"Comments" vs. emails, and more on incrementalism (Across the Sundering Seas #31)
This week, a two-part note: an exchange with a reader, picking up on some of the themes from last week (very lightly edited); and some early reflections on this kind of “commenting”—i.e. emails back and forth. (But in the opposite order, because when I edited this, that seemed right.)
1. On “comments” and email
One of the great joys of writing a newsletter (as of blogging, when it is carried out in certain ways—as in this recent exchange: 1, 2) is this kind of response. It is the thing that internet comments can be at their best: thoughtful interactions that challenge our original formulations and help us to think better. Unfortunately, that kind of interaction is rare. Far too rare. When I wrote Breaking Up With Social Media, I quoted Craig Mod:
I think we’ll look back with shock on many “fundamentals” of the internet as it exists today. I’m still amazed that any private organization would allow unfiltered public commenting. I remain totally unconvinced of its benefits. Twitter, in this sense, is just insanity — an endless stream of public comment posturing and signaling and, largely, screaming. Dumb dumb. Basic ’net folly 101.
This is the internet in a nutshell: the best kinds of things that happen on it are genuinely wonderful. Exchanges that wouldn’t happen otherwise! But the other side of the coin is that “dumb dumb” quality: “an endless straem of public comment posturing and signaling and, largely, screaming.” The way forward must be something that preserves those goods while diminishing those evils: because this genie is not going back in the bottle any more than the printing press did. (I say that as someone who thinks we can say “no” to technologies far more than most folks in my line of work do; I am, as I noted last week, not a technological inevitabilist. But this cat is out of the bag and has now had more than a few litters.)
I suspect one of the reasons that the form of the newsletter is seeing a resurgence is that it is conversational, but in a way that doesn’t incentivize the screaming. For one thing, subscribers are not (usually) hate-subscribing. Drive-by-readings of newsletters are not impossible, but they are rarer than drive-by-readings of blog posts, much less drive-by-readings-of-(re)tweets. They also have two other factors which make them a bit friendlier to good conversation: first, that they land in your inbox; and second, that they welcome a response—but only to the author.
That they land in your inbox changes the feel of the thing. It is not someone broadcasting into a void, come to read it who may. (RSS changes that dynamic… but only slightly.) It is instead a note sent to, and really sent only to, those who have asked to receive it. It is in that way more personal. It’s like getting a letter, a little bit of, well, electronic mail. That is reinforced by the fact that I do know a fair number of you who read.
That replies are not broadcast—cannot be broadcast—means those replies are in turn much less likely to be mere posturing and much more likely to be thoughtful and careful (and human!). The perverse incentives are (mostly) gone. The healthy incentives remain, perhaps even are strengthened. (There are still some perverse incentives for responding to people with massive audiences; but in the small… it’s much healthier. This, too, is worth remembering.) I hear from people I would never hear from otherwise, but without the influx of nonsense. Even the best open comment sections on the internet have an awful lot of un- and counterproductive back-and-forth, rambling arguments that go nowhere and produce all heat and no light. Email responses… have little of that. Even at their worst, they are easy to delete and ignore, to block and move on.
(Parts of this thought, heavily edited, may reappear in an essay I’m working on: one I actually intend to finish before the end of the year! In which I will make a careful case about when and how we should and shouldn’t operate in broadcast mode.)
2. The exchange
(Thanks to the reader for granting permission to excerpt the questions he sent back to me. It makes this a lot more interesting!)
[Are] you growing displeased with incrementalism as a whole (the downsides/failure modes are more often apparent than upsides/successes) or interested in ways of more carefully framing and shaping incremental actions along trajectories? If the former, what then do we do? If the latter, what are the ways you are suggesting?
…
I think incrementalism, by dint of its long focus, can be successful in the minor form for a long time while its practitioners still hold out hope that it will continue to work to change the system bit by bit. But it may, as you noted, be successful in the minor form for a long time and never get around to being successful in the major form.
I’m by no means becoming displeased with incrementalism. If anything, I’m more staunchly an incrementalist than I was even when a friend and I started Winning Slowly. So it’s the latter: that we need to be careful about framing and shaping incremental actions, with an eye to this failure mode.
But I’d say something slightly different than your summary: not only that the small changes don’t always add up to changing the whole system over time, but that sometimes those small changes can actively prevent the larger changes, if they’re ill-chosen.
(I also think incrementalists should be wary of universalizing incrementalism. MLK Jr.’s pointed rebuke of white people who wanted slower, gentler change comes to mind here, and seems to me to be exactly correct: there are kinds of calls for incrementalism which are actually merely defenses of the status quo, or a desire to preserve the comforts of certain people benefited by the present system. Abuse of a thing does not negate its proper use, of course, but it’s another point we should keep in mind.)
…at what point (generally speaking; all local conditions are unique in the specifics) should people working incremental strategies give up on a given incremental strategy and move to something else? Is there a point for individual incremental actions at which people should abandon an incremental action in progress as not working fast enough or trending toward not working? Is there is a general pattern? Or is every situation so unique that people just have to be wise about when to pull back from incrementalism and change strategies altogether?
I think those are the right questions, but I don’t feel remotely confident in any answers I could proffer. The one note I do feel comfortable adding here is that I think there’s one further distinction: between changing strategies within incrementalism and abandoning incrementalism in certain cases. The latter is much less commonly justified than radically-minded folks might suggest. But it is sometimes justified. Radical action on behalf of first slavery and later desegregation was justified—and frankly, far more radical action was justified than ended up being taken in the case of desegregation.
I don’t think incrementalism is necessarily sufficiently wisdom-forming in and of itself that it will lead to people recognizing when they should shift strategies, though I think it does tend to produce the virtue of endurance. It has to be held together with other virtues, including (e.g.) a commitment to justice, an ethic of love-of-neighbor, a resistance of ego, etc. (there are many others which are necessary). Indeed: without those there is a risk that incrementalists will tend to miss the times when incrementalism is to be abandoned (few though those may be).
Is one of the points of incrementalism perhaps then to help shape people’s opinions into the sort of people who care enough about a thing being incrementally achieved that they will break with incrementalism and take action when incrementalism isn’t working or isn’t working fast enough?
I don’t think incrementalism is necessarily sufficiently wisdom-forming in and of itself that it will lead to people recognizing when they should shift strategies, though I think it does tend to produce the virtue of endurance. It has to be held together with other virtues, including (e.g.) a commitment to justice, an ethic of love-of-neighbor, a resistance of ego, etc. (there are many others which are necessary). Indeed: without those there is a risk that incrementalists will tend to miss the times when incrementalism is to be abandoned (few though those may be).