So sometimes I will dance around a point in a blog for hours before I tie it all together to actually explain what the heck I’m talking about. Today, however, I am exhausted from having watched one hour and 43 minutes of “The Joe Rogan Experience.” This episode is a glorified airing of grievances by Tim Pool (https://twitter.com/Timcast) against two representatives of Twitter (Jack Dorsey and Vijaya Gadde) in the form of podcast hosted by Joe. If you’re so inclined, you can view or listen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCBRHOg3PQ
Tim fired off rapid anecdotes of what he thought were anti-Conservative or anti-Right bias (and maybe so) at Vijaya, the Legal, Policy and Trust & Safety Lead at Twitter. She answered them all calmly and intellectually before he could cut her off in a pleading “but what about this!” tone. I really wish he’d taken the time to construct some data sets and arguments rather than relying on hoping to trip up the Twitter team with a seemingly endless avalanche of anecdotes. As minutes turned into an hour plus. He never reached the plea he seemed to desperately want to emote: “This isn’t fair!” or “You’re not being fair.” I actually like a lot of Tim’s content. He’s an independent journalist who sheds light on a lot of issues that both right and left media would probably prefer to leave under a narrative-preserving basket. But for whatever reason, he (and no one else there) was getting to the point.
(People will often ask me my opinion about musicians, as I’ve made a career at some points in my life by playing music professionally. “Are they good?” Is usually one of the most common questions about musicians I’ve played with or seen play. I usually tell the asker that that’s a complicated question, but I prefer to reduce that to “how well is the person doing what he is intending to accomplish.” Whether a songwriter is good depends on whether he is trying to write a 3 minute pop wonder or a 37 minute artistic exploration of the sexuality of one note. The same goes for performing.)
It amazed me, and I’m starting to think that Tim Pool was dreading the answer, that he never asked Jack Dorsey the question “what are you guys trying to do here?” until Jack took it upon himself to lay out four tenets that the team had crafted for Twitter “health” success (yes, I’m paraphrasing):
-Shared attention: “Is the conversation generally shared around the same objects, or is it disparate... because more shared attention will lead to healthier conversation”
-Shared reality: “Not whether something IS factual, but are we sharing the same facts.”
-Receptivity: "Are the participants receptive to debate and to civility and to expressing their opinion...” He references their ability to determine when someone might walk away from a Twitter conversation because they feel it’s “toxic.”
-Variety of Perspective: “Are we seeing the full spectrum (of opinions/viewpoints on the topic that is being discussed).”
The ideal betrayed that Tim wanted to draw attention to, an Anglo-American law crafted “freedom of speech” was more of an afterthought than the crux of these precepts. Tim spent an hour complaining (and perhaps accurately so) about Twitter’s ineffectiveness to allow a myriad of viewpoints and opinions and all forms of free speech only to find out that that isn’t what Twitter is trying to effect. Like some of my conversations about the negative effects of career poker after my recent post, they’d spent a lot of time talking past each other without stopping to figure out if they were trying to achieve the same goal, whether they had the same intent.
I, personally, would prefer a public square where everyone shouts and disagrees and entropy materializes from the ideas. I think we have too much fear of chaos because we view ourselves and our era with too much importance. (But that’s an opinion piece for another time when we all have done more drugs). Jack is describing more of a guided discourse where a set of principles such as purpose, poignancy, inclusion, possibility, etc., navigate the collective conversation. You can draw your own conclusions from here, but everyone should watch him explain what Twitter’s intent is for Twitter throughout the course of the discussion.
It’s still a mistake I make all the time; but please please, people, first make sure you’re arguing about the same thing, AND make sure you are arguing with the same intent. You’ll have much more fruitful and honest conversations so that you can get to hating each other more realistically much faster!
