I think there are unintended consequences to almost every action. Unanticipated results. "Pluck a flower, kill a star." Social media may yet destroy Western society. J. Haidt has an interesting piece in The Atlantic. Yet Russia's hackers seem to have been very successful in achieving their ends of disrupting Western society in general and our 2016 election in particular, and to sew deep division overall, via social media. They seem to be achieving their goal. But perhaps we cannot see the end since we are still in the middle. Maybe the better example of unintended consequences is Putin's war against the West and in Ukraine, at least for the moment. He must be very surprised if he is aware of what he has caused.
Thank you for taking the time to clarify. I sometimes am foiled by assumptions I have held without noticing and it is always good to be nudged out of them.
Russia did not change our society--IOW, that was not their goal. They took advantage of what our society IS.
Creating chaos, distrust, and division is easy... and democracies are weak in that they can only tolerate so much division and distrust before they collapse. If you want to destroy a society, the reality is that you do not have to do much--it will tend to fall apart by itself over time as the various groups separate themselves from each other (a natural tendency) and each pursues what it perceives to be their own interests.
It takes a LOT of work to maintain a society and you can't ever stop working on maintaining it.
None of this happens fast (we have been working our way to where we are basically since the 60s, in terms of proximate causes).
What I present here is a particular narrative, based upon MY reading, observation, and thought over the last 30 years or so. There are biases in it and blind spots--I don't pretend to fully understand any of this. I don't think anyone fully understands all of this.
I think there are unintended consequences to almost every action. Unanticipated results. "Pluck a flower, kill a star." Social media may yet destroy Western society. J. Haidt has an interesting piece in The Atlantic. Yet Russia's hackers seem to have been very successful in achieving their ends of disrupting Western society in general and our 2016 election in particular, and to sew deep division overall, via social media. They seem to be achieving their goal. But perhaps we cannot see the end since we are still in the middle. Maybe the better example of unintended consequences is Putin's war against the West and in Ukraine, at least for the moment. He must be very surprised if he is aware of what he has caused.
Thank you for taking the time to clarify. I sometimes am foiled by assumptions I have held without noticing and it is always good to be nudged out of them.
Russia did not change our society--IOW, that was not their goal. They took advantage of what our society IS.
Creating chaos, distrust, and division is easy... and democracies are weak in that they can only tolerate so much division and distrust before they collapse. If you want to destroy a society, the reality is that you do not have to do much--it will tend to fall apart by itself over time as the various groups separate themselves from each other (a natural tendency) and each pursues what it perceives to be their own interests.
It takes a LOT of work to maintain a society and you can't ever stop working on maintaining it.
None of this happens fast (we have been working our way to where we are basically since the 60s, in terms of proximate causes).
What I present here is a particular narrative, based upon MY reading, observation, and thought over the last 30 years or so. There are biases in it and blind spots--I don't pretend to fully understand any of this. I don't think anyone fully understands all of this.
:)