Chris Bray on the claims that Twitter, er, I mean “X” is broken from people who are suddenly being exposed to unfriendly opinions that the old platform used to kindly keep out of their very comfortable bubbles:
The Democratic Party’s go-to election lawyer, Marc Elias, is disturbed by the decline of Twitter:
Twitter used to work well, but now he receives negative comments, which means that it has stopped working. People can criticize him and express disagreement, so the platform is broken. If it worked, he would only be praised.
“Epistemic closure” had its pet rock moment in 2010, as the news media looked back on the George W. Bush years and the Iraq War and concluded that American neoconservatives had simply lost their ability to think.
[…]
It was supposed to mean this:
It’s rather about information, and what counts as evidence about the real world … if one only gets information from a narrow set of sources that feed back into each other but do not engage beyond themselves, that one will have a closed mind … regardless of what one does with that information.
And this:
Epistemic closure is a fancy term for the practice of defining – or redefining – reality in ways that support your pre-existing ideological preferences. Most of us think of it as “creating and living in a bubble”.
It was a fair enough point, as Bush watched sectarian brutality continue in post-Saddam Iraq and kept drawing the conclusion that everyone everywhere really yearns for democratic pluralism, honest elections, and a free press.
But that era’s epistemic closure is bush-league — sorry — compared to the sealed-in-a-jar-in-a-closed-box-in-a-deep-cave closure of the “mainstream” mind in 2023. If you’ve been on social media since roughly the night of November 8, 2016 and you’ve expressed disagreement with a politician, academic, or media figure, you’ve been a Russian bot, and Putin told you to say that. Criticism of institutions can’t simply arise from authentic grievances, or even from an authentically felt but misperceived grievance; rather, criticism is an op, a calculated string-pulling effort by manipulative forces. The far-right Putin-aligned Nazi grifters are tricking you into believing that you’re unhappy with the Biden administration. Your brain has been fooled by cognitive warfare, see?
