TikTok Teens and K-Pop Stans Say They Sank Trump Rally.
Trump’s campaign was trolled by TikTok users in Tulsa.
After Trump rally falls flat, TikTok teens take a victory lap for fake reservation campaign
NYTimes, CNN, and NBC News Headlines
In the Platonic Dialogue, Protagoras, we meet a charismatic counterpart to the lifestyle-guru of today, the eponymous, Protagoras. He holds sway over a great crowd of influential Athenians and assorted listeners, whom he leads about in a crowd. So great is his hold that as he moves back and forth, the crowd parts for him like the red sea, dancing about him in synchrony. This greatly amuses Socrates who observes,
Nothing delighted me more than the precision of their movements: they never got into his way at all; but when he and those who were with him turned back, then the band of listeners parted regularly on either side; he was always in front, and they wheeled round and took their places behind him in perfect order.
Protagoras, Plato
It is clear from the moment that we meet him that Protagoras is a master of, what Alexander Hamilton called, the little arts of popularity. And this both the source of the central conflict in the dialogue and its cause. He is, as he claims to be, a merchant of knowledge, a purveyor of the undefined good of awareness, the creator of a self-proclaimed field of expertise that teaches “prudence in affairs private as well as public,”
Protagoras answered: Young man, if you associate with me, on the very first day you will return home a better man than you came, and better on the second day than on the first, and better every day than you were on the day before.
He is, in other words, a talking head and self-help guru all rolled into one. He is, in our modern context,
Protagoras, or Not Jordan Peterson†, seeks to teach people how to “order [their] house in the best manner”; or, to put it in more modern terms, to clean their room. Not Jordan Peterson also seeks to teach his pupils “to speak and act for the best in the affairs of the state,” i.e. how to be the top lobster to the benefit of themselves and others.
In the dialogue, the central issue raised by Socrates is whether such things can be taught, and whether they can be taught by someone who isn’t a specialist in any one thing. Or, rather what exactly are we gaining when we engage with such an individual. The debate devolves into whether or not virtues, in of themselves, are teachable (which they are), and it moves away from the observations about specialization and what we gain when we interact with someone who is an expert,
You are paying money to […] Hippocrates, […] tell me, what is he that you give him money? how would you have answered?
I should say, he replied, that I gave money to him as a physician.
And what will he make of you?
A physician, he said
While the majority of the dialogue focuses on pedagogy, i.e. whether such virtues can be taught and to what extent, the initial question is only tangentially addressed. However, this question may be the central question of our times. After all, what is it that we’re paying for when we flock to the modern Protagoras, Jordan Peterson? What do we gain when we engage with such personalities? What do we gain when we listen to a talking head on TV? What are they an expert in? What can they teach us?
Answering this question is difficult. Any expertise the talking head may have had often has very little to do with what they seek to opine on. The death of expertise has been breathlessly written about. Subject to treatises have been published by medical professionals, political theorists, public health experts, and climate scientists. Scholars have created a new field dedicated to the spread of misinformation and the perpetuation of ignorance. These works cannot be easily summarized. The authors drawn on many different threads to explain the rise of anti-intellectualism in the public sphere. Some of these threads focus on systemic incentives. Others on past missteps. Most on the listener and their relationship to the world around their selves. All of these threads are important. They are the threads that weave the whole.
However, the tapestry of ignorance could not be weaved without the crucial element that Plato seized upon two and a half thousand years ago,
there is far greater peril in buying knowledge than in buying meat and drink: the one you purchase of the wholesale or retail dealer, and carry them away in other vessels, and before you receive them into the body as food, you may deposit them at home and call in any experienced friend who knows what is good to be eaten or drunken, and what not, and how much, and when; and then the danger of purchasing them is not so great. But you cannot buy the wares of knowledge and carry them away in another vessel; when you have paid for them you must receive them into the soul and go your way, either greatly harmed or greatly benefited; and therefore we should deliberate and take counsel
Our modern world treats the Not Jordan Peterson and the talking head with neutrality. After all, it is not our job to interrogate its harms or benefits for our collective souls; it is up to the individual, the listener, to decide what to expel and what to retain. It is a practice that may work in theory, but in practice, we imbibe what we hear, and allow the blödsinn to shift our gestalt. What is heard cannot be unheard. What is thought cannot be unthought. What we consume informs what we become.
In this equivocation of nonsense with the profound, we have created an environment where reason alone cannot stand. An environment where someone well versed with the little arts of popularity can thrive. Is it any wonder that this this is an age filled with Not Jordan Petersons? An age where their embrace of rhetoric and the emptiness of argument drowns out the profound? Furthermore, in an age where the “leading intellectual” of the day is a Protagoras by another name, is it a surprise that meaningful public discourse is shifted by the culture of “trolling”?
Before we examine trolling, we must ask ourselves, what insight do we gain when we listen to Sean Hannity wax poetic once again? Listening to Hippocrates would have made us understand medicine, for it was his craft, but what is Hannity’s craft? His craft is the amplification of messages. He is not an expert in policy. He is not an expert in history. He is not an expert in sociology. He is not an expert in any of the fields he opines upon. Then again, neither are the Instagram Influencer, the Self-Help Gurus, or the Armchair Lawyers. And yet, we listen when they speak. We assume that they are simply entertaining us. Or, that we are listening to learn how the craft of popularity, while we imbibe what they say We do not reflect upon it. We do not question it. We simply incorporate it.
If we are the sum of our gifts, burdens, and experiences. Is it fair to assume that we can arbitrarily decide what to keep and what not to? It is a fallacy to assume that what is once heard can pass through us without influencing us. It is, in my eyes, truer to assume that these words impact us and shape us in subtle ways. As those well versed in advertising and propaganda know, repetition remodels reality.
Trolling is an acknowledgement of this reality. At some level, the troll understands the nature of this fallacy. The troll understands that what is once said in discourse cannot be unsaid. And uses this as a mechanism to inject – for good or ill – nonsense into our minds and lives. Once trolled, we cannot be untrolled. It is a parasitic strategy that drowns out the rest. In the “marketplace of ideas”, where there is no fundamental mechanism to sift between the ideas, the only winning strategy is to be the loudest or the most amplified idea. And that is trolling at its core.
There is no easy way out of here. Socrates and Plato may have decried the sophists, and found equal ground, but the modern kind have proliferated, and we cannot eliminate them from the discourse without sacrificing far more important principles. There is sadly, nothing systemic that can be done.
Such a defeatist attitude may be surprising. It would be easy to advocate for personal restraint and control over what the knowledge we consume, but these acts shift the onus back onto the listener and do little to change the structural incentives at play. The genie is out of the bottle. The best we can do at this point is to observe the golden rule,
Troll not, lest ye be trolled
† Note: I’ve used Peterson as an archetype of the “self-help guru” and the “talking head” paradigm. My heart goes out to his family over his recent medical problems, and I wish him a speedy recovery.
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