hex_m_hell

Thought Slime dug in a bit on how Liberals really like to imagine a marketplace of ideas, and how that's total bullshit, in his video about Charlie Kirk.

Think of the term marketplace of ideas, right?

Like they present this as a market stall where people can pick good or bad ideas. And of course, people are rational actors according to market logic, who would naturally gravitate to the good ideas.

The good ideas just out compete the bad ideas. You don't really need to do anything other than present a better idea to defeat a bad idea, because it's just going to be innately more popular.

But if you're not terminally capitalism brained, there's a problem that is going to leap out at you in this analogy. Good ideas can't always afford think tanks and public relations people. They're not always funded by petrochemical billionaires. Good ideas might win in a fair fight, but why the fuck would people fight fair when their money is on the line?

I want to dig in on this a bit more, bit by bit.

Let's just start with the concept of “ideas as products.” This bit quote is from immediately after the first:

It also presents ideas, politics, ideology is simply a product to consume, a marker of identity, and a vehicle for self-expression rather than the means by which change is made.

I think it's worth talking about the difference between this model and a model that's actually informed by any kind of modern scientific analysis from the last … like what.. 50 years?

While the model of ideas as objects, chosen from collections of similar objects, by rational actors, is consistent with the science and social understanding of the 1600's (when the “marketplace” model first started to develop), it isn't consistent with anything anywhere near modern. Advertisement has been manipulating people for more than a century. Social psychology has given more and more insight into how people work. This has allowed advertisers to create more and more powerful and less and less visible messaging to control the customer behavior.

I would be remiss to not bring up the MKUltra mind control experiments from 1953-1973. While conspiracy theorists love to blow these out of proportions (there was a lot of crazy shit and wasted money), there was some success and work in this field didn't really stop in 1973. In the years following, psychological warfare became a central pillar of US military operations. It was ultimately turned against the US population in the form of, among other things, “embedded reporters” during the first Iraq war. Misinformation strategies that had previously been reserved only for the enemy simply became normal parts of military “public relations.”

The whole concept of “public relations” grows from the same root: the dark side of social psychology. The field of social psychology has shown that humans are definitely not rational actors, and are more prone to respond to their environments than to rationally respond to a given situation. The simple fact that one can predictably influence general (not individual) behavior by modifying a situation is alone enough to disprove the concept of a “rational actor.” Something, something, thank you for smoking.

But it's really ideas as inanimate objects that's most worth digging into. The Selfish Gene brought up the idea of ideas as replicators, like genes, in 1976. Memetic spread of mental disorders has been extremely well studied for at least half of that time. The idea of memes, the term coined by Richard Dawkins (brilliant evolutionary biologist and complete asshole who's wrong about a lot of other stuff), is impossible to miss in any discussion of Internet culture. There are whole YouTube channels devoted to dissecting memes in culture and analyzing their mutation. We literally use the term “viral” to talk about the spread of memes in common vernacular.

A modern model is not one of inanimate objects, but a contagion model. It doesn't make sense to talk about the relative value of one idea over another. We must instead think about infection vectors and immunity factors.

This is the difference between liberalism and anti-fascism. Liberals see no problem platforming bad ideas because they believe smart people will choose not to believe obviously bad ideas. Anti-fascists recognize the risk of infection vectors. Flipping the analogy, liberals believe that it's safe to spray everyone down with Ebola blood because any rational person would simply choose not to get Ebola. Meanwhile, anti-fascists quarantine the Ebola shower (much to the anger of confused liberals, who believe every disease has a right to be explored) while frantically trying to vaccinate as many people as possible.

Immunity is an interesting thing. It's not simply a matter of “has your immune system beaten this things in the past.” Rather, there are a lot of factors that go in to immunity. Pneumonia exposure is pretty common, but it's rare for people to actually get Pneumonia unless they already have a compromised immune system. Stress, lack of sleep, other infections (both past and present) can all influence how someone responds to exposure. Exposure time is often a factor, and sometimes a big factor, for infection rates.

You're more likely to get COVID from someone who's infected if you're in the same room without a mask than if you pass them on the street. You're less likely to get COVID if you have been vaccinated or have recovered from an infection (depending on the variant, vaccine, and previous infection). You're more likely to get Pneumonia if you've had COVID. Multiple factors play in to transmission rates.

The same is true for memes. People can be groomed to be more vulnerable to ideas. The Republican party has groomed it's base toward fascism for generations. Some memes can create pathways that allow other memes to spread.

In order to protect their business model from people trying to prevent mass extinction, the oil industry has been spreading disinformation to undermine trust in science. They didn't invent this strategy, they simply inherited it from the tobacco industry. These massive rich industries have managed to spread ideas that have absolutely no merit, to infect through pure exposure. Antivax and all types of conspiracy theories have exploited the pathways, killing millions just during the early waves of the pandemic (and continuing to kill).

These lies, this misinformation, was never the product of these companies. Rather, like industrial waste, this memetic effluent is a necessary side effect of business operation. Capitalism continuously floods our world with manipulation and misinformation. That's just what advertisements and public relations are.

In a strange way, even the persistence of the meme of the Free Market of Ideas against science and reason is itself memetic effluent, the toxic byproduct of manufacturing consent.

Would it help to bridge the gap between the old model and the new model by also using a market metaphor? Let us then refer to the updated model as “The Wet Market of Ideas.” Ideas, in this model, are not the products you are looking for but the pathogens you are exposed to. This market is not a street bazaar, but is rather located in a sewer.

Imagine for a minute you walk into a marketplace. You are splashed with blood from a butcher shop. You look over to see the table covered with the unrecognizable bits of animal meat. You start to realize there are quite a few stalls selling different parts of exotic animals from all over the world, both alive and dead.

The dead are in piles, blood running off the tables into knee deep water that you wade through. The living are stacked on top of each other, excrement from the top falling on those below and finally into that same water. Butchering and cleaning all happens in the same place. There is no running water, aside from that at your knees, or soap to be seen anywhere.

A person shuffles by you and coughs in your face.

This is, perhaps, a different marketplace than you had imagined at first.

But let's also recognize the fact that racists leverage derogatory images of wet markets to spread their own memetic pathogens. Let us then include the innoculative reminder that it is specifically the rich who demand exotic meats. It is specifically in service of their elite desires that these markets risk global pandemic, against the will, ignoring the protests, of normal people. This simple fact, more than anything else, makes the metaphor especially resonant.

We continue to be exposed to pathogens in order to serve the interests of the elite. This is a fact that unites all of us globally who are not those elites. Imagine what we could do if that idea went viral.