blighttown

Mundane extremism

I mean this seriously when I say it: we're all radicalized now.

Sometimes I think about the old Fort Hood shooting. It took place in 2009, and a US army major shot up Fort Hood. According to at least some reporting, he had been radicalized online. Hasan's case (ie, the shooter) is probably a bit unique: he had been in contact with Anwar al Awlaki directly. I recall at the time, people expressed some real surprise that a US Army major could have been radicalized; and remotely! Most of the sources at the time attempt a real psychoanalysis of Hasan. (This probably is not recommended regardless.) People read all sorts of interpretations just how this radicalization could have occurred.

I propose that if the shooting had happened post-2020 there would be no doubt in anyone's mind: of course he was radicalized online. Being radicalized is just what happens to online. It's unfortunate, but would not be surprising to anyone.

Social accretion

In almost all cases, people list "social isolation" as something that can lead to radicalization. I think this is indisputable. By the question is why? I would claim that our beliefs and values are more strongly created through social accretion than most people are willing to admit.

I ran this thought experiment by a friend: imagine that you're walking down the strip in Las Vegas, interviewing random strangers. The question you ask everyone is "can you prove the earth is round without jumping on your phone and citing someone else's research?" I'm not asking "do you believe the earth is round?" I assume everyone already does. I'm asking "can you prove it?" My claim is that you would get a very dismal percentage of people who could answer this in a satisfactory way. It's not that people are stupid. It's just that knowledge is all specialized. For the average person, we know the earth is round because previous experts already proved it, and because we have a general understanding that many of our technologies (satellite, radio, etc.) depend in some way on the earth being roughly spherical.

So in the strictly scientific sense, most people don't fully appreciate that he earth is a sphere. They don't know the math or the principles behind it. It's just acquired knowledge. If they had to go back in time and prove it, they might not be able to. In other words, they acquired their information through social accretion rather than via rigorous understanding.

Here's another thought experiment? Why didn't people care about trans people in the 1990s? I think this one is interesting, because there are a couple potential answers depending on where you land on this extremely contentious issue:

I'm hoping I've been fair to both sides here, as my intent is not to sneak a culture war topic into this essay. But, in either reading: you didn't care about trans issues in the 1990s because the required social movement did not exist yet. In the more sympathetic example (ie, because you hadn't been educated yet) why didn't you just reason from facts and observations and come to the correct conclusion? Why did you need to be educated? The answer, in my opinion, is that you get most of your beliefs through social accretion. The point of this particular example has been to demonstrate that belief-through-social-accretion does not strictly bear on whether the beliefs are correct or appropriate. Correct and proper beliefs are spread socially just as stupid and superstitious beliefs are.

Social media and filter bubbles (and Fox News Grandpa)

So, I think what I've suggested so far is not really new or groundbreaking. (whether you agree or not, you've heard it before.) At least for me personally, social media has made the social-accretion ideas too present to ignore. People cycle through ideas faster than ever. I know people who have said things in the past 5 years that they never could have predicted saying or agreeing with 15 years ago. People do change, but now they change rapidly, in clusters.

How many of you know a "Fox News Grandpa"? (my own term, but here is a great example) You know the kind. He used to be vital and interesting, and now he watches cable news, and is on Facebook all day and his personality and his beliefs are extreme and unrecognizable. He can't just ask you about your job or your kids. More than anything else, he wants you to just as outraged as he is. We might pause and ask why that is. Why is he so determined to get you inline with his thinking and feeling? Really, this is what we all want. Fox News Grandpa's efforts are troubling because his beliefs are troubling. But his impulses (when abstracted away from his beliefs) are perfectly normal.

Fox News Grandpas all seem to follow the same trajectory: perhaps some early dementia and increasing social isolation. And then of course TV, news, or memes that push on their greatest cultural insecurities. Despite the funny name, I actually have a lot of sympathy for Fox News Grandpas. I seldom see their children or relatives do much too try to rescue them from their decay and isolation. It's really quite pitiable. If I just watch TV all day and don't actually do anything, does it actually matter if my beliefs are morally wrong? You might reflect the same question back at the adult children: why do you care if your Fox News Grandpa has the wrong beliefs? In any case, I think it would be difficult to become a Fox News Grandpa without the isolation, but perhaps not for the reason that people think.

Social isolation

Does social isolation cause radicalization? I think that's a complex question. It's certainly an indicator of radicalization. I think it may be necessary for radicalization, but I don't think that's the whole story.

If we get our beliefs through social accretion, what happens when you modify someone's social inputs? What happened to Fox News Grandpa? He no longer goes to work, he sees his family a couple of times a year, and otherwise might only see store clerks and such. By volume, his social ideas are primarily coming from cable TV and social media. I think when a lot of people would talk about a Fox News Grandpa, they would describe the sadness, and the isolation. I'm talking about something related, bit different: imagine you could enumerate all of the social inputs in a person's life. What would you get? For Fox News Grandpa, most of those social inputs would come from cable TV and social media. For your average kid these days, they might have a better-but-still-unhealthy mix. Maybe 20% parents, 40% kids at school, and 40% social media. These are made up numbers, but I think they paint a picture. Interestingly, that 40% from kids at school is almost certainly not a "pure" 40% if you think about it. Those kids themselves will be heavily immersed in social media.

So here's a question. What does Fox News Grandpa, Nidal Hasan, and your average social media-obsessed teenager all have in common? They all get a significant portion of their social inputs remotely; from people they don't really see or know. They have fewer "normal" people to counter-balance their extremism. If you come home to your wife and start ranting about the bankers controlling the world, she will (if you are lucky) tell you to calm down and ask what's really wrong. She'll (again, hopefully) have a de-radicalizing effect on you.

Social isolation: maybe more about numbers than feelings

Today, people get many of their social inputs remotely. (just like Fox News Grandpa!) I think you could argue that since the advent of the printing press, then the radio, then TV, cable, the internet, and finally social media, we've been using technology to put more people in contact than was ever possible before.

And what happens when more people communicate? Or maybe put more correctly, when you modify how people communicate. They acquire different ideas and beliefs than they would have if they could have only communicated locally. Book bans are interesting along these lines. It's easy to imagine in the 1960s that a book ban could legitimately stop the spread of ideas in a small locale. You can't get the book at your school, the local library, or the one book shop in town. Your best bet would be to foster a real relationship with a dissident who had a copy of the book to lend you. (and potentially, to discuss with you) The spread of the "wrong" ideas is so much slower in that environment. In 2026, a "book ban" is mostly symbolic. You can buy the book from Amazon. You can probably pirate it. If neither of those are available to you, you can probably find video essays on youtube espousing similar-but-probably-more-extreme ideas than the book itself contained. These days, a book ban effectively says "we do not approve this book," which is quite different from "there's no way that the ideas in this book will make it to the locals."

As a somewhat similar example, there's an old Simpsons episode in the first few seasons where homer's shirt gets stained pink and they send him to a psychiatrist. Early Simpsons is quite interesting: it portrays a world most of us have forgotten. The episode is obviously a commentary on conformity, but I do wonder if an audience today could understand just how scary the actual scenario would be for Homer. In 1991, people did not dress differently in the way they do today, dressing differently at work could have much bigger repercussions compared to today.

Mundane extremism

So far we've talked about radical terrorism and Fox News Grandpa. But my primary thesis here is that modern extremism is mundane and omnipresent. Fox News Grandpa is scary because you lost your father or grandfather to angry, grievance-based ideology that no one recognizes. But everyone is more separated these days. I'm obsessed with retro games and reading about the old testament. The modern media environment has brought my interests to life in a way that was never before possible. But, there is no one to share my interests with. I've gained and lost in the same moment.

I got pretty into Dark Souls (a video game) for a while. I ended up doing a "SL1 no pyromancy" run. For the uninitiated, this is just a way to play the game in a much more challenging way than the developers intended for most players. It challenges your skill in the game, your knowledge of the game's systems, and your memorization of the enemy moves, placements, and levels. I would claim that this is "mundane extremism." Imagine you plotted a bell curve of people's knowledge of video games. Almost everyone in America was aware of video games. A much smaller portion, maybe as low as 5%-20% of Americans have heard of Dark Souls. What portion of Americans do you think have any idea what a "SL1 no pyromancy run" means? Almost certainly less than 1%. And of that number of people, how many would have a clear picture of what a "SL1 no pyromancy" run would actually entail? An even smaller number still. Perhaps as few as %0.1 (just so we have a number) And finally, what are the chances that anyone I meet in real life will share these interests and be interested to talk to me about them? Effectively zero. So I'm not "elite" for my SL1 run: I'm isolated and radicalized. I'm radicalized because I share a fringe belief that is statistically uncommon.

And you, the reader, may think "well yes, weird video game challenge runs are uncommon." But, we're all radicalized now. Our filter bubbles put us in contact with people we'll never see. And they fill us with ideas and beliefs that are a poor fit for the people who are actually around us. My definition of extremism would just be statistical distance from the people directly around you.

I want you to think about how many of your ideas or beliefs may have propagated locally-first. How many of your interests did you get from your friends and neighbors? How many of your interests do you share with your friends and neighbors? I don't want to be alarmist here: the answer is not "zero." But for sure, it's less than it was before. It's less than it was in 1991, and further less than it was in 1960.

We're all radicalized now, but most of us are radicalized in boring ways. We like weird video games, or we follow some person on Instagram that you've never heard of. Or we get all our news from some podcaster. etc. Only some of us are radicalized and also scary / violent / etc.

We're not fighting the root cause of extremism

The root cause of much of modern extremism is the social splintering we're actively welcoming into our lives. We don't recognize it for what it is because usually it appears benign. But the banal extremism of your high school friend who is now on Instagram all day has isolated her from the people around her. Very few people will strike out in violence when they are so isolated, but such isolation destroys group identity and common trust. It destroys shared values that transform a locale into a community. Worse, you have people growing up today who may have never known a tight-knit community in the first place.

I don't see us ever fighting this successfully. Most people are not remotely interested in fighting this sort of social splintering when it comes to curbing their own interests.

A lot of people seem to think that if you just got the "bad ideas" off of Facebook, then you'll have fought extremism. It's the rapid spread of ideas, and non-locality of ideas which is doing the real work here, and most of us are gladly welcoming it. Put another way, the content of ideas is only a small part of what renders them "extremist."