How to Play with Fire, and Not Get Burned

Developmentally, a child accidentally touching the stove is often used as an example of how the strength of a stimulus trains us to avoid or return to a behavior. As the saying goes, “He who plays with fire gets burned.” But maybe old adages are faulty guides because plenty of people can play with fire and come out the other end unscathed. Perhaps the question then is how ‘He who played with fire’ got burned. Perhaps he didn’t know what he was doing. Like Prometheus bestowing the gift of fire upon a child, the child cannot rightly be expected to know what to do – or more crucially, what not to do. Reliably, initially he will get burned. But overtime, that same child has learned to wield fire and has now entered a technological age where he believes his talents at controlling Prometheus’ first gift also make him adept at wielding his latest [digital] contribution into the lives of humans. Unfortunately, like the proverbial child, we are being burned by our new social technologies, except without knowing it. But like any burn, inflammation and redness soon follow, and can be seen as evidence of the child’s mistake.

 

Inflammation – a reactionary response from the body to infection, insult, or injury – is common enough that we don’t highly regard it as dangerous. But over time, if the pendulum of the immune system swings too far, too often, this well known mechanism can lead to chronic cellular degeneration, ultimately doing more harm than good to the body. A similar idea has been implicated in worsened Covid-19 outcomes, where a ‘cytotoxic storm’ causes an exaggerated inflammation response that exacerbates illness. Generally, medical mediation from the extreme ends of this immune reaction is the key to good outcomes and in maintaining the health of the body overall. Anti-inflammatory drugs and steroids are utilized ubiquitously with this aim, to our great benefit.

 

Today, our larger social organism is also grappling with the problem of increased inflammation. On both sides of the isle our perceptions of each other are constantly incensed – perhaps to the benefit of media organizations; through the panoptic lenses of our phones we are siloed and pitted against neighboring information bubbles – perhaps to the benefit of social media moguls; and in the streets we are constantly compressing our opinions of others into simulacrums built of narrow outlooks on the world – perhaps to the benefit of ideologues. Subtly, and across various sectors, we are being categorically divided and sorted into siloes of thought and opinion. Many of us have stopped looking for common ground and adopted blinders that force people into molds of homogenized beliefs that defy talk of any subtler opinions. This all has led to widespread social inflammation and anger. In effect, our social pendulum has swung towards the extremes without our noticing and we need to start asking the question of how to treat the problem. How can we take our hand off the stovetop, and what elixir can be applied to reduce our worsening social inflammation after we do so?

 

Somewhat unfortunately, it seems that social media is the latest construct to capitalize upon a very natural human tendency to enjoy the camaraderie of outrage. Our collective “likes” and dislikes are now brandished as weapons within the cancel culture, likening its utilization more to the guillotines of the middle-ages and less the court of public opinion it pretends to be. It is an effect even Prometheus may not have predicted, and this is not explicitly our own fault. We just don’t know what we’re doing.

 

The interconnectedness that the Internet and social media offers us is something entirely new to our species, and represents a radical departure from anything our evolutionary trajectory has since enjoyed. Unfortunately, we have yet to understand how best to wield our new tools and are grappling with the ramifications of the increased leverage that mass social interconnectedness has on our psyches. What Darwin may have jested is the “Descent of Man”, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt has called the “Coddling of the American Mind” – as a result of our collective desires to be fed comforting narratives and anodyne images, we have been sheltered from the complexities of the real world. The comforts of our social media siloes may be anaesthetizing us to the burn wounds that we might otherwise recoil from. While basking in our bubbles of cat pictures with people that all share the same opinions as we do, we have acquiesced to the temperature of our preferred pond, and in doing so we lose out on the benefits that come from countervailing

dialogues that exist just one bubble away. Without exposure to those new perspectives we are led falsely into seeing the world through narrow lenses. As a result, everything off message seems to us immediately affrontory and collective inflammation between social siloes ensues.

 

Socioculturally, currently race and gender are on the forefront of our burgeoning collective minds. The explicit goal of the appeals for diversity and equality are acceptance, but somewhat counter-intuitively placing weighted labels on people for their various intersectional differences seems to be having the effect of driving wedges between you and I, he from she, and they from “zir”. We seem to be forgetting the basic humanistic perspective that we are all in this life together, as humans, united. But when this inclusive perspective of mine is shouted down because I am a “privileged white cis-gendered male”, I feel we are headed in the wrong direction. Skin color is at once being used to call for equality while simultaneously utilized as a basis to de-platform those whose ideas are uncomfortable or otherwise not ‘on narrative’. I wish I could say that these actions were resigned to the social media sphere, but the attacks on Bret Weinstein at Evergreen College in 2017 prove otherwise; the inflamed narrow bandwidth of social media has bled into real world discourse. Similar continued attempts to control the narrative undermine social dialogue and – I fear – are undermining American values and the American project as a whole. Unless we can find a workable anti-inflammatory soon to reset the pendulum, I worry that we may irreparably damage our social body.

 

 Naturally, we seek spaces where we can exist unperturbed by pain, inconvenience, and grievance, but are there costs we are paying for the comforts we enjoy? Perhaps temporary pains hold their own value and by denying them we are forgoing powerful formative lessons. It seems so, because the current anaesthetized model of social media has led us surreptitiously to a place of great inflammation without any known anti-inflammatory. The longer we hold our hands to the stove, the worse things are going to get and the more we open ourselves up to the risk of secondary complications. Our collective body is at risk and we need to recognize the fire we are playing with. Either we quickly learn how to handle it before walking any further along the coals, or face permanent damage. Perhaps, like cigarettes, social media is not the pro-social tool we once thought it to be and it’s in everyone’s best interest to remove their hands from the stovetop and stop using it. Until we know what we’re doing, this is trial by fire.