When a culture of fear and intimidation sets it, it is extremely dangerous and usually in my experience even terminal for things like organizations and companies.
What did we do 25 years ago to discuss things? It sure the hell wasn't Twitter or Facebook. It was sitting down with the people around us and having a reasonable conversation that didn't include snippets from stupid corners of some webby thing.
It required thought and a reasonable search of the information at hand, which was slower back then. We were more methodical in forming our opinions and what we put our attention on.
Regardless, the best method for improving knowledge is making it available to criticism, which is why I favour free speech and openness over this silly culture of “fact checking”, algorithmic censorship and “hate” speech. If it means someone does or doesn’t do something someone else dislikes or thinks is wrong but is legal, like not taking a vaccine, then so be it, they’re adults.
High 8 figures+ net worth? Generationally wealthy? With government connections? Otherwise I don't think anyone cares about you
> "OK, so by many standards I'm "elite" (in terms of net worth, education etc.). But I don't think I'm part of the "elite" you're referring to"
explicitly acknowledging different (simultaneous, potentially overlapping) versions of what "elite" could mean. Yet here you are dickering about one definition versus another.
If you don't have that ability, you're just upper middle class.
The definition of "elite" is of course murky, but that does not mean that it's not real. There is a very real process of preference cascades among the discourse of those who hold power in society together with the professional classes that identify with them (even if they themselves do not hold much power). The ability to control the public discourse has collapsed as centralized media has been converted into decentralized social media, which has led to panic and calls to bring social media back to heel.
Part of this is the (correct) belief that Trump and other populist phenomena - for example Democratic Socialists and the rise of Bernie Sanders -- are made possible by people being able to communicate with each other directly, bypassing whatever Overton window the major media outlets try to set, and even forming their own tribal Overton windows with no regard to what respectable people at the Heritage Foundation or the New York Times or members of the Davos-set think about this. These outsiders can then win elections or at least threaten to win elections. That creates a moral panic about wrongthink, "misinformation", fact-checker discourse, and general terror that ordinary people are able to communicate freely, form their own opinions, and coordinate without the supervision of elite consensus.
If you'd like, you could accuse them of "false consciousness" (long a favorite derisive put down from Leninists and their friends), or of simply being patsies for the powerful (more typical of the current US right).
So I'm wondering what your explanation of this concern among non-elites?
Well sure, but that's always been the case. E.g. in the past, people who were outside the overton window had no choice but to get mad at views they disagreed with as they had great difficulty in getting their own voices heard.
Now they can have their own voices heard. They can make their own overton window and completely ignore someone else's.
Point being, there is a democratization at work, but whereas those on the outside always had to put up with disagreeable voices, now elites must also put up with it, which is something they are not used to, indeed they are offended by needing to - it's a real shock to them - and this is where the calls for censorship of social media are coming from.
Most of the outrage isn't about democratization. It's about the gutter-level quality of the voices. I don't think many people at the time had much of a problem with someone like William Buckley being the mouthpiece for the views he expressed on national media, even if they strongly disagreed with those views. He may have been a racist bigot, but he was a thoughtful, literate, articulate racist bigot. Likewise, even the far right tends to have a little grudging respect for the ability of someone like Noam Chomsky to articulate a view of the world with which they fundamentally disagree.
But democratization hasn't resulted in lots more voices cleverly or playfully or insightfully or creatively expressing new (or existing) points of view.
It has resulted in a culture filled with endlessly repeating garbage, where the dumbest, most simplistic, least nuanced crap dominates by volume. Oh, and of course, endless snark, because people don't actually have the courage to say what they really mean, but instead just use snark to try to make other people seem less funny, less clued in and therefore "obviously" wrong.
You seem to be claiming an awfully deep level of insight into the psychology of "elites"
> "which is something they are not used to, indeed they are offended by needing to - it's a real shock to them"
are you a part of this elite, or perhaps study them? They don't seem to actually write a lot - that would be mostly middle class pundits - or appear on TV or other visual media - that would be said pundits and/or party officials or elected representatives. I'm not sure where this level of insight can come from?
Sure, it is.
> It might not be false to say that there's more than one,
There is one for any group of people definable as a meaningful political context, down to and including individuals.
> but there isn't one per person.
Because each person is a coherent political unit and there are also coherent political units with more than one person, there is strictly greater than one Overton window per person.
> The Overton window is the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time. It is also known as the window of discourse.
> The term is named after American policy analyst Joseph P. Overton, who stated that an idea's political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within this range, rather than on politicians' individual preferences. According to Overton, the window frames the range of policies that a politician can recommend without appearing too extreme to gain or keep public office given the climate of public opinion at that time.
This definition does not really allow for the notion of an individual's "own" Overton Window, which would be something without any statistical properties, given it corresponds precisely with "what one person currently believes".
Sure, an individuals Overton window is “the range of policies that a politician can recommend without appearing too extreme” to a voter; in any context the Overton window is per dimension; an idea within the window on an individual sense is one which does not, on its own, rule the candidate out of consideration by that voter, its not the same as the single point the individal voter prefers; this is just exactly the usual sense of an Overton window where the polity has one viewpoint, not just of preferred policies but of which non-preferred ones are and are not deal breakers.
No, its fundamentally rooted by the fact that the relationship between distance from an individuals preferred policy in any dimension and a candidates actual policy on that dimension and the effect on the individuals willing to vote for the candidate is nonlinear.
The thresholding effect in groups is only because of (and is a function of) the thresholding effect in individuals.
Its usually not something worth discussing on its own, but I don't know why you wouldn't call the exact same thing that is called “the Overton window” for any other size set of people “the Overton window” for an individual.
If someone running for POTUS was to have suggested UBI in 1992 (say), they would have been instantly dismissed (probably as a communist). No voting. Not even much in the way of individual reactions, other than a few high profile op-eds here and there and sunday morning talkshow outrage.
When Yang was talking about UBI in 2020, while he was not successful even in the primaries, the idea did not trigger the same sort of cultural reactions at all.
I sense an inner authoritarian coming out of their pupa here.
> even the far right tends to have a little grudging respect for the ability of someone like Noam Chomsky
The "far right" has about as much respect for Noam Chomsky as the "far left" has for John Birch.
Which is to say, they view him as a peddler of hateful conspiracy theories that his low information followers unquestioningly believe. A dangerous person that should be silenced. If you think otherwise, you are fooling yourself about any supposed admiration there is for Chomsky.
> It's about the gutter-level quality of the voices.
Now are you talking about Chomsky again? Because you still think that the right is objectively worse than the left and that's just not the case. Some people are just natural authoritarians and any opposing views are "gutter discourse" whereas their own enlightened views have to be grudgingly admired. That's not how it works. And I would not recommend that anyone read Chomsky because the value of his political commentary really is the same as that of John Birch, IMO. There are some important nuggets of insight, but you have to be immunized against all the conspiracy theories and hate, and most readers don't have the appropriate background to handle it. They will come away with a feeling of faux-insight that is just a bubble of misinformation. And they tend to be very angry and militant. We need less of that.
> but instead just use snark to try to make other people seem less funny
There's no need to bring John Oliver into the discussion. There is lots of snark, but I agree it's not helpful to focus on it.
> I'm not sure where this level of insight can come from?
Yes, the snark is a real problem.
How would you preferred that I put it? I have no idea of your relationship to the putative elites that you're describing; I see no way that a random HN commenter can possibly have the kind of insight that you're claiming in describing how "they" "feel" about the "voices of the masses". So I tried to ask as neutrally as I could, without doubting that you might in fact really have some authoritative knowledge of this, so that you could let us know whether this was just you pontificating about people you don't actually have any real knowledge of, or actually real information.
Oh FFS. I am sure that you read at least some social media. I limit myself to Twitter and don't follow many people, but even there, my exposure to stuff that is "gutter discourse" is still more than I'd like, and it comes from every direction and ideology. I'm not talking about right/left stuff, I'm talking about people who really don't know what they're talking about but still insist on talking.
> public persecution of anyone who was not willing to tow the regime message
What regime? The side that tried to tell us covid was harmless? e.g.