When I started this newsletter, the driving factor in authoring it was to work towards healing the festering, infected wounds that are the many growing divides in the United States. Add to this a healthy dose of reasonable discussion on emerging tech and innovation policy, and you have the dual meaning of Binary Diplomacy. I prioritized nonpartisan discussion in the effort to reach as many people as possible, but I no longer believe that that will be possible for the near future. As truth and facts in the United States now often seem decidedly partisan, this newsletter will shift slightly in the new year to prioritize how to claw back logic and reason in a world that continues to deprioritize it. Briefly, this first part of three will consist of handling divisiveness given a second Trump presidency.
Fully healing divisiveness can only really begin when certain individuals are held accountable for their actions in stoking that divisiveness: yes, for some that means only social repercussions but for others that does include legal repercussions. At this present time, it does not appear that the rule of law will be enforced equally in the United States (although for certain characteristics like race, it rarely has been). This needs to matter, as each aspect of the law differently affecting people groups stokes the fires of divisiveness. America has become desensitized to the idea of collective action, but a wide-ranging general strike grinding economic growth to a halt might be the only thing that could have a tangible effect before the inauguration (as long as clear demands are presented). In lieu of legal accountability, since that seems a stretch to ask for at the moment, we can look to social accountability.
One easy and tangible way, that people have already started jumping on en masse, is leaving Elon Musk’s X (formerly known as Twitter). Almost systematically since acquisition, that platform has engaged in questionable banning of certain content and has displayed concerning trends in unbanning. President-elect Trump’s return to the platform, despite being banned from it shortly following the events of January 6th, was heralded by Musk personally. That ban mattered, as Trump’s replacement media, Truth Social, does not pull the same kind of engagement numbers even amongst his own base. The ban also signaled strongly that public actions can have private consequences even for the powerful. Disengaging from the sort of rhetoric that has been prevalent on X has the benefit of both lowering that platform’s engagement numbers (and thereby reducing platform revenue) and lowering the effectiveness of false information campaigns that propagate from there. Hopefully, deplatforming X would slow some of the disinformation/misinformation cycle that is becoming increasingly prevalent in the AI age, and this should go for any platform that chooses to engage in this sort of toxic public discourse.
Another important way to stay engaged is to keep calling out disinformation and misinformation. This gains significance as AI becomes more and more convincing. Just yesterday, the US Treasury Department sanctioned Russian and Iranian entities found to have been using AI in part to influence the 2024 general election. This is not a new trend, and it certainly does not end just because the United States is now out of an election cycle. Foreign interference should be a unifying factor across political lines, but given the completely underwhelming governmental response to election interference in 2016 and 2020, it seems like this will continue to be ignored. The public needs more tools to fight disinformation and misinformation, but not giving into perpetual sensationalism (a thing that affects any side of the aisle) is a strong step in the right direction.
Closely linked to disinformation/misinformation is what I will call the “normalization of the malignant;” that is, the act of news media treating every story as equally engaging and equally worth the consumers’ attention. It should not be solely up to the consumer to interpret and determine which stories are more significant. Perhaps the most obvious example was in the 2016 election cycle, wherein it seemed that Hillary Clinton’s private email exchange seemed almost a bigger story (or at least, had more sticking power) than Donald Trump’s Access Hollywood tape. The zealous moral outrage over emails that was so prevalent at that time seems to have completely died off now that the Trump transition team is doing something similar. As we inevitably head back into a 24-hour shock news cycle on January 20th, media will likely play along for the next four years. We need to, as consumers of all forms of content, hold any and all entities accountable for the normalization of the malignant.
There’s more to be said, but I wanted to draw attention to these issues because I believe that solving them would have the broadest effect. I'm going to be posting something short every week in the lead up to the January 20th inauguration—while I would like to be solely positive starting off the new year, things are changing and they are changing quickly. The second part of this series will look at what is likely to change regarding tech policy, and the third part will talk a bit more broadly about the socioeconomic implications of everything going on around us. For those of us trying to pay attention to all of the moving parts, it’s a lot to keep in context, but we have to keep trying. I want to stress at the end of this article that individuals and even groups of the public are not to blame for the mass desensitization of the public, nor are they responsible for the sanitizing of otherwise extremely important topics; however, having open discussions concerning what individuals can do is important to fix the ecosystem. Many individuals combined consciously changing their behavioral patterns forms an effective group, after all.