Pirate Wires - Terrorism and Moral Inversion | PIRATE WIRES EP#18 🏴‍☠️

Episode Date: October 13, 2023

EPISODE EIGHTEEN: War. Hamas attacks Israel in a horrific terror attack, setting off a week of counter attacks by Israel on Gaza. On this weeks episode, the Pirate Wires crew is joined by Noah Smith to break down all of the online reactions. From the deranged left, to college campuses, to CEOs creating terror lists. We also get into Twitter (X) and Elon's role in journalism as he continues to make changes to the platform. Featuring Mike Solana, Noah Smith, Brandon Gorrell, , Sanjana Friedman Subscribe to Pirate Wires: https://www.piratewires.com/ Topics Discussed: https://www.piratewires.com/p/moral-inversion Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Noah Twitter: https://twitter.com/Noahpinion Brandon Twitter: https://twitter.com/brandongorrell Sanjana Twitter: https://twitter.com/metaversehell TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Intro 0:31 - Changes to Twitter (X) - Taking Headlines Out Of External Links - Is The Platform Worse Now? 15:30 - Reacting To The Reactions - The Disturbing Discourse On The Far Left To The Hamas Attacks - Is Cancel Culture Now Happening On The Right? 1:04:25 - Is Twitter Dying? 1:13:27 - Final Thoughts On Technology, Information, Cancel Culture 1:15:30 - Like & Subscribe! Pirate Wires Podcast Every Friday - See You Next Week! #isreal #hamas #palestine #hamasattack #war #politics #usa

Welcome back to the pod. We have the one and only Noah Smith with us today. Finally, super stoked to have you. Thanks for coming. Hey, thanks for having me on. We've also got Sanjan, of course, and Brandon this week. I originally, so I reached out to Noah about the podcast right after, I think you had just said something about Twitter. You had mentioned, and correct me if I'm wrong here, if I'm getting it quite wrong, it was like you had found yourself going back to like the newyorktimes.com or you'd found yourself with a new link situation on Twitter in which links are stripped of their title and they're hard to kind of understand.

You'd found yourself going back to like regular mainstream outlets, right? Right. So taking headlines out of the title um, out of, uh, the title cards out of tweets basically has made it very difficult to tell, you know, what article is about what, you know, because you can't, you know, make people can describe the contents of the article in the tweet, but you don't know that that's what they're describing. So if someone says it could be their own commentary and you don't know that that's necessarily what the article is about. So I don't click on any of the

external links. And in fact, I've heard it said that Elon made the change so that he could discourage people from clicking on external links because the idea is that eventually, uh, X, uh, X Twitter will replace the news instead of simply, uh, integrating with the media ecosystem. I think that was his idea. Yep. I think that was his idea. Yep. I think that's definitely his idea. And Brandon's going to go off on that in a minute as well. I have had a similar, I think, experience leading up to the weekend. My sense was like, obviously it's a war with links. I don't think it's helpful. I certainly, I'd found myself going back to the New York Times more often because of it.

And it seemed like Twitter had lost some of its, a lot of its edge as a go-to place for the news. It was no longer the only place I had to go. I think a lot of people for a long time have been lying about the fact that they only get their news on Twitter. And that is no longer- You think they've been lying and they actually were getting it somewhere else? No, no, no. I think they were actually getting it all on Twitter, which seems kind of like, I was, I was, I was too. And I didn't want to maybe even admit that, but that now I'm realizing, I mean, that was really the truth because, uh, I'm, I'm noticing now, you know, I'm going, I'm going to newyorktimes.com, which I haven't done for a long, long time,

other than to fact check myself on something or whatever. But I will say that my opinion changed somewhat this weekend. So I was really seeing sort of a decline in Twitter generally as a place where I would go and have to go for the news. But now in the middle of a serious event, you have the Israel-Palestine situation. I don't think i would have known what was going on without twitter uh i don't know is that like maybe where are you on that have you changed your perspective at all or well no actually i think that what i found on twitter was almost entirely um was almost entirely just commentary so i could go on twitter to find out all the sort of horrible things that, you know, DSA people were saying in response to the, you know, Hamas attacks, supporting Hamas

attacks. And I could go there just to see, see the, you know, the comment wars. Twitter continues to be the comment section of the, of the world where people just fight flame. But I didn't, if, if i wanted to learn the actual events i didn't go to twitter in fact i it was not very good at that so i started going to i went to the washington post i don't subscribe to new york times uh i do subscribe to washington post and um and so i started going there uh and also some other outlets you know i would check but mainly washington post for updates you know sort of live updates about what's going on in the actual facts of what's happening. And in terms of the commentary, in terms of

what people are shouting about it, there you can go to Twitter. That's what I- That's wild to me. I had a totally different experience. New York Times front page, it's a blasted out building in Gaza, this Saturday morning, blasted out building in Gaza. You have a death toll, Hamas and Israel at war. There was some kind of a terror attack, but like Twitter, the first thing I saw was the body of a German girl on a truck. And it was two terrorists sort of laughing, a kid spits on her. That drags me into the actual carnage feed, which was disorienting and toxic. And that's a whole other kind of conversation of, I mean, do I want that in my head? Do I need that in my head? Is it important or something? But certainly the scale of the attack itself, and I did check the Washington

Post, I checked Fox, CNN, nothing gave me a more accurate sense of the sheer scale of carnage than Twitter. And I actually think that that conversation is what pulled the New York Times to a more Twitter-like reporting by Tuesday evening, like several days later. Maybe so. I think we have a lot of, we think about the New York Times a lot as a specific entity. as a specific entity. I would say that the news outlets that I saw got, seemed to get the facts pretty straight as soon as they came out. In fact, the Twitter people were pulling their facts from the news with a lag. So I still saw, for example, the number of Israelis who were dead in the attack. I saw everyone was saying 260. 260 Israelis dead. I saw the number go up to 600 and then 900

on news sites before I saw it on Twitter. And people on Twitter were still just repeating 260. And it was not a large lag. And it's not a, you know, I mean, it's not that big a deal, I guess, in the overall sense. But I felt like facts were coming from the news sites and then commentary was coming from Twitter. Now, of course, you know, videos and images are an exception to that, right? Because you don't, you know, so I got some of these videos from, you know, British tabloids or something like that, searching on Google News. from you know british tabloids or something like that searching on google news uh you know twitter actually when i searched on twitter to see the photos of horrible stuff which i believe we should always make ourselves look at the photos of the horrible stuff so it's not just abstract to us and we don't just you know have sort of this um you know uh detached bloodthirst of saying i support

this many people on paper dying for this abstract reason. You just see what it's like. You know, you see this is what it looks like when a child's blood is smeared all across a bed, you know, or you see burned corpses of babies. And you have to make yourself look at that at least once. And so when I was looking for that, I didn't actually find it on Twitter until I had already found it somewhere else and posted about it. And then people posted in the replies the nasty photos. But when I did a Twitter search, it didn't cop and it didn't cop in my feed either. This is crazy to me.

What was the two of your experiences? My experience is genuinely just like 180% in the opposite direction. Like I could not. Yeah, that's weird. It was like I could not. It's the algorithm. I actually was trying to avoid it. No, I was clicking the trends.

I clicked Israel. I clicked Hamas. I clicked just I went to the trends and every trend I clicked was like all of the feed of carnage. Yeah, no, I didn't go to the trends. I never go to trends. Maybe I've been using Twitter wrong all these years. I always use Twitter. If you just keyword search Israel. I did keyword search. Didn't find it. Didn't find it. The search is not good on Twitter. Search is terrible. I think the search is pretty bad. I searched for a long time to find those search. I did keyword search. Didn't find it. Didn't find it. The search is not good on Twitter.

Search is terrible. I think it's pretty bad. I searched for a long time to find those photos and couldn't find them. Let's back up a little bit, though. On the Elon, the link thing, that's a legit, what is your perspective on that, Brandon? Yeah, I have this theory, and I think I came to it. You basically actually know, you said it out loud. Actually, Noah, you said it out loud.

Whether or not Elon knows it yet, his logic of optimizing the 4U feed for unregarded user minutes means that he needs to subjugate every platform that hosts content, whether that platform is Substack, which obviously he's gone to war with, YouTube, or the New York Times. And there's evidence that he's been doing this in a few ways, and they are the only ways to do this, which is to, number one, how do you get people to stay on the feed? It's, first off, disincentivize

them from leaving the feed at all, which, again, we right like these throttling substack links a month ago new york times said that you know for a weekend their links had reached far fewer people than they were used to so in various ways he's already throttling links like you said noah he's taken headlines off of links so now links link posts are incoherent. And then the sort of positive way to get people to stay on the feed longer, to increase the number of unregarded user minutes is to simply make the content that's on the feed better and higher quality. And like, how do you do that? Well, you have to get more and higher quality content creators and more expensive content creators onto x.com as their primary way to distribute their own content.

And the way to do that is to make x.com the best place to monetize your content online, which again, puts you in direct competition, in my opinion, with somebody like Substack and even the New York Times. Yeah, it's weird that he sees the New York Times as, I don't know that weird, but that's the major change is that he endorses the New York Times as competition, not Mark Zuckerberg, but the New York Times, that's his competition. I don't even know if he sees that. He does. I think that's just where the logic ends up, right? Like you're in competition with the New York Times.

So now, I mean, like before the takeover, New York Times probably saw its Twitter followers as like the top of the funnel for subscriptions, right? So you could monetize X percent of the Twitter followers per month, and you can rely on that as a source of revenue. Now that's in direct opposition to the primary KPI of the four you feed. That's a threat. So what's Elon going to do? He has to subjugate these companies in one way or another, whether that's, I don't know,

quote unquote, doing things to put them out of business or acquiring them. I think that's where this thing ends up. Zooming out. I don't think you're going to have a media content monopoly in the United States or the world. I mean, like in 2015, around 2015, this has happened a few times, like with Facebook, for example.

Around 2015, their newsfeed was like ascendantant they were distributing tons and tons of traffic to uh to lots of newcomers to the media ecosystem and one of the things that they did was release this product called uh instant articles i don't know if you guys remember that or not um but instant articles were it was essentially an offer to publishers. What it was, was like, we'll pay, we'll give you a rev share of the advertising associated with the, uh, with your, with your instant article. If you post your article on Facebook directly and they'd kind of tried to take over, I don't know if they tried to take over news, but like that was a way to get, to keep people on the news, on their newsfeed longer. Um, said, Noah, that didn't work. This has

happened before and like New York Times survived, YouTube survived, Substack was born, right? We still have a, I don't know, dynamic ecosystem of media. But again, I think where- And the Facebook Instant Articles thing never really took off. I never saw a single one. Yeah, and that was not a good... The dominance that you're referring to was entirely external links. That's right. Yeah. And so Twitter's dominance of media...

You know, Facebook got out of that game mostly. And Twitter's dominance of media was always through external links. It was through being a platform for content creators um through external links rather than the place where the content was created itself uh except you know obviously just comments it was the comment section of the internet um you i think you could basically think of it as as publications outsourcing their comment section to one giant communal comment section. But it never... Yeah, so we've never seen a platform like that try to just basically be the one newspaper, the one Uber newspaper.

Well, because don't they have to avoid... They're also trying to stay on the right side of 230. Because don't they have to avoid... They're also trying to stay on the right side of 230. So the more you become like an actual newspaper, the more in danger you are of becoming culpable for everything that is written on your platform. And I keep wondering, at what point does that actually come more into play for Elon? I mean, he's becoming more and more of just like a straight up publisher. I used to criticize Twitter a lot for being the de facto publisher. I would think about their trends, actually. They would have full on those, remember those stories? They would do these kind of aggregated stories. And that to me, I'm like, that's curation,

that's publication. You have definitely a team writing this stuff. I don't know how 230 doesn't come into play at this point. That was my friend, Vijay Pandurangan, who invented that. So that So that, that stuff used to be the thing that really drove me the craziest about Twitter. I used to hate that shit. And I used to feel like this is you coming in with your editorial opinion and like, that's fine, but then you're a publisher. And so you, you have to be culpable for this shit. I, I think it's, it's a, it's a huge risk for them. They have a lot to gain from maintaining their status under 230. And I think it's a mistake. It's also though, just I'm completely biased because it's so much

worse for me personally. The golden age of me being able to post links unencumbered to my work. And it's crazy that I have to be like, it's weird that I'm like, oh, I wish I could post my... I mean, we all want to live in a world where we can share links to our work. And that was better for me. And it was better for PirateWire. I think it was better for me as a reader, a consumer. It was better for me as a creator. So when we talk about creator, he wants the best creators on his platform. He wants them really well monetized. This new product is not that for me. I don't want... well monetized. This new product is not that for me. I'm never going to be able to make as much on Twitter subscriptions as I am on Substack for PirateWires or even just my own email newsletter service or whatever. So I don't like it. I do think it's good for the world. I think that

it felt to me extremely different than what I saw anywhere else. And I do think the Overton window has broadened quite a bit. I'm wondering, I don't understand what the Europeans are talking about and what they want right now. I don't know why they were mad about what they saw on Twitter. I wish they would say it. I wish that we could see what the EU regulators are pissed about. Do you have any sense, Noah? No.

Yeah, I genuinely don't. I don't know. Do you have any sense, Noah? No. Yeah, I genuinely don't. What did they say? That X posted illegal content. I think it was literally like, you posted illegal content,

like content that's illegal in the EU. Weren't those the words? I don't know. They should say it. I would like to know what specifically they did not want there. Yeah, don't know. But on that, we should talk about you know this weekend

a little bit um i try not to and i'm not gonna hear maybe like a little disclaimer i am not gonna solve middle eastern politics um uh and that's not my that's not my interest that is not my goal here i tend to follow this stuff as an American, and I tend to be interested in the react. So for this week, I wrote a piece called Moral Inversion for Pirate Wires. And the anchor of it was the reaction that I saw to the sort of, I mean, the worst stuff I've ever seen in my life, I would say. Genuinely, I'd never seen anything as bad as I saw in Israel. Maybe that is because I haven't had access to it. I don't know what other fucked up things have

happened that I just missed because they weren't allowed or they were traded away. I don't know, but this was really unfathomable to me. And I was very... It was hard. And I saw you, Noah, talking a lot about this. So I think that we're kind of probably roughly on the same pager. It was really hard to watch the reaction to this stuff. It kind of seems to have bubbled up mostly from college campuses. And you see a lot of professors saying the professor is going viral now from Yale for her sort of, they weren't civilians tweet. That was one. I saw a handful of professors saying that this was legitimate. One was a Hawaiian studies major who was like, a Hawaiian studies professor. She was like, this is what we need to be doing here in Hawaii. And I was like, oh God, this is crazy. Sajana, before we get into Noah's take on this, and there was a lot, what was the lay of the land at the college campuses right now? Yeah. I mean, so I guess broad brushstrokes, what you've had happen over the past few days is a lot of university student groups have issued statements about the events

that happened in Israel and Hamas's attack that have then unleashed reactions and subsequent apologies, in some cases, from the students, and then doubling down in other cases. So, for example, a very well-known incident at this point happened when NYU Law's Student Bar Association, their president issued a statement where they said, because I believe this person identifies as non-binary, hi y'all, this week I want to express first and foremost my unwavering and absolute solidarity with Palestinians and their resistance against oppression toward liberation and self-determination. Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life. And then this person goes on to say, you know, I condemn the violence of apartheid i condemn the

violence of settler colonialism and then they end their statement by saying palestine will be free and so the day after or a few days after this statement comes out and following massive backlash on twitter the white shoe law firm that this person uh had a job offer at uh winston and straw which is a firm that, you know, has notably defended General Motors. And, you know, they're involved in lots of corporate litigation. So there's a bit of irony of this person presenting themselves as, you know, a freedom fighter or something, but they withdrew their job offer. And this is, you know, one of many cases that have occurred. So there was a statement that was issued by the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups, which begins with the sentence,

we, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence. And this was signed by a ton of student associations, including the Harvard Islamic Society, Harvard South Asian Law Students Association, et cetera. The Nepali Students Association signed it. And then Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard, got on Twitter and sort of tweeted that he was disappointed to see this statement was published. Bill Ackman tweeted that he'd been asked by a bunch of CEOs whether Harvard would release a sort of list of students who had signed this kind of statement. And Max Meyer, I believe, and some other people actually ended up putting together. They published what they called a terror list, where they basically listed students who had signed on to these statements, which all, you know, use the same boilerplate kind of phrases like Israel bears full responsibility for this attack. Glory to our martyrs from river to sea, to quote the Berkeley statement.

And, you know, it's interesting because initially, I know in the case of Stanford, my Alma, they released this very banal statement the day after the attacks, where they said something like, you know, we know that there's lots of troubling things going on in the world, and here's where you can get counseling. And this was amidst, you know, Stanford students hanging, like, sheets all over campus with things written in, you know, red ink saying the Israeli occupation is nothing but an illusion of dust. The land remembers her people. The illusion of Israel is burning. And so there is this like growing pressure for university administration to issue a statement condemning uh hamas's attacks which they eventually did um now they have to so the now they have all like the students are responding to this stuff the same time that we all are on saturday like this is mostly when we're all kind of the super online people are processing this, talking about it. I'm horrified at what seems to me at that point, the stuff that I saw,

the celebrations directly following this the same day, that to me is like a rape parade, basically. And I'm horrified by that. And I'm thinking, man, I'm not aligned with culture. This is hard to deal with. Three days later, it doesn't feel like that. Or now four days later, Wednesday, it seems like there's been a broad institutional backlash. And now what we're dealing with is the cancellation of the cancelers. Noah, what is your rough take on... I guess let's just start with, how do you feel about this you know, this Harvard thing in particular, you have these groups now, you have a list of names of people who have, who have signed on to the pro terror thing. Um, I don't know. What do you think about what it's,

it's a list of names. Uh, it's a political list. Is this, is this, how do you feel about it? Well, so what happens is that, that people join these groups and you're in this association, right? Sometimes you go to their meetings and like get some pizza, right? And maybe shyly try to hook up with someone there. I don't know. And so then when the, you know, the leadership of those groups are the people who are really invested and who really care, who make it their sort of everyday thing.

And everyone in this group sort of knows that the palestinians are oppressed and the israelis are the ones oppressing them and that's how morality works and that's sort of the moral firmament right but they don't think about it a lot on day-to-day basis and then the event happens right hamas um you know paraglides across the border and slaughters like a thousand people or something it burns babies and beheads them and rapes people and all that you know stuff and then uh the org the leadership you know the three or four people for whom this is their life and they're you know probably not very well adjusted people and they're pretty bloodthirsty extremists you know college kids they put out the statement they just put it out there as this is the statement of our org. And your average member of that org doesn't hear about it. And if didn't sign their

name to it, simply was a member of the org, right? And if they had gotten a chance to see it, might have signed off, might have not, we don't know. But the fact is that the members of these organizations had nothing to do with it. They just sometimes show up for pizza. I will just quickly clarify and say that what I saw of Max's list, it looks like leadership. And you have had some examples of leaders in some of these groups saying, I didn't even see this and it was published without me and I retracted or whatever. But I don't see full lists of 30, 40 people in a group. I haven't seen that yet. Maybe it exists, but maybe it will exist.

So the broader question is important. But what's Merriman asked for it? So he asked for a list of every single person in the group. It makes me uncomfortable. I think that there's also something, because obviously we're throwing ourselves back into the cancel culture conversation. And it's like, well, you were against cancel culture. Now here you are trying to cancel someone.

And I want to like dial it back or rewind a little bit to the punch and Nazi stuff. So I was not, I'm like, I don't think you should just go up to someone and punch them if you think that they're a Nazi. A big part of that was everyone who was a Republican was being accused of being a Nazi. And that was what was fueling the punch and Nazi conversation. Donald Trump was a Nazi. Trump supporters were Nazis. I don't think that Nazis should simply be punched. I think Nazis should be allowed to go and say what they want to say in America. But I also don't want to be working with a Nazi, actually. I've never wanted to be sitting next to a Nazi who's publicly espousing Nazi opinions. Nazi opinions. It's weird to be sitting next to someone who wants to exterminate the Jews as, I'm not a Jewish, but I imagine for a Jewish person, that would be very difficult. And I think it's perfectly reasonable to not want to work with someone who is publicly a Nazi. And so when it comes to this Gaza shit, you're suddenly a pro-Hamas person,

I don't see a difference there. And I think it's perfectly reasonable to not want to work with a supporter of terrorism. Well, no, I mean, I agree with you And I think it's perfectly reasonable to not want to work with a supporter of terrorism. Well, no, I mean, like I agree with you. I think people have, many, many people have repugnant personal opinions. It would be difficult to find a workplace without a couple of people who have a hidden repugnant personal opinions that they keep to themselves. And the idea of professionalism is that you keep it to yourself. And someone who signs a public statement and makes tweets declaring that they have this horrible view of like i support these rapists and murderers and baby killers um god baby killers is no longer an exaggerated term is it well it depends on who you ask you ask the la

times it's not justibble on the details. Baby beheaders might be exaggerated. Is it? How many babies were beheaded? I don't know. Was it just one? I'm sorry. Some of the babies were only burned and not beheaded. They were burned with their heads on.

Shut up. Anyway, am I allowed to curse on this podcast? Yeah, you curse all the time. It's pirate wires. Yar. I want to curse. All right. we curse all the time it's pirate wires yar i want to curse all right anyway uh well fuck that shit but anyway my point is that if you put your stuff out there and you're a vocal bad person uh have vocal like horrible opinions that's one thing if you're just

someone who sits there and just sort of silently you, like hopes that our team goes and kills all their team in some foreign war, but then you don't talk about it. Professionalism requires that we not go rooting around in people's lives to discover people's hidden bad opinions and that if they keep it to themselves, then it's fine. Yeah, I think there's also something you said about it.

It's really being framed as like well they're the truth is the palestinian israel thing is complicated otherwise it would have been solved by now it's like abortion right like people have very strong opinions they've been fighting about it for fucking thousands of years uh well i guess last 80 years for sure um it's like it's very it's not something that i'm trying to come in here and be like, no, the Palestinian position is beyond like you. It's so immoral that you must be kicked out of work forever or something. It's specifically like that. Hi, y'all, with pumpkin fall stationary on a newsletter saying I support this violence. I support this specific thing that we all were inside of online watching

the carnage that I've never before seen. And then you have someone so like cheerfully say something that is so beyond what I want to be working next to. It's like, and I think for a lot of people across the country, there was this moment where you were like, I didn't realize you were actually evil. Like I thought that we disagreed on some stuff. I did not realize that you were going to be celebrating rape. That is just crazy. And for the whole left, this is a really big problem. I thought Joe Biden very smartly came out very soon. I think he probably saw some reports pretty fast that were like, yo, there are American hostages. You do not want to be anywhere near

this crazy leftist shit celebrating this. This is going to be a huge problem. And he was sort of against, out of the gate, he was very strong in support of Israel and espousing like, this is really a tragic thing that I saw and whatnot. But the other leftist organizations did not get that memo. The student groups certainly did not. The BLM groups. Bernie did. Bernie. I didn't see Bernie. I know most of the Bernie Sanders did. And you know why? Because these guys are old and they remember the last time this kind of stuff happened. They remember the people who would chant in this, like leftist people who would chant on the street for Mao or the Khmer Rouge or Pol Pot or whatever.

And then they remember that. We don't have any personal memory of that. We can read in some article that that happened at one point but that doesn't mean it's real to us they remember the last time that you had a a sort of a situation of geopolitical chaos increasing atrocities where a bunch of american where america was sort of divided and a bunch of americans just unironically unapologetically supported some of that horrible stuff, primarily because they were coddled Western middle class kids who just, you know, like to watch some conflict on TV. And, you know, but also just because Western leftism and Western rightism as well, you know, are extreme ideologies and people have these ideas. Bernie and Biden

remembered those things. And so they knew, they could sense which way the moral wind would blow. They could skate to where the puck was going to be because they knew where the puck was going to be. And I think a lot of the rest of us haven't lived through it. That is interesting. I think that's probably right. I think that it's, if you go back though, to those moments, I want to give the college campus students who were supporting Mao a little bit of a support here because they didn't have the violence in a live feed. You learn that in history. The stories come out slowly over time and you have to readjust. There was not this constant live feed from the moment it starts of the actual carnage. Maybe I'm being too nice to the Marxists of the 60s and they would have celebrated the carnage had they seen the live feed. But there's really something else. You're definitely being too nice. Yeah, I probably am. I mean, I hate Marxists. I feel like I hate them more than you do, so I should be less nice. What do you make of the impact of this on the left right now?

I think that I've always made a distinction between progressives and leftists. To me, and it was not a distinction simply along a spectrum of the leftists or the more extreme people on this line. There seemed to me, I had a sort of a clustering algorithm in my head where these people you know cared about like um you know prison and police and welfare and things like that and those were the progressives and these other people had a collection of issues like um you know they they did care about some domestic issues they wanted student debt cancellation and whatnot but then they um they cared a lot about a lot of foreign stuff uh palestine is obviously their number one issue by far uh but they were also you know pretty supportive of of um anything that was anti-american basically and my clustering algorithm separated those into two clusters

because those are the two two distinct clusters of people I knew in college. But you could definitely see the Chapo Trap House guys and the BLM people, the prison abolitionist people were very different groups of people. That doesn't mean either one is less extreme than the other. It's not on a spectrum. You can see prison abolitionists and police abolitionists get insanely extreme. And you can see the Chapo, you can see socialist leaning people who are more moderate, you know, sometimes. But then, but this whole, the cluster of the socialists, the people who sort of identified with this global leftism, who cheered for Hugo Chavez, were not simply, you know, prison reform people, but more

extreme. They were they cared about a different clustered issues. They cared about foreign policy a lot more. And that ideological cluster that I called leftists that I was like, no, these are not progressive. They may call themselves progressives for a hot minute opportunistically, but then they'll call themselves socialists tomorrow and Marxists the next day and whatever. They'll call themselves whatever. They're just a faction of people who just thinks all day about power. Ultimately, we call them tankies. And I think what we're now starting to realize is that there's a lot more tankies in America than we realized. It's not just the people who have the hammer and sickle in their bio and say literally Stalin did nothing wrong, blah, blah, blah. People talk about it as if it's that tiny thing. We're now realizing that tankies, that the chop out trap house people are actually just tankies and that a lot of the DSA people are actually just tankies and tankies. British socialists actually made up to insult British communists for supporting Stalin invading

Hungary and Czechoslovakia with tanks. Czechoslovakia was not Stalin, but the Soviet Union invading Eastern European countries with tanks, when they tried to do sort of moderate socialism stuff, the Soviet Union attacked them with tanks. And so that's why tankies, that's where that word comes from i think we're now starting to realize that um you know the um the existentialist comics twitter account or uh um brianna uh joy gray um or a lot of these people these are all tankies and so uh and they're bad that seems like at this point these are people who would have been extreme in a different time now yeah they are extreme and yet they occupy different levers or different institutionally important spaces like they're they're kind of

they're kind of mixed in you have have these people everywhere. They have been allowed into polite society and they've dominated there to a certain extent. It looked a little bit, when I saw all of the institutional messages coming out, mostly yesterday was when all of the revision was happening. People were like, whoa, wait a minute. We're retracting things and we're rewriting things. That felt like a civil war to me on on the institutional left i would say um who do you think wins that i mean am i right and then is is there a victory there perhaps i don't see the tankies certainly the tankies like to fight i don't see them just losing i see them losing uh relevance they were there in the 1980s um those people were around uh and um if you watch the

movie slacker which is a sort of the pastiche of what austin culture was like in the 1980s you see this guy sitting there cheerfully passing out pamphlets to people saying terrorism is the surgical strike capability of the oppressed and that was a tank that was those guys you know and they were a joke and um you see another guy who's in a co-op house early in the movie sitting there talking about how, you know, he's just so extremely obsessed with politics and speaking in a way very similar to how we see DSA people talk about politics on Twitter. recognize that these types have been around, what happens is that they recede, that this would be revolutionary left, the sort of nasty tankies for whom really just bringing down the United States is like the number one North Star, right? These guys recede and they become a joke. And you saw Nazis recede and become a joke. And then they came back and it was like, whoa, you know, Charlotte's like, there's people in the street chanting Jews will not replace us in the street.

And the president's sort of kind of saying some equivocal or maybe even nice things about them. That was like, that was amazing. And you could see Trump's approval numbers, which had been high in that populist moment in 2016. You can see after Charlottesville, they tanked and never, never recovered. It seems so much, it seems never, never recovered. It seems so different, dude. It seems so different. We're talking about actual institutional support for these things right now versus some kids doing some really fucked up crazy shit. And the president, I mean, was he really saying white nationalists are kind of good?

I don't think so. I think he made a massive fumble there and was trying to talk about a broader thing. And it was totally wrong, but it was not the same as people actually saying verbatim from, you know, it's like the NYU, whatever, like having her name on it, proud of it. This is justified violence and it's across the country. Those people don't just all vanish. You fired a couple, but like they're occupying actual positions of power. This girl was going to be going into, you lawyer at some Microsoft or some shit. She's one. How many people actually think like that? It feels like a lot. It was my sense. And there's plenty of tons of shocking amounts

of support for this stuff. Really huge. I mean, any posts I have, I say run my mouth up a lot, but I don't get a lot of haters in my comments. I've never gotten so many genuinely once when I was piled twice when I was piled on by the Chabo House guys a while ago over a San Francisco thing and then this week when I was saying like just simple things like this is horrible like oh my god like I can't believe what I'm seeing or whatever like

inundated with comments there's a lot of support for this stuff I don't really see how it just goes away now I have a question for you. What percent of Twitter users, I'm going to just keep calling it Twitter, just calling it X sensitive. I can't help it. Yeah, I'm going to say- Let's call it Twitter now. Sorry, Elon. What percent of Twitter users do you think are in the United States of America? That's a good question. Yeah, you're right. So I think probably not a majority. I would say maybe 10%. 20%?

But what about people who are actually making content? Most of the content producers I see are- So first of all, start out with the fact that English is the global language. Everybody sort of speaks it. And every, you know, most of the, most of the people on Twitter speaking English and most of the tweets are in English. And then most of the people on Twitter are English speaking people who can speak English to some degree who are not from this country. Um, then after that, uh, ask this, how many people are actually, um, like the,, like the engagement you're getting represents how many actual people. So if you see some of the most horrible tweets that I saw,

some, you know, in favor of Hamas got 20,000 likes. Now 20,000 is a lot of people. That's a lot of people, but the edgy prostitute, Mia Khalifa. The 45,000, that is a lot of people, right? But it wouldn't fill up Michigan Stadium. You know, it wouldn't, that's in the grand scheme of global things, that's a tiny drop in the bucket. So I've always believed that Twitter's, not the Twitter algorithm in terms of what you see, but the Twitter setup in terms of the way it concentrates responses on certain things um it produces the illusion of vast quantities of people it produces the illusion of consensus the illusion of mass opinion where none actually exists it is an illusion and i think that you know

i i would get piled on by the the d people like all the time, you know, with just a couple hundred people yelling like you're a fucking idiot and sending just the same dumb memes. And they never have an argument. They just say you're an idiot. But then there it is. And my job is sort of to get called stupid by stupid people all day. And I've I've reconciled myself with that. But then but it's only a few hundred people and like even at this this massive moment when like the whole world is watching and twitter has how many like what

over a hundred million users and then like you know millions of regular users right and then you have yeah but it was enough that's enough enough. You're manufacturing consent. I understand that. It's a minority of people, but they are able to use these tools to change behavior among the broad populace, I would say. There's a general sense that this was complicated. And you see that that's the reason

that the universities were so tentative in their commentary on this in the beginning. They didn't want to offend anybody. And so they do have, you're right. I think you're right that it is a minority of people. And I think that they are able to exert a lot of influence on institutions. And I hope this is the moment that changes. The BLM thing I thought was really crazy from Chicago. So you had the BLM Chicago put up a heroic image of a parachuter. A parachuter famously went into the festival and massacred 260 people. It looked like

there were some pretty brutal rapes there. We've had accounts of that now. Kidnappings, obviously, famously the girl screaming on the back of a truck being dragged into Gaza. And you have BLM celebrating that. There was a Jessie Chenet, a founder of a company in tech. She tweeted, I received immense pressure in 2020 to not only support this privately, it was insisted that I publicly support BLM, the organization, and now I'm watching this, and the mask is finally off. I think a lot of people are having that experience with these organizations or I say, I think, I hope, I hope that it's a moment. The truth about BLM organizations is that they were discredited a long time ago, even among people who marched in BLM protests. So BLM protests were very widespread. I mean,

the Floyd protests were by some measures, the largest protest in modern American history. I mean, that was partly just because people needed something to do during the lockdown, but partly because there was a mass outpouring. It was, it was nationwide. Um, the BLM orgs are actually very small orgs that just take that name because no one else has the right to tell them not to use it. And they are consistent grifters and embezzlers. And most of the people who march in the marches will have negative things to say about those organizations. But they're more rioted. I wonder what their perspective is. Well, so the people who decide, I am BLM, we are just going to declare,

we're five people who are going to declare that we are BLM Chicago. Those are just the DSA guys looking for more attention and using this popular brand you know because there's no copyright there's no intellectual property here they can just use that brand and then everyone thinks that is blm and whenever there's like a anti-police brutality march by you know the the chance black lives matter people think that march is somehow being organized by that org that just took the name but it not. And like most people think those people are drifters. Now, that being said, among the general like lefty youth movement, there's way, way, way, way too much acceptance

of the sort of tanky perspective and the pro-Hamas perspective. And that it is way too common. But I think that what we're seeing is a separation where uh i've been using the words progressive and leftist different to mean different things for years now and uh and sometimes people even don't realize i'm using those differently and get i do liberal and leftist i don't use progressive i think it's like not fair. You don't deserve the word. But leftist and liberal, I used it differently. Yeah. And the people, you know, themselves will define these terms fairly plastically. You know, there was this funny moment after Super Tuesday 2020,

when Bernie lost that primary, when all of the current affairs and the Chapo guys and the Sanders campaign, they stopped using the word socialist and started using the word progressive the day after Bernie lost. And it was amazing just the shift. They just all switched. They were like, OK, we're progressives now because now they were falling back. They at first they thought, like, we're socialists. We're going to overthrow the progressives who are just weak and wimpy and were socialists. Then when they realized that the Democratic primary voters weren't going to go for that at all, they pivoted extremely quickly saying, actually, we're progressives. We're just like you. We're just the most progressive candidate

and no one went for it. Your use of that word is confusing to me, not just on the fact that I think the word progressive means something that I consider myself, but it just is not how it's used in San Francisco. In San Francisco, progressive is used for leftists. It is distinguished from moderate liberals. And, and so progressive to me is, is leftist. I don't see a distinction there at all. I don't, I don't use the word progressive, but like that is how they, that is what they all call themselves. That's right. Um, there's nothing, so I can't really do anything about that. I'm trying to use words and I can make up my own terms. then i have to be one of those guys who you know makes up his own terms and then and then tries to get everyone else to use them and say well actually it's this this is what you are i've made up this word and you have to apply it to yourself and i can be that guy but you know

instead i just sort of like aim at the target brand was gonna ask a question a while back and i think it's interesting uh we're talking about the M. Is silence violence? No. Silence is violence. This is a huge thing that was said in 2020. I never believed in it then. I still don't believe it now, but Brandon, you want to frame the question and let's have the conversation about that. Yeah. The question is simply, is saying the silence is violence, is that cancel culture? Can the right turn around and say silence is violence because right like even if it's a democrat or whoever right now is saying like you have to like like is the the concept of like you being quiet as an institution as an individual in a place of power

is that valid at a moment like this either ackman or summers said said that almost verbatim or Summers said that almost verbatim. Summers was referring to... One of those people did a silence is violence. Summers wanted Harvard to say something in response. Yeah. And that felt very ironic to me when I read that. Oh, I was just going to say, I mean, I think that we're kind of at the end

of the life cycle of silence is violence to some extent. And that the kind of the life cycle of silence is violence to some extent. And that the, the kind of counter cancellation of the people who issued the student groups who issued these statements to me shows that because there's now this sort of like the Stanford president who eventually issued the interim president who eventually issued the statement condemning the Hamas attacks in Israel had this addendum at the end of his statement where he said, you know, it's been in vogue in recent years for universities to issue statements on all kinds of geopolitical issues and to, you know, constantly, you know, provide their take. And, you know, I

think that going forward, universities should do less of this because really, you know, maybe this isn't in their purview. And I do think that there's this kind of like the way that the student groups have been punished for issuing these knee-jerk boilerplate statements, which by the way, I think in a lot of cases, I'm not sure that actually indicates like very well thought through political belief to the extent that like all of these statements are kind of copy and pasted from each other um and they all use the same sort of slogans that we've become accustomed now to hearing like you know from the river to the sea that kind of thing um but you know the silence is violence thing i think started with blm in 2020 and there was this huge pressure for us all to like come out and you know the black

square phenomenon and you know say that we thought police brutality was wrong um and I just I don't know if it's uh if the next time a crisis like this erupts everyone's gonna be rushing to issue statements. Was it an AIDS thing? Silence is violence? I feel like it was an 80s thing that was then brought back in this context. I don't know. I'll have to look it up. I think that you can't be expecting someone to speak out ever. I think it's like, I want the world to be, especially people who are not super plugged in, you don't want to speak about a political thing, please do not. Stay home. Don't put up your black square for any of these things. You're perfectly entitled to not being plugged into the news and speaking out about it. That goes for institutions, that goes for people. I also understand why, let's say you're a hardcore Palestinian person and the most atrocious thing that you've ever

seen happens, it's this Israeli thing. And you really do believe it's extremely disturbing, it's bad, but you're thinking to yourself, I'm going to get blamed for this. And it's not what Palestinians are. And the whole topic just upsets you because you're like, oh God, everyone's going to think this is Palestine. It's just Hamas. How do I talk about this? I can't talk about it without pissing off Muslims. Maybe you're in a space where that's really difficult. You have a Muslim family that is super obsessed with this. You can't talk about it. You want it to go away. I kind of understand just wanting to stay out of it. And I would never hold that against anyone personally. I think that there are a million reasons you might not want to talk about something. And it doesn't necessarily mean

that it's because you're pro-violence. It's when people aren't silent and they come out and say, hey, I'm pro-violence. That's when I'm like, okay, well, we have to talk about this. What are the chances that two things that were actually the same would rhyme? English. very low which tells you it's very likely that people just said silence is violence because it rhymed i'm also just remembering i'm remembering that um i'm pretty sure silence is violence is on those lawn signs where it says in this house we believe in science like all humans are legal and then like the last thing is silence is violence.

I think. We might just be creating this in our minds. I feel like that's a ton of science. Let me look up in this house we believe. I see kindness is everything as the standard one. Kindness is violence. The original one said, in this house we believe, black lives matter.

Women's rights are human rights. No human is illegal. Science is real. Love is love. Kindness is everything. silence is no silence no but probably silence and violence was silence is violence everywhere you know i just remember being in college at the time and it was like you could not post anything on social media that did not have and i with, you know, I used to live in, I used to live in silver lake in Los Angeles and there was multiple bedsheets like hanging off of rich people's houses in the Hills with spray painted, like white silence is violence. Yeah.

And like, there's a portion that in the, in the driveway too. You also see all the storefronts putting it up because they don't want their windows shattered and it's like that one i kind of that's like the star of david on on the uh on the uh the egyptian the jewish yeah it's lamb's blood so your son isn't isn't killed by the the plague of god um so it's a don't loot me sign but anyway um but the point is this it is perfectly legitimate to criticize people for tacitly accepting and not speaking up about ongoing atrocities in their society in in the abstract that's a legitimate thing to do right if you are everyone should be expected who should be expected? Who should be expected? Everyone has to say, I saw this thing and it's happening.

I'm not saying that I, I'm saying that you can, it is an arguable thing. There are situations in which I think there are sins of omission and not just sins of commission in which bystanders actually do something bad by doing nothing. I think those situations exist. There is not- I would say the New York Times was complicit in that this weekend, from their reporting. I wrote about it. I think that that was omission, but their job is to report the truth. I think the average person on Instagram is like, I don't know what the fuck's going on. There's a classic thing. You walk by, you see someone getting raped, you don't call the cops,

you don't try to do anything. we've had these arguments for decades and there are they're legitimate arguments and they're they're highly situational um i think that in in the abstract there can be times when people can be expected to do something we're doing nothing is bad a sin of omission is a real thing that sometimes happens, right? And that doesn't mean, but slogans like silence is violence universalize that idea in a way that doesn't make any sense. And that is, you know, we can all think of times, many, many times when silence is not violence. And so there's no general principle where we can say silence is or is not violence. There are some situations in which people can reasonably be expected to do something that they didn't do,

a sin of omission, right? And there are many situations in which you have no right to expect people to do something that they didn't do. And so I think that it's so situational that trying to discover, you know, make some blanket principle about silence is violence that just rhymes there's no there's no universal principle there um anyway i want to say sorry situational ethics relativism ah so sorry i mean are we i guess just on the cancel culture thing is this are we are we canceling people and is that good? Is that where we've landed? We're the woke right? The woke right. Well, I said, well, yes. Yes, it is the woke right. But I'm saying we're the woke right.

They introduced this language to us and it's like, we've attacked it for years and now here we are saying, ah, some things are perhaps worthy of cancellation. And now here we are saying, ah, some things are, are perhaps worthy of cancellation. Well, you know, so I think the people who point out that cancel culture is social ostracism and social ostracism has been around forever are correct. That doesn't make it always good. And that doesn't mean social ostracism is always a good thing, but I think it's correct to identify that that's what it is. And I think what happens is that society and technology change to make social ostracism more of a burden on society and less of a burden. you know early 1800s or something like that cancel culture or social ostracism i will say will which is just cancel culture is very very bad you're it's extremely conformist you know

oh no you slept with your boyfriend now you get a big red a on your head that's bad like but then social ostracism of like you're in the the 1980s and you're in like a punk rock scene. And then you wear like swastikas and you're always talking about like Nazi shit at the punk rock concert. And people like shove you out the door and say, don't come to the concert. That's fine because you just go to a different concert, you Nazi dork. Like, and the point is that technology. It sounds like you're just like one of those things and not the other. You're just enforcing your own values, right?

So you're saying it's good provided we're canceling the right things. That's- No, I'm saying that there's a technological situation, a technological milieu in which, I don't even know another word for it, but a set of technologies in the world that will make social ostracism incredibly damaging to people's lives and will make social ostracism merely slightly annoying. And technology determines that. actually complaining about, even if they don't realize it, is that the internet has changed social ostracism to turn the world more into a small town. And we are now rediscovering some of the annoyance of living, some of the burden of living in a small town and being subject to the consensus morality of the small town mob. We're rediscovering this after decades in which the car and the modern industrial economy and all these

things and urbanization liberated us temporarily from small town moral consensus breathing down our necks all day. We then are rediscovering it because Twitter and the rest of the internet turned our society into a small town again. Maybe it's a small town of like a few hundred thousand people. Maybe it's a small town of a few million people who are actually active Twitter users, but it's still a small town because, you know, everyone knows everything that everyone else says and everyone knows everybody. And, and so it's, I think, and, and nobody ever forgets anything. Everyone remembers what you did. You know, if you, if you were caught having sex with some person that everyone remembers that for 20 years for the rest of your life, because the internet is forever because they can screenshot your tweets and they can screenshot your Facebook messages and they have your photo there and everyone knows who you are.

And we escaped small town life in the mid and late 20th centuries. And all of us grew up in a time when we could escape the small town morality. And then a new technology came that thrust us back into that small town cauldron and we hate it. I think there is something interesting about just, you used to be able to, I think about that small town, you're talking about even the Scarlet Letter. If it got really bad, you still could leave towns. And that is just no longer the case, right? Yeah. It's like, we're all in the small town and

yet it's everybody. And we're not supposed to be in a small town of literally everybody. Sanjana, I know Brady, you're about to comment. We'll bring it back in. But I do have a question for Sanjana before as we're getting close to the end here. It's for, I hate to be giving you as a younger person questions, but as a younger person, it this a stupid conversation? Has the cancellation thing been so internalized that people are just like, obviously, we're going to be canceling forever? It's not even cancellation. It's consequences. Is that totally ingrained or is it more of a trend? Are people thinking about it differently, specifically in the context of this wave you've seen in this Gaza-Israel thing? Has that changed the conversation at all? Yeah. I mean, I think I do agree with you, Noah, to the extent that I think cancellation is

really just sort of emergent with the technology we use. I think that it's almost, in my opinion, naive to think we can escape cancel culture when we're using a technology that allows people to sort of... That rewards people for the kind of viral tweets in which they are, you know, citing something someone said and this tweet gets referenced and then it goes, you know, it blows up and this gets the person who's gotten canceled for posting, you know, stuff after the Hamas attack. But I have seen a kind of realization from a lot of people I know on the left that the cultural winds are shifting such that they will now have to realign themselves in a way that's more advantageous. And I think, you know, I've always, again, with these university statements, it's like all of this is just virtue signaling, of course. Why does the Nepali Student Association need to issue a statement about the Hamas attack in Gaza?

Well, it's because we live in like this cultural paradigm where they think they're expected in order to stay in, you know, the good graces of their peers to issue this kind of statement and now they're being punished for it and so i think they're just going to realign um you know to what they think will be will allow them to stay in the good graces of their peers um and i don't think that that in my mind that doesn't constitute like a reckoning of about cancel culture like i don't

think i see people my age who are like maybe we should stop posting screenshots of our peers saying stupid shit uh you know from their slack pages or their you know messenger uh conversations just the opposite they're just yeah sorry yeah just just they're just you know realigning where they sort of uh do that that kind of thing so which will have consequences across or repercussions or whatever the left broadly i think is has to evolve right now especially if you want to mean i think just practically speaking if you want the support of jewish people who are a major part of the democratic party um not in terms of population obviously it's a major part of the Democratic Party. Not in terms of population, obviously, it's a small group of people, but it's just culturally important.

It is in terms of donations and just power and status. Jewish people bring a lot to the table. And I don't know how moving forward, the Democratic Party could possibly maintain support from Jewish people without doing what Biden has been doing smartly, I think, which is just coming in really, really, really strong on this issue. Well, there's a lot fewer Jewish people than there used to be. I mean, they're down to less, you know, 1.6 or 1.8% of the population from a former like 5% to 6% of the US population. So, but- I don't think they matter as a voting block though, and never have. It's more about cultural and economic impacts. And like, I mean, stat like even it's, we're, we're in these, I was referred to, recurred to me the other day. I've always been aware of how few Jewish people there were. I'm from Jersey. I was surrounded by Jewish people. And, uh, this has come up

always my whole life. Then I went to Boston, went to BU third of my house was Jewish. Like I've known Jewish people. The idea that there weren't many Jewish people was weird to understand, but I did know it. But the places that I go, I was in publishing, I'm in tech, I was at a college. These are places where Jewish people exist and do have influence, I think. And I think it is important and they do add a lot to the Democratic Party. So it's not something that you want to just lose. And also the Israel relationship is incredibly important to America for all sorts of crazy. I'm not going to again, I'm not sitting here trying to have my whole punchline here about my idea that cancel culture is actually just cancel technology and that people are always trying to cancel each other. I think that the idea, everyone sort of in their mind has this mental model of cultural phenomena as being autonomous.

Like people just decide this and then norms change and then people talk about and decide this other thing. And I think there is some of that. You know, there's not zero of that in the world but i think we consistently underrate the impact of technology and so i think that um and the interplay between two and i think that my instinctive solution is uh for for the problem of everyone being in one small town is to break up the small town and to have, and I think we're already seeing this. I think most discussion is now happens in DM groups. Yeah. You know, be that on Facebook or chat, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, whatever,

DM groups, even Twitter DM groups, or Slack or Discord or things like that, or small groups. You know, Discords are not DMs. Slacks are not DMs, but it's a small group. You know, it's a small town. And if you say something horrible in a Discord group and then someone goes and posts it to Twitter, a few people may care, but it's not like something that you posted to Twitter. So I think Facebook was the problem in the mid 2010s and solved itself by, by pushing all the discussions into Facebook groups.

And that's why no one talks about Facebook as a political force anymore. Uh, even though people are discussing politics on Facebook plenty, they're doing it in groups and DMS. Um, and I think Twitter is Twitter's the same kind of thing. Twitter needs to – I would like it if Twitter just died, but I'll be happy if Twitter simply shrinks in importance to where it becomes this sort of paper bag that everyone shouts into, but that ultimately that's not where a real discussion – real consequential discussion happens. On Twitter dying, and this is not a trolly question i'm genuinely curious shrinking or shrinking right not i'm saying well like let's talk because i why uh are you on it because you think that you have to be on it yes for your for your job okay so i hate it i would quit in a second i would never be on yeah i would say that it definitely is a kind of poison in my life, but has always been. And yet, it also has tremendously benefited me.

And I can't deny that. I am good at it, as are you. And it has helped me- I'm not the accelerator of it. I could be like an independent business. It has helped me build an audience. And I'm a writer and a publisher. And it's important for those reasons. I don't see a better tool still. of it i could be like an independent business it is helping both an audience and that's you know i'm a writer and publisher and it's important for those reasons i don't see a better tool still um

though i can't share my links so maybe i don't know uh brandon i cut you off a moment ago i want to talk about this technology second and i'm gonna we're gonna keep going then that'll be our last topic but uh i want to make sure that I get Brandon's point before I cut him off. Sure. Just that, Noah, you described cancel culture as basically like a technology, like an emergent phenomenon from a technology. I think that there's still another side of that. When we complained about and complain about cancel culture now, we complained about it because people were getting canceled for really stupid, uncancelable stuff like the Aziz Ansari bad date. Like that for me, when I think about cancel culture, I think about microaggressions. And so I think cancel culture is you can't disconnect it from, I don't know,

the shifting norms that started in 2018 and have lasted until maybe now. Maybe now we're sort of at the tail end of it. But my point was just to say that I don't know that you can say it's only a technology issue. I think it's also like, look, people are getting canceled for telling a bad joke at an elevator and having been overheard. This happened at a tech conference in like 2017 or something like that. Yeah. That is also maybe just, it's possible to be, you can disseminate stuff like

that because of the technology rapidly and it is associated, excuse me, it's associated to a profile and whatnot. I still do is, I think it is a cultural change, but the cultural change would have been not really impactful if there were not a way to spread that message around rapidly and have it affect your actual life status. What could you even have done with something like that in the 90s? I mean, how would a joke that you told in an elevator have spread? I think that unless someone put it on the news, which is unthinkable, and it wouldn't have mattered. I know, but we're in a situation right now where all four of us are kind of feeling like some people should be canceled for the really bad stuff that they're doing right now. They're

doing rape parades, right? And we're like, that's cancelable. Aseez Ansari's bad date, maybe not. So here's the, I think because the influence that we now have with our opinions, also because of technology, makes it somewhat, there is some validity to like, if someone is out there espousing truly horrendous things and they have a huge audience, you want to talk about that. And you have more of a reason to, like, I don't know what a student group would have done at Harvard in the nineties for an atrocity. Where would they have written? I guess, would they have written something in the Crimson? Like where would they have done that even? Like an email? They didn't even have, were they even emailing in the nineties? I don't

remember emailing in the nineties, like in the mid 90s or something let's say the 80s like like where did those messages you would have had to have gone to some coffee shop to meet some crazy person um and even then it would have been stuck in the coffee you wouldn't have heard about it elsewhere um it was just like the technology has allowed for much spikier culture like weird extremes has allowed for much spikier culture like weird extremes and because of that there's it's actually somewhat rational someone went after me today for looking at uh this girl i i saw two tweets of hers no you guys all maybe have seen this it was uh the girl saying uh i'm waiting for like white americans to stand up and denounce every mass shooting and we were all like yeah like yeah i denounce every for sure i didn't know it's every mass shooting. And we were all like, yeah, I denounce every, for sure,

I denounce every mass shooting. No, man, there were a couple that were okay. It was a crazy thing. And then her other one was just a pro-revolution. On Saturday morning, she tweeted it, pro-revolution. And I screenshotted those. I was like, man, I think there's a cultural difference here. I'm starting to sense a cultural difference here between us and her. And someone was like, why do you engage with these crazy people? I'm like, because lots of people are seeing that and lots of people are... I'm looking at the numbers. People do agree with that. And so I think that I'm looking at trends. And as I think Noah said earlier, I think it's true that there are less of them than it feels like when

you're on Twitter, but these trends do grow. Brandon, you were at Thought Catalog editing me maybe 12 years ago when people were talking about systemic white supremacy. And I was like, that's fucking crazy. I would talk about it with people in the real world. They never heard of that before. And I was in there in these like message, like in the comment section of these dumb articles being like, that's a crazy idea. America's not a systemically white supremacist country. Now that is a standard opinion. fast an idea can proliferate or can spread and then proliferate, I think you're forced to kind of engage with this stuff to a certain degree until you shut it down. But I don't know how you shut it down. I don't know how you just flip a switch and turn off the internet's ability to mainstream these crazy ideas. It's just Twitter, man. It's not though. You just said it's not because you want to shut it down why do you want to shut it down because you recognize the power of it and if you can't shut it down no no

that's what i mean no it's just twitter as in when you talk about the internet the at the the the disaggregated internet is much less good at it it does spread crazy beliefs but their spread is naturally limited by the size of groups. Maybe Reddit, for example, they're a little bit narrower. I mean, we have massive Reddit groups where people aggregate, but it does. Yeah. You don't maybe make, I see what you're saying. It's maybe doesn't mainstream quite as quickly.

Twitter is pure. It is like pure, a pure. Pure mainstream of extremism. And America has now been forced to mainstream the extremism of everybody in every other country too. And I think our Americocentricness causes us to forget that a lot of these complete genocidal assholes we're talking about are sitting there in a country with a per capita GDP of $2,000. And just tweeting out their ethnic hatreds and we think it's the person next door to us. It's not just Twitter. know like tweeting out their ethnic hatreds and we think it's the person next door to us it's not just twitter i think you you should we should zoom out and say it's basically the the discovery algorithm tiktok has a discovery algorithm and by that i mean um it's an algorithm

it's an it's an algorithm tuned to not giving you um content from the people that you follow. It's an algorithm that optimizes keeping you on the platform that you're looking at. And so you're just getting the thing that's going to spike your cortisol or dopamine levels as much as possible. And any algorithm that does that, that's the Facebook newsfeed algorithm. That's TikTok. And that's Twitter right now, I think. It's going to promote this small town, I don't know, thing that you described, Noah, just categorically. It's not just Twitter, I don't think.

It's this just Twitter, I don't think. It's this type of algorithm. Well, we're going to have a lot more to talk about because you have bipartisan consensus right now and you have for quite a while to do something about the algorithms. I think that there's no way something is not... Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's just because the Democrats

want something totally different than the Republicans want. They all want something done. I was talking to someone in government the other day, and obviously, the Republicans want social media companies to have less power over what can and cannot be removed. over what can and cannot be removed. That has been diminished somewhat under the age of Elon, because he just is so important right now to so many Republicans. But the Democrats just want much, much more. And so maybe just by that reason, nothing happens. Maybe we are just stuck in this legislatively, nothing will happen. It doesn't seem like any other companies like this can emerge. The platforms are so mature. TikTok took me by surprise, but I mean, that was a new medium. Like we would need a new medium to accompany one of these platforms to grow again.

I don't know. Noah, last thoughts before we wrap it up. I think that the world adapts to new technologies. And if you sat there in the mid 1800s and you looked at the impact of the printing press and of pamphlets that people would just pass out saying like kill all those people and blah blah you would say that the printing press had been an unmitigated disaster for social stability and we had thousands of years of agricultural stability under kings and then

along come these crazy revolutionaries and started beheading people and, you know, and doing all these horrible things because of the printing press. And then by, you know, by the, by the two thousands, the printing press like newspapers, you know, then the,

the, the paper boy throwing the city newspaper onto your front lawn is regarded as the safe thing, you know, that now is being challenged by these scary new online media things. I think humanity adapts to technologies. thing, you know, that now is being challenged by these scary new online media things. I think humanity adapts to technologies and sometimes our adaptations are social and sometimes our adaptations are legal and political and sometimes our adaptations are technological in nature. But I think that we do adapt and it's just this question of how fast,

how fast we adapt. And overall, I see us adapting to new challenges faster than we did in the 1800s and early 1900s. I think that it used to take us 50 to 100 years to adapt to some of these things or maybe even multiple centuries. And now I see us adapting within like a couple of decades. And it's still a couple of decades is a significant portion of our life. And so we're going to live a significant portion of our life in the chaos created by social media. But I believe that we will adapt and that the fragmentation of discussion we're seeing is already a sign of adaptation and that Twitter is not going to succeed in aggregating all discussion into

one platform, that instead the tendency is toward fragmentation and that that's good. Okay. Well, I have a lot of pushback on the goodness of the printing press but we will save it for another day um no you guys should check out noah substack he's uh are you just noah smith on twitter i just fall i see your head no opinion on twitter as well no no opinion that's what so no opinion on twitter um check him out on substack uh thank you for joining us we will see you guys next week