Porn, Platforms, and Moral Panic

Thinking about Platform Temperance with Dan Oppenheimer.

I have a new podcast conversation out with Dan Oppenheimer of Eminent Americans where we start off talking about porn and the similarities between moral panics about sex and tech, and then broaden out into thinking about both the epistemic situation of living in our contemporary “mass society” and the political possibilities (or lack thereof) for doing something about it.

The David Sessions Session

I suggested this topic to Dan after I wrote this post a while back and then did a bunch of reading to try to reach a more informed position on what Max Read calls “Platform Temperance.” (In the background of a lot of what I say is sometimes-critical readings of work by Max Fisher, Max Read, Taylor Lorenz, Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, Derek Thompson, and others). I wanted to try to bring my competing impulses into friction with each other: that, yes, anyone can see social media is Bad, stupid, a miserable slop experience, and surely in some sense socially and politically corrosive; at the same time, it isn’t straightforwardly anti-social either, as it provides new forms of networking, connection, and in-person interaction. I’m trying to reconcile my general affinity with technology and new media with the fact that it has become such a site of political anxiety, contestation, and a sense of social crisis. Dan’s approach makes him a congenial interlocutor because he’s willing to just explore such questions as opposed to approach them from predetermined ideological schemas.

Not to get too meta here, but this type of conversation is the sort of intellectual practice that appeals to me most at the moment. Starting from “the discourse” but seeing how it can be elevated by stepping back, reading, drawing larger connections and historical lines of movement. But also just reasoning through those things publicly without presuming a responsibility to provide policy solutions, and without obscuring the highly personal positions from which we approach them. I’m not going to posture, for example, by writing anxious lines about the threat of climate change when I in fact do not lose any sleep over climate change—a completely normal, average relation to politics I think a lot of people share, even people who worry about politics for a living. Similarly, I’m not going to freak out about social atomization when I am not socially atomized myself, and in fact neither are most of the people I know, including some of the ones whose brand it is to fret about it. I guess I want to see how much we can discuss these things, some of them real and serious problems, while still being normal about them.

A couple of notes in relation to this conversation: Blake and I have recorded another episode with Dan on the state of gay intellectual life that goes into where we think gay culture is at and what we’re trying to do with our podcast. I’ve listened to it a couple of times and I’m very excited for it to be out in the world as soon as I have time to edit it. I also enjoyed Dan’s recent conversations with Jacob Siegel and Damon Linker. I say in the forthcoming episode that Substack is trash, but Dan is one of the exceptions to the rule!

I’ll leave you with a transcript of one of my monologues from the episode:

I don’t believe that people are meant to be exposed to infinite, unfiltered, unlimited information. This idea from the 2010s that WikiLeaks dumping emails online, or releasing the Epstein files, is going to lead to any kind of enlightenment or clarity rather than just fuel more conspiracy is just completely insane. Truth and trust and social agreement are a product of authority, a product of someone saying, “this is what’s in bounds and this is what’s not, these are the rules of the road, the structures we agree on.” That depends on elites, it depends on authority, it depends on institutions.

And the way that social media—and I don’t think it’s just social media, this is an explicit project of Silicon Valley, they have always from the beginning, their ultimate aim has been to unseat the East Coast institutions, to unseat the “old world.” And they thought, and some of them like Jack Dorsey, who founded Twitter, that in a sort of left-anarchist way this would be a win for decentralized democracy and truth. But that ultimately that leads to Elon Musk; Jack Dorsey’s Twitter leads to Elon Musk’s Twitter. It leads to a total vacuum of authority and structure and it being filled by an authoritarian crazy guy.

I don’t know what you do about that; I guess I’m kind of okay with Platform Temperance in the sense that, maybe it works that we just stigmatize these tech companies and social media and the crap they currently produce and the way they’re forcing that on us—as much as possible, and make everyone hate them and think they’re bad, or think that phones and social media are bad for you. Maybe on balance that’s a good thing if people feel a little bit guilty about scrolling on their phone and at least try not to do it.

But personally, the thing that has the strongest evidence and is most persuasive to me is that these platforms have seized a part of the public commons and the public information infrastructure that they have no right to, that they should have to earn the right to, or that the political community should have the authority to structure or revoke if they don’t handle it in a responsible way. So like, people have hated the media for decades, and one of the most common, low-information voter things to believe about the media is that it’s divisive—intentionally divisive and sensationalist, which maybe is not wrong. We have to remember that these attention logics have always been part of the media, they’re not entirely new.

So I wonder if it’s something like that, if we can say, “Facebook is bad because it is making money off of dividing people. It has designed a technology that gives Facebook more money when people are divided and argue and hate each other.” And that’s not what any of us want, why would let that happen? To me that’s a more persuasive case than, like, “Facebook is addicting you like tobacco companies addicted you to cigarettes,” but maybe I’m making too fine of a distinction, maybe just stigmatizing them in general is enough.