The Future of Humanity Requires Understanding
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The Future of Humanity Requires Understanding
A column to exploring communication barriers, the conflicts that arise from them, and how to overcome them.
Introduction
Long Term Liberalism’s purpose is to promote a freer and more pluralistic society in the hopes of ensuring humanity’s long-term survivability as a species. One barrier, of particular interest to me, is the barrier of communication. How can we work together if we can’t understand each other?
Misunderstandings have consequences. Sometimes these consequences are severe and lead to mass casualties and sometimes these consequences are less severe and might result in someone being unfriended and/or blocked.
A lot of times, these misunderstandings happen unintentionally, but regardless of the intentions these chip away at the most important aspect of a pluralistic society - trust. We can’t trust what we don’t understand and we aren’t always presented with the best incentives to actually try to understand what people who disagree with us think about certain issues. I think this issue is being exacerbated in part by how social media platforms work.
Social Media
Please don’t misunderstand (haha *wink*) me, I think social media platforms are powerful tools that have allowed people to not only organize but also cultivate very important networks. For example, I will be sharing this post, as well as all future posts, on the various social media platforms that I use in the hopes that more people will see it and hopefully share it.
However, NYU’s Jonathan Haidt, recently likened social media to the Tower of Babel in The Atlantic, an apt comparison I also made in a previous blog post for Students for Liberty. Despite the ability (and intentions?) for social media to unite us, it’s (debatably*) pushing us all apart.
Of course, most algorithms are influenced based on how a user is using a particular platform, and mindfulness can help us avoid some of the more pernicious effects of social media use, but how reliable and sustainable is a mindfulness approach?
There are plenty of studies done on social media, find linked a curated list of studies and their abstracts showcasing Social Media and Political Dysfunction and Mental Health, which I hope to use in this column to explore some of the more interesting ones.
Purposes and Expectations of this Column
The purpose of this column will be to explore the nature of human communications and how it plays out, particularly on the public stage of social media. I aim to have a blog post every 2 weeks to be published on Mondays around 3 pm ET. I will try to avoid pop topics unless they are very relevant to the piece I’m working on.
Playing on Leveller’s first YouTube video, I particularly want to understand more about how and why social media fosters a soldier mindset** and how we can approach things as a scout even when surrounded by soldiers.
I want to explore both historical and current examples, I want to expand beyond just the American or even English-speaking implications occasionally, and I want to take a more optimistic*** approach and offer tangible solutions to the current plight of miscommunication culture I see within the social media ecosystems. I also want to engage with the permissionless innovation crowd**** who I feel do not take some of the negative aspects of social media platforms as seriously as they should.
Finally, I am by no means an expert on this topic, so please take everything I say with as much skepticism as you can. I hope to learn a lot while writing this and that those who read this column will also learn a lot and engage in conversation about it. My email is alex@leveller.tv, I welcome any and all feedback and I will make a point to respond to any email that contains a reference to these column posts in the subject line.