The author writes, “You end up in a world where changing your mind becomes impossible because you've built your entire identity around being right”. Yet social-media personalities regularly do a 180° turn on some issue (e.g. pro-Ukraine to anti-Ukraine or vice versa) and still keep their following and ability to monetize it.

Social media is so full of parasocial relationships that a lot of followers are in love with an influencer’s personality, not their views or factual content. So, the influencer can completely change his mind about stuff, as long as he still has the engaging presentation that people have come to like. Followers are also often in love with the brand relationships that the influencers flog, because people love being told what stuff they should buy.

> But exposing yourself to articulate versions of positions you oppose does something valuable: it makes you realize that intelligent people can disagree with you without being monsters or morons.

The idea that being articulate implies intelligence and/or sanity is very common, but really a bit weird. You can find plenty of articulate defences of, say, flat earth theory.

The challenge is that short-term incentives can easily lead to long-term problems, as the short-term min/maxing can leave you stuck in a particular global minimum, with no clear way out.

Capital 'T' Truth isn't correlated to the American political 'center' or 'liberalism' or the maximally 'nuanced' position. It's insane to think that it would be.

> 'manufactured consent', "liberal" as a slur...

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Joan has lost relationships with her lefty friends because she doesn't think that the apartheid state of Israel is committing a genocide on the Palestinians using American weapons.

I also believe she doesn't want to say that directly, hence this nebulous essay.

Relatedly, y'all should read One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, by Omar El Akkad.

A lot of this goes away when you stop spending so much time on social media, which is a very poor reflection of "reality." Part of the problem is that there are a number of people who can't really look away, because they've built their livelihoods on it. Traditional media in many ways has come to rely on it too. Unfortunate mistake.

Prominent figures on social media change their minds all the time, but they'll re-sculpt their reality around the basis that they were always right anyway. Just take a look at how the story around the Epstein files changes with the way the wind blows. It feels very familiar to the "Narcissist's Prayer."

I think disengaging from social media is a big part of this. These advertiser and engagement fueled algorithms promote all of the insane takes as well. You find much more fulfillment engaging with people locally or people in your close circles.

>A third began using the word "liberal" as if it was a personality disorder rather than loose coalitions of sometimes contradictory beliefs.

I'm a long time Jon Stewart fan and if I'm being honest, looked at the "other side" as if it was a bunch of retarded people isn't new and predate 2016. No doubt Trump and social media got conservative to embrace condescending and extreme rhetoric and pushed it to another level but let's not pretend they invented anything.

Not sure what the point of this is other than to complain about being out of touch with the world. Too many people think "diversifying your information" means subscribing to whatever drivel they find on substack instead of, you know, following a diverse set of _actual journalists_.

I have a hard time taking this kind of enlightened-centrist both-sides gruel very seriously. Calling every strong position "extreme" is a classic sleight-of-hand maneuver by people who want to mask their own wrong-side-of-history beliefs that they know they should feel ashamed of expressing.

> it makes you realize that intelligent people can disagree with you without being monsters or morons.

Many issues really do have a bright dividing line. I mean, for fuck's sake, there are people who are currently fighting against releasing the Epstein files, documents that clearly incriminate pedophilic rape and sex trafficking.

> One friend became “convinced” that every major news story was manufactured consent.

I think the author here doesn't actually understand what manufactured consent is, because believing otherwise demonstrates media illiteracy. Talking about our extreme filter bubbles (community/information homogeneity) in one breath and then denying the pervasiveness of manufactured consent in the next is otherwise a perfect demonstration of Gell-Mann amnesia.

I think you really have to cherry-pick to argue that "insanity," so to speak, is rewarded with attention. If we're talking about politics, for example, there are millions of people who hold particular political views, but most of those people are anonymous, and a lot of them don't engage in social media political arguments. One's beliefs don't automatically bring engagement or a "community."

If anything, the notable online influencers are frequently insincere about the propaganda that they post. It's just a cynical opportunity for them.

In my opinion, the article is a rather shallow psychological analysis of the phenomenon. It doesn't even explain why online extremism is rewarded, just takes that for granted.