Public Discourse and Walled Gardens

 A recent post by Antonio Garcia-Martinez struck a chord with me -- The walls of perception, or why blocking is good.  Excerpt:

If you want an answer for the leading riddle of our time—why is it that in a media landscape where the individual consumer has never had more absolute control over who or what they read or watch are we more obsessed than ever with ‘content moderation’ and ‘misinformation’?—the answer is insufficient use of the block button. Every person you block is like a another brick in our frontier wall, defending you from the insane philosophies, inane prattlings, and bad-faith self-promotion of a world fracturing into mutually-hostile tribes no longer tethered to physical or cultural contours like political or linguistic borders. There’s no point in engaging with the foreign tribes, and you’re fooling yourself if you do.

I disagree with the last statement, but find Garcia-Martinez's observations about public discourse illuminating.  Suppose we follow his suggestion and try to create a space free from distractions?  The following questions arise:

• How concerned should we be about the possibility that foreign tribes get around our walls and obtain information which they use to discredit us in the public sphere?  Garcia-Martinez seems to say that this could be countered by more effective blocking, while ignoring the immediate consequences.  This seems reasonable with the caveat that it may not be possible to ignore the immediate consequences, depending upon one's employment status.  The old warning with regard to email seems relevant:  Anything you say or write may become publicly available. 
• Should one behave differently in the public sphere where foreign tribes are present?  The obvious answer would seem to be yes.  One can't and shouldn't want to withdraw from the public sphere entirely.  In the public sphere, it will be useful to be respectful to foreign tribes if conversation there is to be constructive.  In more private conversations, however, it can be more useful to speak openly and test heterodox views.

Let's consider these points in light of Martin Gurri's book, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium.  As described by Matt Taibbi:

The thesis of The Revolt of the Public is that traditional centralized powers are losing — have lost — authority, in large part because of the demystifying effect of the Internet. The information explosion undermined the elite monopoly on truth, exposing long-concealed flaws. Many analysts had noted the disruptive power of the Internet, but what made Gurri unique is that he also predicted with depressingly humorous accuracy how traditional hierarchies would respond to this challenge: in a delusional, ham-fisted, authoritarian manner that would only confirm the worst suspicions of the public, accelerating the inevitable throw-the-bums-out campaigns. This assessment of the motive for rising public intransigence was not exactly welcomed, but either way, as Kling wrote, “Martin Gurri saw it coming.”

Gurri's book was originally published in 2014.  We're well into the process.  Personally, it's been about one year since I stopped reading any mainstream publication or viewing news/political commentary on a mainstream TV channel.  Over the course of that year, I've become more and more convinced of the wisdom of this decision.  From my admittedly unscientific perspective, the anti-authoritarian trends predicted by Gurri are accelerating, as the number of journalists moving from mainstream publications to Substack soars, while the mainstream media gets tied in increasingly absurd knots.   

Update 3/30/2021:  Here's an email I wrote today which illustrates Gurri's point about the Internet undercuts authority by empowering amateurs to do their own investigations:

Transportation hype has become one of my hobbies.  It started with self-driving car technology which I've been following since about 2017.  I read approximately an article per day on that subject, following via reddit. Then, around 2018,  I started seeing some skeptical commentary about the California HSR in the liberal/Democratic blogs I used to frequent.  Here's one example: California Bullet Train Becomes Slightly Less Bullet-Like, 3/16/2018.  When Musk's loop/hyperloop technology began to be hyped as the wave of the future, I investigated more seriously and began to realize some of the physical / economic limitations of such technology.  Moreover, I studied past failures such as SST Concorde  and maglev trains and understood why they failed.

So when I received your email, I thought this is a subject where I can constructively add to the conversation.  I checked notes that I keep in evernote.com and keep.google.com, but couldn't find what I knew must exist somewhere on the Internet given the long history of this project.  Eventually I did a Google search on "high-speed rail california" for the time frame Jan 1, 2008 - Jan 1, 2010 and that's where I found the good article by Michael Mahoney.  I spent a couple of hours searching last night, knowing that I was too tired to finish the project last night, but not too tired to find a good article or two via search.  I woke up this morning and extracted the best parts of the articles I found last night in response to your email.