Social media is (to quote Michelle Gildernew on Northern Ireland) a sh!thole. That nasty stuff is posted there about the presidential candidates is no surprise. It’s like rugby where the referee is tied and bound and left in the changing rooms.
People focus on the brutality it helps generate from time to time (the intimidatory protests outside Naomi Long’s house, for example) but it also makes us stupider as a society. It is its basis in large language models (LLMs) that’s making us thicker.
The basic problem is that LLMs is not just that the algorithms amplify anger and outrage but that they only know what has already happened or has been input. This gamified realm cannot deal with or facilitate collective thinking about novel issues.
Whilst the subject of a border poll and united Ireland has succeeded in gaining traction on social media, and through that has dominated the political discourse in dependent mainstream platforms, it has barely moved the needle on its wider popularity.
LLMs act like a fast breeder reactor, generating more fuels than they consume while generating power. But in the process of re-consuming its own inputs its outputs are riven with fallacy and cliche (language that’s lost its force, according to Orwell).
I don’t believe there is anything inherently sectarian about politics in the south, but as some postings on Heather Humphries give the impression that tolerance for Orange culture south of the six southern border counties is poor to non existent.
There’s not much that’s surprising about that. Geordies don’t particularly warm to the idea of folks from the south east of England. Then again no one is trying to make them share a flat. Schopenhauer’s Parable of the Porcupines comes to mind:
One cold winter’s day, a number of porcupines huddled together quite closely in order through their mutual warmth to prevent themselves from being frozen. But they soon felt the effect of their quills on one another, which made them again move apart.
Now when the need for warmth once more brought them together, the drawback of the quills was repeated so that they were tossed between two evils, until they had discovered the proper distance from which they could best tolerate one another.
Thus the need for society which springs from the emptiness and monotony of people’s lives, drives them together; but their many unpleasant and repulsive qualities and insufferable drawbacks once more drive them apart.
For all the short comings of the south’s neo-liberal economy, most of its resident citizens are deeply proud of their long march to freedom. But like many northern nationalist counterparts they are not ready to embrace the chance unification would bring.
They don’t want to change the flag, they don’t want (as Paddy Kielty once suggested) to move the furniture to make the stranger feel welcome. Making room for newly Irish ‘Prods’ (just 2% think it’s important for them personally) is not a priority.
This is just one measure of the failure of nationalist politicians from former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar to the leadership of both Sinn Féin and the SDLP to invest in genuine, non LLM thinking of their own in convivial offline spaces.
My friend John Kellden has described the problem succinctly:
The paradox is recursive: too little moderation, and meaning disintegrates into meme-ified and emojified churn; too much, and conversation dwindles, turning non-committal like button clicking or thinly disguised marketing.
So we discover via the Borderlands podcast series (a really valuable long form space launched by BBC NI on Sounds this week) that the SDLP’s much lauded New Ireland Commission had neglected to invite at least one of its 32 commissioners to anything.
We also discover that Michelle Gildernew thinks that even after her party’s joint government with the DUP for 18 years she thinks NI is a “shithole”. Both are a product of too much time spent engaging on LLMs and not enough talking to real people.
Winning the internet is not winning the argument. The proprietary net of like button and retweet is where sense and sensibility to the world go to die. What’s needed (if a border poll is not to be deferred till 2075) is time/space to explore “the in between”.
Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty
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