Connecting During Four Years of Chaos
Only connect.
—E.M. Forster, Howard’s End
Hermes the Trickster god, my buddy, voice of improv, is all about connection. Born as a demi-god, the offspring of Zeus with Maia, a mere nymph, his hybrid state is a constant reminder of their congress or connection. Creating the rites of sacrifice that unites the gods with humankind, Zeus makes him “messenger of the gods.” In myth after myth, his role is to connect the gods with one another and with humankind. “Only connect,” was the novelist E.M. Forster’s advice in his epigraph to Howard’s End, advice Hermes took long before the novel’s publication.
This at once darkest and most festive time of year, too, is a time of connection. And disconnection. A lot of ink has been spilled of late about how to deal with the Woke or MAGA devotee Uncle Benny around the Thanksgiving or Christmas holiday table. Get beyond politics, we are advised. Only connect, we are advised. But how?
The trauma of COVID’s forced isolation not yet behind us, we long for connection. For reasons I can’t explain I tend to avoid the telephone. But at the beginning of the lockdown, I reached out to a friend and had a long, lovely chat. Afterwards, I wisely announced to myself — drumroll — that the remedy for this prolonged isolation would depend on staying in touch with friends. Full of that wisdom, I returned to composing Winging It: Improv’s Power and Peril in the Time of Trump, and the wisdom was all but lost. I hope it was worth it, but who can say? It depends upon my success in connecting to readers.
When, by the way, did this metaphor become almost universal for the act of picking up the Mr. Bell’s device? Behind “reaching out” surely lies the metaphor of outstretched arms ready for an embrace — exactly what a telephone call can only do metaphorically. It is a metaphor for our longing to connect, and to connect warmly.
Such is the warm connection famed comedienne Julia Louis-Dreyfus longs for during Kara Swisher's recent On podcast (Nov. 5, 2024). She states:
The key is connect, connect, connect. I don't mean plug your computer in. I mean connect with human beings. There's everything to be said for community and everything not to be said about isolation. We're in a land of isolation now which is paralyzing and toxic. So, I think there's nothing but value in finding ways to take action to connect with other people. I think people are desperate for it, desperate, desperate for it.
Decidedly for Louis-Dreyfus warm connection is not to be found by plugging into our computers and our social media. Yet that is just what social media’s “like” and “friends” buttons hollowly promise.
What butters social media’s bread is the sociometry of its users. Sociometry tracks and measures how people are linked and fed into the algorithms, in theory, fosters the pleasure of community engagement — connection.
The entrance to the Facebook/Meta campus: 1 Hacker Way
Mark Zuckerberg first used the term “social graph” in 2007 to refer to the network of members’ connections and relationships used by the algorithm to distribute our posts and to increase engagement. The like button was added two years later. Sociometry was off to the races and was soon winner of the internet Triple Crown: customer base, profitability, and social media dominance. Other social media adopted similar buttons.
History is full of ironies. Zuckerberg ripped off “social graph” from the Austrian psychiatrist J. L. Moreno who created the science of sociometry in the 1920s. Moreno is one of the godparents, of improv comedy, along with his friend Viola Spolin whom he influenced. Moreno’s biography is titled Impromptu Man. Moreno founded the Theatre of Spontaneity in Vienna in 1921 and soon brought it to New York City.
Moreno had a profound commitment to spontaneity. Moreno believed that “Spontaneity and creativity are the propelling forces in human progress,” and “that a super dynamic community” would be realized by improv games and by sociometry. A man on a mission to reengineer society, Moreno wasn’t motivated to monetize his improvisational techniques.
A Moreno sociogram which tabulates connections among students
Nor did Moreno anticipate the “friends” function or the “share” and “like” buttons which made billions for Facebook. Yes, ironically, the internet’s sometimes dark power — itself an improvisation — is rooted in the origins of modern improvisation and its founder’s vision of the healing improvisation could bring. In Zuckerberg’s hands it brought anything but social healing.
Sean Parker founded Napster in 1999 (beginning the ruination of the music industry) and by 2004 at age twenty-four became Facebook’s first president. His bank account stuffed with billions, he deserted from the social media cause, telling all as an insider/whistleblower. At the 2017Axios Summit, he warned that social media sought to “consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible” by offering “a social-validation feedback loop. . . exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”
Or, exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like Zuckerberg would exploit. The address of the Facebook campus is “1 Hacker Way.”
Moreno’s sociometry was a passive tabulation of personal connections the psychiatrist believed would relieve the atomizing isolation industrial society caused. Zuckerberg’s “friends” and “groups,” “likes” and “shares” actively supercharge it, exploiting our psychological vulnerabilities: the buttons provide a social-validation feedback loop which grabs our attention with dopamine hits. Social media were “passive” conduits —neutral vessels according to the “platforms” — yet jacked up society’s preexisting problems to 11.
For Esther Perel, author of many best-selling books on intimate relationships, social media hijack the meaning of “friend” and “like,” “connection” and “community.” Their buttons and the algorithms they enable empty the terms of all responsibility real connection entails. Connections which are innately complex, they render simple.
Social media may be “neutral vessels” — deeming themselves platforms, not publishers, under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (1996) in order to establish protection and shirk responsibility for all the harm we posters and their algorithms cause. Esther Perel would perhaps agree that the friendships they inspire are empty vessels. She calls social media the “new AI”: artificial intimacy.
The Challenge
Social media isn't going away, nor its ill effects. They hold a humongous pot of gold which the Citizens United decision allows them to funnel to Congress in truckloads to prevent the legislation we need to limit social media’s ill effects.
As the new Trump administration deploys social media to ill effect, disconnecting the tribes, the challenge is to use social media to good effect. Here are some rules to observe along the way.
First, don't forward things you haven’t read. The headlines, often just clickbait, don’t always capture the articles’ message. A keen observer called me out once, and I looked more closely at a piece I thought meant well. Shamefaced, I deleted my post.
Second, support those blogs, Substacks, and podcasts that support democracy. Democracy is a conversation. Honoring the messenger of the gods, let us converse. No better way to connect than through conversation.
Third, join communities that have an in-person piece to it. As Robert Putnam argues in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, social groups are much in decline. MAGA rallies start early, long before Mump arrives, because they are community gatherings. The Left needs to gather too. The Pink PussyHat March after the first Trump inaugural drew an estimated 500,000. Perhaps we should wear Mump rocket cone hats January 21, 2025 to honor to Musk-Trump dual presidency.
For the first Trump inaugural, in New Orleans we held a mock jazz funeral for a 10-foot papier-mâché Statue of Liberty. As Trump put his little hand on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible, we lowered Liberty’s articulated right arm and lifted her into a black coffin. We paraded her down Canal Street with a terrific jazz band to the banks of the Mississippi river where we strewed funereal flowers. Watch the parade video here:
