“A Mutual Strangeness and Repulsion”: Content Curation and Moral Personality

• In Event: Promise and Perils of Content Moderation on Digital Platforms

Abstract

Georg Simmel’s 1903 “Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben” offered one of the first analyses of the effects of urbanization upon moral personality. For Simmel, the city was essentially a site of repeated interaction in the absence of particular knowledge; the urban dweller experienced daily encounter with those about whom nothing much could be known. This relative anonymity entailed both a space for freedom in self-development, but also profound constraint; what was revealed by the urban dweller was only that which could be safely disclosed to unknown others. As such, the city dweller had to produce a sort of manufactured personality, one adjusted to the particular social encounters endemic to urban life - and this manufactured personality, argued Simmel, could not help but become an essential part of the moral life of the city dweller, even once that dweller retreated from public spaces to the realms of the private and personal.

This paper argues that particular online communities can be understood with reference to Simmel’s analysis of urbanization. All such communities give rise to the need for particular forms of public personality, capable of withstanding encounter with indefinite numbers of unknown other agents. Those who build such public selves, however, cannot help but be affected in their off-line lives by the selves they build online. What is distinctive about the digital platform, however, is the fact that apparently regular interactions with arbitrary others are in fact curated. In contrast with the city, whose inhabitants encounter one another primarily because of choices made by the inhabitants themselves, the encounters made on digital platforms are often created by digital agents, including artificial intelligences. Those who participate in digital platforms are aware of this curation, but experience it as profoundly opaque; indeed, for suitably complex artificial intelligence, it may be impossible in principle for us to be provided with an explanation for why the curating agent makes the choices it does. If Simmel is right about the effects of the public upon the private, however, this set of circumstances may give rise to increased likelihood of conspiratorial thinking. A personality built in the knowledge that the apparently random encounters are in fact curated by an opaque agency on a digital platform is likely to find it difficult to limit that explanation’s currency to the online world. This paper concludes that, just as online community generally has tended to increase conspiratorial thought, content creation by artificial means will likely serve as an independent factor by which such conspiracy theory gains adherence both in both online and off-line communities.

Author

• Michael Blake, University of Washington