La Generalista

Wrote a little thing for my friends at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace:

Tankies do illustrate some of the ways that Twitter hurts political discourse, however. The fact that a couple thousand people can terrorize large segments of left Twitter demonstrates that the discussion platform is a huge force multiplier for loud extremists with lots of free time. A couple thousand people is absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of electoral politics, but when they’re all screaming at you in your mentions, it feels like a vast army. Twitter’s political function is to gather bands of like-minded crazies from all over the world and concentrate them directly into the mindspace of journalists and politicians. We should really have a deep and long conversation about whether this is a healthy thing for any society.