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The internet went from subculture to being the mainstream culture, especially for politics. Roughly the point at which everyone started participating in sharing memes on Facebook as the successor to email forwards.

This made it valuable enough to be worth destroying.

So all kinds of bad actors started creating appealing, emotional, and false or misleading content aimed at this kind of sharing.

Polarisation is deliberate. Some of it from the media, some of it from parties, some of it from random bored channers, some of it from the unemployed and upset, and some from intelligence agencies and their contractors.

(This has had even worse effects in countries where democracy and media are young and fragile.)

conspiracy theories about nebulous entities also proliferate after eternal september or october

https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/story-of-us.html

This might not be a perfect resource. Among other things, he likes to use a lot of words to explain his point. But he offers up his theories on the Why behind polarization, including several contributors. Even if he doesn't get everything right, I think this is a solid place for someone who's serious about understanding it to start, and find plenty of references to dig into.

I share eqdw's distaste for knee-jerk symptom addressal without adequate understanding of the cause.

I am somewhat disappointed by the other responses to eqdw here because they each immediately proffer or refer to competing interpretations of the cause without also referencing empirical tests of those interpretations. They miss eqdw's excellent point that there's always a hand-waved explanation waiting in the wings. Interpretations (which the other comments are) are not true explanations: they add dimensions to how we think, but not certainty in our conclusions. The historical method is not a valid substitute for the scientific method, as E. H. Carr long ago demonstrated with "What Is History?"

The point I'm making is that there's got to be a higher bar for reasoning about social issues than a preferred interpretation, and that is likely going to be experiment. I'm aware sociological issues are so-called wicked problems, are hard to replicate solutions consistently with, and are difficult to have error bars over in their contribution to the end result. I don't think that means it is not possible to do experiments well enough to make reliable inferences - simulated games and follow-up interviews with participants are an effective research technique in this area, for example.

> Do you know _why_ this uptick has happened? Does anyone?

I think it's because online, each of us is disembodied and anonymous. We're a nobody. And nobody wants that. So the quickest way to become somebody is to join a group -- ideally a group that seems to be a winner, that offers easy compelling answers to hard problems... especially answers that somehow favor you and others like you. That's populism. Populists are fearless and decisive and sure they know what's true and right. They also know that everybody who's not on their team doesn't get it. So the quicker you join them, the sooner you become a somebody, a player. And if everyone else like you joins that team and you don't, you could degenerate into something worse than a nobody... an enemy.

Combine that with where fame (and leadership?) seems to have evolved in our culture -- where becoming famous is the result of doing whatever it takes to attract attention. Even if if you lack any substance at all, if you somehow stand out, now you're no longer a nobody. You can't be ignored any more. And in the echo chambers of today's hollowed-out media and bored internet, that seems to be enough for most folks-who'd-rather-not-think to see you as outstanding, and an opinion leader.

Those two phenomena don't sound like much, but they do help explain how an empty angry bombastic boob could become President of the United States of America and split the country like nothing has since slavery.

Why is Trump in this comment? You talk about dividing the country yet your comment does exactly that.

Further I think you’re wrong in your claims that nobody wants to be anonymous. Some of us are punished for our points of view and very much want to remain anonymous, using it as a place to vent frustrations with no repercussions.

I would go as far as to say that your comment is a prime example of toxicity on the web given you assume (wrongly) that everybody hates Trump and therefore it is ok to step on the thoughts and beliefs of 1/2 of the country

I mean, pro- or anti-Trump, you have to admit that he's at least symptomatic of divisive politics, right? It's probably fair to go one step further and say that he also embraces that divisiveness.

That's without expressing an opinion on the underlying politics.

Did Obama not divide the country to a point where Trump could get elected?

I would say Obama divided the country more than Trump. Trumps approval rating among african americans is now over 40%. That's huge. To US citizens, Trump is less divisive in my opinion, but his character definitely sparks the opposite side into creating a new bread of louder and in your face divisive culture (Antifa, etc).

Altough I believe that to be true during the Bush years as the anti-Bush types were very loud and crazy. Now that many more people are online and are able to spread opinion via Twitter/FB/youtube/etc, the divisiveness from activists has gotten louder. Joe Rogan also observes this in how he describes the 2 minute tv news media culture where 10 people are trying to shout over one another to get their point in, and how that is a sign of a dying medium (being replaced by internet, long form discussion, etc). This seems like further proof that the traditional media is more divisive more than ever...it's the last breaths of a dying medium. Don't think that's true? Just watch local tv news in SF Bay Area and compare to a smaller city outside of a major metro (blue) area.

Do you know _why_ this uptick has happened? Does anyone?

That is obvious. No idea how to solve it, but the cause? Sure.

There's people determined to make it happen. They're called activists. From both sides. They're determined to make anyone in between to choose sides.

Look no further than this post. See comments attributing the problem to the right, the left, old people, young people...

> Do you know _why_ this uptick has happened? Does anyone?

I believe the culprit is expecting the diversity of the world's voices to be able to converse through a single comment widget. Any online article or post has a single comment widget that mixes the voices of everyone together. This causes chaos, as we are all well aware. I believe we need to provide a mechanism for the public to self segregate when they post comments; if they can say "I am posting this to these people" or "this post is of this attitude" and the comments section beneath a post/article were a selection of conversations with different attitudes - things would be different, less heated, and (sub)-culturally richer.

> Do you know _why_ this uptick has happened? Does anyone?

I don't know but my take is that media makes more money if we get angry, and this anger-inducing style is permeating in the population.

> Do you know _why_ this uptick has happened? Does anyone?

Controversy drives engagement, engagement drives profits.

Exactly this. The channels through which people an anonymously communicating (also a part of the problem) are biased towards sensational and controversial content, which sends dialog down this path no matter what.

An important consideration is that many different cultures are experiencing very similar radicalization / polarization trends. The facts on the ground are quite different but the tooling by which these conversations happen is the same.

The centuries-old conflict between egalitarianism and hierarchism, driven by economic and environmental pressures and to which technology is a a revivifying input.

It's been said many times, _you can't change human nature_.

Seems like it's really "inhuman nature" that would need to stop.

In the wider world man's inhumanity to man has always been a prominent factor, and appears to have been on the increase in recent decades as the world grows.

There is also the possibility that this is a destructive reversal.

Regardless, In online areas where polarization/toxicity has not been traditionally represented, mainstream influence would require the web negativity to increase at a faster rate than the mainstream in order to catch up and eventually equalize.

The more the rest of the world catches up with the web, the more the web catches up with the rest of the world.

The web just seems like it's getting worse faster than the rest of the world because it actually is.

I think it is a confluence of factors, but primarily it has become much more visible due to the rise of social media. And by that I specifically mean that social media enabled far more people to actively contribute and communicate online to wider audiences than previously. Most of the people communicating undesirable ideas have not formed them recently. They have held them and repeated them very often, they simply haven't been accessible to others, searchable, indexable, etc. All of the various notions about requiring platforms to regulate speech online and similar will, at most, return us to that situation. That would not necessarily be a positive step. As an example, two sisters from the Westboro Baptist Church have left the organization expressly as the result of one of the sisters having her mostly deeply held beliefs questioned, challenged, and refuted on Twitter. Were that communication not able to flow, that group would still have two more members protesting funerals, spewing irrational hatred, and promoting a harmful ideology.

Human beings have a natural tendency to wish to categorize things in a binary manner, and they deal exceptionally poorly with situations that feature an abundance of both good and bad. They feel compelled, really compelled, to decide to pay attention to only one of the two possibilities and to minimize the other so that the opinion of the matter can be held onto more tightly. I personally think this is a tendency of deep biological origin (down to the actual functioning of the brain level) and it is something we must guard ourselves from buying into.

Another large factor is simply number and breadth of people communicating online. Children, adolescents, and young adults are very active online now. They are learning social skills and as our society totally and utterly abandons them in this regard outside of the Internet, it is the only location in the world where they can even have the possibility of interacting with other people as equals. Beyond the bounds of the Internet, they are treated and spoken of very poorly by all segments of society, and they bring their bitterness over that with them online. Human society has problems, and our desire to hide those problems should be resisted in preference to wishing to see those problems solved. Talking about it, and attempting to find successful means of solving those problems without compulsion but with education should be an actively pursued goal, IMO.

>> Human beings have a natural tendency to wish to categorize things in a binary manner...

Assume you're human too. You've illustrated your point, whilst stating it.

My comment is flippant. Sorry for that. Important thing I wanted to say is: not all humans conform to that pattern. Indeed, many entire cultures do not. Including the majority of people in the place where I live now.

I suggest you get out more. You may find that the world is less fully specified than you imagine.

I suffer no illusions that I am myself immune to any of the common pitfalls of being human. I imagine if you shared where you live now, either your community has learned to resist the tendency I describe (which I am guessing you misunderstood, that may be mostly my fault as I didn't go very deeply into it) or else they simply express it in different areas, perhaps demonizing the microwaves of wifi or the evils of certain chemical compounds and their tendency to give people 'unearned' happiness, etc.

I am curious, though... how is saying that humans have a certain tendency an illustration of categorizing things in a binary manner?

I would suggest you make fewer assumptions about the people you're having discussions with. You don't seem to be skilled at sussing out at least my own background. And of course the world is 'less fully specified than [I] imagine' or how you believe I imagine it. That's one of the reasons I studied philosophy, and why I continue to study different cultures, history, and current events. Even the most primitive cultures center their thinking around categorizing things, and they begin with two categories, then split them from there. It's practically the essence of human reason and even pattern recognition.

> Do you know _why_ this uptick has happened? Does anyone?

Are you asking why polarization has happened? Or why is had gotten worse? The answer to the first is all about control. There's a great book called The Dictator's Handbook that documents this. Throughout history, the ruling class has sought to divide the people they rule over into groups and then cater to the groups that will help them remain in power. See the current situation in the United States where the president won by less than 50% of the vote and the majority party in the Senate represents a minority of Americans. Between the various tools for voter amplification and voter suppression, the goal is to carve out the smallest group of people needed to win, then cater to their base emotions by painting everyone else as the Other, to be feared and attacked.

As for why the uptick, that's due to technology. The Internet, ad placements, etc, have enabled these groups to execute on these strategies en masse.

As the expression goes, there's nothing new under the sun, just a reiteration of the past.

> Frequently, when I try to bring this up, the cause is waved away with "oh they're just stupid/ignorant/angry" or some other such explanation. The current-year favourite is "they just believe fake news", and I'm sure next year there will be a political explanation, and then the year after that we'll loop back to generic ones. (The irony of denouncing other people as causing polarization "because they're just angry and stupid" is lost on most people)

I think what you're describing is attribution bias - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribution_bias

Just a personal hypothesis, probably colored by my own biases, but I think it has a lot to do with the ad-based economy of the Internet.

The news has evolved to grab attention. It's always done that somewhat, but the Internet and the explosion of options available to people has made it worse than it used to be. Media companies compete for attention by presenting their stories as the most outrageous, most outlandish, most urgent issue ever in the world.

A cute puppy is not just a cute puppy. It's everything you need. It saved me. It is the sole beacon of light and goodness in this cold, heartless world.

Political party X proposing something that a media outlet's demographic dislikes is not just another bill being proposed, it's the enemy trying to destroy everything good in this world. Literally Hitler and so on.

Everything is hyperbolized to the nth degree to try to get it to stand out in the morass of everything else. This trickles down into the way we talk to each other. People don't just disagree, anyone who has a different opinion is literally the greatest villain humanity has ever known and people treat them as such.

The root cause is advertising. Media makes money by attracting eyeballs. They attract eyeballs by standing out with something more urgent than what everyone else is saying. Unless we can provide another way for media to make money that changes their incentives for how they write stories, I expect this will continue.

It's not like the masses aligning with one side or the other is a new invention, it's how politics works and always has worked. So, in a way, what's "causing it" is humanity being stupid and measures against it are attempts at managing stupidity. Nobody wants to hear that. Because everybody is too stupid to drop their ego.

That being said, there's about three articles a week that blame the unchecked spread of stupidity on the internet for the uptick in bizarre fringe ideologies. And they're probably right. One of the best explanations of how this happens I recently found in a comment thread – unfortunately I don't remember where (I assume tildes.net). In short, social media tries to find patterns in what people like and documents/encourages them. Content creators then try to make money from following those trends very quickly, which artificially accelerates and grows them. It used to take a while for some random, weird ideology take over, now it only takes one viral youtube video or tweet, even if people initially just watch it ironically.

It's no different than it always was, it just runs way too fast.

_In the Swarm_ by Byung-Chul Han does a good job explaining why this happened.

In retrospect, it's perhaps more of a miracle that we got a decade or two of relatively low toxicity from the Internet.

> Do you know _why_ this uptick has happened? Does anyone?

Lookup Overton Window Shift.

I believe the reason for the uptick is two-fold.

1.) In general, this is a reactionary movement from the elite class of society(straight, white, cis people) to keep a death grip on the social and systemic power they see being taken from them in the form of diversity, equality, feminism, etc. This has been happening for a long time now, but it got real, real bad after...

2.) ...Trump was elected. Him winning the election was a shot of weapons-grade steroids into the ass of these regressive movements. He validated and emboldened them. He made them feel not only okay about being bigoted, but morally good for it.

That's my thoughts, at least.

> Trump was elected. Him winning the election was a shot of weapons-grade steroids into the ass of these regressive movements.

It’s actually exactly the opposite. We lurched left in a very short time. As recently as 2007, a plurality even of Hispanics said there were “too many immigrants” in the US. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/19/latinos-hav.... Little more than a decade later, every mainstream Democratic candidate is running on providing universal healthcare to people who immigrate illegally.

> In general, this is a reactionary movement from the elite class of society(straight, white, cis people) to keep a death grip on the social and systemic power they see being taken from them in the form of diversity, equality, feminism, etc. This has been happening for a long time now, but it got real, real bad after...

Trump's base is decidedly not elite. It's working class people who live outside cities.

The elites live in cities and have graduate degrees. Very few of them voted for Trump.

>Trump's base is decidedly not elite. It's working class people who live outside cities.

Define "city," "elite" and "working class."

Because if Trump's base primarily consisted of people who lived in areas with, let's just say, populations under 10,000 without access to municipal services and who primarily farm and live off the land, then he would never have had enough support to carry the primaries. Clearly a significant number of his supporters live in what most people would consider a "city."

According to these articles, at least[0,1], Trump's primary support was among relatively affluent Republicans. It shouldn't be a surprise, either. Trump is an elite, a billionaire businessman. Obviously, other elites were going to support him.

That said, I would agree with GP in a general sense, that we're seeing a hard right-wing, reactionary shift primarily driven (as right-wing shifts typically are in the West) by white cis Christian males fighting to maintain their cultural power in the face of demographic and progressive change. However, I don't think there's necessarily a strong correlation in this movement to urban/rural or high/middle/low income lines, although I could be convinced by data to the contrary.

[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/06/0...

[1]https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps...

If we're talking about online conversations only, then I personally believe that the reduction in AGE of participants online has had a massive influence.

Teenagers simply do not have the maturity to have mature conversations.

I could find countless examples of why this is completely inaccurate, but i'll submit one: members of Congress.

Not too sure about that. Many of the rudest people I've encountered online are retirees.