Building Brittleness

Societies, communities, and governments that can’t plot a course through the use of an open deliberative process descend into brittleness, and ultimately into collapse. Social and political health require the testing of ideas. We’re doing the opposite, with growing momentum.

This week, YouTube has announced that it will start hiding “dislike” tallies; you can still click to give a thumbs-down vote to a video, but the count of downvotes won’t be shown. Here’s the way BuzzFeed characterized this move:

YouTube will now hide dislike counts, the number of thumbs-down votes given to content, as part of its ongoing effort to curb harassment on the world’s largest video platform.

On Wednesday, the Google-owned site said it’s making the metric private after testing the change earlier this year and seeing a decrease in “dislike mobs,” in which people deliberately downvote videos to drive up dislikes.

The change comes as YouTube faces intense scrutiny over toxic content on the platform and complaints from creators who upload their videos to the site. Some who have been targeted by hate speech and misinformation have told the company that dislike counts can impact their well-being.

Disagreement is pathological: disliking things is harassment. If you and a bunch of other people say that you don’t like something, you’re being a mob; you’re engaged in hate speech. People “deliberately downvote videos,” can you imagine?

The relentless drumbeat of ritual framing from media about “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories,” the constant narrowing of opportunities to express routine disagreement, the pathologizing of ordinary questions and doubts all lead to the same place. They’re the maneuvers of a dying order. This is decay. When “I don’t like this” is hate speech, you’re in the late stages of societal disintegration.

What comes next?