I've been writing some pessimistic things about AI recently, so I thought I should try to balance those out with some optimistic takes. One way I think AI could really help our society is by injecting reasonableness and moderation into our public discourse.

I'm known as a pretty nice and reasonable blogger nowadays. But when I got started, as an angry graduate student in 2011 trying to distract himself from his dissertation, I was genuinely snarky.

Going back and rereading some of my posts from that era makes me chuckle, but also wince a little bit. The genteel eminence grises who sat atop the hierarchy of the very hierarchical economics profession just had no idea how to deal with a snarky, internet-native Millennial who was willing to talk back.

That snarky bravado, though sincere, was how I (accidentally) forced myself into the influencer elite. Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong, and other established bloggers liked how I tweaked the tails of the stuffy New Classical macroeconomists who pooh-poohed fiscal stimulus.

So they boosted me on their own blogs, and pretty soon almost everyone in the economics profession knew my name — deservedly or not. Then I got Twitter, and I started tweeting way too much, and the rest is history. Notably, it was my political tweets — anti-Trump stuff in 2015-2020 — that got me my biggest bump in social media followership, rather than my economic insights.

In the media world of 1991, this career path would have been a LOT harder to pull off. I could have been a newspaper columnist or perhaps even a TV show host, but it would have been a long hard slog, gatekept by a bunch of editors who embodied the conventional wisdom of an older generation.

My best bet for breaking in as an irreverent, independent voice probably would have been talk radio. In the media world of 1971, forget about it — I would have zero chance of breaking in to a discourse dominated by broadcast TV and big newspapers.

We can wonder whether the world would have been better or worse had I never become a public intellectual (hopefully, because you read this blog, your answer is "better"). But in my personal opinion, it's pretty clear that the phenomenon of outsiders breaking in to the discourse with aggression and social media attention-seeking has gone too far. There is very clear evidence that social media — far more than the traditional media it replaced — has led to the elevation of divisive voices and bad actors.

For example, Bor and Petersen (2021) find that social media draws malignant, status-seeking people who use hostility to get attention and power:

Why are online discussions about politics more hostile than offline discussions?…Across eight studies, leveraging cross-national surveys and behavioral experiments (total N = 8,434), we [find that] hostile political discussions are the result of status-driven individuals who are drawn to politics and are equally hostile both online and offline. Finally, we offer initial evidence that online discussions feel more hostile, in part, because the behavior of such individuals is more visible online than offline. [emphasis mine]

Basically, spreading hate and divisiveness on social media is a form of entrepreneurship. As Eugene Wei has written, social media is all about getting social status. 10,000 followers on X may not sound like a media empire to rival CBS News, but for most people it's more attention than they would otherwise get in their entire life. For malignant individuals who crave status and attention and enjoy spreading fear and hate, social media is a natural platform for their dark dreams.