Peggy Noonan and Technology, Tribalism and “Troll Nation” – Very Online and Very Angry

This Internet experiment – my person webpage – is pretty much as old as the World Wide Web itself, having been started in late 1996. So I have had occasion to watch the popular use of the Internet develop over time, and have commented on how it has changed, for the good and the bad.

So I read with interest Peggy Noonan when she opined in her column “AI In the Garden of Eden” about how she, too, was excited at the dawn of the Internet Era, but has since soured on the Internet and technology as it has been used in real life. Noonan speaks about the “brutal downsides” of our high-tech Information Age socioeconomic world: 

“…political polarization for profit, the knowing encouragement of internet addiction, the destruction of childhood, a nation that has grown shallower and less able to think…”

Wow, a nation which is stupider than it was before, less able to think… it reminds me of my latest addition to my classroom:

It also reminds me of the movie WALL-E, where high-technology renders denizens of the future overweight, lazy, and dumb – passive consumers, sloppy slobs, over-entertained dimwits. 

That movie was produced back in 2008, but it has only gotten worse in the following 15 years, in my opinion.

Then I think of so many I see wearing pajama pants all day long out in public, with crocs instead of regular shoes on their feet, smoking more than a bit of marijuana pretty much everyday… binge-watching Netflix, doing poorly in school, taking in more calories to their body than they are burning (ie. soft bodies, obesity), drifting in their lives and… not exactly thriving. A common story nowadays.

These negative trends are way too much to lay at the feet of technology and the Internet alone, but some blame can be laid there. Is the Internet responsible for, as Noonan accuses it, or making us “shallower and less able to think”? I think it is part of the problem in rendering us overall undereducated and over-entertained. It has also made our life more crass and mean. 

Because in addition to obesity and a dumbed-down contemporary American, there is also the “hair on fire,” mentally-unwell activist who is Very Online and Very Angry. I am far from the first person to notice this. The Internet, and social media in particular, has helped to make us more tribal (ie. partisan political polarization and culture war tribalism), dividing the nation into “them” versus “us,” helping to make the whole country more like a toxic middle school of over-emotional aggrievement and self-aggrandizement – as can be seen by the Democratic Governor of California Gavin Newsom attack on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and then back at ya’, buddy while DeSantis was visiting California – essentially trolling each other through the media. Such rough-and-tumble political combat was seen in the Nixon era, too. That by itself is not new. The presidential elections of 1800 and 1884 had as much mud-balling as takes place today. But in our lightning-fast, Internet-enabled social mediascape milieu the scene is somehow qualitatively different.

In fact, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 is the best proof of how bad things have gotten in the USA in terms of media consumption and scandal-mongering – the rise of “Troll Nation” in America. Would Trump have been elected president without the free publicity he garnered with his “outrageousness” on Twitter? Harry Truman (33rd) and Dwight Eisenhower (34th) would blush in shame to look seven decades into the future and regard their successor, President of the United States Donald John Trump (47th). Regard how we have stooped since then!

It seemed back then responsible adults were in charge. Nowadays not so much.

It was very strange. I will never forget the sense of confusion and bewilderment I experienced on Tuesday evening November 8, 2016. I witnessed my country elect a former reality TV star and real estate developer (ie. a scandalmonger who stoked cultural resentment for his own self-aggrandizement: a demagogue) with no previous government experience to the highest office in the land. Social media America had come of age.

Welcome to the United States of America, “Troll Nation.” Donald Trump is the premiere “conservative” troll, along with his spiritual father, Rush Limbaugh. But there are many others shit-talking, carnival-barkers like Trump – trolls large and small, in the contemporary American social mediascape. Too many, in my opinion. “Burn it all down to the ground,” they say, “and build a better world on the ashes.” It is madness.

So of course the opposite “progressive” side of the political spectrum has their trolls. There is AOC and “the squad,” as well as transgender activists and the DIE (“Diversity, Inclusion, Equity”) grifters from university schools of sociology and education. “Departments of Ethnic Studies.” Resentment, anger, grievance. “Fight the patriarchy!” “Oppose white supremacy!” “End the gender binary!” But make no mistake about it, they are trolls, too. “Tear down the old,” they argue, “and start again anew.”

The Progressive Left and the Populist Right are the two sides of the same coin in Troll Nation America. The one side resembles the other (”Horseshoe” Theory of Politics). They need each other, vibe off each other. And they all are Very Online and Very Angry. That is mostly where they fight: the Internet, on Social media. (Maybe we should just call it “anti-social media”?)  Conflict is confrontational in a hyperpolitical, almost hysterical, nearly uncontrolled, style. “Drive our political opponents into the wilderness!” It is extreme. It fuels the political extremes. And the extremes push up the temperature of the conversation, unfortunately.

Collectively the fervent Left and fervid Right don’t come anywhere near to making up a majority of the country. But they seem to have an outsize voice in the national debate online in “Troll Nation” America. I often struggle to understand why so many moderates, and moderate views, seem to be so ignored. Critics like Peggy Noonan claim that social media monetizes scandal and attention while fostering conflict, and so the politicos who want attention have to be flamboyant and extreme to gain traction online. Moderates, and moderates positions, are too bland and boring to get attention in Troll Nation, apparently. To be a “normie,” or a reasonable grown-up with mainstream views, seems out of fashion. Social media by design whips up anger, spreads dissension, and profits off it – to the detriment of the country, in my opinion. Noonan goes even further than me in pointing the finger at tech companies for our maladies.

Noonan lays much of the blame directly at the feet of those “titans of the technology industry” whose business plans changed so much in the country in the last fifty years. She names, blames, and shame a “dead-eyed” amoral Mark Zuckerberg (social media), a tone-deaf semi-autistic uber-nerd Bill Gates (software), and a Google (search engines and online video) unable to live up to its modest goal of “not being evil.” To Noonan, Artificial Intelligence is the next dangerous step in this damaging dance of technological change in the United States. According to Noonan, AI is the next great beast which will destroy us… The organizing metaphor for her essay is the Adam and Eve story from the Book of Genesis with the forbidden Apple from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which we have collectively bitten into with tech and which has gotten us cast out of the Garden of Eden.

Does Noonan go too far? Is it really this bad? What about the good that technology brings us? There is plenty of good. 

I don’t know. Noonan is much smarter and better informed than me. So she may be right. As a classroom teacher, I have little direct professional experience with macro-economic trends with respect to how AI will influence the American job market. I don’t know how Americans will live in the future. I can’t say what will happen to our larger society. Will we come to resemble some WALL-E society? I can’t say. But I can say this: AI will not destroy me. Nor will social media. I’m not going to be a couch-bound creature binge-watching Netflix shows endlessly. I’m not going to be one of these obese zombie-like figures in a fugue-like state staring at screens hour after hour.

As for me, it is clear: I don’t want to be a passive viewer of video; I want to be an active reader of books. Always have. Always will. Maybe that makes me “old fashioned,” Perhaps I am a peripheral inhabitant in the present “Troll Nation.” I live in the ascendant and triumphant Age of Video but adhere to an aging and receding Age of Print.

But whether in video or in print I will be careful to use my time to advantage and profit, not waste it in idleness or dissipation. I will avoid needless conflict and abjure invidious gossip. I can’t stand the United States as a Troll Nation. I don’t want to live in a middle school milieu of meanspirited backbiting. I will go in the opposite direction. I need to use my time well, as I will be dead soon enough. “Do it now!” I remind myself. Tomorrow is a myth, a lie. Do it today. Tomorrow is the eternal tease; the eternal present is where we live. Always and forever. Stoicism is the key; mindfulness is the tool. Evenness of temper and calmness of soul are the ideal. Reading widely and thinking clearly are paramount, for me, to strive towards this goal.

So a careful observer could learn an enormous amount about me by looking at the lists of books I have read for the past few decades – in addition to what I write about in my blog, you would see what I was learning and thinking about over so many hours in the books I read during so many specific moments of the “eternal present”:

It would be hard to stress too much how important my reading is to me. I can’t find the time or energy to read more than about four books per month, but it is a rare month when I don’t read that much. I read everyday. It is a priority for me, and I make time for it. Even busy people, such as myself, find time for what is important. No excuses.

Recently I have been reading books in Spanish. At the beginning I was reading Nobel Prize authors like Carlos Fuentes or Gabriel García Márquez. As an Advanced Placement English teacher by trade, I appreciated the literature but it was not exactly… the Spanish you hear day-in and day-out in the street. I wanted more conversational, practical Spanish. So I turned to reading the middlebrow Michael Connelly thriller novels in English, and then slowly and laboriously reading them in Spanish translation. I write down the Spanish words I encounter which I don’t know and I memorize them, so that next time I will know them. Here are two pages from one of these notebooks full of my Spanish notes:

Do you see? I have hundreds of pages of such notes. I review them almost everyday. In this way, and in others, I constantly try to grow my vocabulary and become more comfortable with the cadences and inflections of Spanish. I try to immerse myself in the language. I seek to think in Spanish while awake, and to dream in that language while asleep; that is how you learn: immersion. Over time the brain adapts. “Uno se acostumbra.”

It is hard work which seems never to end; it takes gobs of time and effort. But I learn. Little by little I improve. Months and then years of this result in consistent growth and dramatic improvement over the long-term. I enjoy it. The process gives me great personal satisfaction. I listened to the daily news on Cadena Ser while driving my car, and I understand the majority of what I hear. Hour after hour it becomes easier, even if it is rarely easy. I have done it for years. All of this is why I was in Costa Rica a good chunk of last summer.

Because I’m polishing my Spanish in preparation for living large parts of my life in Latin America. I hope to be the gringo viejo who speaks practiced, formal Spanish in Quito or Bogotá – and plays tennis with the caballeros at the club and shares a few laughs and a beer afterwards. If those guys can play a solid game of tennis doubles, they will find that I can, too. Or I will be the expat American in Viña del Mar or Sayulita who sits in the corner café for hours, reading the newspaper, writing in his notebook, looking out the window, seemingly lost in thought, for long stretches of time. Yes, that will be me. I did all this in the United States, too.

So what do I care about Artificial Intelligence? Or about the latest popular Netflix sitcom shows? Social media influencers? Pop star singers? Donald Trump? That large segments of American society seem to be devolving into something resembling a superheated middle school sociodrama? That Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez troll each other on Twitter? That the “Mean Girls” movie set in a hormonally-charged high school setting seems to have come to Congress?

Et tu, Peggy Noonan? Instead of knitting your brows and tearing your hair about “the state of things in America today,” maybe you should just tend more to your own garden? Like Voltaire’s Candide?

Maybe everyone should mind their own business more? Grow up?

America used to be a place where one encountered grown ups. 

Now it seems not so much.