It is absolutely true that things happen faster now; it's quicker and easier to crowdsource a mob using the internet, for instance, and there are some unique dynamics to identify. But cults, bigotry, political reaction, fascism, conspiracy theories... none of this is new.
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You don't have to look far in American history here. The Know Nothings are the direct ancestor of the current crop of reactionaries in this country.https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/01/30/heres-what-happens-to-a-conspiracy-driven-party-463944 …
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The Wilmington Coup of 1898 clearly resembles what the Trump mob tried to do on January 6th, for broadly similar reasons.https://www.britannica.com/event/Wilmington-coup-and-massacre …
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For presidential criminality and impunity, just look at Nixon. For cults, well, scores of them predate the internet. RW extremism? The Oklahoma City bombing. The Trump GOP didn't invent racism, violent racist mobs, or domestic terrorism in the US.
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I study the internet. It's my bread and butter. It feeds my cats. But I will not stand here and pretend that the internet opened a magical new dimension. It is simply the latest stage on which very old historical forces are playing out.
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Call it presentism or perhaps chronocentrism, but whatever you call it, be mindful of such tendencies as to let your panic, fear, anger, or rage at current events mislead you into thinking it's all completely without precedent.
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Goodness knows we hear far too much of that in the press from people who should know better, calling recent events "unprecedented" when they neatly rhyme with dozens of episodes in US history.
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Things are febrile, yes. Shit's scary. It's bad; worse than bad. And it demands your outrage, as an attack on democracy must. I'm afraid too. This moment is all sorts of awful things. But the one thing it's not is new.
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If you want to read a thoughtful perspective on how technology has made these old trends worse, and how they might be fixed, read
@shoshanazuboff's vital essay in the Times:https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/opinion/sunday/facebook-surveillance-society-technology.html …Show this thread -
There's no shortage of issues regarding how IT has accelerated certain trends and made them worse. But we mustn't make the mistake of pretending that computers or the internet somehow *created* those trends.
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