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Fixing Social Media

“When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry a hundred.” Thomas Jefferson.

“Move fast and break things.” Mark Zuckerberg

In this post, I explain how to fix social media, the internet, and the polarization of America. To be clear, I don’t expect the fix to happen, not without divine intervention that I am not presumptuous enough even to hope for. But I do hope I can show that the “like” button is pernicious. I don’t especially like ChatGPT and generative artificial intelligence, but they are only a symptom of the underlying problem with the computer network, the so-called Internet, that has become the nervous system of our world.

My argument requires a long introduction.

I was one of the constructors of the ubiquitous computer network that connects nearly everyone today. I played only a small part, but I think my attitudes were shared by almost everyone on the project.

We had one goal: connectivity, to connect every programmable computer to every other programmable computer on the planet and share all their resources— data, programs, storage, and sensors into the “real world.” When we on the eastside of Seattle saw the level of a pot of coffee in a lab at MIT in real time, we declared a triumphant milestone. In 2025, we are outdoing ourselves. We are now developing interplanetary computer connectivity.

I used to say the greatest mistake of the 1990’s was ignoring security. Using computer connectivity for malice, fraud, and theft never occurred to us. Cybercrime is rampant today, but so is the computer security industry. I’m not as worried as I might be because they cancel each other out.

Now, I think that our greatest failing was lack of attention to humanity, the engine that ultimately drives the computer network. Of course, the computer network can be no better than the people who use it; that should be obvious. I think we in the 1980s and 90s realized this, but shoved it to the back of our desks. What did not occur to us, at least not to me, was that the network had the capacity to make humanity worse.

Karl Marx said that changing relationships between workers and the means of production deeply affected society, which is the basis of his economic determinism.

That’s about as far as I go with Marx, although I used to soothe our infant daughter to sleep by reading Das Kapital to her in German. I don’t have my copy anymore. She may have thrown up on it.

Changes to the means of dissemination of knowledge are even more significant than changes to the means of production. I quote Phil Christman from another context in which he says that improvements in communication are not all good: “people panicked over television (Fox News alone proves them right) and that people thought radio would rot your brain (it rotted Germany’s) or that print would kill memory (which it did, that’s like Media Ecology 101).”

Now, let’s get down to exactly how the computer network has made humans worse. I still believe connectivity is good.

Today, I, an engineer without special resources, can broadcast my thoughts to anyone who cares to listen. This post on Vine Maple Farm and my Substack is an example.

I, and everyone else, have greater freedom of speech than any previous generation.

As little as twenty years ago, this freedom did not exist. Today, anyone can post on social media like Facebook or Bluesky.

Yet why has our free public discussion become so crabbed and polarized? Is it simply an example of “one bad apple spoils the barrel”? The computer network puts more bad apples in the world’s barrel and therefore there is more spoilage?

That’s oversimplification. Growing up on a farm, I recall that a bad apple spoils a barrel of apples but a bad walnut does not spoil a bushel of walnuts and a bad potato does not spoil a  sack of potatoes. The difference is that spoiling apples produce a gas, ethylene, that spoils any fruit in its proximity. No gas, no spreading spoilage.

The spoiling gas of the computer network is thoughtless propagation. The easiest and most thoughtless propagation is to hit the “like” button. “Sharing” is a close second.

You don’t have to stop and think long enough to type out a comment like “I agree! Chopping up starving children in poor countries for pet food is a grand idea, ” and signing your name. Instead thoughtless “likes” and “shares” seep out like ethylene from a bad apple, perhaps not as egregiously as my example, but each thoughtless propagation is a missed opportunity to add another morsel of humanity to the message, and that is the tragedy.

Instead of a vast community, each member adding to soaring cathedral choir, the computer network promotes thoughtless, sterile, and soulless anonymity.

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Ages of Piety

“It’s early yet. All drastic changes don’t herald new ages.”

The fourth year of the Education for Ministry (EfM) program is devoted to theology. EfM years equate to Richard Hooker’s classic Anglican three-legged stool: scripture, tradition, and reason. The first two EfM years are on the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, the third year is on church history and tradition. The fourth year is theology year, which I like to think of as the year for reason.

Our group’s fourth year students are now reading Timothy Sedgwick’s The Christian Moral Life: Practices of Piety. Sedgwick ties the practices of Christian piety to the challenges in life that vary over time. He depicts three phases of American piety.

The first, he calls “traditional” and ties it to the society typical of the first half of the twentieth century. At that time community survival was crucial. Vine Maple Farm is my name for the farming community in which I grew up, immersed in what Sedgwick calls traditional piety.

Social interaction was a necessity, not a luxury. Neighbors had no choice but to get along and work together. Tasks like putting hay in the barn, thrashing grain, and harvesting potatoes took more concentrated labor than a single family could provide, but with the cooperation of willing neighbors, everyone could survive and sometimes prosper.

But cooperation doesn’t happen without reciprocity. Rules are required, like returning borrowed tools  in better condition than when received. Visiting, exchanging meals, celebrating birthdays, weddings, and funerals were necessary to keep communications lines open and the community working. This spirit of cooperation and mutual support was the vital characteristic of traditional piety. Read my impressions of this life in posts like Chicken Catching Night.

Traditional piety declined in importance as people got jobs. Instead of relying on their neighbors, folks began to rely more on their job and employer. This, and other societal changes brought on the form of piety that Sedgwick calls “modern.” For me, this was the piety of the Vietnam War protests in which an equitable future became the dominant concern of folks who were morally concerned about their world.

I mark the beginning of “post-modern” piety to nine-eleven when America discovered vulnerability. I happened to be at the east coast Consumer Electronics Show in Atlanta when the Trade Towers went down. I entered the show hall early, preparing for a panel discussion on a new release of our team’s product that I thought was exciting and would make the company a mint.

By the one o’clock, my bosses and colleagues were huddled together in a hotel dining room worrying over what to do next. My boss, who lived in Brooklyn, was frantic because his eighty-year-old mother had been in Manhattan for the day and was returning home on foot, walking over the Brooklyn bridge. We were all figuring out how to get home as safely and quickly as possible. Since planes were grounded in Atlanta, a group from Seattle formed a caravan of three rental cars for forty-three hours of driving straight through back to the northwest. Our piety had shifted focus from the future to vulnerability and safety in less than a day.

In 2025, we’ve practiced post-modern piety for almost twenty-four years, but I wonder: have we moved on to a new stage? America changed decisively in November 2024. Have we passed on from community, future equity, and vulnerability to something new? And more terrifying?

This week, our EfM group discussed our changing feelings about Tesla vehicles. A year ago, a Tesla Y was a desirable vehicle. Its minimal carbon footprint, sleek design, and low operating costs were all attractive. But today? For some folks, a Tesla has become an advertisement for a nihilistic creator intent on rapid and radical change, reshaping government programs indiscriminately, and pursuing threat diplomacy.

It’s early yet. All drastic changes don’t herald new ages.

But caution has never stopped me from making wild guesses. I predict a decline in reliance on government and return to something like traditional piety in which personal cooperation shines more than it has for decades.

Today, government services and society in general appear disrupted and not as trustworthy as they once were. Consequently, we may have to turn more often to our families and friends for support. Personal communities will become more important, revitalizing bowling leagues, lodges, and churches. Neighborly visits and community potlucks will comfort us in a turbulent world. Computer networks will foster interdependent support groups and shift away from spotlighting blazing individualism. Helpers will become more prominent than influencers.

Sound utopian? Well, why not?

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The Federalist on Factions

“By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” James Madison, The Federalist Papers, Number 10.

Over two centuries ago, the authors of the United States constitution were remarkably prescient in their anticipation of the turmoil that blankets the United States today.

The United States in 2025 is in the clutches of a faction that wants to remake the country into something it imagined existed in a mythical near past. Mounting a diatribe against the faction is tempting, but here I will only discuss why factions are undesirable and how they rise rather than fume over the details current factional fever.

The problem with factions is, as James Madison pointed out in his definition above, is that a faction places the impulses of one group over the rights of other groups and the interests of the wider community. In the eighteenth century, propensity toward factionalism was noted as a flaw in democratic governments and a reason for forming the United States as a republic rather than a democracy.

Here, republic and democracy are used precisely. A town hall that is open to all and gives an equal vote to each attendee is a pure democracy. A city council meeting in which only the elected council members have a vote is a republic. In both cases, the ultimate authority stems from the citizens, but control is less direct in a republic. In historical republics, such as the classic Roman republic, membership in the governing council might be be freely elected but was often limited to people of wealth, land ownership, special families, etc.

Madison’s argument was that factions form with more difficulty in a republic and dissipate more quickly in a large republic. This argument may not have greatly swayed decisions on the U.S. constitution, but we now have what Madison wished for: a large republic of federated states.

I’m not sure that today’s prevailing faction is a majority. In my estimate, although Donald Trump officially won both the popular and the electoral vote, the November 2024 election was too close to confirm his supporters as a majority. Nevertheless, the election has given a faction a tight grasp on the reigns of power in America and the winners intend to do as much as they can to reshape the country to their tastes.

I ask what caused the current faction to prevail, contrary to Madison’s expectation. Before I sail off into speculation, I quote Madison again, simply because he wrote so well:

“Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.”

Since the turn of the twenty-first century liberty has reached new levels; we have computer networks that offer almost everyone the liberty of their own platform for broadcasting to the world. In the last decade or so, social media have added the equivalent of anabolic steroids to the computer network: likes and shares on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and others. Those pernicious buttons have enabled virality; today, within a few clicks, a catchy post spreads like the measles at an anti-vax birthday party.

Ubiquitous platforms and virality have transformed our American republic to a brood stall for factions. Virality is all about “fast thinking,” the shoot-from-the-hip thoughts that are fight or flight reflexes rather than considered, judged, and reasoned responses; in other words, an aliment which is gasoline to the fires of faction.

Madison expected that a large republic would quickly engulf factions with reason.

Instead, technology has added an accelerant.