[DanielBMarkham]

This was a good essay: well-written, cogent, and thought-provoking.

I know there are a lot of folks that want to take this essay and bash it into some political points. I think that's probably part of the problem Mattis is describing; our desire to make social media hay out of whatever we're given.

He does have a point about current politics in there. It's hidden quite a bit. His larger point, though, is about how instant communication is changing the nature of how governments work. Presumably that's what he gets paid for: understanding and projecting current trends through a historical lens.

I don't know what the solution is. A big part of the problem is that nobody much wants to talk about the generic situation. There's no clicks in it. Instead it's pitching rhetorical softballs to people who are already on your side. Congrats to Mattis for being able to walk through this mess and still come out looking okay. He's doing better than most.

[flixic]

> I don't know what the solution is.

Neither do I but I see tribalism as one of the most destructive forces of the last decade, responsible for almost all big changes (and lack of change) in the world. Politics spill out to other areas. It is not difficult to connect the dots between rapid clicks-and-likes driven social media to the burning of Amazon forests.

I don't know what the solution is but this is the meta problem. Solving it is likely to start fixing other areas of life.

[DanielBMarkham]

Perhaps what we're finding out is that humans have had all sorts of natural obstacles to communication: geography, the ability of sound to travel, and so forth. As time progressed, trade and travel have presented unique challenges. When I meet a strange person, they might not be friend or foe but something in-between. We can still converse and exchange, but I don't trust you. Not like my people.

We've socially evolved as tribal creatures, but odd ones. We're tribal creatures with the ability to freely mingle between various tribes (for the most part). This actually gives us tremendous evolutionary advantages. We evolve first as individuals, then as small groups, then as groups-of-groups, and so on. At any one time there could be millions of various adaptations in the works. As conditions change, various individuals and group succeed and others fall by the wayside. This person-family-clan-tribe-region evolutionary promotion model works for biology, science, social mores, and so forth.

What we tech folks have done, and we had no way of knowing, is flatten all of that out. So now what we see is winner-take-all for all of those things that used to be widely diverse and somewhat chaotic. It would seem to folks who didn't know better that this would be a good thing. After all, isn't standardization good? But in fact it's turning what used to extremely robust and anti-fragile systems into quite brittle and unpredictable ones.

I don't think most people understand the problem, even the ones who complain about it. That doesn't make me optimistic that there's a solution forthcoming.

[Fricken]

>What we tech folks have done, and we had no way of knowing, is flatten all of that out.

We did have a way of knowing, Marshall McLuhan went on at length about the rise of tribalism in the upcoming age of 'peer to peer electronic media'.

"The electronically induced technological extensions of our central nervous systems, which I spoke of earlier, are immersing us in a world-pool of information movement and are thus enabling man to incorporate within himself the whole of mankind. The aloof and dissociated role of the literate man of the Western world is succumbing to the new, intense depth participation engendered by the electronic media and bringing us back in touch with ourselves as well as with one another. But the instant nature of electric-information movement is decentralizing——rather than enlarging——the family of man into a new state of multitudinous tribal existences. Particularly in countries where literate values are deeply institutionalized, this is a highly traumatic process, since the clash of the old segmented visual culture and the new integral electronic culture creates a crisis of identity, a vacuum of the self, which generates tremendous violence——violence that is simply an identity quest, private or corporate, social or commercial…"

https://mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com/2017/02/16/marshall-mclu...

[johnisgood]

> It is not difficult to connect the dots between rapid clicks-and-likes driven social media to the burning of Amazon forests.

Would you please elaborate on how "rapid clicks-and-likes driven social media" leads to the burning of Amazon forests?

I would also like to add these two related paragraphs:

> According to various reports on the subject (Greenpeace, FAO), livestock farming, including soya production, is responsible for about 70 to 80% of deforestation in the Amazon region. The development of intensive livestock production, combined with the increasing consumption of meat in developed countries, is thus the main cause of Amazonian deforestation.

> According to the WWF, It’s estimated that deforestation caused by livestock is responsible for the discharge of 3.4% of current global emissions of carbon to the atmosphere every year. That’s why the late 2018 IPCC report stood out that reducing meat consumption by 90% is the single biggest way to reduce global warming. Some studies also show that without meat and dairy consumption, global farmland use could be reduced by over 75%. In this way, reducing your meat consumption is also a big step to stop not only deforestation but also global warming on a larger scale.

Source: https://e-csr.net/definitions/what-is-definition-deforestati...

[flixic]

I'd rather not redirect this discussion to Amazon forests. It was just one example... and I probably could have picked a better one.

The dot chain I see is social media -> stronger tribalism, social bubbles -> strengthening of nationalist movements, particularly far right -> electing Jair Bolsonaro -> rejection of foreign aid, support of these farming techniques.

Perhaps I'm wrong in my reasoning... but I'd much prefer to be wrong about this particular example and right about the general trend.

[rayiner]

So we could reduce something that accounts for just 3.4% of global emissions by 75%?

[vekker]

I'm pretty sure that's wrong or the wrong data point. Livestock is the largest source of methane emissions and methane plays a larger role in climate change.

Not to mention that eating less meat is just karmically/ethically way more optimal, regardless of what the data says.

[johnisgood]

Note that there is a difference between methane and carbon. My quote only mentioned carbon.

> The most important greenhouse gases from animal agriculture are methane and nitrous oxide. Methane, mainly produced by enteric fermentation and manure storage, is a gas which has an effect on global warming 28 times higher than carbon dioxide. Nitrous oxide, arising from manure storage and the use of organic/inorganic fertilizers, is a molecule with a global warming potential 265 times higher than carbon dioxide.

Additionally, he missed the fact that deforestation has other negative impacts besides contributing to climate change.

All things considered, meat consumption is pretty much the main reason for the destruction of Amazonian rainforest, using up incredible amounts of land, food, and water, as well as producing a statistically significant amount of pollution. Then there is desertification, MDR pathogens, and so forth.

If you want the total percentages per sector: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...

Some more reading (website is currently down for me but it was available a couple of minutes ago): https://www.fao.org/gleam/results/en/

[AnimalMuppet]

> I see tribalism as one of the most destructive forces of the last decade, responsible for almost all big changes (and lack of change) in the world.

Go further back. The Civil War could be viewed as large-scale tribalism. After that, there were regional and ethnic tribalisms. The World Wars pushed us into a bigger tribalism - the US became one giant tribe. (It still had the smaller tribalisms, but they became less important.) That kind of held through the 50s. In the late 60s, the hippie movement could be regarded as a new tribalism (and a rejection of the old one). The US "big tribalism" has been progressively fragmenting into a number of "small tribalisms" since then.

[flixic]

I really like this deconstruction! Never thought about it this way but it makes a lot of sense.