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Populism, Media Revolutions, and Our Terrible Moment

2024-11-22 · explainer · Hank · 33:57 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Internet & YouTube (also: History & curiosities, US politics & society) · mode: News analysis · tags: timely hook, heavy topic

Hank argues that every media revolution (the printing press, radio, now the many-to-many social internet) brings a rise of reckless, anti-establishment populism, which he calls a marketing strategy rather than an ideology; the internet now devours trust in institutions, expertise and the press, and he asks how to shorten the slow road back to a world where better information wins.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Hank's aim to explain the moment; his son will grow up in a world fractured as not for 500 years

  • ★★ Hank argues his eight-year-old son, probably alive in 2100, will have a historically weird life in a world fractured by circumstances unseen for more than 500 years. — 00:00:29 · Orin Green

00:00:58 — Radio in the Depression, Father Coughlin, Hitler; populism as marketing; FDR takes Coughlin off the air

  • ★★ Hank says radio was invented in the 1890s, many homes had radios only from the 1920s, and by the 1930s they were cheap and easy to get. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ Hank says radio was the first time one person's voice could reach millions in real time, arriving during the Great Depression when people had good reasons to be dissatisfied. — 00:01:25
  • ★ Hank says Germany was hit hard by paying World War I reparations, though how much that contributed is apparently debated by historians. (hedged) — 00:01:54
  • ★★ Hank says radio beat newspapers at feeding the demand for blame: cheap, no literacy needed, magical, and at first with few legal and no mental regulations or norms. — 00:02:52
  • ★★ Hank says Father Coughlin, an early radio preacher attacking elites, banks and Jews, drew millions of listeners and spoke of Hitler with great appreciation. — 00:03:51
  • ★★★ Hank says a rise in populism follows pretty much every media revolution. — 00:04:23

  • ★★★ Hank argues populism begins not as an ideology but as marketing: I see your real problems and who causes them, and if you listen to me we will solve them. — 00:04:23

    “Populism is not an ideology, it's a marketing strategy.”

  • ★★ Hank says populism sometimes becomes the policy itself (name the bad guys, get rid of them), as with Father Coughlin and Nazi Germany. — 00:04:53

  • ★★ Hank says Coughlin urged US cooperation with Nazi Germany and attacked FDR and Jews; as tensions rose, the public and government got stations to drop his broadcasts. — 00:05:22
  • ★★ Hank thinks FDR's move to keep Coughlin off the radio, justified by radio's limited spectrum, was a fairly clear violation of freedom of speech. — 00:05:22

00:06:11 — Trump as product of a post-media-revolution populism; centralizing radio and TV versus the decentralizing internet

  • ★★★ Hank says Trump is a product of a post-media-revolution rise in populism, with grievances, attacks on institutions and a new unregulated medium, without being the same as Coughlin or Hitler. — 00:06:11 · Donald Trump
  • ★★ Hank says radio is not the best analogy for the internet: radio and TV, costly and tightly regulated, centralize, while the internet decentralizes. — 00:06:40
  • ★★ Hank says centralizing TV helped bring America together but silenced marginal voices; it later fractured into Fox News on the right and MSNBC on the left. — 00:07:09

00:08:08 — The printing press, Martin Luther's pamphlets, his recklessness, Erasmus, the Reformation

  • ★★ Hank says Johannes Gutenberg invented Europe's movable-type press to end hand-copying; early demand was mostly from powerful institutions, largely the Catholic Church. — 00:08:08 · Europe
  • ★★ Hank says printers profited from Martin Luther's cheap pamphlets while Luther, like everyone on Twitter, made no money from them. — 00:09:06 · Twitter
  • ★★ Hank says Luther seems to have found that more inflammatory writing sold more pamphlets; he calls him a social media influencer who was not chill. (hedged) — 00:10:05 · social media
  • ★★ Hank says Luther hated Jews, called the Pope the Antichrist, and urged landowners to kill rebelling peasants; 100,000 to 300,000 were killed. — 00:10:34
  • ★★ Hank says the 16th-century Catholic Church was worse than Luther: very bad, pretty evil. — 00:11:03
  • ★★ Hank says Luther was also an exceptional theologian whose good arguments explain his popularity then and now. — 00:11:03
  • ★★ Hank says the pamphlet war was much more of a Twitter screaming match than he imagined; Erasmus's last letter blamed Luther's arrogant personality for a fatal dissension. — 00:11:45 · Twitter
  • ★★★ Hank says Luther, Father Coughlin, Donald Trump and other anti-establishment populists who rose after media revolutions share one trait: recklessness. — 00:12:18 · Donald Trump
  • ★★ Hank, who has a big platform and is often terrified of saying something wrong or harmful, finds it hard to understand Luther, who could not stop talking despite the deaths. — 00:12:47

00:13:16 — The recurring pattern: imperfect institutions, a media revolution, left and right populism, many-to-many communication and algorithms

  • ★★ Hank says the printing press did not cause the Reformation alone (literacy was needed too) but was an important piece; the Reformation shaped all later European history. — 00:13:16
  • ★★★ Hank says the pattern repeats: imperfect institutions plus any media revolution bring a rise in populism, helped by problems like post-pandemic inflation, indulgences or the Depression. — 00:13:45
  • ★★ Hank says populism does not map onto today's left and right: left-wing populism blames the wealthy, right-wing an out-group, and as marketing they blend. — 00:14:44
  • ★★ Hank says current American populism is clearly from the right-wing party, with a sting of socialistic populism, aimed at cultural elites. — 00:14:44
  • ★★★ Hank says anti-establishment populism now was inevitable, given imperfect systems, people's poor situations and an intense decentralized media revolution. — 00:15:13
  • ★★★ Hank says the shift to authoritarians is an internet phenomenon, not a post-COVID one: you cannot imagine Donald Trump without Twitter. — 00:15:41 · COVID-19 pandemic, Donald Trump, Twitter
  • ★★ Hank says today's bureaucracies are better than in the 1930s but imperfect, with real problems like easy unhealthy food and hard-to-get medical care and childcare. — 00:15:41
  • ★★★ Hank says print let the less powerful reach many and radio let one reach millions, but the social internet lets everyone reach everyone, unprecedented and without tools to cope. — 00:16:28 · social media
  • ★★★ Hank says many-to-many communication plus algorithms rewarding the best attention-grabbers flip things, because there are few legal regulations and none in our minds. — 00:16:58 · recommender system
  • ★★ Hank contrasts a reporter's six months and a bureaucrat's four years with RFK Jr., who would attack the FDA across platforms and podcasts within a day, prioritizing views. (playful) — 00:17:27 · YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok
  • ★★ Hank says a good way to win views is telling ordinary people that powerful institutions prey on them; after a communication revolution minds are open to such spells. — 00:17:56 · recommender system
  • ★★ Hank says he knows two brothers who have used everyone-to-everyone communication, he hopes not as recklessly as some. (playful, hedged) — 00:18:26 · John Green, Hank Green
  • ★★★ Hank says an attention-optimized system selects what sticks, true or not; the compelling populist story is that bad people designed the systems to help the undeserving. — 00:19:07

00:19:43 — Society built on trust; an editing aside on the press and its lost business model; individuals versus institutions

  • ★★ Hank repeats his saying that on today's internet, any content that will be consumed will be created. — 00:19:43

    “Any content that will be consumed will be created.”

  • ★★★ Hank says society is built on trust: nobody can know everything, so we trust those who understand roads, voting and clinical trials; sharing that labor got humans here. — 00:19:43

  • ★★★ In an editing aside Hank adds that trust needs checks: the press has incentives to find abuses and, to protect its reputation, to avoid errors, hence journalism ethics. — 00:20:12
  • ★★ Hank says trust in the press is now easy to destroy, compounded by the internet destroying its business model and the loss of an institution good at explaining the world. — 00:21:54
  • ★★ Hank says individuals' credibility is harder to destroy than institutions': his video on Elon Musk's many errors in one day did little harm to Musk's reputation. — 00:22:24

00:23:42 — The internet as a machine that devours trust; deserved versus easy reputational harm; the creator-algorithm-audience loop

  • ★★★ Hank says Luther had a deserving target, but now everything is a target: the internet devours trust in each other, institutions, expertise, tradition and democracy. — 00:23:42

    “the internet is less a machine that devours corruption and more a machine that devours trust”

  • ★★ Hank does not think the destruction of trust will stop getting worse soon, would love to be proved wrong, and allows it may be less bad than he thinks. (hedged) — 00:24:12

  • ★★ Hank says where trust is destroyed, people turn to individuals they trust rather than knowledgeable institutions, giving power without the ability to use it well. — 00:24:12
  • ★★ Hank doubts the lesson that everybody must now do populism: he admits being one of the elites, but sometimes popular things suck. — 00:24:55
  • ★★★ Hank proposes two factors in reputational harm ('cancelling') to experts and institutions: how much it is deserved, and how easy it is to inflict, only loosely connected. — 00:25:25
  • ★★ Hank thinks whatever makes building new homes so much harder in blue states than red states deserves to be named and shamed. — 00:25:54
  • ★★ Hank says the measles vaccine and FDA rules on raw milk are easy to attack but the evidence says they don't deserve cancelling; he worries systems are being cancelled. — 00:25:54 · vaccine
  • ★★ Hank lists institutions suddenly almost equally under reputational attack, from the CDC, FDA, EPA, schools and the press to Ukraine, NATO, voting machines, chemotherapy and fluoridation. — 00:26:23 · Europe, chemotherapy
  • ★★★ Hank says, from his own world, there is a feedback cycle between creators, recommendation systems and audiences: the system shows what works and creators do it. — 00:26:52 · recommender system
  • ★★ Hank says viewers follow creators down the hole, from mild suspicion of impenetrable systems to certainty that every lost election is fraudulent. — 00:27:14
  • ★★ Hank says groups less aligned with existing systems do best here, his bureaucracy-staffing group worse, and he is very suspicious of charismatic people claiming only they can be trusted. — 00:27:44

00:28:09 — What to do: explain systems, admit real failures, speedrun past the wars of religion, communicate like a human with allegiance to truth

  • ★★ Hank, glad not to be a politician, says his job is making things that help people understand things, since impenetrably complex systems are easier to attack. — 00:28:09
  • ★★★ Hank urges those able to make systems less complex and better; otherwise we need technologies that explain society's mechanisms well and are not seen as hyperpartisan. — 00:28:38
  • ★★ Hank says some systems are ripe for cancellation for bad reasons, like people's dislike of needles making injections seem bad. — 00:29:24 · vaccine
  • ★★ Hank says college prices have risen for 50 years, saddling students with lifelong debt, and over half of students with debt never get a degree: bad, and our fault to fix. — 00:29:24
  • ★★ Hank asks whether we can speedrun this: after print came 200 years of religious wars, and for 100 of them the second best-seller after the Bible was a witch-burning manual. — 00:29:53
  • ★★ Hank says witches were long the populist target, with hundreds of thousands murdered, yet now witches are an adorable folksy thing in our culture. — 00:30:23
    • check: hundreds of thousands — doubtful
  • ★★ Hank says Luther's German was translated into other languages while the Church published only in Latin, which most people could neither read nor speak. — 00:30:52
  • ★★★ Hank sees a parallel in leaders sticking to authoritative news outlets rather than accessible ones like Joe Rogan's; they must act human, less on stage with Beyonce. — 00:31:21

  • ★★★ Hank says we need good communicators with an allegiance to truth, which is harder because there is one truth and infinite lies, and grifters on Reels move faster. — 00:31:50

    “there's only one truth while there are infinite lies”

  • ★★★ Hank says that as we learn to resist the new media's spells, as we always eventually do, those with better information tend to win out eventually; the question is how long. — 00:32:19

  • ★★ Hank says the gap between the Reformation and the Enlightenment was more than 150 years. — 00:32:19
  • ★★★ Hank says it seems important that our path be much shorter than that, so we should focus on that. — 00:32:19
  • ★★ Hank says the video is heavily inspired and informed by Jeff Jarvis' The Gutenberg Parenthesis, which he suggests to anyone, and draws a lot on the book Wrong and on Renee DiResta's Invisible Rulers. — 00:32:40

00:32:48 — Bibliography: High Conflict, How Minds Change, Cheap Speech

  • ★★ Hank recommends High Conflict by Amanda Ripley, which informs everything he does: probably the most important book anyone can read. — 00:33:03
  • ★★ Hank also recommends How Minds Change by David McRaney. — 00:33:03
  • ★★ Hank recommends Cheap Speech by Richard Hasen on speech, read about two years ago, while disagreeing with parts of all these books. — 00:33:03

In the description and comments

  • ★★ The description's bibliography also lists The Gutenberg Parenthesis and Invisible Rulers. — video description
  • ★★ The description says that if all trust is destroyed, reality matters less and people pick the reality they prefer, what Renee DiResta calls 'Bespoke Realities'. — video description
  • ★★ The description says putting the pieces back together will take time but will bring a better world, though most days Hank thinks it will take forever. — video description
  • ★ In a channel comment Hank says John read the script and gave him a lot of feedback on the section a viewer commented on. — creator comment · John Green
  • ★ Replying to a viewer about Coughlin, Hank's comment says hate speech is very explicitly protected by the First Amendment. — creator comment

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Catholic Church · Charles Coughlin · distrust of expertise · Donald Trump · journalism · Martin Luther · populism · printing press · Radio · recommender system · Reformation · social media

Also: People: Adolf Hitler · Beyoncé · Elon Musk · Erasmus · Franklin Delano Roosevelt · Joe Rogan · Johannes Gutenberg · Orin Green · Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Works: Bible · Cheap Speech · High Conflict · How Minds Change · Invisible Rulers · The Gutenberg Parenthesis · Wrong

Organizations: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention · Facebook · Food and Drug Administration · Fox News · Instagram · MSNBC · NATO · TikTok · Twitter · United Nations · United States Environmental Protection Agency · YouTube

Concepts: Age of Enlightenment · antisemitism · authoritarianism · cancel culture · chemotherapy · division of cognitive labour · electoral fraud · fact-checking · freedom of speech · higher education · housing crisis · inflation · influencer · Latin · Lutheranism · nationalism · raw milk · socialism · television · vaccine · water fluoridation · witch hunt

Places: Europe · Germany · Nazi Germany · Ukraine

Events: COVID-19 pandemic · European wars of religion · German Peasants' War · Great Depression · World War I

Memes: Hawk Tuah

Only in the description or credits: Amanda Ripley · David McRaney · First Amendment to the United States Constitution · Jeff Jarvis · Renée DiResta · Richard L. Hasen

Also centred on distrust of expertise: Can You Trust Mainstream Media?

Also centred on journalism: Does "The Press" Hate YouTube? · Why We Stopped Making Explainers: EXPLAINED · A Lie I Heard this Week

Also centred on populism: Just Some Election Thoughts… · My Big 2026 Prediction is...Not Fun

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