Is Social Media A Force For Good?
Heidegger, Arendt, Benjamin, Strauss, Kojeve, and Schmitt
As a longtime fan of Torah Scholar Avivah Zornberg, it was an honor to record this conversation with her. I hope it brings some joy and recognition to her other fans, and for those who wonder what her argument is, I hope it clarifies what’s at stake for her.
If I had to sum it up, it would be something like “Life is anguish. Acknowledge it, hold it, let it deepen you; seek God in it. Great literature, and especially Torah, offers us a way to open our hearts to this existential anguish.”
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Moderator: Is Social Media a Force for Good?
Schmitt: The good life is one in which people risk their lives for what they believe in. Social media rewards those who agitate, but it also sublimates the basic instinct for war into “dunking.” Social media is a liberal institution that simulates the political, but remains apolitical. Political opining is subordinated to the attention economy, and reduced to fuel for advertising, which ultimately rewards purchasing and producing, not taking up arms. Social media gives the appearance of hyper-politicization, but it’s actually depoliticization, the reduction of a viewpoint into a brand. The pundit class loves to spew on about polarization, but it’s theatrics. Consumerism is a stronger force in the digital age than genuine conviction. Liberalism has turned the noble fight into just another slogan to put on one’s coffee mug: politics as “merch.”
Kojève: The world will not be a rational and good place until everyone follows as many people as they are followed by. Alternatively, social media is a site where we see the master-slave dialectic play out. Masters have no need for social media; slaves, who lack recognition IRL, turn to social media to have their persona affirmed. But even when they succeed in racking up millions of followers, they remain depressed, because the recognition they receive is 1) contingent on their alienation and 2) given to them by masses of people they resent and disdain.
Strauss: Social media is a vulgar place that most philosophers should avoid, except to understand human nature. Socrates was known to hang out in the marketplace and question people, so in theory Twitter might be a contemporary agora. But just as Socrates was sentenced to death for corrupting the youth, any genuine philosopher would today be condemned by a Twitter mob simply for asking the wrong questions. As for virality, it is anathema to truth, which seeks to protect itself from the tyranny and idiocy of the many.
Heidegger: Social media simply expedites and externalizes a basic feature of language and human exchange: Gerede, “idle chatter.” The reason we post random thoughts or read the random thoughts of others is because we are fundamentally anxious about our finitude. Memes are a degraded form of Mitsein, being-with, that reveal, at the same time, how we are always “with” others even in their absence.
Benjamin: In the Tiktok videos of teenagers goofing off, I recognize the spirit of the German Mourning Play, in which freedom and captivity are indistinguishable. New media offers us an image of hope only to the extent that we can spot in it the stories of old, repurposed. With each new post, adding to the vertiginous pile of data which only a Potemkin could decipher (were he so motivated), language moves closer to pure language, the word moves closer to pure translation, and our earthly condition becomes ever more suffused with the light of redemption.
Arendt: The rise of the social sphere has done more to destroy both the personal and the political. Modern people have traded in both the intimacy of private life and the grandeur of public life for a life that is neither intimate nor grand. The ease with which people can “drag” their friends, students, teachers, and family members on social media all for the sake of likes reveals a sickness at the heart of modernity. They think they are liberal, enlightened, do-gooders, but they are depraved. If totalitarianism is “organized loneliness,” social media has both capitalized on and effected it. The only bulwark against organized loneliness is to kindle friendships, as Lessing did, that are oriented towards the search for truth, rather than the search for status or self-righteousness. This said, I prefer American shallowness to European dandyism. For at least the crass Americans make obvious the void at the heart of modern culture. The Europeans remain in denial, turning the classics into props, like so many leather-bound collections that have never been opened.