[loud noises]

Over the past year or so, I’ve felt the world—the social world, people’s behavior, the Discourse, you all with your Tik Tokking and memes and such—to be increasingly unintelligible. It’s like there’s a book I’ve been reading, with some clear passages and some confusing ones, in which the text begins transforming into something runic and alien, completely boggling. To be more specific, I have the feeling that people’s actions are more frequently incomprehensible to me than used to be the case. I mean people in a broad sense: of different backgrounds and political leanings, including everyone from perfect strangers to familiar internet personalities to friends and family. I’m not 100% certain that this isn’t mostly in my head; once you notice something you start looking for it, such that you end up accumulating examples of it in a not-necessarily-representative way. But even adjusting for that possibility, it feels like a thing, and I’ve been trying to work out what it might mean.

Let me give you an example, just the most recent such thing to trip the sensor and make me think: huh. Alex Tabarrok is an economist and co-blogger with Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution. He writes some things that I find insightful (his work on vaccination over the past year, for instance) and other stuff that I don’t agree with. But as with a lot of writers and thinkers out there, I’ve felt in the past that I had a general sense of where he was coming from, such that when there’s a piece of his writing I think is wrong it’s at least a comprehensible sort of disagreement: he thinks the world works like x, and I don’t, but I generally get how a person might think x and because of that belief draw y conclusion. But then Alex publishes something like this:

What Voltaire understood is that if diverse people are to cooperate they must focus on their common interest and leave other (important) predilections like religion at home. Unfortunately, the woke movement is bringing religion back into business (and every other aspect of life). The religions have changed but Voltaire would not have been surprised at the consequences, a break down of cooperation and amity.

I find the whole post utterly baffling. I mean, I understand that “wokeness” has become an incredibly loaded topic. I would describe myself as someone who has made an effort to be more “woke”. For me, wokeness is about recognizing that my views on how the world works are informed (of course!) by my lived experience, and furthermore that my lived experience is not broadly representative of society as a whole in crucial ways. Over the course of my adult life, I had different kinds of interactions with law enforcement, for example, and I formed a view of “how law enforcement generally works” which was influenced by these personal experiences. My experiences, I have come to appreciate, were of a different sort than is often experienced by black Americans. When I was a teen and I got pulled over I felt fear: of the possibility that my folks might take away my driving privileges. It never occurred to me to be afraid of the cop. 

I understand now that feeling annoyance and impatience at traffic cops, rather than mortal fear, has been a luxury that society permitted me to enjoy, without my ever realizing it, for no reason other than that I am a white male. I didn’t have to accept this on faith. I was hit smack in the face by piles of evidence: video after video of police officers abusing their power with impunity and engaging in extralegal violence against black people. The only cognitive work I had to do was to allow myself to reevaluate my understanding of the world and my place within it in light of this evidence. I have attempted to draw a broader lesson from this kind of reckoning and others like it, namely, that I ought to be more humble and empathetic, more open to considering the perspectives of others. 

That’s what I mean when I say that I have attempted to be more woke. Wokeness means other things to other people. For some folks, it’s less about personal reflection and more about exposing the role that structural factors play in perpetuating injustice for all to see. And for some folks, this process is less about evidence and persuasion than pushing people to hew to a particular ideological line. I don’t deny that in some corners of society people’s approach to wokeness shares elements with experiences of religious revelation. But it seems reasonable to me to venture that most of the people out there engaging in some sort of effort to cultivate wokeness—grappling with their own white privilege or trying to get their employer to identify and change passively discriminatory practices—are not crazed fanatics. It’s like how many people are sort of generally of the view that individual liberty is valuable and there is an important role for markets in society, while only a small number of people become hard-core libertarians, with a reverence for strange texts and a bizarre view of what makes for a healthy society.

Alex, though, seems to be in an information space in which it is obvious that wokeness is best understood as a religion; it’s not a view he feels the need to explain or support with evidence. To him, talking about racism at the office, or making small efforts to be decent to coworkers—by using their preferred pronouns, for instance—isn’t a practical thing: one which might enable the people who aren’t white, male, or cis-gendered to feel as at home in a workplace culture, and as able to contribute productively to the firm’s business, as those who are. It’s the introduction of a mystical belief system of no real relevance to the operation of the workplace: the same as if a colleague suddenly began proselytizing about the Good News between meetings.

My point here is not that my conception of wokeness is right and his is wrong. It’s that he feels it to be obvious that wokeness is a particular thing, while the many intense arguments I’ve followed about wokeness which inform my view of what it means to me and to others of different political persuasions include his conception of wokeness as the fringiest of fringe views.

It’s this kind of jarring disconnect between the ranges of meaning I associate with a word or issue or action and the meanings others seem to associate with such things that I keep stumbling into, in lots of different contexts. Sometimes it’s an acquaintance on twitter taking an unexpected and perplexing view on a particular matter. Sometimes it’s a person behaving in an odd way in a public place: becoming strangely, frighteningly angry about someone’s choice to wear a mask, for instance. Sometimes it’s a friend responding to a situation in an uncharacteristic way. It’s a very disorienting thing. Quite possibly, the problem is entirely mine. Far more often than I’d like I see stuff unfold on the timeline and think: somebody here is losing touch with reality and I wish I felt more certain that it isn’t me. I suppose I’m writing this, in part, to hear from others whether they have experienced similar things. 

But as open as I am to the possibility that I’m the one out of step with everyone else, it does seem to me a little like the world itself is going mad. Right? Alex, I suspect, would agree with me on that point, even if the evidence he would cite to support the claim would be quite different from the examples I would choose. So, assuming that I’m not alone in feeling this way, what might this phenomenon mean?

One way of approaching this question is to consider why the world might seem less intelligible now than in the past. The Internet is certainly one culprit. That seems strange, when you think about it. Connecting people, one might suppose, should reduce the scope for divergences in understanding about what is happening across the world and why. When someone publishes a video of a news event, we all have instantaneous access to that video. Shouldn’t that common access make it easier for large groups of people to arrive at a rough consensus regarding what that news event represents?

Demonstrably, no. But why? To arrive at a shared understanding of what has happened, we have to communicate with each other: we have to collectively process the information we’re receiving. Communication depends upon shared meaning; if I want you to go to the store to buy me some eggs, then it’s important that we both have similar ideas about what is meant by “store”, “buy”, and “eggs”. And “I” and “you” and “go” and “some” for that matter. The Internet, though, is a great obliterator of shared meaning. This is part of its charm. Think about the layers of bizarre allusion embedded in the typical meme. Within certain fleeting micro-communities, the richness of these allusions may be at least momentarily, delightfully comprehensible. But communities and meanings are constantly shifting; the boiling cauldron of the Internet whisks away a word or an idea and carries it off in a hundred directions, where it is saturated with new and different meanings.

The link between community and meaning seems important to me. One of the things which defines a community of individuals, online or in the real world, is a sense of shared meaning. “Community” could mean the set of people who speak English, or who are comfortable with a particular collection of professional jargon, to give two examples. Shared meaning facilitates communication within these groups. But the relative stability and distinctness of community boundaries does too: because people know the places beyond which certain meanings may no longer be assumed to apply. A doctor or an engineer knows (usually) to speak in lay terms outside the realm of the initiated. But again, the Internet obliterates all of this. People flow into and out of subcultures; the subcultures themselves are constantly changing. In the real world, flows into and out of communities are often observable. Not so online; I have no idea what weird arguments a person has been getting into with what weird interlocutors—what sort of meaning baggage they bring to an exchange. It is, quite literally, difficult to know where someone is coming from.

In the real world, we have all sorts of things to guide us, to help us contextualize communication and extract the right meaning from a piece of communication. There are (often unreliable but nonetheless informative) visual cues: like body language, or what a person is wearing. There are relatively stable grammars associated with real-world forms of communication. There are rules of etiquette and ethics which influence what we communicate to others through speech and actions, and which help us to perceive what others’ responses to our actions mean. If I’ve unintentionally been rude in the real world, there are error-correction mechanisms embedded in the norms of everyday interactions which let me know that I’ve done something discourteous and which enable me to fix the problem without it getting out of hand.

The Internet seems to resist the emergence of durable forms of such things. In addition, of course, our real-world interactions have been dramatically curtailed over the past year and a half. If more of our communication is occurring within spaces without well-developed structures to facilitate the construction of shared meaning, then more of our interactions will be distressingly incomprehensible. Beyond that, we have to consider the possibility that the destruction of grammars and norms and shared meaning which occurs in the online world bleeds into real life. Like, it seems to me that the normalization of assholery online is contributing to increased assholery in the real world. It used to be that people would shake their heads at the awful things people say on the Internet and note that no one would ever express such thoughts face-to-face. But real world norms of courtesy are not spreading across the Internet; rather, they are being eroded by it.

That matters, I think, and not just because it’s no fun to deal with jerks (or because it is psychologically unnerving to feel as though the world no longer makes sense). Modern civilization is fantastically complex. Complexity depends upon coordination, which is in turn dependent on our ability to communicate effectively with each other. If society has become such a muddled place that large numbers of people will not take a safe and effective vaccine against a deadly virus, for instance, then the deadly virus will stick around and continue to cause harm to lives and livelihoods. But sometimes I wonder whether we aren’t putting ourselves at risk of still greater woes.

I wish I didn’t feel that way. I wish it were easier to look out at the world and feel it to be reassuringly comprehensible. But perhaps I’m being too pessimistic. Maybe it is just me.