A Theory Of Social Media Meltdowns

Hello everyone. I've been taking a long break from blogging during the Rampjaar that has been 2020 for a bunch of different reasons, but seeing as we (probably) saved The Republic by electing Joe Biden and, in God's good time, we will get some sort of vaccine to end COVID, I have decided to "get back on the horse", as they say.

(I should also say I was a bit inspired by a lot of people doing things like launching their own online projects, or leaving standard journalism to brave the wilds of Substack, or pointing out that the old internet of Blog World was in many ways a lot better that the often times insane brave new world of social media.)

So with that here's my first attempt at posting in a while.

 

One thing you hear a lot about if you spend too much time on the internet is various very online and often social media driven meltdowns*, where an organization or institution, usually closely connected to the internet, makes a questionable (or not questionable!) decision, and then all hell breaks loose inside it in a very public way you can watch in real time.

Remember that time the New York Times decided to publish Tom Cotton's terrible Op-Ed? Classic meltdown. Or see this 2019 piece about a number of the social media driven meltdowns in the world of young adult literature. Likewise columnists in top tier media outlets leaving is its own subset of meltdowns, see the saga of Bari Weiss, or the meltdown about Kevin Williamson getting the boot. Or if you'd like a "ripped from the headlines" example, see the recent meltdown at Random House over if they should publish a self-help book from best selling author, and controversial weirdo, Jordan Peterson.  

These events are hardly that important in the grand scheme of things, but for those of us who spend way to much time online (which thanks to the virus is a lot of us these days) they can be very prominent when they break.

When they happen, they tend to create a enormous amount of online content where people fight about them and "what they mean". These takes run the gambit from "this was fair" to "this was unfair" to "this shows a dangerous new ideology" to "some one is getting their just desserts" to all sorts of thing about "wokeness" and "free speech" and God only knows what else.

But I was always struck by there being a weird sort of dynamic in these meltdowns that I couldn't quite put my finger on. Then I remembered a great old post and Twitter thread by Bloomberg's Noah Smith. He compared these sorts of dynamics to the Japanese concept of gekokujo.

Gekokujo is a Japanese concept that roughly means "the lower rules the higher" or "the low overcomes the high." Once upon a time, it would refer to lords of the lower ranks in the nobility overthrowing or controlling more senior lords in pre-modern Japan. But as Noah points out one of the classic examples of this is the so called "February 26 Incident" in 1936, where a influential clique of lower level officers in the Army attempted a coup to seize control of the military and government. They failed, and many of their leader were executed, but ironically, the Japanese military and government largely adopted their policies of sidelining civilian leaders, extreme militarism, and imperial expansion.

It didn't end well, to say the least.

This example may be extreme, but that's why I thought about it in terms of various online meltdowns. A lot of this stuff is a sort of gekokujo attempt by lower level people in very online and social media adjacent organizations to "over come the high" of that organization by leveraging the internet and especially social media.

Note that as Noah points there is nothing inherently wrong with this: "As an example of how gekokujo can do good, it's wonderful that the econ profession is finally trying to rid itself of sexism. That would never have happened without the support of social media. That was a heroic episode of gekokujo!" 

You could also argue that a lot of what happened around the whole #metoo movement in Hollywood was a sort of gekokujo push to get rid of people like Harvey Weinstein and others, and as the hashtag shows social media support was a big part of this.

Noah argues that the big danger of of gekokujo is a sort of backlash it can lead too, but I don't think that's what's going on with these sorts of very online social media meltdowns. Instead I'd point out some other specific problems that keep popping up:

1. Gekokujo campaigns have a tendency to get out of control: The Bari Weiss example is telling. No her career is not some important national issue, and I don't care for her much either. But if you're a progressive media person and start out trying to criticize the writing of one of the few non-progressive writers in your newsroom and end up arguably creating a classic "hostile work environment" for your lesbian coworker, maybe you should step back and ask yourself, "what are we doing here?" Or see the strange case of David Shor, the smart progressive political data guru who who faced a classic use of gekokujo online tactics to try kick him out of the small world of progressive data campaign people for tweeting an academic paper people didn't like. (Or see some of the truly bizarre stuff from The Online Young Adult Fiction Wars.)

2. Gekokujo tends to lead to group think: Many of the very elite media organizations I've outlined above that have engaged in these sorts of meltdowns seem to been stuck dumbfounded by recent political events. The New York Times is instructive: according to in-house conservative writer Ross Douthat when it came time to write their various "the case for..." pieces about who the next Democratic presidential nominee should be, none of the liberal columnists he works with were willing to do it for Joe Biden and so it fell to him. Why were these highly paid writers totally out of touch with what actual Democratic primary voters think? Likewise see the City of New York's swing of 7.6% towards Trump, more than any other state in the union, but I don't a recall a single pre-election story about this possibility. Gekokujo campaigns might cause your to lose focus on things like what voters in your own community actually think. And of course they can, one theme of these kinds of campaigns is that they take a lot of work to get going.

3. Who is the actual little guy? One of the themes in all these meltdowns is that the "lows" in gekokujo campaign aren't really that in terms of society, even if the fights are often always fought in those terms. Lower level staffer in The Atlantic or New York Times are hardly the truly disposed in our society. Is overthrowing the leaders of flagship publications really about creating a more just society? A better political press? Or could it be about something a little more self interested?

The big point here isn't that these individual meltdowns are some grave national crisis. It's that they show a peculiar sort of dynamic in a certain type of organization, some of which are quite influential, that seems increasingly common. And since this dynamic has the potential for real consequences, good and bad, it should be seen as something to actually treat seriously.

*I decided to call these events "meltdowns" in honor of the epic Gawker meltdown that was a trailblazer of this phenomena and also because I wanted to stress the similarities of these types of individual events rather than the unique circumstances that surround each one. If you are outraged and want to organize a social media campaign to cast me into the outer darkness please don't, but feel free to sound off in the comments!