I once thought of "the mob" as something noisy and distant, a clanging crowd of sign-waving zealots in some city square, chanting, ranting, banging on the drums. Almost all of it was visible only on TV news. A lot of what they were protesting I agreed with, like foreign wars, environmental degradation, and factory farms. I joined in some of those as a teenager, shouting about Ronald Reagan and his Interior Secretary, James Watt. Thinking back, it was sort of romantic, though I doubt it accomplished anything beyond being loud and lots of fun.
Anti-War Protests of the 1970s.
No longer. Somewhere on planet Earth, every hour of every day, a mob is or will be assembled, holding up their phones, filming the un-choreographed chaos. They don't even need much space, any street corner, road or park will do. All of it can be dropped on Twitter and TikTok, gain a "like," a swipe, or share, and the momentum grows.
And yes, we're in on it. It's theater.
This mob machinery isn't calibrated; it's frenzied and auto-tuned for modern media consumption. Nuance, context, corroboration, and even coherence are luxuries that aren't necessary. If you've ever seen a new media reporter ask a protester for details, they often cannot articulate much beyond the signs and bumper stickers. Who cares? We fight!
This new media climate creates a mirage that protests are effective. It's like blocking traffic; look at how many cars they blocked on the freeway; surely that means something. Consider the amount of media attention they've received; surely that indicates they're making progress and taking action on whatever is bothering them. Conversely, many well-meaning "mostly peaceful" protesters are overshadowed by the kinetic violence of agitators.
And for those who don't want to take to the field, social media offers a host of sideline snacks for when they have a hankering to be heard but don't want to take the time to make signs, drive to a place, or articulate exactly what their opinions or ideas are. They see a meme that they agree with and "Like" or "Share," and that's the contribution to the cause. They don't have the time to do more at the moment.
It's in this malaise we now have AI to do our cognitive grunt work. Just tell my new LLM assistant to write my pithy statement or argument, and walla, my writing is suddenly coherent and powerful. It's an odd thing to see people who formally couldn't string words together now read like an imitation of John Updike or Martin Amis. They don't need to overthink, write too much, or worry over needless details when the much smarter-than-we-are AI pal can pump out the copy. What could go wrong?
When we outsource our thinking, our judgment, and the critical individual ideas we have, they will get lost in the haze of homogeneity. Nothing new. Real moral discernment requires wrestling with ambiguity, fighting with language to express competing ideas and the disquieting possibility that we may be wrong. AI can do sort of do it, but if do it ourselves, we sharpen our minds and thus clarify our thinking. It’s not always easy, self-expression doesn't come pre-packaged.
I belong to a tiny group of men falsely accused of rape. Statistically, such cases are vanishingly rare; whatever the quarrel over definitions, the overwhelming majority of rape reports are genuine. I get it; I'm one in a million! And yet, rarity does not equal irrelevance. In a healthy society, it seems to me, the din of the majority must never silence the often modest minority, whether that din comes from a chanting crowd or the algorithmic monotony of AI-generated consensus. Justice that fails at the margins is justice that fails. Period.
I wonder if we'd all be better off if we stopped "liking" posts written by people we don't know and started writing a little more ourselves. Who cares if it's weird or unpolished? What matters is that it's ours. First-person. Genuine. In an age of borrowed outrage and AI-assisted eloquence, reclaiming our voice can be an act of moral clarity.
It's what I tried to do with my podcast, writing about my experiences. Writing was critical because it helped me process what happened, and then converting that into a conversation about the dangers of outrage movements. That's why we need writers, artists, and the informed to document what happened after the mob left.
The antidote to all this isn't silence, nor is it noise. Loudness doesn't solve problems; it just empties the room of the good people who don't want to listen to more shouting. And silence? It’s safe and often a better choice, but if we don’t speak up things never change.
Aristotle wrote, "We are what we repeatedly do.." So, do more writing and thinking, or maybe live your life quietly and forgo the trampoline of protest and agitation.
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