The Redress of Grievances

If we think of social media messages as the electrical impulses firing across the synapses of varying efficiency provided by twitter, facebook, whatever other service you use that is too cutting-edge to bother with first-letter proper-noun capitalization, then when particular issues light up across all platforms, we can get an idea of how this massive shared brain works. We can get a look inside to see exactly how it is we, the stupid lumpen body providing the thoughtless meat and muscle to hold this new-fangled Turing thinking-machine up, absorb, process, confront and--daring all--learn. The hope is that the cascade of spasms and sparks, with the expected misfirings and complicated clutter, will to some degree and in some small corners, snap into coherence (however temporary or brief) long enough to afford us just a little bit of crowd-sourced insight above and beyond what we may have been capable of if left to slowly rot alone with our regular heads full of otherwise useless jelly.

This week we had two chances to get a look at widespread meme-think when Robin Williams died and then when police in Ferguson, Mo., killed a boy for what still appears to be no apparent reason.

If I'm cynical, I can say that in the past, the only thing that social media can really eventually prove is that confirmation bias is a powerful fucking thing. The line between genuine advocacy and rock-headed shilling is a pretty thin one, drawn with a feather in a gossamer layer of powder-fine sand scattered over a sand-colored tile floor. It's the Fox News*-ification of public discourse, where disagreement is a violation of your right to your opinion on par with a violation of the liberties guaranteed to you under the First Amendment. Debate therefore becomes zero sum, where an attempt by one side to speak and (gracious!) to dare to argue causes immediate and irreparable harm to the other's side's ability even to express itself. The implicit and instantaneous appeal to victimhood, pioneered by political-wilderness liberals in the 1980s and perfected by post-Clinton "conservatism," is all we can reasonably expect without risking the crushing disappointment of having our hopes for a civil debate of any substance crushed again and again and again... We're all made of crystal shards and tissue paper, held together sugar-paste and the nostalgia we keep mistaking for hope. And it all gets ripped apart in the same maelstrom of spinning charges and counter-charges of basic unfairness, then intentional misreading and then finally just trying to decide which side is Hitler.

The Ferguson issue has been particularly fascinating. There have been actual violations of real First Amendment rights by police intimidation of journalists going about their duties and people assembling peaceably. Well, mostly peaceably. What I want to learn from the twitter chatter and facebooking is where the soul of the issue is, besides the one escaping from a dead American boy's chest. Outside the chaos of the commentary complicated by rumors and lies, feelings and ego, and the standard amount of regular asshole internet trolling, when would we (as a country, as a world, whatever) produce the one thing that summed it all up, that cut through the violence, current and historical, to teach us something about the issue (or even maybe to actually identify "the issue" itself) as it stands this moment, this second.

I'm not sure exactly, but right now I think it's right here.

Luckily, the Robin Williams thing turned out to be way easier. You can just go listen to what he has to say about a lot of things, including wrestling with the idea of suicide directly. It's a few years old, but the internet isn't just the place we produce our new thoughts. It's also where we keep all our memories.

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*So there are my biases confirmed