I think that politics has always been susceptible to conversion so that it’s not actually about living people it’s about signaling membership within a particular community.
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What I’ve seen as a founder of MoveOn is that we’ve become increasingly polarized. And in fact we have gotten to the point where we have separate…realities? when it comes to a whole raft of facts. And so how can we possibly make good decisions together when we don’t even share basic facts? You first have to have a relationship, and you have to have shared values.
We’ve got two paradoxical trends happening at the same time. The first is what I call in my book “the cult of the social,” the idea that on the network, everything has to be social and that the more you reveal about yourself the better off you are. So if your friends could know what your musical taste is, where you live, what you’re wearing, what you’re thinking, that’s a good thing, this cult of sharing. So that’s one thing that’s going on. And the other thing is an increasingly radicalized individualism of contemporary, particularly digital, life. And these things seem to sort of coexist, which is paradoxical and it’s something that I try to make sense of in my book.