Learning To Talk With Each Other Again

Sometimes just one signal reveals how the story will flow and the rest is epilogue. In the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton’s tone deaf “America is already great” refrain served as such. In workplaces, a large fraction of Slack messages sent in DMs versus public channels bodes ill. In social media, a growing sophistication of content selection algorithms has, at the very least, correlated with a rising divisiveness in American politics, driven by a realization that the stickiest material consists of that which triggers in us either a sense of belonging or revulsion. In all cases the bad outcomes center on failing to conduct conversations that evince curiosity and empathy — the crucial ingredients for completeness and compromise.

“Here we are again”, I find myself thinking as the 2024 U.S. election cycle winds down and we gird ourselves for the transition. One wonders if the unifying theme for Trump voters, despite what may have been a hugely diverse collection of issues, distills to — “I’m scared by how things are going, the incumbents lack my sense of urgency, and so I’m going to roll the dice on smashing the status quo to see where the chips land”. If you feel uninvested in a system that also seems not to be listening then “burn it down / start over again” can feel pretty appealing, particularly if those old enough to have overlapped with people old enough to have fought in a proper civil war are few and dwindling, and especially if every interaction outside of your “tribe” feels like a clash with polar opposites who threaten your way of life.

“What’s good for the world isn’t necessarily what’s good for Facebook”, founder Mark Zuckerberg once darkly observed in a leaked email. Meta and others have profited enormously from Merchants Of Outrage while anything resembling a digital town square has morphed into a grotesque array of funhouse mirrors. Legacy media, desperate to compete, has largely followed suit in this race to the bottom. Pearl clutching politicians and pundits have lost the plot, focusing proposals on solutions as divisive as they are ineffectual, imagining that if we could just fact check all the content then reason would prevail.

The sad truth — “it’s the algorithm, stupid”. Social media’s optimization of clip size has corroded our ability to process long-form conversations, its optimization of clip disposition has prioritized polarization, and its preference for inline content keeps us ensnared in their preferred and highly personalized filter bubbles instead of following our noses. Small wonder that most comment sections devolve into churches of the faithful or arenas of poop-flinging monkeys…

If the weaponization of machine learning algorithms had not by itself proved adequately toxic, certainly layering a pandemic atop did the trick, ensuring that chance encounters between people with “optimally distant” mindsets and circumstances would run into each other with diminishing frequency. On the personal front, some of the best social mixers, things like sports leagues and bars, disappeared from our reality. On the professional front, the replacement of in-person interactions with Zoom meetings squashed spontaneity and cross-pollination, while the accelerating cannibalization of email by Slack continued a trend away from long-form inclusive-distro communications toward highly private micro-bursts of chatter that paralleled developments in social media. Though some triggers have faded, their consequences have stuck.

In nearly five years as a full-time consultant, I have seen all of my clients struggle with some variant of communication challenges driven at least in part by environmental factors. Conway’s Law warns us that “organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations”. That phrase has perhaps never felt so prescient and unsettling to me than after this election. With my clients, I am continually exhorting them to look at the stats in their Slack environments to reveal “filter bubbles”, pockets of communication driven by a preference for private communications within parochial tribes that engender fragmented ecosystems over public forums that foster triangulated and collaborative outcomes by pulling conflict forward when it is still small and manageable. Given the horrendous outcomes of these accidental echo chambers, ones where humans simply flow like water along the paths of least resistance, consider the appalling implications of an external actor optimizing this dynamic for ad revenue dollars by doing it to us on purpose.

Julia Galef’s concept of The Scout Mindset, introduced in her Ted Talk and later expanded into a book, offers a solid framework for how we ought strive to think and interact, exhorting us to consider in every circumstance whether we are engaging more like a “Scout” or a “Soldier”. When operating as a Scout, we actively seek information without bias toward either the confirming or disconfirming, aiming only to answer the question “what is true?”. Soldiers, in contrast, engage with motivated reasoning, focused on the primary goal of destroying someone else’s stated position or defending their own, asking questions that respectively distill to either “must I believe this?” or “can I believe this?”. Our tribalist tendencies, deeply rooted in evolutionary biology where maintaining group membership often proved the difference between life and death, alas naturally drive us toward Soldier-like behavior, instincts we must work hard to overcome to maintain complex civil societies in the modern world.

Let’s be clear — the re-election of Donald Trump as President augurs one of the most precarious chapters ever in U.S. history. The reasons for that electoral outcome, however, are more alarming still, rooted as they are in structural realities. Our political system has long entrenched itself in a self-serving duopoly that resists certain kinds of gradual change so vigorously that it comes about only once sufficient pressure has accumulated to yield violent upheaval. To build meaningful and incremental alternatives we need open primaries, instant runoff voting, and campaign funding transparency, but so far we have lacked the will. Alongside this intrinsically polarizing political architecture, meanwhile, has grown a technical architecture that fans the flames, profiting by amplifying the extreme positions of vocal minorities, positions that leave the majority of people choosing between two undesirable candidates. It is no surprise, then, that we find ourselves trapped in a cycle driven by the “tyranny of the minority” — every few years a radically different yet scant majority “takes back America” and does what it can to fuck “the other side” during its tenure.

I want to believe (whoops — “motivated reasoning”) that we are now dealing with the aftermath of a situation where most of the people voting for Trump did so while holding their noses and under-appreciating the risks of re-electing a deeply aggrieved extreme narcissist with a well documented disdain for the core tenets of our republic specifically and democracy generally. Perhaps they believed that the system needed a shake-up, that their single issue was best served by Trump, that certain issues would be out of reach of Trump, that Trump didn’t really mean many of the things he said, and that another four years of him will be a temporary phase worth the short term benefits. Yet that’s a gamble with profound consequences given the fragility of democracy and the power of precedent and momentum. And what is certain, meanwhile, is that large swaths of our population have immediately experienced a huge erosion of their sense of safety and autonomy.

If we are to dig ourselves out, we need empathy, tolerance, nuance, and patience — qualities that foster coalitions around moderate positions on thorny issues. We must doggedly and humbly stay engaged until tentative allies feel reasonably secure in the moment and capable of metabolizing the changes to come. We must shrewdly partition the reconcilable issues from the irreconcilable. We must prioritize what is most important to us and remember that if we reach for too much in a given moment then we court the catastrophe of losing everything we hold dear.

How, for fuck’s sake, did we end up in a conversation where the supposed choices on immigration include only “open borders” and “mass deportation”? Why, for the love of god, can we not have a calm and informed conversation about the facts and trade-offs around gun ownership, instead speaking only of “mass shootings”, “mass confiscation”, and “assault rifles”? What is the reason we can’t first consolidate “gender affirming care for adults” without skipping straight to the “bridge too far” of “gender is just a construct”? When, instead of spouting political slurs, can we have a serious conversation about how globalization and automation have for decades been leaving people behind despite “productivity gains” that mostly accrue to white collar workers and share holders while creating fragile supply chains that exacerbate international conflict? Might we consider an option somewhere between the totalitarian “one really violent day” and the anarchic “defund the police”?

The answers lie in how we do, and don’t, talk with each other.