In 2011, around the time of the Arab Spring, Maria Ressa believed that social media would aid grassroots movements and revolutions. A decade later, she wrote:
“Social media’s instantaneous nature had accelerated the speed at which the revolutions had taken place. Authoritarian governments couldn’t keep up or control the messaging because those protest movements were modeled on the networks of the web: loose, nonhierarchical, leaderless. Dictators didn’t know whom to arrest; there were no political parties to tear apart, no underground revolt to dismantle. This was the people, and any government that fought its people would ultimately fail.
I cringe now when I remember that presentation. Those very same developments I welcomed in 2011 would soon be fine-tuned by the platforms’ business models, co-opted by state power, and turned against the people, fueling the rise of digital authoritarians, the death of facts, and the insidious mass manipulation we live with today.”
— Maria Ressa. How to Stand up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future. New York: HarperCollins, 2022. p. 105.
Maria Ressa is awesome. She won a Nobel Prize in 2021 for safeguarding freedom of expression.
This sounds similar but isn't
In 2023, Yascha Mounk recalled:
“In the spring of 2014, I taught a first-year seminar called ‘Democracy in the Digital Age’ at Harvard University. My understands came from every state in the country and many parts of the world. They were planning on majoring in every subject from history to physics. But they also had a few things in common: they were smart, ambitious, unfailingly polite, and deeply convinced that the internet would make the world a better place.
It is now difficult to remember to what extent the conviction that the internet and social media were forces for good had been nurtured by virtually everything my students read as they went through middle and high schools. This positive view first took shape in the late 1990s, when a few writers made a name for themselves as internet evangelists.”
— Yascha Mounk. The Identity Trap. Penguin, 2023. Chapter 5, “The Identity Synthesis Goes Mainstream.”
It may sound similar to Ressa's recollection. However, Mounk, for the record, blames people who began identifying too strongly as members of certain groups, like race and gender. He goes on to blame Tumblr users specifically. Tumblr, founded in 2007, "quickly became a place for its predominantly teenage users to experiment with new identities," at first as music and TV shows, then "to explore their gender and sexual orientation," then to promote anorexia. Citing Katherine Dee, whom he identifies as "a culture writer who has interviewed more than a hundred early users of Tumblr about the role it played in their lives," he writes that
"Tumblr developed wondrously protean properties: a heartfelt manifesto or even a casual joke could become the kernel of an entirely new identity. Tumblr was where new ways of describing one's own sexual orientation (like 'demisexual'), new ways of referring to one's ethnic identity (like 'Latinx'), and new ways of thinking about one's gender (like 'libragender') first reached a large audience."
He then quotes Dee: These days, "for every strange (or even just unfamiliar) proclamation about identity...there's a Tumblr post from the early 2010s introducing the concept."
Mounk goes on to say that on early Tumblr there reigned a version of "standpoint epistemology" in which it was "an article of faith that members of dominant groups, like whites or heterosexuals, could not in any meaningful way understand the experiences of members of disadvantaged groups," allowing individual members of those disadvantaged groups to "claim special authority" even if "most members of that group" would disagree with them, and there also reigned a version of "intersectionality" in which "each group...define[d] a correct set of views in its area of presumed competence while demanding unquestioned fealty to that new orthodoxy from everyone else."
This drew my attention because I recognized the Tumblr complaint from J.K. Rowling's anti-trans apologia via a podcast series, about which I wrote at length ("I’m disappointed in the ‘Witch Trials’," 16-min read).
So I looked up who Katherine Dee is, and indeed, she's anti-trans (they call themselves "sex realists" these days) and writes for anti-trans publications. This is indeed the same complaint against Tumblr that Rowling was pushing when she alleged that Tumblr was the origin of (::waves hands::) all the transness.
Mounk's concern is that "Tumblr proved to be at the vanguard of the internet" in at least one way, as "one of the first online spaces in which users regularly experienced a sudden and dramatic fall from grace on the basis of some minor violation of ever-shifting community norms." By the early 2010s, "Tumblr ideology had reached an important milestone: its offshoots were now so visible and influential that even relative 'normies' like me were starting to stumble across them."
People remember different things about internet optimism
And they do different things with it.