Social Learning Links, 3/8/2025

Dan Williams on preaching to your own side; Some conservatives preaching about technology; Samuel Gregg on classical liberalism; Andrey Mir on the future of journalism

In 2013, I wrote The Three Languages of Politics because I noticed that op-eds and online “debates” were not trying to persuade people who would disagree. Dan Williams notices that this is true, especially about Bluesky.

the goal of political communication is not to change an audience’s mind but to advertise the state of the communicator’s mind. It is politics as performance, treating political communication as a tool for signalling the communicator’s virtues, social identities, or loyalty to specific political factions and causes….

Given that the audience almost entirely includes people who endorse the same narrow range of political views, it makes little sense to understand people’s activity there in terms of rational persuasion or propaganda

Jon Askonas and others write,

we believe that public policy should direct technology toward the flourishing of the family and the human person. Our laws and regulations must seek to form a technological order that provides a functional economic role for the household, protects human sexuality, rewards marriage, enriches childhood, preserves parental and communal authority, enables the practice of liberty, and ennobles our common life. These human goods are fundamental for thriving families and they must be guarded and advanced amid revolutionary technological change.

As spelled out, their principles strike me as a grab bag of social conservatism and early Internet-era leftist animosity toward corporations. The latter includes

Legislate toward a restored republican culture in a digital age by giving citizens ownership over their own data; protect privacy by blocking the transformation of everyday appliances into surveillance systems; and require platforms to build robust tools that give users transparency and choices about the algorithms that construct their feeds.

…Favor technologies that enhance local and familial autonomy through right-to-repair laws, open-source software, and open-platform designs, all of which make technology less reliant on distant power centers.

Pointer from Mary Harrington’s afterthoughts on ARC. Again, my assessment is that ARC is a harmless exercise.

Samuel Gregg writes,

One consequence of the rise of left and right illiberalisms is that it has surfaced a long-simmering division among contemporary classical liberals. On the one hand, there are classical liberals who believe that virtues can be known and lived and that this need not imply aggressive state intervention into the private sphere of life. On the contrary, they hold, it puts principled limits on the scope for state action. Other classical liberals, however, give the distinct impression of regarding the idea of virtue as ephemeral at best, as inhibiting social experimentation, or as providing postliberals with an excuse to extend state intervention even further into society and the economy.

When one looks at the classical liberal tradition as a whole, the former position is far more common than the latter.

Should libertarians try to use control over the government to crush illiberal forces that have taken over universities and other institutions? Those who say yes would applaud the Rufo-ian approach of the Trump Administration. Those who say no would say that the assertion of Presidential power will ultimately reap a whirlwind of more illiberalism.

Gregg disdains Rufoism (although he does not call it that), and I am inclined to agree. That leaves our brand of classical liberalism without strong weapons. We have to plea for libertarian virtue, in a world of FOOLs (Fear of Others’ Liberty).

Andrey Mir writes,

institutional journalism as we knew it, with its twentieth-century professional standards and codes, is dead.

What will replace it? Trendsetters are pursuing business solutions for independent journalism, focusing not on commercial objectives but on “community-based” and “mission-driven” journalism. A cynic might speculate that stories will be based on, and driven by, people who know what to report—and, crucially, what not to. Whatever form post-journalism takes, it mostly will be supported not by those who want to read it but by those who want others to read it.

Going forward, institutional journalism will look more like an NGO than like a twentieth-century newspaper. The funding will come from donors, not subscribers. The institutions will take their cues from their funders, not from the market, and definitely not from the ethical standards to which journalism rose in my youth.

substacks referenced above:

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Against Bluesky

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Year Zero And The Permanent Things

substacks referenced above:

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Against Bluesky