C'mon In, the Bubble's Fine!

An interior decorator's guide for life in our new homes

A bubble. (Photo / Creative Commons.)

The Singularity is happening. The Great National Discourse is moving from Twitter to Bluesky.

The Atlantic’s Ali Breland reported yesterday that Twitter saw more users shutter their accounts in the week after Trump’s election than at any time in the two years that Elon Musk has been “running” it. Bluesky has added 10 million accounts this month.

Ergo, angsty progressives are angsting about whether to drop Twitter (or X) entirely, and whether that represents Bubbleism and an insult to empiricism.

It’s appropriate to worry whether we live in a bubble, oblivious to facts and social currents. So The Fucking News is here to help.

First of all, we’re talking about distinct things: Hearing others, and engaging with others. A couple of articles address these issues well: Rebecca Solnit’s in Harper’s, and Breland’s in The Atlantic.

There’s no one-size-fits-all path here. But, that said, some quick spoilers:

• Is it okay to leave/stay on Twitter? Yes!*

• Is it okay instead/also to go to Bluesky or [insert next platform here]? Yes!*

* Caveats to come.

Let’s address some concerns folks might have, first about leaving Twitter and then about the future of online engagement.

Should I Stay or Should I Go Now?

Isn’t it important to listen to everyone to know what everyone’s thinking?

No!

More importantly, also no.

Never in history has humanity known what everyone’s thinking. It’ll be possible in a generation or two once we’re all neuro-linked, but no need to jump the gun.

Plus, you definitely don’t need to know what poor thinkers are thinking. Or people with bad intent.

Should someone know? Fuckin’ A right. But you’re not obliged to drink that venom yourself. You can read the reviews.

One reason The New York Times is accused of sanewashing is that they attempt to do exactly this: Filter and/or render the most toxic streams palatable to people who don’t routinely drink it. Hard as it may be to believe, they’re trying to help.

If that seems hard to believe, remember that they’re run by rich people: They’re doing the best they can.

If the Times (or anyone) doesn’t reflect insane rhetoric or behavior to your taste, find good journalism that floats your boat. But it’s possible they’re not intending sanewashing, they’re trying not to let the insanity drive the discourse.

In pre-internet days, no one piled on newspapers and networks for failing to apprise us of the far right’s daily contemplations. You could subscribe to right-wing magazines if you wanted that. Or left-wing ones.

No one claimed you were insufficiently informed if you didn’t hang out with racist, rapey biker gangs and desperately lonely gamers. No one thought listening to them would improve our understanding of them. I mean, do they strike anyone as particularly self-aware?

Nevertheless, here’s former presidential candidate-ish and Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN) arguing that understanding how half the country feels requires congregating with, presumably, all 167 million of them, I guess?

Must We Learn 335 Million Perspectives?

When toddlers throw things, we respond to their emotion. We do not, however, engage intellectually with their firm conviction that the dog is a poopy-head.

More bluntly: Society at large need not ask KKK leaders their views of Black people.

Understanding what they believe doesn’t mean listening to them. I don’t need to talk with Flat-Earthers to understand their claims or their feelings about their claims.

To understand planetary sphericality, a lot of disciplines might help. Math maybe? Physics? Fuck if I know.

Luckily, in 2024, we don’t need to master those disciplines.

We just need to understand our taxonomy of expertise. Which institutions and experts are generally trustworthy and why? How do they signal certainty versus speculation? The rest is easy.

We don’t need to listen to and understand Flat-Earthers to know they’re wrong about planetary sphericality. We don’t need to listen to Torus-Earthers, either. We’re not obliged to study the universe of wrongnesses before we can know that some things are correct.

Understanding why people believe stupid things also doesn’t require their input. If we’re going to understand things, let’s listen to people who understand things: Pyschologists, sociologists, historians. A precious handful of extraordinary journalists.

If I want to understand why people believe the Earth is flat, why ask someone dumb enough to believe the Earth is flat? I can ask Scientific American!

We don’t listen to whale songs to understand their message or their mindset; we listen to cetologists.¹ You get the idea.

Engager Danger

Engaging with stupid bullshit isn’t passive. Online, we are all publishers and our every share and like and response is a decision with publishing and editorial dimensions.

What we pay attention to matters. It signals prioritization.

Unfortunately, evolution did not hard-wire us to be good publishers. Or editors. We’re not good at ignoring things. We’re especially not good at ignoring outrages.

We’re also not good at assessing the statistical significance of the outrages that toxic algorithms set on our table.

Once upon a time, it seemed incumbent upon us to swat down poisonous Tweets and posts, to eradicate them from the intellectual ecosphere.

But we were already in a bubble. And that bubble — including the media, social media, and antisocial media — floats outrages to the top. But it’s not (just) algorithms that do it.

Swatting them does it, too. It draws attention. It creates conflict. Humans and other unself-conscious journalists are drawn to conflict. The outrage gets elevated.

Just as journalists tell us about the piece of glass in our spaghetti before they rave about the sauce, humans naturally focus on the poisonous shit in our social stew instead of all the yumminess and nutrition.

If we lived in the bygone cultures in which we evolved, negative social attention would be a miracle cure for these toxic outrages. We do not, so it is not.

We live in a tech bubble for which our evolution is sorely unsuited. So entirely well-meaning people, including media people who should know better — and including all of us social-media publishers — leap on outrage. Either to kill it or, if you’re a journalist, to “cover” it.

Because it’s “interesting” or “bad.” Either way, it wins.

The real question journalists — including all of us publishers! — should ask is, “Is it newsworthy?”

Not merely “Is it important?” or “Is it bad?” but “Is it more important than anything else I could elevate right now?”

We’re bad at answering that because our brains don’t do proportion well. One Tweet represents one minute of time from one human being. It might feel like it matters because it’s so horrific, but against all the minutes from all the humans, it is statistically nothing.

Unless we engage.

So, what’s the alternative? Preaching to the choir?

Does anyone actually do that? Well, preachers! Okay, but does anyone listen? Choirs!

Preach to the Choir

We’re not all suited to proselytize effectively, So there’s no reason to beat yourself up for failing to even try to win over non-choir members.

In fact, there may be reason to revel in not.

Solnit reminds us that preaching to the choir isn’t just repetition of known facts or agreed-upon principles. “Good” preaching explores shared tenets, prompts contemplation about beliefs. It creates spaces of agreement sturdy enough to withstand interior turbulence.

As one preacher told Solnit, “My task as a preacher is to find the places of agreement and then move someplace from there. Not to change anybody’s mind, but to deepen an understanding.”

And fine-tuning our preaching to seduce the non-choir has its own drawbacks, Solnit says. It curtails robust discussion of things that might piss off the non-choir. Failing to have those conversations fully is its own kind of bubble.

And it has its own dangers: You might lose the choir!

It’s largely forgotten now, but then-Pres. Bill Clinton’s toxic neediness was an ur text² during his presidency. He wanted everyone to like him.

Here’s Solnit on the political price for trying to make your bubble an appealing place for everyone:

“…centrist Democrats often go wooing those who don’t support them, thereby betraying those who do. It’s as though you ditched not only your congregation but your credo in the hope of making inroads among believers of some other faith. You think you’re recruiting; really, you’re losing your religion. This has been true with welfare ‘reform,’ with the war on terror, with economic policy, with the fantasy of winning over ‘the white working class’: time and again, misguided attempts to bring in new voters have offended existing constituencies…

“Is the purpose of the choir to sing to the infidels or inspire the faithful? What happens if the faithful stop showing up, donating, doing the work?”

Profoundly, Solnit argues that it’s the right wing that needs to convince people. Most people don’t need a lot of convincing to accept free education, health care, or housing! They’re political third rails only because the right sold some people on narratives hostile to those things.

Seen any protests over free flu shots or the existence of libraries? People only hate common goods if someone convinces them to. There’s more good news. You don’t need to win over everyone.

Solnit cites a study that found you only need 3.5% of a population to work for change to make it happen. In layperson’s terms, that’s just three-point-fucking-five percent.

How do you motivate 3.5% of the people to sing a good song? Preaching!

And with such a small margin needed, trying to win people over is worse than overkill. It’s wasted effort. It might even be Clinton-esque narcissism.

Safe spaces aren’t safe because they’re free of malignance that might win over Clinton Republicans. They’re safe because the assumption of good faith enables a more open discourse. That’s why a safe space is actually more intellectually free and liberating than chambers where malice is magnified and heard.

That’s why Twitter was great for the right but not the left. The right needs to change minds. The left needs to inspire them.

Leaving Twitter degrades the right’s ability to drive public discourse, Breland argues.

Breland links to a review of Corey Robin’s book, “The Reactionary Mind,” evoking his thesis that conservative movements aren’t really crusades for political ideas, but repeated reactions to (against) progress.

The right is defined by pushing back — which requires something for them to push against. Because physics. Leaving Twitter denies them anything to push against.

And it lets the rest of us hear both preachers and choirs.

Getting It Right

I’m not a huge Dylan guy but I love the line, “To live outside the law, you must be honest.” Well, to live inside a bubble, you must be honest.

But it’s silly to argue that Twitter makes this happen. We’ve been testing Twitter for years and it hasn’t kept anyone empirically open.

The left has its own epistemic closure, but even after Musk took over, nothing popped those lefty/progressive/liberal bubbles on Twitter.

Over the years, I literally lost track of the number of things even “professional” journalists got wrong, succumbing to what’s been called Trump Derangement Syndrome.

I’m not fond of the label, simply because it’s Trump-centric. But the problem of media-wrongness is a real and serious one. I raise it only to point out that Twitter immersing us all in everyone’s perspectives didn’t remedy it. So why keep trying?

The danger of moving to Bluesky is that we perpetuate the same bubble bubbles. The same impulse that sparked the Twitter exodus could fractalize.

Purged of those Twitter users deemed toxic, what’s to stop the Bluesky tribe from initiating a new round of purges? There’s nothing intrinsice to prevent Bluesky, too, from forming into camps.

So what’s to prevent one faction from declaring another toxic, labeling critics grifters, trolls, whatever? How do we ensure any platform nurtures epistemic growth rather than epistemic closure?

There are hacks for this! Most are simple. And unfun, too, the way counter-intuition is.

Ideally, the bubble we’re creating is so safe that everyone can share critiques and everyone can hear critiques. But, for instance, I know I struggle with hearing and offering criticism.

So I’ve tried to think about how I can do better.

Better Homes and Bubbles

Be curious, not judgmental.³ Yes, I judge the shit out of shitty ideas and statements and actions. But judge not the people responsible for them. Not because they don’t deserve it, but because online it accomplishes nothing. Here’s one way of thinking about humans that helps me…

Reject essentialism. Humans don’t have inner homunculi immovably wedded to ideologies. Our brains are ridiculous blobs of protein and fat sloshing around in a cradle made of bone. The fact that thoughts emerge from it is hilarious.

We know American brains didn’t become unracist in 2008, racist again in 2016, unracist in 2020, and then racist again in 2024. Humans are a mess. So let’s help them, pool our collective wisdom to overcome the inadequacies of fat and protein. It may feel like excusing victimization, but it’s the best way to prevent it.

Assume good faith. You don’t have to engage, but don’t assume bad faith. I’ve turned trolls into good-faith interlocutors. You’re not obliged to try; self-care matters. But it’s also self-care to assume good faith, even if you can’t see how a troll might be capable of it. People are weird! I’ve done things I’m ashamed of you and probably have, too. Be the person you neeeded when you were being that asshole. Telling yourself your troll’s having a bad day or temporarily hypnotized lets you retain faith in humanity. That’s really powerful self-care!

Reject confirmation bias. You might agree with something, but liking or reposting is a way of saying “Pay attention to this.” Likewise, pouncing on every exhibit in the case against the people we don’t like. Be judicious about what we call attention to, because bandwidth is limited and people trust us to advise them wisely about what merits their time.

Fuck authenticity. No one needs our honest answers. Here’s why authenticity is bad. Remember essentialism? Our brains are not computers. Our “authentic” answer is merely what our brain does in one split second, not the immutable calculation of digital processors. The you who thinks about and improves your impulsive answer is just as legitimately you as the you who came up with the impulsive answer. An edited answer is just as authentic, or more, than an impulsive one. So…

Edit yourself. Best trick ever is writing emails you don’t send. Same thing goes for social-media posts. Write them if you must, revel in their awesome hellaciousness, and then delete the fuckers. Or at least improve them!

Don’t assume motive. Do some foes of reproductive rights want to control women? That answer’s a lot clearer to me than it used to be, sadly. But it’s not all of them. Some have been convinced that every fetus is human long before it gets a philtrum, in which case it’s understandable that they weep for those “murders.” We can’t assume we know why people do or believe what they do.

Good and evil are not a thing. Okay, fine: Actions and words can be good or evil. But relying on “good” and “evil” to explain human behavior is super-unhelpful. It shuts down inquiry. Which means it’s an impediment to improvement. There’s a trick to this that I used when I briefly wrote webcomics: Never write a villain whose motive is “I am evil.” Everyone’s the hero of their own story. Write people that way. Read them that way.

Distinguish tactics from principles. Centrist Democrats really wanted to keep Donald Trump out of the White House. So did progressives.⁴ Where I lose my mind is when one side accuses the other of wanting the opposite, just because the tactics differed. Or even because the politics differed. If someone’s deluded enough to believe that The Invisible Hand will provide everyone with health care if only government doesn’t interfere, make that mutual goal of universal care your starting point for that dialogue.

Lie. Remember when I said I struggle with criticism? It’s true-ish. But it’s more a lie. My authentic impulse was to hector the shit out of every Newsfucker except me. As it turns out, that’s a terrible approach! So I thought about how to discuss it that puts us all on the same plane, despite my obvious superiority. Figure out effective ways to raise ideas that will be poorly received in their honest form!

Don’t be defensive. You’re doing it now, aren’t you? Cut it out. Practice backing down and acknowledging blind spots and conceding points. It gets easier! (Plus, it’s good judo: Concede a point your troll thinks you give a shit about and they’ll see you as reasonable and maybejustmaybe they’ll question their own axioms). You can help others not be defensive if you…

Make it okay to be wrong. No one’s perfect. Don’t pounce on wrongnesses. Reward contrition and acknowledgment.

Ignore converts. This is more of a pet peeve of mine, but The Cause isn’t helped by elevating former opponents who are only here because their side got just as bad as we warned it would. Elevate the people who’ve always known which side to be on. It’s fine for new converts to get on board, too, but they can take a number. Elevate the people who’ve always understood where to stand, even without Donald Trump clarifying things.

What’s the Point?

We, however that is, are losing the demographics we thought were guaranteed. time is no longer a contractual ally. Progress isn’t a given. So fixing the goddam country requires approaches we haven’t tried before. They’ll only come about if we engage with each other effectively.

It’s not about generating new political ideas. All the political ideas we need are out there and it’s easy to spot when and where they worked. “New” ideas are all-too-often disguises for recognizably terrible ones.

But we definitely need new tactics. And new ways of ensuring collective control of the political institutions (e.g., the Democratic Party) that run things.

These goals will elude us until we create better bubbles that don’t reward toxicity and create safe spaces where we can inspire effective action.

It’s not just the right that’s wrong. The MSM and the left get lots of things wrong, too. We need to be able to criticize every/anyone. And hear it.

The good news is that there’s plenty of debate on Bluesky about how to accomplish all of this. The existence of that debate suggests that, so far, healthy debate’s doing just fine.

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This TFN attempt to help you navigate our shifting social-media space took me a good chunk of Saturday and another good chunk of Sunday to research, write about, and then edit — yes, I edited it down, hard as that might be to believe, Newsfucker! To support this work you can make a donation or become a subscriber. Thank you.

1. No, I didn’t know this word before. But I love it.

2. Not sure I’m using the phrase “ur text” correctly, but taking the gamble.

3. A Ted Lasso-ism. Judge me if you must.

4. Yes, I know, some want us to hit bottom ASAP. I consider even this a tactical difference.