A reminder about how polarized we are on social media, look at the latest Elon Musk F-you

Now does that picture look like people who are trying to solve problems together. Well I guess yes, if the goal is to simply win for your team.

None of this is earth shattering or should come as a surprise, but always a good reminder. Here is what I observed on TikTok a few days ago when scrolling through vids as I looked for excuses to not get out of bed and get some work done.

1. First I saw that short video how Elon was telling Disney CEO Bob Iger and the corporate machine to go F themselves about corporate advertisers pulling out of “X” after his antisemitic comments, all while the audience was mostly silent. I looked at the comments, and they overwhelming indicated disgust at his behavior, so I made a comment, adding to the noise of comments.
2. I saw the SAME short video posted at least 20 times and I first noticed that in another post, the sentiment was exactly the opposite, they were all cheering Elon, for not getting pushed around, for being a strong leader, etc. Woe….I though. As I quickly scrolled through comments in the 20 or so videos posts, I noticed how polarized they were. About half of the posts had almost all NEGATIVE comments about Elon, and half had almost all POSITIVE comments. I thought, what is really going on? Is this a function of the algorithmic clustering around the person who posted it? The description of the video by the person who posted it? Did it feed this to the appropriate people based on the sentiment of the first few comments? WTF!! Well I guess that’s Tik Tok, and social media in general.
3. Then I saw another short video of that same interview, but what Elon said MOMENTS BEFORE this first video I saw. He basically said his antisemitic post was one of the stupidest things he ever said, and he apologized for it, and tried to explain himself, but was canceled over it. I was honestly tying to understand his apology, but his explanation in the interview was really difficult to make sense of. He really did sound like he was babbling gibberish. He didn’t have any credibility.
4. But I realized, that he does believe this is no big deal: from his point of view, he made a mistake, apologized and was angry about being cancelled in what he felt was an inappropriate way.
5. I thought about it: his logic makes sense, although I don’t agree with it for one fundamental reason. We collectively have different opinions about the IMPACT of what our attitude and behavior has on other people in a public forum, especially if we have a lot of followers. The problem is which of these positions is true is hard to prove: A) It doesn’t really matter, it’s all in good fun. B) It has a HUGE impact, probably more than anything else — which is what I believe, as this is a core aspect of leadership.
6. Which leaves us to the polarization. There are a huge number of people who take Position A because they don’t grok how important it is, or they don’t care, or they think the ends justify the means because our economic and political system is so messed up…which it is (and we disagree on what to do about it).
7. So I went on Reddit and saw the same thing — polarized threads. I saw one thread with POSITIVE sentiment towards Elon, and only a few negative comments. I figured, there’s no point in joining the US vs. THEM argument, and posted there and tried to basically argue the above, and take a balanced point of view — explaining that he was pissed about being cancelled, but he needs to please be a little more careful, he has a lot of followers and his statements, regardless of his intentions can be used by many people to do awful things. I was curious if anybody would comment on what I wrote. Not surprisingly, nobody did. Well, we all know balanced opinions don’t “sell” on social media very well. Sigh..

What can we make of the polarized world we live in? We have always been polarized, but social media has dramatically accelerated / increased what was already there — polarized people who now have the power to express themselves and join their chosen narrative and hope their team wins or who might just enjoy tearing other people down and cancelling them to make themselves feel like an important hero, or maybe just to cure their boredom. And they also have the incentive to be more polarized and to dumb down the points to get attention or feel like they can do something about our screwed up, complex world.

UGH!!!!

We are in a World War of Attention!

I’m sure we’re all thinking, what can we do about this? Are there any tools, in a sound bite, social media algorithm world that can bring us together and to “discuss” complex topics, considering the multiple issues and opinions surrounded that topic? It is even possible to build such a platform? If so, it is possible to garner enough resources to build it, get the word out to grow it, and maintain it?

The very thought of it is laughable. Well, this sort of thing is supposed to happen in politics, for example, when considering a bill or a policy is up for a discussion. I used to be a lobbyist (green energy and cybersecurity liability), and this is the sort of thing I tried to engage in, but the process was so perverted by money — simply because there were so many more people (and their opinions) being provided by the corporate side that had the money to pay these people to show up day-after-day.

Maybe the human race is just f-ed. What this reminds me of is the months I spent in Jerusalem on a spiritual (not religious) quest. Here are my key takeaways from my time there:

The Jews I met were always arguing about religion. They would argue with each other, defending their position with rigor, not giving one inch to the other party, and they were doing it without realizing what they were actually arguing about. It was pretty obvious, there were 2 basic narratives about the purpose of prayer and following religious principles:

1. Traditional: We pray so God hears us, gives us points for each time we pray and uses that to decide if we’re good people and deserves his good grace and good luck and blessings
2. Spiritual: We pray for mostly ourselves, because it makes us each better people, calms us down, helps see perspective, and helps us connect with each other.

I also discovered in Jerusalem the following:

There are two types of Jews

1. Cool people
2. Assholes

There are two types of Christians

1. Cool people
2. Assholes

There are two types of Muslims

1. Cool people
2. Assholes

I think I also learned a little bit about the rituals and prayers, but I forget all of that. I just remembered the above MOST IMPORTANT key takeaways. Because if you don’t understand these points, does anything else really matter?

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