Decency

 Martin Longman has a sort of "Inside Baseball" post about the economics of writing in the internet. Basically, he was one of the OG Bloggers back in the day and built a solid readership. I read him religiously, and he does his best to bring rigor and insight into his analysis. 

One thing he rarely, if ever, does is troll.

His point is that trolls make money. Trolls gather attention. Trolls can monetize that attention in ways that being thoughtful and decent cannot. Twitter has gone down the shitter (though I still find it easier to use than BlueSky), in large part because you get this rampaging race to the bottom. Nakedly racist, misogynistic and bigoted content draws attention - positive and negative - in ways that ten tweet analysis does not.

It is tempting - but I think wrong - to blame this on "the algorithm." The algorithm is simply predicting what you want to see based on what you engaged with. In other words, the problem is...us. We are training the algorithm to outrage us, and as things become more outrageous, we lose a little bit more of the milk of human kindness. 

It's similar to Trump. He's awful, truly awful, but there are people who vote for him BECAUSE he's truly awful, and the most dispiriting part of all this is that our neighbors are not only OK with that, but seem to crave it. 

I am hopeful that the Democratic nominee in 2028 is the one who embraces basic human decency as their calling card. Newsom is great in this moment going toe to toe with Trump's troll army, but I want to rally around someone like Obama or even Biden who makes me feel proud of my country again. I want to believe that we are not that cruel and awful.