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One insight I've derived from my reading of Arendt, but which is certainly not unique to her, is that people need a common world in which they can appear and be seen and act. So much of what we call the attention economy exploits precisely this need. 1/x https://twitter.com/kevinroose/status/1351970722319532032
Mass society in the 20th century created conditions of anonymity, rootlessness, and loneliness, which Arendt famously argued was the seedbed of totalitarianism. 2/
Digital media, especially social media, appeared to address this alienation. Faced with a world in which they did not matter, individuals could enter “worlds” in which they did. 3/x
But these “worlds” were not created equally. None could, I don’t think, fully satisfy the primal human desire for belonging. The worst of them have left their members in a far worse state. 4/x
These latter “worlds” can have disastrous consequences, transforming the need to belong into a need to exclude, cultivating hate, inciting violence, or defrauding their members. 5/x
The answer to this is cannot simply be to shut down these corrupting and radicalizing "worlds." It is to somehow rebuild a social world in which a person, in their particularity, can matter, in which they can act meaningfully. 6/6
Postscript: The alternatives, as Arendt well knew, only get more grim. https://twitter.com/JaneLytv/status/1351989803642974209
