typically don’t get a chance to speak up. The reasoning behind the decision is never made public. Seriously, how is anyone supposed to pretend that’s justice? And you’re attacking, what, their ability to make enough money to go eat at a Sizzler every month?

2. Who gets to decide what should piss everyone off? Seriously. Who gets to have that power? I’m going to play an integrity card here. I was raped when I was a kid. It ruined decades of my life. I’m smart enough and did well enough on tests that all kinds of people were trying to open doors to me as I was leaving high school. I just emotionally couldn’t make myself walk through any of them because of that trauma. NASA gave me a scholarship. A Nobel Laureate called my house and gave me a scholarship. Didn’t matter. Still couldn’t manage to believe in myself. Couldn’t stop hating myself. Should I get to decide to make entire groups of people disappear from the internet if they make arguments that I personally find to be too pro-pedophile? There’s one person I have blocked on all of substack and it’s Noah Berlatsky. He says all kinds of stupid stuff about supposedly “ethical pedophiles” and it pisses me off. If I see something by that guy, I’m just immediately pissed off. So I don’t look at it. Same for any work written by the science-fiction author Samuel R. Delany who has made some hair-curling comments in favor of things like the North American Man Boy Love Association, and ditto for Alan Ginsburg. If “triggering” can be said to exist in any meaningful sense, that stuff triggers me. But do I go looking for other people spouting that garbage just to get myself angry? No. Do I get to kick down Chris Best’s door and demand that anyone I name be booted from the platform because they give me the creeps? No. Because that’s not fair, it’s not justice, and it’s not principled.

3. You can’t have invisible laws with irregular enforcement where the only punishment is the digital equivalent of the death penalty and not be living under the politics of fear. Where is the official substack definition of Nazi so I can make sure that I am not one? Who gets to write that definition? Who gets to say if it’s still accurate? If someone writes it right now does it retroactively apply to all the content I made before it was written? Who gets to make all of these decisions and who gets to decide that they got to make that decision? Do the people you’re doing this on behalf of get to consent to you doing all of this on their behalf? I’m against the politics of fear in general. I’m a regular boring guy living a regular boring life who likes to occasionally write long spergy science-fiction stories and also advocate for really crazy political positions like… I don’t know… maybe there should be some kind of functioning republic/democratic layer of the internet with due process. That’s my crazy take. No one should be a dictator. I still only feel “safe” doing that under an anon account. Like, maybe we shouldn’t ask the CEO’s of tech companies to act as monarchs over something as critical as speech and maybe I shouldn’t have a real worry that someone with Borderline Personality Disorder will try to get me fired for saying something like that because something I wrote caused them to hyper-fixate.

I am going to Curse You with the Knowledge of an Obviously Better Idea

The thing about an obviously much better idea is that once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it. An obviously much better idea forces you to shift your position. Forever after the point of you hearing the obviously much better idea anytime you try to do something that follows the worse idea, your heart can’t ever really be fully in it. It sort of take the winds out of your sails not because someone convinced you that you were the worst person who ever lived, or that you were the most righteous, or because they were in all ways better than you, but because just for a second your brain went: “Oh. Huh.”

“Oh. Huh.” is the sound that angels make when they break into your mind and transform your perspective toward reason and truth.

I mean Jesus, John/Kevin/Miguel/Marisa/whatever your name is, you’re fifty-one years old arguing about fascism or dictatorship or whatever and you literally never even once thought that people should have a republic on the internet where they can do this sort of content moderation themselves? In all your screaming that people you don’t like should be disappeared you never thought to ask for a system and a forum in which to enact some kind of basic order by yourself?

How about instead of saber-rattling that Chris Best and Substack should act as king on your behalf you asked for them to give you the tools to self-govern instead? You could do all of this stuff for people who chose you to do it for them.

Oh. Huh.

Yeah, you could… I don’t know… maybe ask for a series of features that would help you create some kind of distributed online order instead of requesting to electronically execute people who feel differently than you do via a separate authority?

You get to make your own rules for your own community. Written by you and your community. You get to write those rules for your community. People in your community get to vote on them. If someone is accused of something by your community then that person gets to speak up in their own defense, or if they just don’t, someone else gets assigned to speak up in their defense. If you don’t want to see any Nazi content you can suppress that content for everyone who opts into your group. If you want to note something that is deceptive, you get to note it for your group. And then you get to coordinate across other groups to determine if normal people —who are not going to want to be involved in this kind of a system for a long while, let’s be honest. We’ve already established that if you are reading this that you are not a normal person— see those same kind of context notes or see those same kinds of suppressions.

That’s ordered. That’s lawful. That’s due process where you don’t just get to have an angry mob show up with a list of childish demands delivered with a threat. That’s the politics of process not fear.

We’re all too old for this shit. I am writing this because I have a child and it’s just so fucking stupid to pretend no one can even imagine a database with a couple dozen fields that will let you do things like share block lists and community notes. As substack grows, the relationships between organizations grow. The more you see people publishing pieces advocating for one position, you’ll see pieces and communities advocating against, and they must have a way to handle those disputes in public with fair rules. Trying to keep everyone in a walled garden won’t work because people like to fight with each other and if they don’t have an ordered manner in which to exchange those ideas they will just climb over the garden wall.

This is boring. I get that. This doesn’t give you an immediate satisfying rage. It’s slow and imperfect because any grand human action is slow and imperfect. It only indirectly effects the dozens of dollars that Nazis are making every month by depriving them of attention. People have to talk about what stuff means and how this all, precisely, works. And the first few features you get probably won’t be everything you want. But, it’s the kind of progress that sticks and builds on itself. It’s the kind of progress you could be proud of. It’s a way of being forty years old on the internet with some dignity.

I’m not saying no one should ever be kicked off substack, ever. There are limits to the first amendment. But if there are some rules somewhere about what that kind of behavior is wholly unacceptable, shouldn’t it by definition be written and accepted by the people who will be living and working under those rules? I’m old enough to remember when we believed that governments derived their just powers from the consent of the governed. If you don’t want society to work that way then who, really, is the fascist?

Otherwise, you are literally asking for someone who is trying to run a business to act as the king. You are hoping that the royal opinion will be swayed by your arguments. We can do better than that. We can be better than that. We could be ruled by ourselves. All you have to do is make the ask and talk out the particulars. Even if you don’t like me, I’d bet you agree with that.