I am sure people are behind these decisions, but I am also sure they know that stuff like this gets clicks. Clicks generate traffic. Traffic generates revenue. Hate clicks generate the most traffic and so the most revenue. News sites are now specializing in outrageous content that gets the most clicks and that most often is caused by hate clicks.

Those hate clicks then get shared online, fed into algorithms, and recirculated to increase the hate and increase the traffic. Clickbait headlines compound the issue and for good measure outrageous videos and cute puppies pile on too.

I have been thinking a lot about all of this after seeing two separate and unrelated, but very connected, pieces this past Friday. The first is this katherine Miller essay at BuzzFeed on how the 2010s broke our sense of time. The second is the Georgetown University Battleground survey where in a majority of voters think we are headed towards a civil war. In fact, the average voter thinks we are two-thirds of the way to the “edge” of a civil war.

We no longer live chronologically online. We live algorithmically. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the rest of the internet now shows us content in a timeline designed to increase our interaction and increase our clicks. It has taken us out of chronology.The algorithm feeds the fire. The screens we are connected to make it worse. Teen suicide has started climbing significantly since the introduction of the iPhone — that moment we can precisely calculate the nation’s screen time addiction truly began. It was not long after that the nation started living in perpetual angst. People used the blame the twenty-four hour news cycle, but now we have the algorithmic news cycle where news from two years ago can become part of the twenty-hours to drive more anxiety and outrage.

None of this is healthy for society and social media companies do have to share some of the burden for taking us out of chronology and putting us into algorithms designed not truly to show us new and interesting stuff, but instead designed to keep us on sites and in services.

Add to all of this the decreasing tolerance for grace and the situation is spiraling chaotically towards violence. Each of us is now defined by the worst thing we have done, which is helpfully recirculated by others on social media. There is no need to improve or grow up because we will never be credited with improvement or growing up when one person with a social media audience can tie us back to the worst thing we have done. College athletes are now routinely destroyed for things they did as teenagers.

There is, of course, a cure for this, but it is one no one has incentive to provide when everyone and everything is now anchored in the digital. Perhaps Northern California can get a taste of it as it goes dark.

Get offline and into your community. Scripture says to seek the welfare of the city in which you are in exile and there you will find your welfare. But too few are doing that because the city has no algorithm. It has something worse — physical human beings. We would all rather stay online in digital communities we have created filled with user names and avatars that look and think like us and share the same interests and feelings. The same algorithms fuel our angst, worries, fears, and occasional hopes.

Unplugging, however, may be our only hope. Our Facebook friend is not going to bring us dinner when we are sick or water our flowers when we are gone. The actual, live human being next door to us just might.
Progressives and conservatives need to get offline, spend way more time in their own communities, and both must decide to be okay with the other’s community looking and behaving differently, but behaving chronologically.