Twitter has killed our Common Enemies

Even in wartime, we are always pushing each other apart

The graphic novel Watchmen depicts a dystopian world on the edge of nuclear war between the West and the Soviet Union.

Supervillain Ozymandias decides the only way to ensure humanity steps back from the brink is to engineer an ‘alien’ invasion, which will make mankind’s warring tribes put aside their differences and focus on the external threat. A bioengineered monster kills much of New York and nuclear Armageddon is duly averted.

An uneasy truce is formed in response to a Common Enemy.

Conjuring a Common Enemy is a tried and trusted strategy for depolarising groups. Sir Alex Ferguson and Sir Tony Blair invoked outside threats to hold teams together. The Nazis brought America and Russia together temporarily. The Japanese did the same for China’s Communists and Nationalists.

So will Russia’s invasion of Ukraine produce a ceasefire in the West’s Culture Wars? Will our commentariat and activists realise that we have more in common in the face of Putin’s aggression? Assuredly no.

In The Networked Age, the enemy is always within.

Earth has just faced an alien invasion. Covid-19 rampaged around the world, killing millions more than Ozymandias’ mutant squid ever could. It’s fair to say humanity didn’t come together as a result.

Within months of the outbreak, we had gone from applauding keyworkers to de-banking them. President Biden, elected on a unifying platform during the pandemic’s darkest hours, called it a ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’ before his first year was up. A vaccine developed in record time and sold at cost, to ensure that the business of saving lives would be a not-for-profit endeavour, produced a bitter dispute between neighbouring states.

Last week the Western world was united in horror by Putin’s declaration of war on Ukraine. We had a new Common Enemy as a European state was invaded. We were able to put aside arguments about Downing Street parties, facemasks and Brexit.

This week, familiar cracks are beginning to emerge in our unified response, because the same social media dynamics are at play.

Social media has killed the effectiveness of the Common Enemy depolarisation strategy, because of three axioms.

Axiom One: Hot topics benefit from the Network Effect. As more people talk about a subject, others want to get in on the act. Soon, everyone is talking about one thing. As one topic rises in popularity, it crowds others out. If you want to be relevant or popular, you have to join in.

Axiom Two: For any given topic, there are very few people who actually know what they are talking about. Everyone wants to be relevant to the conversation, but they don’t know very much about epidemiology, trade policy, or the history of Ukraine, etc. So to join in, they begin to mirror the opinions of people on ‘their side’ in other arguments and to transpose other debates (on topics where they feel more confident) onto the topic at hand. Very quickly, a discussion about Ukraine becomes a conversation about Brexit, Trump, Wokism, the Great Reset, or whatever other topic really animates people.

Axiom Three: Virtue signalling produces diminishing returns as more people express the same views. If everybody’s special, then no-one is. After the first few days of a major global incident, saying that Covid, Putin, global warming, etc, is bad earns you few retweets. In order to accumulate more social capital, it is necessary to raise the stakes and identify (or invent) ideological opponents.

These axioms mean that each new Common Enemy generates a similar, polarising arc - a play in four acts:

Act One: Shock

People are united in horror by the arrival of the Common Enemy. They share news sources and express disbelief. It is not important to know anything about the subject or to have formed strong views in order to gain social capital, it is enough to show that you are aware and concerned about what is happening in the world. We can all agree, the Common Enemy is bad.

Act Two: Exhilaration

Quickly, we move from common horror to common purpose. We raise money, sign petitions, display our opposition to the Common Enemy. During this Act, we begin to develop specialist knowledge which sets us apart from others - we know what must be done and we invite others to endorse our solutions. And at times of stress, we become more attracted to prototypical figureheads who offer easy solutions. Tribes begin to form around these ideas and champions.

Act Three: Enforcement

These tribes begin to seek out people who disagree with their solutions to the Common Enemy. They punish them through mockery, shaming or cancellation, accusing dissenters of being Deniers, Apologists or Shills acting on behalf of the Enemy. In turn, dissidents become more resentful of what they think is unfair treatment - and their dissent hardens. Opposing tribes no longer share a Common Enemy.

At this point, the tribalism has become mutual antipathy. And the conversation takes on the typical characteristics of a polarised debate.

Act Four: Reversion to the Mean

In the final Act, the Common Enemy becomes bundled with a host of other topics that divide competing tribes and considered primarily as a weapon with which to criticise familiar domestic enemies. Social capital is earned for criticising Tory or Stop The War hypocrisy towards Russia, rather than for criticising Russian actions themselves.

Right now, the Ukraine debate straddles Acts Two and Three, with pro-social campaigns like #airbnbukraine nudging up against a campaign to cancel University of Chicago academic John Mearsheimer for being ‘an apologist’ for Putin.

Elsewhere, Boston international relations academic Josh Shifrinson was chased off Twitter for wondering aloud what the US’ interests are in Ukraine, while progressive influencer George Takei was attacked as a Marie Antoinette elitist for suggesting that US consumers should accept higher gas prices as the cost of standing up to Russia. This kind of recrimination will intensify as the debate evolves.

Twitter shapes elite thought and influences what questions get asked of political decision makers. It matters if we can’t overcome the temptation to attack one another rather than think things through.

Polarised conversations stifle debate, leading to worse decision making. As international relations analyst Susan Eisenhower recently warned:

“We have to be very careful that the issue of what to do in Ukraine doesn’t get politicised going into two very big electoral moments at the end of this year.”

Common Enemies may not depolarise us anymore, but the threats they represent, if we make the wrong choices, are no less real. Look on our Tweets, ye mighty, and despair!