We are building a generation of yes-men

As a millennial, I’m a product of the internet age.

For many of us millennials, coming of age amid the social media revolution, it felt like the barriers of entry into public discourse were collapsing. In the olden days, competition for limited space in newspapers meant that few writers could build audiences or be heard. Information was scarce and inaccessible, requiring hours of toil in physical libraries to find answers to basic questions.

In the Internet age, all these constraints suddenly disappeared. With the aid of online blogs and tweets, any writer anywhere could easily broadcast their views to the rest of the world, sometimes reaching millions of readers, and even presidents, prime ministers, and policymakers. Information became readily available at the touch of a button. Perhaps just as importantly, distant people around the world could mobilise based on shared beliefs.

The political impact of these trends became almost immediately tangible. Through the late 2000s and early 2010s, the world saw a proliferation of democratic protests and movements, as young people everywhere clamoured for freedom and fairness. It happened in the United States, where the Occupy Wall Street protests followed the Great Recession. In India, anti-corruption protestors marched through New Delhi after a wave of scandals. It even happened in the Middle East, where the Arab Spring quickly toppled longstanding autocrats across Libya, Egypt, and Tunisia.

In 2011, Time magazine captured this universal march for liberation by naming a faceless protester its Person of the Year and hailing their use of technology to connect across geographies. “This year,” Time wrote, “instead of plugging in the headphones, entering an Internet-induced fugue state and quietly giving in to hopelessness, [the protestors] used the Internet to find one another and take to the streets.” But in celebrating the connectivity induced by social media, what we missed was the disconnection it equally wrought.

In the pre-Internet age, public debate and discourse may have been restricted to a tiny, educated elite. But those who did partake in debate were also forced to engage with opinions that flew against their own. Village elders in the public square and senators in parliament had to establish their following by arguing against the substance of opposing views. Media outlets were limited in number and covered all sides of the debate in their reportage.

The social media age expanded the public square by giving more people a platform. But it also created ideological silos and echo chambers. Instead of a large, noisy public square where a plethora of ideas and opinions mingled freely, social media allowed people to form isolated rooms full of folks like themselves. Contrarian thinkers were often publicly humiliated and then expelled, until they too found a room full of like-minded people.

In more recent years, entire social media platforms have become echo chambers. As ideologues get banned on various platforms, they have gone on to form new ideologically sanitised platforms of their own. Democratic populism has validated these impulses: When an ideology gains sizeable support from the voters, it declares itself supreme and considers debate unnecessary (because, electorally, it is).

This treatment of public discourse – like a game of football – has formed sharp divides within and between countries. Commentators, analysts, and even the common citizenry now fall into neat boxes, each filled with people holding the same predictable views on nearly every topic. There can now be few patriots criticising the government, few rebels agreeing with it, and few hawks arguing against war or for peace.

This polarisation has several perverse consequences. For one, when an ideology is in power, it is liable to govern poorly since it faces little internal dissent. Even in democracies with robust State institutions, electoral success for any one party can have damaging results, as contrarian ideas are violently suppressed.

Second, as people adopt uncompromising positions, common ground between different parties and ideological groups rapidly vanishes. When ideological groups are so neatly defined, leaders who dissent with their party on any issue become traitors. That not only discourages dissent – it also reinforces the idea that rival parties are enemies since dialogue is not possible.

To be sure, finding your echo chamber on the internet is a great feeling. It’s far more pleasant to be surrounded by people who share your views, anger or biases than to argue and debate. But the truth is that in large nations, millions of people will never truly agree on most things, so different ideologies must debate, compromise, and find a middle line.

Social media might be giving us a voice for our views, but it is paradoxically also building a generation of yes-men.

The writer is a student of all things global and, self-confessedly, master of none, notwithstanding his Columbia Master’s, a stint with the UN and with monarchs in the Middle East.