Plato's Tweets

I liked that one about Epicurus so much that I decided to read another BBC Future post by the same author : Would Plato Tweet ? And this one's pretty good too. Before I dive back to the usual consciousness/reality posts, I think here I'll stick with the theme of social media instead.

Long before philosophers were writing books and papers, their thoughts had to be transmitted in a way that could grab their audience's attention – there was an element of public display. Early philosophers also developed highly elaborate public personas. Empedocles, who's credited with inventing the idea of the four Classical elements, made his public appearances with extravagant flair – a purple robe, a golden belt, sandals of bronze – and referred to himself as an incarnate god. 

These Socratic dialogues, which are the fountainhead of the whole philosophical tradition that follows, can be read as a fictionalised biography of a career influencer – the Collected Twitter Threads of Socrates, liberally reinvented, yet perhaps faithful in spirit. 

In the age of social media, we may be returning to a state in which a thinker's claim to wisdom relies on their ability to effectively perform it – with the additional requirement that they're able to transmute that performance into content.

That's quite interesting. I've been vaguely thinking about deepfakes and other AI-generated misinformation. I see many claims that some coming deluge will be nothing less than apocalyptic for out faith in news reports, about which I'm extremely skeptical. A more likely worst-case scenario, I think, is that it would return us to a pre-video era, when no videos could be trusted as the gold standard of accuracy because none existed. 

Even this, I think, is not really plausible, but the parallels of social media taking us back to a worse, less well-informed past is a healthy way of stopping us from getting too misty-eyed about a lost Golden Age when you could believe everything they put in the newspapers. It never existed. Today's misinformation problems are just the latest in a long line of attempts to confuse instead of convince; different in their specifics (very importantly so !), but not pointing to some fundamental change or decline in human psychology.

As Plato represented him, Socrates was unimpressed by moral posturing. And so according to the journalist Olivia Goldhill, he would well feel the same about this characteristic of social media, wherein people often hypocritically implore others to be more kind and virtuous. The more you display certainty in your self-righteous posting, Socrates might have argued, the more likely you are in fact ignorant of your own moral shortcomings.

Oh very much this. Not so much for Plato's likely perspective (I'll get back to that), but for the whole accusative, holier-than-thou tone of social media in general. Endless memes about what's wrong with the world, who to support and who to blame... I hate it. The petty judgements, the culture wars that make moral issues out of things which have no moral aspect to them whatsoever... and the endless anti-religion memes ! Just who the hell is it these are appealing to ? Who is ever going to be persuaded by them, and if they're not supposed to be persuasive, what are they for ? And what in the world – this one particularly confuses me – is the point of posting very long articles but then not be willing to have a discussion about them ?

Look, I get the need to vent and rant (he says, going on a rant). I don't get the need to do nothing but state your moral beliefs over and over again. And I don't for the life of me understand why we're not supposed to have a conversation. It's okay to argue with people. Arguing is good for you ! We should be encouraging actual discussions, not just sanctimonosity !

But let's move on.

The sophist Protagoras was said to have espoused a theory of "relativism", which essentially suggested that since our individual perceptions differ, we are each limited to our own subjective construction of reality. One can see how this thesis is exemplified by aspects of the social media experience, as we scroll through an apparent infinity of information, yet always within the confines of our private information bubbles. 

As I was saying, we all live in our own multiverses, which helps explain why the concept is such a good bit of science fiction even if it relies on lousy physics. This brings us to the titular question of whether Plato would in fact participate in social media. Here I somewhat disagree with the conclusion : 

To combat the problem of distinguishing desirable from undesirable information – good from bad influencers – Plato introduced an infamous degree of censorship into his theoretical city. Jenny Jenkins at Swansea University has speculated as to whether he would have allowed citizens to use Facebook, surmising that this would have been a resounding "no". "Facebook does not have the intention of promoting morality, and does not particularly seek to educate its users," she writes, "so I think Plato would have disapproved of it for this reason alone."

This question of filter bubbles / unwelts / multiverses is one that keeps gnawing away at me. We should absolutely and unequivocally clamp down hard on abject misinformation. But beyond that, what do we want social media to be ? A place where we can only ever hurl judgemental, petty memes at each other ? A pseudo-encyclopaedia where factual accuracy must be reinforced at all times ?

The best answer I can come up with is "something like real life". Where we generally agree on most issues with most of our friends, but not everything. There's overlap, but never a complete one, and our attitudes are similar enough that disagreements (at least on issues of no immediate importance to us) aren't at all likely to lead to slanging matches; and of course best of all is when slanging matches don't actually matter and nobody goes away permanently angry.

Now as to Plato, I disagree because I think looking at his ideal society is the wrong approach. Plato didn't actually live in his ideal society, and the article quotes a famous admonishment of his against the written word :

"They will be hearers of much, without learning anything; they will appear to know much, yet for the most part know nothing; and they will be miserable to be around, having become wise-seeming, without actually being wise." (Phaedrus 275a-b; my translation)

But the context is missing here. The point is that you can't take everything literally, that everything is subject to change and cannot be determined with absolute certainty (even if he was indeed after a search for objective truth). Above all, Plato stressed most emphatically that if can you can ever arrive at real Truth at all, it's only through extreme effort and through a process of dialogue with others. So while he might well reject specific implementations of social media, and certainly most of the business models that foster it, I doubt he'd reject the notion itself.

For unlike the physical agora, where the whole crowd may be deceived at once by the ideological seductions of an itinerant sophist, the virtual agora is different for each crowd member. We receive the proffered wisdom of the modern philosophers and sophists "alone together", to use the social scientist Sherry Turkle's phrase. We are each deceived uniquely, adding ever another layer between us and our collective grasp on what's actually there. And it is we ourselves, when we post and repost, tweet and retweet, who deceive one another, circulating our own sophistries.

When social media works well (and it often does work well), it connects interested people with genuine experts, or people of similar interests and levels of knowledge but with qualitatively different perspectives and backgrounds. When it fails it connects idiots. Plato would definitely not approve of the latter because nobody would, but equally, who would disagree with the former ? To disagree with people having productive friendships just because they occur digitally rather than physically wouldn't make any sense. More on that in an upcoming post, but for now :

It may be that some Stoics – whose ranks included people of all classes and extractions, slave and free, Greek and Roman – would have had at least an ambivalent, and perhaps a guardedly optimistic view of the possibilities offered by online social networks. Insofar as they offer a mechanism for connectivity, they can foster real community – particularly when their users are engaging with one another in good faith and to mutual benefit, as may indeed be the case with content creators who provide education, community empowerment or therapeutic support to their audiences. 

A Stoic might ask, are you using this platform as a rational contributor to human well-being and the community of the Universe? Or to aggrandise, entertain or escape from yourself? If the former, go for it; if the latter, delete your accounts.

And I think Plato would probably agree with this. As with all critiques of social media, the problems aren't usually with the messaging system per se, but with the business model around it. Whether you send a letter or a tweet or a phone call, if your dialogue helps you learn or foster genuine connections, this is generally a Good Thing. Plato would certainly not approve of the kind of social media that feeds endless adverts (especially the political kind) to its users, and would undoubtedly insist on strict regulations. But if it could be devised in such a way as to allow good, thoughtful discussions, or just for the typical sorts of everyday conversations everyone has anyway, I don't see him having any objections.